Productivity, regulation and resources

Oh, the bonfire of the red tape rears its head again. We are told that the problem to our dragging productivity - the sea anchor holding us back from boldly and swiftly 'growing the pie' - lies with excessive regulation.

At the risk of sounding like a definite greybeard, there is no doubt that - since I started out in work twenty-one years ago - the amount of regulation and due process we work under has increased. A planning application used to be a hand-filled form and a handful of drawings, not reports on everything from contaminated land to light pollution. To discharge planning conditions requires even more. To lay a sewage pipe or connect to the electricity grid requires a forest of forms and permits. There are licensing requirements for everything from A-boards to hanging baskets. 

Red tape gone mad! Well, not so fast. It is in the public interest to control whether a new building - or even a house extension - will cause harmful impacts to the environment. A wheelchair user shouldn't have to navigate A-boards on a narrow pavement. There shouldn't be flooding as a result of inadequate drainage design. Outside of our sector, we want food, products, services to be safe.

But what we have today, are regulations without the resources available to service the process. Over the last ten years, the public sector teams charged with processing these approvals have been hollowed out to almost nothing. Not only has the headcount decreased while the amount of processes they are expected to manage has increased; the experience and expertise in the teams has also shrunk hugely. This has led to a death spiral where the staff that remain become anxious and unsure of their own expertise; they put in more checks and balances into the process as a result, putting the burden back on the applicant to prove everything to the minutest detail; and the process becomes even slower and more tortuous. Cue projects grinding to a halt and productivity dropping like a stone.

In the practice, we have a project where it has been over 18 months, and counting, to negotiate the necessary technical consents for a small public project. (This is not a project that even requires planning permission, by the way). We laugh about it, because that's all you can do, rather than cry. We have to bill our lovely and very patient client for all the extra hours we spend negotiating demands on every minute detail that change from month to month, and we feel bad to do so, but what choice do we have? Meanwhile the cost of delivering the project has gone up and up. Who is winning here?

The thing is, we want the project to be as good as it can be. We want someone to be checking through all our homework, but if we were as slow and as inconsistent as these bodies are, our clients would have sued us long ago.

Regulations without the resource to handle them, creates a completely unsustainable situation. If the resources aren't there, but we want growth (i.e. products and projects making it to reality) we - as a society - are going to have to accept less safety, and the statutory bodies that oversee these areas are going to have to prioritise only the applications with the highest risk of potential harm.

There is of course another solution. We could fund and recognise the vital work that statutory bodies do to keep us all safe. We could pay them better, head-hunting the best technical experts from across industry to staff and manage teams, making good, informed decisions that work sensibly with applicants rather than 'computer says no'. That would unleash productivity overnight. Speak to almost anyone who is trying to get a product, service, project through regulation and into production, and they would be glad to pay more, whether in tax or fees, to get good quality, quick and reliable processing.

Alas, not a solution that Truss and co will be considering any time soon.