Brexit is never going to make us better off. But as a way of persuading themselves and other people to vote to leave, Brexiteers consistently argued that it would. One of the areas apparently ripe for cost cutting is those “burdensome” EU regulation. All sorts of figures have been bandied about and having started with huge numbers are now dwindling to almost nothing.
David Davis in a speech in 2012 said the EU themselves had put the cost of regulations at £110 billion – presumably across the whole EU and per year. The previous Labour government had calculated the burden at £140 billion total for the UK over the years 1998-2010, so about £10.7 billion per year.
One of the leave groups, Open Europe, during the referendum campaign put the figure much higher at least £33 billion (HERE) based on the government’s own impact assessment for the top 100 most burdensome rules including things like:
1) The UK Renewable Energy Strategy – : £4.7bn a year
2) The Capital Requirements Directive IV package – : £4.6bn a year
3) The Working Time Directive – : £4.2bn a year
4) The EU Climate and Energy Package – : £3.4bn a year
5) The Temporary Agency Workers Directive – : £2.1bn a year
The £33 billion total was widely ridiculed because it (a) assumed there were no benefits at all to any of the regulations and (b) assumed they would all be scrapped, which nobody was suggesting anyway. The same criticisms could be levelled at David Davis' figure as well.
After the referendum, in December 2016, presumably after a bit of detailed thinking an organisation called Change Britain, which grew out the Vote Leave campaign concluded that total savings from leaving the EU would be as high as £450 million a week or £24 billion a year! This was not just savings from scrapping EU regulations but also from a surge in exports and cutting EU contributions. This also was widely ridiculed (HERE). It has now been taken down from their website but you can see an archived copy HERE.
But let me just focus on what they said were the savings purely from scrapping EU regulations. First of all, Change Britain took the same top 100 most costly rules that Open Europe said cost £33 billion and assumed (amazingly now!) we would stay in the EEA, calculating therefore that only 59 of the 100 regulations could actually be scrapped. Then they discovered many of the remaining 59 were in fact international agreements that we couldn’t escape or had desirable environmental or social effects that we would probably want to keep.
Then they took only laws criticised in the government’s red tape impact assessment and it was eventually whittled down to £1.22 billion!! But this isn’t the end of the story. The £1.22 billion is almost entirely made up of two items. One is Motor Vehicle Type Approval Regulations 2008 (£151 million) and the other is the Data Protection Act (£1,058 million)! It also turns out the Motor vehicle regulations are actually a UN requirement so can’t be saved anyway. That was it - Brexit was done in order to scrap the Data Protection Act!
Notwithstanding this someone named Harry Phibbs writing on the Conservative Home website (HERE) recently, still claims the savings at £33 billion and even says The Telegraph has calculated it as high as £120 billion!
It is exactly this kind of wishful and poorly researched thinking that shows more clearly than anything else that Brexit is bound to be a failure.
