Connoisseurs of our civil service will enjoy this one. In April 2004, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration raised concerns that the number of transactions and form-filling required of the recently bereaved was "onerously bureaucratic". A committee of Britain’s finest was accordingly drawn from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, Cabinet Office, Department for Work and Pensions, Inland Revenue and Court Service (DCA). After due consideration they duly issued a glossy 1cm thick report in March 2005. Two ministers signed the foreword to applaud it as "the first of its kind…tackles unnecessary bureaucratic burdens."

The committee came up with eight recommendations. How many burdens are now to be reduced? How many forms will no longer need completion? You guessed it: not one. All the recommendations are, in effect, that the relevant departments should consider these matters further.

The first recommendation backed off an obvious reduction. In addition to gaining all the data on forms and by phone, the Probate Office required the bereaved to appear for an interview. This lasts 10 minutes, serves no purpose and is a waste of time. The Committee wondered if the requirement might be scrapped. "The Review of Probate Business Final Report stated that: 'Overall, 65 per cent of respondents [the bureaucrats] were opposed to the proposal [to scrap the requirement], although 75 per cent of members of the public were in favour of it'." (p.80)

The civil servants advanced two arguments for keeping the requirement: "one of the main aims of [this] consultation is to respond to the views of customers by providing the services they want" and "Ministers were concerned that other modernizations…. should be in place and shown to be working satisfactorily, before considering such a radical change to a well established procedure."

So the final recommendation was to go on consulting, i.e. do nothing.

The civil servants' objections are so laughable that one could not have made them up. The first was to give 'customers' (why are the bereaved customers of the Probate Service?) what they manifestly say they do not want. The second, rather neatly I thought, was to blame the Ministers for holding it up.

If this shows the way the government will de-regulate, as the ministerial foreword suggests, then skeptics will be vindicated.

(‘Making a Difference: Bereavement' - Regulatory Impact Unit, Cabinet Office, March 2005).

[Tim Ambler is a Senior Fellow at the London Business School]