Paul Scully's statements from the despatch box on Wednesday concerning the business of the next parliament refer. While hoping that a comprehensive economic crime bill will be included in the Queen's Speech, one trusts that further deregulation is not. In July last year, Kwasi Kwarteng and Lord Frost (who has now resigned from the Johnson government because he believes it is not reactionary enough) published a document (pdf here) opening a three-month consultation on post-Brexit reforms to the regulatory framework. If there has been a government response since the consultation period closed in October, I have not been able to find it on the Web. However, in the light of continuing revelations from the Grenfell Inquiry of how deregulation contributed to the disaster, Private Eye fears the worst. Its analysis concludes that the proposed new framework would:
entail delegation of legal powers to regulators (who often end up being captured by the industries they're regulating), "less prescriptive" rules (allowing wriggle room of the sort the cladding manufacturers and others exploited), regulators being "encouraged to adopt more innovation-friendly initiatives in their sectors" and a return of "regulatory offsetting", whereby at least one regulation is scrapped as soon as a new one comes in. All would make for more "agile" and "proportionate" regulation.
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