The Adam Smith Regulatory Monitor

A critical new eye on the regulatory burden

The Adam Smith Institute’s Regulatory Monitor highlights the worst excesses of bureaucratic red tape and excessive compliance costs in the UK.

Over the last ten years there has been a striking boom in the regulation industry as a raft of new agencies have been established to regulate whole sectors of the UK economy. Some of these regulations have been initiated by Westminster, but an increasing number are generated by the European Commission in Brussels.

“Regulation is the invisible way to strangle an economy,” says Martin Wolf of the Financial Times. As he points out, “ Each regulation always seems reasonable. But each imposes a cost. That cost is felt in wasted time and in the economically inefficient decisions that result”. But the forces piling regulation on regulation are remorseless. Governments are increasingly constrained by public expenditure targets, and regulation appears the cheapest way to satisfy articulate interest groups, redistribute income, protect their own backs, and win votes.

The annual cost of regulation to the UK economy was estimated by the government-sponsored Better Regulation Task Force (now renamed the Better Regulation Commission) to cost an astonishing 10 – 12 per cent of national wealth, measured as GDP. That works out at over £100 billion, the same amount as the income tax burden.

The Adam Smith Institute’s new Regulatory Monitor casts the searchlight on some of the latest proposals for further regulation, with the aim of scrutinising whether these initiatives are really necessary. Our aim is to curb the enthusiasm for implementing cumbersome and expensive regulation before it is adopted.

The Regulatory Monitor focuses on a clutch of new regulatory bodies:

Turning The Spotlight On The Gambling Comission

Regulating Airports

The EU's Financial Services Action Plan

The Takeover Directive