UK Parliament / Open data

Deregulation Bill

Proceeding contribution from Oliver Letwin (Conservative) in the House of Commons on Monday, 3 February 2014. It occurred during Debate on bills on Deregulation Bill.

I certainly do not want to venture on to the particular terrain where my hon. Friend tempts me, but I shall say that in the whole process of looking at 6,000 regulations and a welter of statutory guidance, one of the things we have done is precisely to draw ideas and information from wide sources throughout the country. This has not been a top-down process involving a small group of bureaucrats. I think I am right in saying that about 30,000 responses have been received following our various online efforts to crowd-source ideas, and in every single case—we have done this subject by subject—we have asked panels of real, live business people, “What really matters to you?”

What we are bringing forward as part of the red tape challenge process, of which the Bill is one small fraction, is not a set of changes that have been dreamed up by some bureaucrat or even some elected Minister, but an

approach that is based on the advice of those most affected. I think that is the right way of going about it and, incidentally, it is why, across the 3,000 or so regulations that are being got rid of or improved, we have managed to achieve a little more than £800 million a year of savings for British business. I do not think that that is by any means the limit of what we can achieve, but it is already a significant achievement.

Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
575 cc38-9 
Session
2013-14
Chamber / Committee
House of Commons chamber
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