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.
30 Responses to “Experts line up to distance themselves from Fallon’s deregulatory push”
cari_esky5
Figures will seem large in the NHS because it has roughly 58 million people that can use it. A private hospital group may have some thousands of patients that pay up to it.
It’s hard to judge private against public in the UK but if you look abroad it may be possible but that relies on the laws that govern reporting of deaths in privately run hospitals.
Now this isn’t about treating the NHS as a sacred cow when it comes to negligence, it’s about getting to the truth to sort out the systematic problems and minimise as much as possible avoidable deaths. I can’t see many people arguing against that no matter what political spectrum they come by.
cari_esky5
Again it depends on what need sto be reported to the authorities to put them into the statistics. Not many countries report hospital acquired infection rates where as it is compulsory in the British NHS but not British private hospitals.
Mr Reasonable
Would deregulation reduce avoidable deaths in the NHS? Or maybe more target setting? Perhaps it’s target setting that results in higher numbers of deaths. If the NHS was private (which it nearly is, now) would we have less or more target setting as private providers, obligated to maximise shareholder value and shift income to tax-friendly jurisdictions, seek to justify its receipt of our taxes?
Mr LB, you call the NHS a “sacred cow”. You sound like an informed correspondent. What are its problems? How would you sort out these problems? What alternatives do you have in mind? Who does it better?
LB
Ah, the top trumps arguments.
40,000 in the UK, versus 75,000 in the USA.(See the post below).
NHS killing people and because its a sacred cow, not touched. That’s the top trumps argument.
Next, lets look at Birmingham, versus ECH London.
For low risk patients (ie. Same risk), Brum is running at 500% of the deaths in ECH.
That’s the key one. It’s like for like. You never know with US versus UK, if the same methods are used.
There’s also systemic underreporting. Today we have hospitals covering up their deaths.
The systematic problems will only be solved when the insurance, the regulation and the supply of medical services are split. Otherwise the conflicts of interest mean it won’t be fixed.
In the mean time, the victims are being told to bugger off, sort yourself out, and the chief executives get the 6,7 figure payoffs.
Mick
What a complete shot in the foot by the minister. At least the way the Left reports it.
Labour did indeed pile on the PC red tape, which only served to STIFLE patient care. Waiting lists were imposed yet standards plummeted. If hospitals were run so that they could manage themselves by competent managers, with trusts acting only as advisors, then you’d go a lot further to increasing efficiency, a savings pot and recovery figures. Least the way I see it.
MILITARY HOSPITALS ran exceptionally well away from most jobsworths poking noses in. And Labour closed the last ones.