The Forum of Private Business has given a cautious welcome to the Business Impact Target (BIT) report from the Better Regulation Executive, as the need for transparency is greater than some of the deficiencies that the report contains.

Ian Cass, Managing Director of the Forum of Private Business explained, “We believe that the need for transparency is absolutely vital as every few years we hear of how much the government has saved us in deregulation when businesses only ever see their reporting requirements going up.”

“The omission in this report is one that we have with all regulation reporting – it does not include the taxation regime which is one of the most bureaucratic in the world and is likely to be increased with quarterly reporting requirements in the near future. This means that the report fails to comment on the issue of the National Living Wage and EU regulation when it argues that the state has “saved” businesses over £885 million.

“The report clearly needs to be comprehensive in the future – when the biggest deregulatory impact was to do with the plastic carrier bag charge, you know that the figures are only partial” explained Ian Cass. “There is however a realisation of this and perhaps the most important line of the report is about the government looking to reduce the annual cost of tax administration by £400 million by 2020”.