Business leaders gave a sceptical welcome to last month's Budget proposals to reduce the spider's web of red tape. While Chancellor Gordon Brown accepted the recommendations of two key reports on cutting regulations, the Government itself was accused of increasing the bureaucratic burdens on business by almost 39bn in the past eight years.
'Since 1997, we have calculated the cost of all the extra regulations through our burdens barometer and it comes to 38.9bn,' says Lewis Sidnick, the British Chambers of Commerce employment policy adviser. 'Forty per cent of that cost is related to employment regulations.'
The difficulty is that these regulations place a greater burden on small organisations than on large firms, which have human resources teams to keep abreast of changing legislation.
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