Compliance costs British business around £52 billion a year. Damian Pudner asks how much of that is wasted on rules nobody has bothered to think through? Every hour spent on paperwork is an hour not spent selling, investing or training staff. Ministers are held to account when they spend public money. They should face the same scrutiny when they spend everyone else’s time.
If the Government wanted to spend £5 billion, Treasury officials would crawl all over the numbers: where the money was coming from, whether the assumptions were credible and what taxpayers were getting for it. Make businesses spend the same £5bn on extra staff, advisers and management time to comply with new rules and the interest suddenly fades. It never touches the public accounts, so Whitehall can impose the cost without ever having to find the money.
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