Taking regulation to task

Three weeks ago I wrote about the launch of the Regulatory Taskforce that, under the co-chairmanship of Minister McDougall and Tina McKenzie MBE, is working at pace to identify recommendations to cut admin cost and burden. This post focuses on progress to date and other regulatory updates.

Taskforce members met this week for the first check-in and to update on recommendations forming. Rapid progress has been made with updates from workstream leads; Iain Wright Prameet ‘Polly’ Dhaliwal Matthew Jaffa Sally Devine-Smith Josh Toovey.

I am leading the Regulatory Passporting workstream with three areas of focus.

1. Single Company ID – everyone agrees that having a Single Company Identifier would be a good thing not only for small firms who could use the ID as a passport to carry between public services ie interaction with government, and private services eg when applying for finance and accessing business support, but also to combat fraud which is estimated to cost business circa £1bn per annum. I hosted a call yesterday with all parties working to develop such an ID to a) update on respective work and timelines b) explore alignment as we don’t want multiple single company IDs! And c) agree any recommendations for the Taskforce that could accelerate output. Thank you to all who joined – you can see the list of organisations represented below.
2. Single form-filling in procurement – this one has been spoken about for some time. How can small firms complete details once and port those details every time they bid for a new tender? The potential for this is being progressed with the Government Commercial Agency, with more of an update to follow.
3. Single submission of burdensome regulation – I have long admired the work of America’s Small Business Administration and one key element of that work is the Office of Advocacy which is a single point of entry for small firms who want to report a regulation that is holding back their business. This coming week we have a call with the team running the Office to ask how it works, the benefits, and to assess if this is something that could operate in the UK.

This is in addition to our main activity of cutting admin burden by getting the UK to a state of prompt payment where, nirvana, no-one has to spend non-productive hours chasing debt.

I will keep you posted on Taskforce progress.

In other news this week connected to reducing burden, plans were announced for a single ‘front door’ for businesses to access government services via a single log-in. User research for this is underway and for which you can register here. And there was good news for small firms who want to test and deploy innovations in that government is set to increase the use of Regulatory Sandboxes – ‘what are they?’ I hear you ask.

A regulatory sandbox is a:

‘supervised, time‑limited environment where businesses can test new products or services with certain legal or regulatory requirements temporarily modified or disapplied. Testing takes place with state oversight and clear safeguards. If evidence shows the approach is safe, effective, and beneficial, the Government can lay legislation to make the changes permanent, enabling the innovation to scale across the UK.’

You can find out more in this PDF flyer but, in short, this is good news for small firms as it offers safe testing ahead of potential national scale-out.

It’s been a big week for getting to a smaller set of regs and burden with which small firms have to comply.

Emma

Organisations represented on call re Single Company ID

• HMRC
• Home Office
• Companies House
• UK Finance
• City of London Corporation
• CFIT
• StartUp Coalition
• Xero
• Teya
• Tech UK
• The Entrepreneurs Network
• Department for Business & Trade – Smart Data teams plus Regulatory Taskforce