Business minister Michael Fallon MP this week blamed both the financial crisis and the deaths in Mid Staffordshire hospital on the “regulatory culture” of the Labour years. However deregulation risks babies and bathwater territory. What we need is better and more effective regulatory systems so that failures cannot be ignored again and stakeholders are protected.
Tessa Evans is an intern at the Institute for Public Policy Research
Business minister Michael Fallon MP this week blamed both the financial crisis and the deaths in Mid Staffordshire hospital on the “regulatory culture” of the Labour years.
The massive costs the financial crisis imposed on UK taxpayers and on our economy occurred “in the name of regulation”, he argued. The appalling suffering in our hospitals can also be traced back to “rules and regulations” that weigh down the NHS.
To prevent such disasters from happening again, he suggested, we should cut regulations, allowing businesses to focus on their “first task” of creating wealth.
“We must de-regulate further and faster, both at home and in Europe, to remove barriers to growth,” he said.
However, it is striking that Fallon’s attack got little support from the main business organisation in the UK.
Neil Carberry, CBI director for employment and skills, distanced himself from Fallon’s speech, arguing at the IPPR’s ‘Revitalizing Social Europe’ event yesterday that businesses have no desire to “sweep all regulations off the table”.
Carberry argued that “more fastidious and more meaningful regulation” is what the business sector is calling for, and criticised government performance in this area as “not quite what we would like it to be”.
Deregulation risks babies and bathwater territory. What we need is better and more effective regulatory systems so that failures cannot be ignored again and stakeholders are protected.
Pretending that the crisis itself was due to an abundance of regulation defies economic logic and common sense. Instead, the perils of light touch regulation need to be remembered if the finance sector is to service rather than threaten society.
The United Kingdom already has one of the world’s lowest rates of regulation. In the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report 2012-2013 it was ranked 8th; two and four places higher respectively than the previous two years.
In 2008, the OECD ranked the UK as the least restrictive country in the world for product market regulation and third on labour market regulation, behind only Canada and the United States.
EU Commissioner Laszlo Andor, speaking at IPPR’s event, also dismissed Fallon’s plans, arguing that the lack of recovery emerged instead from the “failure to sort out the banking system” and the inability to “eliminate doubts about the future of the single currency”.
Andor also joked that “the country with the triple dip recession should not lecture the EU on economic growth”, suggesting that the government needs to move away from its obsession with regulation if it is serious about growth and recovery.
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30 Responses to “Experts line up to distance themselves from Fallon’s deregulatory push”
LB
40,000 avoidable deaths a year in the NHS.
If that was a private company, what would you be saying?
Ho hum, its the NHS, we can’t touch the sacred cow.
henrytinsley
I don’t know where you get the 40,000 figure from. Source?
I can tell you that recent independent research has shown that 75,000 people die unnecessarily in the US health system so admired by the right.
LB
There aren’t admired by me.
However, the 40,000 avoidable deaths is the BMJ. NHS estimates are 20-80,000.
So lets see.
300 million in the USA, 75K avoidable deaths. 1 in 4000
UK.
60 million, 40K,1 in 1500
Hmmm NHS is outperforming the US (crap system) when it comes to killing people.
So why are you admiring the NHS for killing more people at a higher rate than the USA?
Shows just how bad it is.
Compare it say with Switzerland, and its even worse.
Make the far better comparison, within the NHS, same methodology, for same risk, and Birmingham has 500% more deaths than UCH for the same risk of patients.
Raging Leftie
Regulation, regulation, regulation that is all you every hear from the Tories, like deregulation is going to sort out the World’s problems. Andor is completely right – our country and our politicians are not in any position to advise any one else on what to do (especially since they are the ones who created this mess in the first place). We need to sort out our own problems first before we look to anyone else’s.
henrytinsley
So where’s this 40,000 figure from?