Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill

One idea that I have spent some time on, and which I will look at again in much more detail when I do not have to spend so much time on complex legislation such as this, is bringing inspectorates together. That will ease the burden on a range of public sector organisations and enhance the impact of these measures on the citizen. Essential to meeting the challenge to which I referred earlier is a regulatory regime that meets the needs of the public, while adding the lowest possible burden to businesses. Let us think for a moment about that challenge. Today, Asia’s manufacturing output is greater than Europe’s. Its share of world consumption has risen from some 10 per cent. to nearly 30 per cent. in the past 20 years. In the next five years, China’s economy will overtake Germany’s, which is now the EU’s largest economy. China’s exports to the EU have grown by 100 per cent. in just the past three years. China and India are now turning out more engineers, computer scientists and university graduates—4 million a year—than the EU and the USA combined. As we all know, the gap in productivity and competitiveness between the USA and the EU is widening, not narrowing in the way that it should.