Volume 15: Government and Public Administration
7. Reducing regulation
The impact of deregulation on officials

7.8 Officials were therefore mindful that they were expected to take deregulation very seriously. The Permanent Secretary of MAFF told his colleagues in 1993 that their Minister's view was that 'deregulation must be a top priority in the Department's work' and that the Prime Minister's instructions meant looking at policy options in a certain way:

. . . we must question the justification for the burdens already imposed by MAFF regulations, and accept new disciplines on future regulatory activities. We must also report our plans and achievements to Ministers more fully than in the past. ¹

Mr Richard Carden (Head of MAFF's Food Safety Directorate) told the Inquiry that:

When I came back to MAFF from the Cabinet Office in 1994, I found that Ministers there were very concerned to carry forward the Central Government initiative on deregulation . . . I knew the importance that the Government generally was putting into deregulation by that time.

7.9 There was constant pressure to revisit existing Regulations and to identify possibilities for simplifying them or doing away with them altogether. Mr Kevin Taylor, from 1991 an Assistant Chief Veterinary Officer in MAFF, expressed the view to the Inquiry that the Deregulation Initiative:

. . . required busy staff to spend time either identifying legislation which could be revoked or simplified, or to defend the need to retain regulations which others had suggested were no longer necessary. The initiative also made it more difficult to introduce new regulations, even when this was essential as a result of epidemiological investigations or research findings. ²