Cuts? Regulation needs to be cut

TomTom

Education has only been cut at University level. PFI BSF deals should be renegotiated and costs cut. Classroom Assistants should be laid off and troublemaker children sent to sin bins so classroom teachers can teach.

Headteachers should teach and not be administrators.

Time to cutback on massive over-spend

startledcod

Tim. Good piece but please could you expand/explain the fourth and third paragraphs from the end.

Austin Barry

"..the “burden of government regulation” handicaps businesses more in Britain than it does in such soundly governed polities as Nigeria and Zimbabwe."

This is because the EU requires Britain to implement directives which in terms of volume, intricacy and, in many cases, micro-managed absurdity are the delight of Magic Circle London law firms which charge corporate clients mega-fees to wrestle successive waves of this stuff to the ground.

Chris

Not much hope of a cut in the burden of regulation from the government that produced yesterday's pathetic nannying announcement about tobacco sales.

Tim Morgan

startledcod: Could you please be a bit more specific on what you would like expanded? It's likely that my full report contains what you are looking for.

Simon Stephenson

startledcod 1.00pm

I think the point is that while the volume of physical inputs to the health sector went up by 75%, the money cost of inputs, adjusted for inflation, went up by 116%.

Labour Party statements about public spending always have an undisclosed presumption that value out equals, at least, value in. In other words, that there is no such thing as money poured down the drain; that paying 10,000 people to do the work of 5,000 guarantees that the quality of the product is at least twice as valuable; that however much a new hospital costs, the value of service will be enhanced by at least this amount, compared to that which would come out of the old hospital.

Of course, you can never get them to address this issue, because as soon as the measure starts to cast doubts on the validity of their presumption, they refuse to accept the accuracy and/or impartiality of the measure. If necessary, the rest of the world must be re-defined so that in every instance it can be asserted that Labourism is right.

TomTom

"I think the point is that while the volume of physical inputs to the health sector went up by 75%, the money cost of inputs, adjusted for inflation, went up by 116%."

Simon, you know the NHS Budget has some positions buried in it. The use of Management Consultants like Bain, McKinsey etc all billing 5-star hotel rooms; or the feasibility studies for PFI borne by the hospitals, or the 5% Yield the Treasury claws back from the Budget as "rental stream for NHS facilities"

We know they park unemployables on the payroll at all levels. We know they underpay lab staff, medical secretaries etc so the delays mount.

We know the conferences and managing upwards cost money as do company cars for administrative staff

We know the contractor deals are suspect, that procurement is usually non-competitive and bureaucratic

We know that leasing deals are highly lucrative to the lessor

There is a whole industry feeding off NHS Budgets and it is not necessarily in the public sector

TGF UKIP

Mr Morgan, you are unlikely to find many, if any, Coffee Housers disagreeing with the conclusions in your final para and sentence.

However, dream on, as they say. This is, don't forget, nannying nudging Cameron & Co, so on Sunday 6th March we have Dave in messianic mode promising war on regulation only to be followed on Wednesday 9th March by a whole wodge of new regulations from Cameron & Co on the display and sale of cigarettes and tobacco. Regulations which will of course caquse massive disruption and added cost for many thousands of small retail businesses up and down the land.

Simon Stephenson

Chris : 1.35pm

"Not much hope of a cut in the burden of regulation from the government that produced yesterday's pathetic nannying announcement about tobacco sales."

Unfortunately, they're hoist by their own petard here. By failing to object to, or even question, the use of false, fabricated evidence concerning passive smoking, they locked themselves into the modern morality that if you can't achieve something by fair means, it's OK to achieve it by foul. And, further, they chose to accept that the institutional use of dishonesty in one area can be assumed to have no negative effect on the ability of authority to be effective, honestly and fairly, in other areas.

Limply, they fell in with the zeitgeist of the times, instead of making a stand for what was right.

Tim Morgan

Simon - yes, a 75% rise in volumetric inputs but a 116% rise in real spending.

Could I point something out here? At the foot of page 14 of the report is a link which takes you to a statistical supplement which I hope will be useful.

Simon Stephenson

TomTom : 2.19pm

I couldn't agree more, but why does Labour seek to pass off a trebling of NHS funding as a trebling of NHS product? Why is there not the remotest thought about the massive additional product to be made through efficiencies in existing spending? Why is there an idée fixe that getting more out of public services demands that we commit more money to them?

Perry

" It didn’t look that way at the time, of course, because Britain was riding Gordon Brown’s reckless debt-fuelled “boom” for most of that period. "

And exactly what was the Tory 'Loyal' Opposition doing during that time?

Sitting on its hands, that's what.

Instead of tearing the place down to get answers we heard not a word! Not a gesture! Not a whimper!

The only one with any guts was Boris, who wanted to impeach the Hero of the Heir to B.

Perry

Thanks Simon S.

I suggest a 'Yes, let's SMOKE TODAY' Day as a counterweight to the Nicotine Nazis.

denis cooper

The proposed restrictions on the display and sale of cigarettes is yet another idea which is presented as springing from the brain of a UK government minister, but which has in fact had a long incubation period in Brussels.

http://europa.eu/pol/health/index_en.htm

leads to

http://ec.europa.eu/health/tobacco/policy/index_en.htm

and it can all be read there by anyone who can be bothered.

For anyone who replies that much of it has originated from the UN, the World Health Organisation, which is why similar measures are being proposed and implemented in other non-EU countries all around the world, I'd agree with that but still point out that in our case it is Brussels which is being used as the conduit for such proposals.

Tim Morgan

Perry 3:12pm

"And exactly what was the Tory 'Loyal' Opposition doing during that time?"

True. It's often said that you can't know that you're in a bubble until it bursts, but that simply isn't true.

No-one - government or opposition - was watching the indicators which would have revealed the bubble nature of the 'Brown boom' :-

- House price/earnings multiples

- Mortgage income multiples

- Mortgage LTV ratios

- Asset price vs retail inflation

- Total debt as % GDP

- External debt as % GDP

In fairness to the Coalition, the creation of the OBR should help prevent a recurrence.

Bill Habergham

Good erudite article! I jointly own and run a manufacturing business. 70+ employees, contributing around £2 million a year to the treasury in PAYE, VAT and corportaion taxes, exporting 30% of our output etc.

The regulatory enviroment in which we operate is increasingly strange and I now question the "moral" basis of it. No politician, civil servant, political advisor or trade union oficial, if confronted would ever consider themseleves to be sexist, racist, phobic of religion or sexual practice or would wish ever to hurt their fellow man and the planet on which we live. It appears, however, that they believe their moral worth in these matters to exceed all others and that no one else, particularly those who run businesses can be trusted to hold the same views as themselves. How else does one explain all the anti discrimination, health and safety and petty environmental rules that we must suffer, backed by continual "audits" and "enforcement". Why do we need these regulations? Could we not just operate our businesses in a atmosphere of mutual trust and esteem with the governing class? Do the politicians who create these laws actully believe in their moral superioty or is it just ignorance of the wealth creating process?

Here is a cost free "growth agenda" for all parties. Trust the people who run medium to small business and abolish all equality, anti discrimination laws on businesses below say £50 million turnover and 200 employees. Keep environmental and health and safety laws simple and minimalist. I guarantee on behalf of myself and probably the 300,000 other businesses in the UK within this category, that we will create between 1 amd 3 jobs each in these circumstances. You do the maths!.

Tim Morgan

Bill Habergham 5:12pm

Extremely well put. If we DON'T do the things that you recommend, the outlook will be depressing.

yank

It's not that the outlook "will" be depressing, it already is. Stagflation is here to stay. It's your government's policy. They have planned on inflation, as your blogpost confirms, and growth is only a rumor.

But stagflation isn't a rumor, it is reality.

Occasional Ostrich

Bill Habergham

The last clause of your penultimate paragraph says it all.