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”
LB
Split regulator out from supplier from insurer.
Here are some examples.
Why is there a post code lottery? In effect the insurance part of the NHS is colluding not to supply health care.
What about the reporting of deaths? Regulation isn’t going on. Supplier is colluding or hiding from the regulator, and the regulator isn’t doing their work. The insurer part colludes because if they don’t they have to pay out compensation. Now its going to be worse. The claims lawyers will get their teeth into it now PPI money is drying up.
So what is it about the NHS that the public like?
1. Universal coverage.
That’s the main one.
2. The other, is minor and its lip service, free at the point of use. Prescriptions, dental, isn’t free at the point of use.
So how to organise it.
1. You have to buy insurance. If you don’t have enough money, its comes in the form of welfare. It’s for standardised costs. Swiss has one with three rates. Under 18s, 18s to 25, and the rest.
This also deals with health tourism.
2. Insurers are allowed to refuse to insure you. Wait …. If you get two refusals, you go to the government, and they pick the name of an insurer out of a hat, pro rata to market share. That insurer has to insure you. The reason is that it prevents an insurer being picked off by all the bad risks. You pay the standard costs.
Everyone gets insured, and insurers get a risk they can manage.
Since the insurer isn’t the supplier, its not about medical care.
Now the government can regulate without conflict of interest. Imprison, fine and ban the bad doctors and nurses that are killing people. Close down the hospitals that are slaughtering people, and move in, clean up and sell off.
If the unions don’t like it, here’s an option. They set up and run a not for profit hospital.
About the only area where I might make an exception is A&E. I think that needs different models.
The other being contagious illnesses. There, even for visitors, its treat first. However, if they are subsequently found to be without insurance, they get billed. If they don’t pay they get kicked out.
Newsbot9
Yes, you keep trying to slaughter hundreds of thousands every year. Gotta butcher the poor by raising healthcare costs!
Newsbot9
Yes, America has massive systematic under-reporting given the number of people who never enter the system at all and just die.
And of course you want to charge three times for medical services.
Newsbot9
Yes, keep talking up your horse meat. That’s how you view people, after all, meat to be slaughtered by denying them medical care.
Newsbot9
Under Thatcher, we had an underfunded system with terrible results. The NHS was catching up with it’s funding increases (which happens) at last, when your Tories disorganisation sent it reeling back again immediately.
Of course you want Trusts to have to pay into hospitals where all the cash vanishes into your private sector pockets, leaving the poor paying for medical care AND the NHS.