According to a report from the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), planned regulatory reforms could save businesses some £300m a year, or £1.5bn over five years.
Entitled Defra: Better for Business, the report confirms plans for 336 regulatory reforms that aim to ensure the UK’s very high welfare, environmental and food quality standards are upheld and remove any unnecessary regulatory burden on business.
The savings are expected to represent a third of all savings to business coming from planned Government reforms to regulation through its Red Tape Challenge initiative,
The report contains guidance on how to comply with environmental legislation, making it much easier to follow and reducing compliance by some 80 per cent.
Defra aims to reduce the time spent by businesses reporting information to the department and its regulatory bodies and agencies by 20 per cent, saving business some 850,000 working hours by April 2016.
In addition, the department and its nine agencies, which include the Environment Agency and Marine Management Organisation, plan to consolidate legislation, reducing the overall number of regulations by 20 per cent since 2011.
Commenting on the report, Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Owen Paterson, said that he wants to see less but better regulation, as that is the best way of ensuring that small firms prosper.
Meanwhile, Defra has also launched a prototype online regulations portal, DefraLex, which will be a comprehensive database of the department’s regulations, improving the transparency of laws and making it easier for business owners to keep on top of changes.