Deregulation – Putting the fox in charge of the henhouse
The whole point of government regulation is to intervene in
the conflict of interest that companies and individuals have between
their own financial benefit and the public interest.
Most people seem to get that, but not here. We’ve documented a long process of
UK government prioritising business interests in policy-making and
creating new processes that give businesses more say in what gets
regulated and how.
The latest capitulation to business is over animal welfare standards.
From next month the poultry industry itself will write the guidance on
what counts as compliance with animal welfare regulations. For example, poultry farmers will typically trim the beaks of their chickens to prevent them injuring one another – current guidance
advises that this should be limited to beak blunting performed by
trained professionals to very high standards. The industry will now
decide on this guidance itself. As this is the current guidance, as
commentators have rightly pointed out, when it comes to self-regulation
of standards the only way is down.
The fact this move was slipped out quietly indicates an awareness of
just how out of sync it is with public attitudes, which view
environmental and social protections very favourably. When they tried to
crowd source online suggestions from the public for regulations that
should be scrapped they mostly ended up with suggestions for more regulation, not less.
The consequences are very real. The Volkswagen scandal, in which the
car company deliberately flouted rules about what fumes its vehicles
could emit, showed that weak regulation and enforcement can lead to
corporate abuse and, ultimately, deaths. Last week it emerged that the UK government stopped spot-checking cars to check compliance with pollution regulations five years ago.
The only way our government can convince us that all of this is good
for us is by misconstruing social and environmental protections as pesky
‘red tape’. Decisions taken by and for businesses are shrouded in
language of entrepreneurialism and freedom from bureaucracy.
But is lessening the pain for battery farmed chickens really a case
of red tape? Or trying to protect children from air pollution created by
cars? Not in my books.
This handover of welfare guidance starts with the poultry and will be
extended to other meat industries. But the wider story is about more
than just our food. This is one more step in a long road of deregulation that threatens the democratic principle of government itself – the state should make decisions in the interest of society overall, not just businesses.
By neweconomics.org – economics as if people and the planet mattered
