Person: Gibson, Stephen
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Gibson, Stephen
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Publication Are regulations achieving their objectives? Post Implementation Reviews – why they should be done, why they aren’t done and how to get them done(Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business & Government, 2024-03) Gibson, Stephen; Kenche, VenkatakrishnaRegulatory policy is often under-prioritised by governments, particularly when compared with the detailed focus associated with tax and spending measures. Even where a clear policy development process is adopted and applied for regulatory measures, it rarely has the same profile or attendant resources as applied to fiscal measures. This paper highlights one aspect of this regulatory policy deficit – the lack of priority given to evaluation and ex-post review of regulatory measures. Post implementation reviews (PIRs) are an essential part of the framework for ensuring best practice regulatory policy making by government and regulators. Ex post evaluation highlights whether regulations are achieving their objectives and operating as expected, or whether they are leading to unintended consequences or imposing disproportionately high costs. They inform decisions over whether to retain, revise or remove the regulation. However only 25% of OECD countries have formal requirements for PIRs and even then, an evaluation is often not undertaken for many regulatory measures. This paper reviews the different approaches to PIRs in the UK, Canada, Australia, the US and the European Union in terms of system governance, methodology and public transparency and capacity building. It highlights the methodological challenges in undertaking PIRs, in particular the importance of a well-designed monitoring and evaluation plan and the failure to feed the results of the PIR into subsequent modifications to the regulations which suggests a systematic failure in the policy making framework. The paper suggests that PIRs are not undertaken more comprehensively due to: limited political benefit, lack of prioritisation and concern over exposing previous policy failures. It proposes seven policy approaches that might lead to a more comprehensive approach to PIRs, however the common thread running through all of these approaches is the critical importance of high-level political support. Without high-level backing, statutory requirements will be variously disregarded, internal and external voices ignored and the pragmatic short-term pressures to focus on new and high profile policy measures will trump the longer-term benefits from a comprehensive approach to policy evaluation.Publication Reducing the Burden of Government Regulation(Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business & Government, 2023-03) Gibson, Stephen; Henshall, William; Banda, TasilaGovernment regulations can impose significant costs on businesses that are then passed onto consumers in higher prices. This paper considers the different approaches that the UK and other governments have adopted to try to reduce the burden of regulation, how successful these approaches have been, and what we can learn for current and future government policy. These approaches have included: • Regulatory offsetting - One-In-One-Out (OIOO), (followed by One-In-Two-Out and One-In-Three-Out) prevented the introduction of new regulation unless an existing regulation of equivalent or greater value was removed. Many other countries, including 10 EU member states, have introduced regulatory offsetting rules. • The Red Tape Challenge (RTC) sought to identify regulations that could be removed or reduced via ‘crowdsourcing’ suggestions sent to the RTC website. A similar approach was introduced in British Columbia. • The Business Impact Target (BIT) - where the government set itself a target for regulatory burden reduction. An additional approach (which is currently being considered for retained EU law), is the sunsetting of regulations if they are considered no longer effective at achieving their objectives. The data do not provide a clear picture of the relative performance of the different approaches. However the BIT approach has been the least successful with regulatory costs increasing significantly during its period of operation and the Government consistently missing the target it set itself for reducing regulatory burdens.Publication Assessing the impacts of primary and secondary legislation – a Real Options approach to rules for making rules(Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business & Government, 2024-01) Cave, Jonathan; Gibson, StephenImpact assessments (IAs) of government regulatory policy proposals set out their expected costs, benefits and risks and who is likely to face those impacts. In the UK, primary legislation can confer powers on Government ministers and other bodies to enact Statutory Instruments (SIs) and other secondary legislation. Because SIs have the same effect as Acts of Parliament, but face significantly less scrutiny, there has been a trend to increase the use of this mechanism for areas of policy or principle, rather than purely administrative procedures. This trend has implications for democratic accountability and the different timing and treatment of primary and secondary legislation also has important implications for the way impact assessment is carried out. This paper outlines the rationale for a compound (primary and secondary) approach to introducing legislation, identifies different types of subordination and considers the implications for estimating their expected impacts in an IA - particularly when the assessment of the secondary measure happens after some of the uncertainty related to the possible outcomes of the primary measure has been resolved and this can be taken into account in the secondary decision(s). It points out the limitations of the conventional NPV-based approach to assessing the impacts of compound measures and proposes the use of a real options approach to IAs to address this concern. In particular it suggests that the real options approach should be used in cases where there are: uncertain outcomes, different possible timings, irreversible policy decisions and distortions due to the use of standard discount rates. Primary legislation creates the opportunity but not the obligation to pursue secondary measures and should be assessed taking these future options into account.