It's time to free ourselves from the dead weight of excessive regulation
I am not a conspiracy theorist and I do not share the widespread assumption that most of our politicians are venal. Our elected representatives, from all parties, usually entered public life with noble motives. Yet the uncomfortable truth is that vested interests — represented by highly effective lobbying groups — have managed to get too many regulations brought in that are not just or reasonable.
Brexit should gradually help. It will eventually mean that we can review the legacy of swathes of rules that were imposed from Brussels. The European Union is a lobbyist’s dream. As Enoch Powell declared in 1982:
“The institutions of the EEC create an ever-expanding vested interest on the part of those who service them, to whom this becomes a livelihood and a way of life. Quite apart from politicians, there is the multitude of lobbyists, purporting to represent almost every interest with which the Common Market might interfere, who have thus gained an illimitable extension to the parasitical profession of go-betweens and know-somebody-who-knows-somebody else.”
One particular scandal involved European car manufacturers lobbying the EU for rules that promoted diesel cars. Diesel does produce 15 per cent less CO2 than petrol and so the change was justified as being eco friendly. Diesel cars went from less than 10 per cent of the UK market in 1995 to more than half in 2012. The problem was that CO2 is only one of the polluting gases caused by engine exhaust — a diesel engine emits a lot more more gas and particulates, making it more polluting overall than a petrol engine. The change brought in by the EU was very damaging to air quality and thus public health. Volkswagen was later found to have been programming some of its engines to cheat emissions tests.
Yet it would be naive to imagine the pressures for bad laws will be lifted. One might think that business groups would favour scrapping red tape. Yet often a particular sector finds it would be more profitable for further regulation to be brought in — if it could mean extracting more loot to their firms from the taxpayer or the consumer, or sabotaging rivals. Economists call this “rent-seeking”, a confusing term as it does not have to be related to the rent paid on land or buildings. Rent-seeking, in this case, means extracting extra profit by manipulating public policy rather than providing increased value — Adam Smith would give the example of seeking tariff protection.
What makes it all the more exasperating is that businesses pushing for these special favours usually proclaim the most virtuous of motives. “The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons,” as the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked.
Safety legislation is one area being distorted. There were 243 fire-related fatalities last year. Ten years earlier it was 328 and 20 years ago it was 485. But the horror of the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, when 72 people perished has quite rightly kept up the pressure to do better.
To “do better” in actually saving lives means practical measures. That means having the honesty to accept that costs can not be unlimited and that 100 per cent safety can not be achieved. From the evidence I have seen installing sprinklers would be a more effective way to proceed. Within that caveat that risk can never be eliminated, it is a pretty powerful point that no lives have been lost in the UK due to fire in homes fitted with domestic sprinkler systems.
The cost would be significant. One report estimated that retrofitting them would cost £1,150 for an average flat. Presumably rather more for the average house where the chances of escaping a fire are obviously greater.
So that would be expensive. But then it would probably save more lives than the myriad other safety measures combined. It is also likely that the cost would be lower.
In many council flats, steel window frames have been replaced with plastic ones. As plastic burns rather more easily than steel that has proved a hazard. The dangers with cladding are all too well known, as are the costs of mitigating that danger. The risks of external panels, missing fire doors, exploding electrical appliances, obstructions at fire exits, a lack of concierge staff and a lack of heat detectors have all been documented. But the evidence is that, where sprinklers are in place, death will be averted regardless of those other hazards.
Yet while sprinklers are not required an awful lot of money is spent on regular tick-box checks of appliances. These checks are a lucrative source of easy income for boiler engineers and electricians who lobby for them. The electricians noted that gas boiler engineers were getting work to do annual checks. Thus an industry body, Electrical Safety First (formerly the Electrical Safety Council) was allowed its own set of rules adopted as “Part 18 British Safety Standards”. The checks are required every five years though, instead of annually. But they are empowered to add new requirements without Parliament, or even Ministers agreeing. The bill for the landlords is considerable. This means higher rents for the tenants.
There is, to put it mildly, considerable scepticism as to how much of a safety benefit is provided by replacing perfectly good plug sockets and so on, or whether it is really a “make work” scheme.
How many homeowners choose to have such checks done in their own properties? Very few. Not because of a cavalier disregard for their themselves or for their families but because they do not think there would be a tangible benefit.
The answer is for politicians to show responsibility. Rather than agreeing to every lobby group claiming some worthy objective, there needs to be transparency over the costs and benefits. Could more be achieved for less? Could a review of the law in a given area see that the objective — for cleaner air, or reduced fire risk or whatever it might be — could be advanced while the burden of compliance could be reduced. I suspect many politicians know that a sense of proportion would mean we would have better laws. If they would treat us like grown-ups and set out the choices realistically, then that could be achieved.
