Speeches by Madders.

“We are looking to examine—across the board, where different Departments and regulators are pulling in different directions—what more we can do. There is a question whether we need so many regulators, of course, and whether some regulators’ functions could be folded into others. That might help somewhat, but any intelli…”

“That is what we hear as well. The biggest initiative at the moment is going to be the single point of contact, for want of a better description, for large infrastructure projects. You will know that the record of UK plc in terms of delivering infrastructure projects on time and on budget is not a good one. The message …”

“I can think of an example to do with recording of hours under the working time regulations. That was something that the previous Administration removed.”

“There is the regular report that we have on the Retained EU Law Act, which was brought in under the previous Government. A lot of the legislation was repealed under that.”

“In that particular circumstance, you would have more, but, of course, there have been a number of examples of where regulations have been removed from the statute book as a result of us leaving the EU.”

“I am not sure that we have done the analysis on pre and post.”

“We recognise that since we left the EU, there have been occasions where there have been two lots of paperwork. Chemicals are a good example of where very costly exercises have had to be undertaken. You will know from the recent EU reset that we are looking at ways in which we can avoid that duplication of cost. We will…”

“That is correct.”

“It is over the lifetime of this Parliament.”

“There was a conversation around whether there was a way that we could get a figure for the release of the action plan, but we just concluded that it would not be robust enough to rely on. We want to do it properly.”

“Yes, roughly. That is not to say that the work is not going on in the meantime.”

“We think that it is going to take about 18 months, which is akin to the timescale that it took under the last Labour Government’s similar exercise.”

“It is probably more on costs. Chris has done a lot on this, so he may be able to articulate it slightly better.”

“That is the challenge. We have to get a baseline to start with.”

“Our view is that there is a need to reduce the regulatory burden. We have a target of 25%, but putting that into crude numbers of regulations does not necessarily achieve the outcome that we want. It is more the administrative burden overall that we are thinking of. Is that particular piece of form filling required? Is…”

“When we first started talking about this, I raised those very examples of how it has been done in the past. Without wishing to traduce previous Governments, “one in, one out”, “two in, one out” or whatever number you call it were not really a great success story. It was too crude a measure. It gave a good headline, but…”

“First of all, I would start from the proposition that “regulation” is not a dirty word. When we look at this, we sometimes take the position that because regulation sometimes gets in the way, it is a bad thing. In fact, it is really important for consumer confidence, for the wider economy and for businesses to operate …”

“Feelings are always a good way to look at things, because it is about the sum of your experiences, is it not? There has probably been a lack of pace in decision making. This is partly from conversations with stakeholders as well as my own reflections, but pace, duplication, overlap and competing priorities all play int…”

“Thank you. That is a consolation. It is a good question, because that is a daily challenge that we face. There are two elements to it: there is the internal decision making in Government and the need to get write-rounds across Departments, the correct legal advice, the requirement for consultations and so on, and then …”

“Has it been only a year?”