Cut the red tape choking Britain
BRITAIN must sweep aside thousands of needless EU regulations after Brexit to free the country from the shackles of Brussels, a coalition of senior MPs and business leaders demands today.
Theresa May will tomorrow start the formal process of leaving the EU when she invokes Article 50, giving her a “once in a lifetime opportunity” to rejuvenate the UK economy.
Today The Daily Telegraph calls on the Conservative Party to promise a bonfire of EU red tape in its 2020 manifesto to put Britain on a radically different course.
The proposal has the backing of the former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith, who believes the Tories should promise at the next election to “whittle away” unnecessary rules, reducing the “burden” on businesses and citizens.
He said: “Let us leave and then the Conservative Party at the next election needs to say ‘we can reduce the cost on business and on individuals by reducing regulations which will improve our competitiveness, our productivity and therefore ultimately our economy’.”
According to a House of Commons report, ministers will have to import 19,000 EU rules and regulations onto our statute books as part of the Great Repeal Bill, which will take shape in a white paper published on Thursday.
EU regulations are estimated to cost Britain a total of more than £120 billion per year. The Common Agricultural Policy alone reportedly costs £10 billion in direct costs and by inflating food prices.
After Brexit occurs in 2019, the merits of each regulation will be assessed before a decision is made on whether to jettison it or not.
Lord Lawson, the former Chancellor, said the Conservatives must then swiftly seize the chance to “transform the British economy” by cutting “massive” numbers of EU regulations.
Business leaders and doctors hope to see the back of the working time directive, which imposes such strict conditions on shift patterns that workforces cannot be as flexible as they need to be, and surgeons say it prevents them gaining vital training.
Builders have been frustrated by rules on preserving newts, which are classed as “endangered” in Europe even though they are thriving in the UK.
Meanwhile, consumers have been angered by rules which have banned the most powerful vacuum cleaners and forced householders to use dim energy-saving lightbulbs.
Writing in today’s Daily Telegraph, Mr Duncan Smith said that once Brexit is complete in 2019, “we should prepare to carry out a root and branch review of the costs of the regulatory burden of its intrusions into the daily lives of the citizens and businesses of the UK”.
Owen Paterson, the former environment secretary, said the Government now had a “once in a lifetime opportunity” to scrap such hated regulations as the Common Agricultural Policy and the Common Fisheries Policy and replace them with legislation “tailored to what is right for us”.
Lord Lawson said the Thatcher government’s wide-ranging programme of deregulation in the 1980s “transformed the performance of the British economy”, adding: “Once out of the EU we have the opportunity to do this on an even larger scale with the massive corpus of EU regulation. We must lose no time in seizing that opportunity.”
According to a study by the Eurosceptic think-tank Open Europe, ridding Britain of needless EU regulations will save the economy £13 billion a year.
Stephen Booth, director of policy
and research at Open Europe, said: “EU regulation places a significant cost on the UK economy and there is scope for savings, so we would call on parties to commit to repealing unnecessary red tape. Brexit offers an opportunity to tailor rules to the specific nature of the UK economy, rather than the one-sizefits-all approach characterised by EU regulation.”
Lord Tebbit, a former member of the Thatcher Cabinet, said: “I am all for taking advantage of the opportunity Brexit gives us to do a substantial job of deregulation.”
The news came as David Davis, the Exiting the European Union secretary, suggested that Britain could leave the EU without paying anything like the reported £52 billon bill. He told the BBC’s Question Time: “I don’t know about 50 billion. I’ve seen 40, 50, 60. I’ve seen no explanation for any of them.
“We will, of course, meet our international obligations. But we expect also our rights to be respected too. So I don’t think we’re going to be seeing that sort of money change hands.”
Mr Davis also suggested that migration might increase after Brexit. He said: “I cannot imagine that the policy will be anything other than that which is in the national interest, which means that from time to time we’ll need more, from time to time we’ll need less, migrants.”