On democracy, environment and the Red Tape Challenge

April 7^th 2011 was a dark day both for the Coalition government’s commitment to be the ‘greenest government ever’, and for democracy in the UK. That was the day that the government launched its Red Tape Challenge.

The idea of cutting red tape has a long and undistinguished history in the UK; undistinguished in that it is never a job that anyone has said is done.

Under Conservative Prime Minister John Major in the mid-1990s, there was a ‘deregulation unit’. Major memorably described tackling red tape as like trying to wrestle with a greasy pig.

Across governments, the idea of slashing red tape never went out of fashion. Under Tony Blair, New Labour established a ‘red tape task force’. And Gordon Brown claimed to be the ‘enemy of red tape’.Now, with dismal statistics on economic growth, the Coalition government has pushed to the very top of the pendulum’s arc with its Red Tape Challenge.

The Red Tape Challenge is in some respects a successor to Nick Clegg’s failed ‘Your Freedom’ crowd-sourcing experiment; an experiment which folded after the government received more comments than it could cope with on the Your Freedom website. (The website, incidentally, is now partly archived so that it’s impossible to see what everyone said).

Your Freedom’s opening paragraphs included the following words:

“We want to restore Britain’s traditions of freedom and fairness, and free our society of unnecessary laws and regulations – both for individuals and businesses…. This site gives you the chance to tell us which laws and regulations you think we should get rid of”.

That something remarkably similar should re-emerge so quickly in the form of the Red Tape Challenge is itself surprising (though there are many possible explanations).

Like Your Freedom, the Red Tape Challenge is a web-based (so-called) ‘crowd-sourcing’ initiative.

Economic sector by sector, the Red Tape Challenge invites comments on “which regulations are working and which are not; what should be scrapped, what should be saved and what should be simplified”.

In parallel, the initiative invites comments onsix sets of ‘general regulations’.Among these, the ‘environment’ section of the Red Tape Challenge website  includes 278 separate pieces of environment law.

In the website’s own words: “here’s the most important bit – the default presumption will be that burdensome regulations will go. If Ministers want to keep them, they have to make a very good case for them to stay.” So not only may Ministers have to waste their time, post cutbacks, potentially justifying anything anyone on the site says is burdensome; they also have to overcome a threshold presumption that if it’s considered burdensome by someone – anyone – it’s to be scrapped.

It’s now becoming close to impossible to keep track of what proposals are being made where and which policies, institutions, or laws, are up for incineration. For example, the Equality Act has been put forward for ‘crowd-sourced’ proposals for repeal in the Red Tape Challenge. But regulations made under the Equality Act are included in a separate more conventional consultation exercise –not the Red Tape Challenge. The Climate Change Act is included within the Red Tape Challenge. But it’s not listed under ‘carbon emissions’. Instead, it appears in a section on environmental permitting and information.

I’m no e-democracy expert, but the Red Tape Challenge certainly appears to

risk getting ‘crowd-sourcing’ all wrong. An old piece by Will Hutton shows why. Crowds are most ‘wise’, it seems, either when significant numbers of people make informed choices, or when the ‘wisdom’ emerges as a result of proper deliberation.

Simply listing vast numbers of regulations doesn’t make for the sort of quantitative decision-making where wisdom is likely to emerge, either. Discussion about the pros and cons of regulation cannot in any meaningful sense be equated with the ‘guess the number of marbles in the jar’ stall at a summer fete.

There’s a long way to go in working out how to apply the idea of ‘crowdsourcing’ to government decision-making. And gambling almost the entirety of the nation’s body of environment, health and safety, employment and equalities legislation on an experiment is foolhardy in the extreme.

In contrast to the Red Tape Challenge’s fundamental assumption that if regulation is a burden – to anyone – it must go; the history of business innovation for sustainable development is replete with examples of innovation that is nurtured – or sometimes forced – by regulation.

Perhaps the most celebrated example is the phase-out of ozone depleting substances, spurred on by the internationally agreed Montreal Protocol.

One business’s burdensome regulation is another’s signal to innovate. One enterprise’s burden is the source of a green growth for another.

The Red Tape Challenge consummately fails to recognise this, and that alone places it well behind the curve of those parts of the business community that exist to drive and serve the ‘green economy’ that the government has eagerly expresses its wish for.

If you will forgive the repetition in an already-long post: under Caroline Spelman’s stewardship, the greenest government ever, commited to mainstreaming sustainable development across government, has put 278 pieces of primary and secondary environment legislation up for crowd-sourced comment with a presumption that if they’re considered burdensome – possibly if they’re considered burdensome by anyone – they must in principle go.

It may only be accident that some pieces of legislation (the Clean Air Act and the Environmental Protection Act among them) have escaped listing; that it is not the entirety of the body of UK environment law that has been opened up to trading off against the government’s plan for short-term growth.

Over and over again on the environment regulation pages of the Red Tape Challenge website, respondents charge that the Coalition government is guilty of short-termism; that it has failed to take account of future generations; that it is putting short-term profit (and economic growth) before protection of the environment and sustainable development.

Campaign groups have also woken up to the risks. Despite a muddled explanation of what’s proposed, a petition by online campaign group 38 Degrees has gathered more than 50000 signatures. The RSPB invites its members to send a message to Vince Cable under the slogan ‘some cuts never heal’. The Woodland Trust is also among the groups encouraging their members to post messages in support of the existing body of environmental legislation.

Government departments have issued some responses to the initial wave of indignation about the Red Tape Challenge from environmentalists. First up, the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) moved on 20^th April to issue the reassuring statement that:

“The Climate Change Act is here to stay and is central to the coalition’s policies to cut emissions and incentivise investment in the green economy….[b]ut given the crucial role business has to play in the low carbon transition it’s only right that the government looks at how this can be done in as business friendly a way as possible and at least cost to consumers and business.”

But refraining from repealing primary legislation in its entirety is no guarantee of continual progress towards the achievement of its goals. The tension in DECC’s carefully-negotiated statement is obvious, three weeks on, from the row that broke out across government departments (and between Lib Dem Ministers) on the adoption of new carbon budgets – ultimately adopted. There were calls for David Cameron to intervene in the face of Vince Cable’s claims that the latest round of proposed carbon budgets recommended by the independent Climate Change Committee, and supported by Chris Huhne at DECC, excessively burden the UK economy.

With DECC’s clarification on the Red Tape Challenge issued, on 24^th April DEFRA published this double-speak statement on its website:

The myth: there have been reports in the media that important environmental regulations in legislation such as the Wildlife and Countryside Act, National Park Act, Clean Air Act and the Climate Change Act could be scrapped as part of the Government’s Red Tape Challenge.

The truth: Defra is committed to enhancing the natural environment and there are no plans to remove important environmental protections. The Red Tape Challenge is about examining and understanding the impact of regulation on the people, businesses, and communities it affects, to ensure that it is proportionate while delivering the desired outcomes.

This reader doesn’t find the ‘myth’ busted at all. DEFRA’s statement – one of 23 on an extraordinary ‘myth-busters’ section of its website – serves principally to sound even deeper alarm bells.

A reminder: the Cabinet Office, home of the Red Tape Challenge, says this: “here’s the most important bit – the default presumption will be that burdensome regulations will go. If Ministers want to keep them, they have to make a very good case for them to stay”.

The devil is in the detail, and here we have it: it’s ‘important environmental protections’ versus ‘burdensome regulations’. Neither DECC nor DEFRA provide any guidance on how trade-offs will be managed when it comes to the inevitable balancing act between competing Ministries.

The Cabinet Office’s ‘default presumption’ is so clearly stated that it is as if government faces no balancing acts.

We now may be seeing the start of sustainable development policy subsidence on a grand scale. We will all be the poorer for it; and so will our democracy.