The China Daily News tells me that the government of the People's Republic is going to remove the regulation on its telecoms charges. At the moment, the PRC has some of the highest mobile phone charges in the world, thanks to detailed price regulation of course.

The new plan is to set maximum charges and then let the market sort it out. It is believed that the maximum - not just on mobiles but on long-distance and other calls - will fall as competition drives prices down.

Other daft arrangements - such as the fact that, under the present order, both sending and receiving parties on a mobile phone get charged for the call - seem likely to go.

Good to see the PRC welcoming competition. Pity our regulators in the UK are not as laid back. The original idea of UK regulation was indeed to set price caps and then let the market sort it out. But our regulators have delved into, and regulated, so much of the mobile phone business that it is hardly a market at all. Folk here say that China will overtake the UK as the world's fourth largest economy by 2010, and if they do more of this free market stuff, they will probably make it.

Despite pledges to make life easier for small businesses, the government has failed to make progress in many key areas. This is the verdict of the Confederation of British Industry in a new report, according to the BBC, and David Smith in the Sunday Times. Of the government targets,

Four have not been met, it said. These are building an enterprise culture; encouraging entrepreneurs in disadvantaged areas and among under-represented groups; improving regulation; and creating a positive environment for small-business growth. But it gives the government credit for meeting three targets: improving access to funding, making it easier to start a business and making government more accessible and helpful.

Some of the rest makes depressing reading. Instead of rising to 14 percent, the number going into business has fallen from 12 to 11 percent, and fewer adults would now consider starting a business.

The report shows red tape has increased in the past five years; many firms still find access to capital difficult, particularly in the £250,000 to £3m range, and small businesses are increasingly reluctant to take on staff. While the number of small firms has grown from 3.7m to 4.1m since 1999, those employing staff has dropped from 1.35m to 1.23m.

CBI head Sir Digby Jones says the government presides over "stifling red tape, a discredited planning regime and a society that becomes more politically correct and risk-averse by the day." One solution might be to look at, and to emulate, the success of Italy's small artisan sector a generation ago, and create a category of small businesses to which most of the rules and regulations devised for large firms would not apply. Entrepreneurs, given space to grow into, can achieve great things.

As is well known, we do need to regulate the excesses of capitalism, no doubt about it. The question is not whether regulation, but who regulates? Should it be individuals making their own choices or should it be wise and benevolent people choosing for us? A poster child for the second view is yesterday’s report (pdf) into the new Pensions Regulator. It's discussed slightly differently in the Telegraph.

Companies with significant holes in their pension funds may have to get permission from David Norgrove, the pensions regulator, to pay dividends or buy back shares, said a leading actuarial firm yesterday.

And the Guardian:

Britain's biggest companies are using their spare cash to reward their shareholders rather than repair the holes in their pension schemes, according to a report published today. The report found that the 100 biggest UK companies paid out £39bn in dividends to shareholders last year - almost four times more than the £10.5bn they paid into their final salary pension schemes during the same period.

Note that the Guardian regards profits as "spare cash." The real point, though, is that defined benefit pensions are in trouble as people live longer. So companies who made promises 30 years ago are now finding that these much more expensive than expcted. Hence the setting up of the Pensions Regulator to ensure that those promises are properly funded. Clearly this is an appropriate and proper response to the problem, a good use of Governmental power. Who could doubt it?

Purely as a minor side effect, this now means that companies must, before paying investors for the use of their money (the majority of which are in fact pensions funds and insurance policies) ask a nice bureaucrat before they do so, and to what extent they may do so.

As the implications of this change in the legal and financial environment become clear to managers, what will happen? My prediction is curtains for any company offering a defined benefit pension system at all, with everyone moving even faster to a defined contribution one. In other words, they will move to a system where the Pensions Regulator has no say in their company actions.

What was that phrase from the Vietnam War era? "We had to destroy the village to save it." Clearly regulation via Government appointed bureaucrats solves problems. All problems with defined benefit pension plans will be solved pretty soon after the appointment of the Regulator, since there will be no defined pension plans left at all. Well done lads!

(Tim Worstall writes here).

It seems the European Court of Justice (ECJ) is going to have to rule on the great case of whether the Marks & Spencer chocolate teacake is in fact a cake or a biscuit. HM Customs & Excise say it's a chocolate-covered biscuit, in which case M&S owes them £3.5m in Value Added Tax (VAT). M&S say don't be daft, it's a cake, which makes it zero-rated.

This stupendous waste of public money and time arises out of the sheer stupidity of the VAT laws. VAT in Britain puts a whopping 17.5% on the cost of what you buy, so in order to show how much they care about deserving groups, the politicians exempted some items such as food, domestic (and, for some reason, aviation) fuel, and children's clothing. Later the tax was extended to hot take-away food, so if you buy a hamburger and salad, I guess one has VAT on and the other doesn't.

I'm certainly confused, like M&S and the Excise. But I suppose the origin of this dispute is that chocolate biscuits are considered a luxury and are taxed, while chocolate cakes are considered food and are exempt. We have seen the same disputes over Jaffa Cakes and gingerbread men.

Such things are the hallmark of a bad tax. We used to have just the same absurdities with the old Purchase Tax, which had various rates. So a dish with indentations to put your cigarette on was classed as an ash tray and taxed as a luxury, while the identical dish with a flat rim was classed as a peanut bowl, which being a food container attracted less tax. Not surprisingly, pub ashtrays became universally flat-rimmed, and you still see many of them around today.

It's surely a principle of taxation that it should apply evenly rather than haphazardly. If you're going to have VAT (and it's a very bad, complicated, and costly tax we could well do without), you should apply it to everything and cut the rate. If that means needy people can't then afford clothes for their children, then deal with that problem separately. But don't complicate a tax so much that you have to go right up to the ECJ to define a teacake.

Twenty-five years ago tomorrow, Mrs Thatcher's government created seven new 'enterprise zones'. The idea was to show what free enterprise could do if only bureaucrats and tax-collectors would keep out of the way.

The idea went back as far as 1978, when Sir Keith Joseph hinted to a meeting of the St. James Society in London that, if elected, the Tories were minded to create areas where "the queen's writ did not run". But few local politicians were minded to give up their powers, and the enterprise zone proposal was gradually diluted.

But then, in conversation with ministers, the Adam Smith Institute realized that the government held large areas of land around ports and airports which would make ideal bases for the 'freeports' that existed in many other countries. It came up with a list of proposed sites which might have a second go at the enterprise zone idea, this time as freeports.

As we reported later, the freeport experiment was a mixed success. It did show that enterprise and trade could be released if the conditions were right. But officials, in particular those at H M Customs & Excise, proved very reluctant to loosen their regulations as part of the test. They suspected, correctly, that once some areas had enjoyed this freedom, others would want the same.

All of this means that we are still working on our hidden agenda of the time - to turn the whole country into one vast freeport where the writ of regulation fusspots and tax inquisitors does not run!

Prof. Sir Liam Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer, has called for a change in the allowed personal imports of cigarettes from other EU countries. The full report (pdf) states:

In 2002, the indicative limits on cross-border shopping to the UK from the European Union were increased following pressure from the European Commission. An individual can now bring 3,200 cigarettes or 3 kg of hand-rolling tobacco into the UK without paying any UK tax or duty.

And makes the recommendation:

The Government should use its influence within the European Commission and with other Member States to address cross-border shopping for tobacco products,with the aim of reducing the limits to 200 cigarettes or 250g of handrolling tobacco.

The aim is, of course, to raise the price of tobacco products in the UK and thus reduce smoking.

Unfortunately Sir Liam is working with a gross misunderstanding of the law. We all have a right, an unlimited right, to make personal imports into the UK of items upon which we have paid duty and VAT in other EU countries. (There are certain limitations from the 10 new entrants, but none from the other members of the EU-15.) This is the cornerstone of the Single Market, that such cross border shopping is allowed as of right, not as a series or permissions or allowances.

The indicative limits to which he refers are exactly that, indicative. Anything below them is to be regarded as a personal import, unless there is other compelling evidence (say, three trips a day across the Channel by the same person) that the materials are for resale. It is still entirely legal to bring in larger amounts if one can convince Customs that they are for personal use. For example, one can take a pantechnicon of champagne through Dover (with an HGV license, of course) if the guest list for your daughter’s wedding proves to be compelling evidence.

A reduction in such indicative limits would make no difference whatsoever to our right to make personal imports of larger amounts. They would just lead to more time showing Customs that one is indeed a smoker.

The value of technical experts in the bureaucracy is said to be that they are able to look at the larger picture, make recommendations without being constrained by day to day political pressures. Yet when one of that august number misunderstands the law, then makes policy recommendations based on that ignorance, what hope for the rest of us?

(Tim Worstall writes here.)

A boy has been barred from returning to school because of a plaster cast on his leg, reports Stewart Payne (Telegraph). The risk is that other children might trip over his leg and injure themselves.

Rosemary Clarke, the head of Balksbury junior school, Andover, Hants, made her decision after consulting the Health and Safety Executive.

In my schooldays plaster casts were a regular feature of life. Someone would break an arm or a leg, and we all lined up enviously to sign the cast. Some schools have banned conkers, lest children are hit in the face, and another recently banned children taking cardboard tubes and used egg boxes on safety grounds.

The difference between then and now is not that these things have become more dangerous, or that we have become more aware of hidden dangers. It is that we now have Health and Safety Executive Officers to dream up absurd risks, in much the same way that Racial Awareness Officers dream up non-existent insults in our ordinary turns of phrase. These people are paid out of taxpayer funds, and think up these absurdities to justify their jobs.

Childhood is a dangerous place. You fall over; you get cuts and bruises every day. Sometimes you break a limb, and it heals up again. To protect children from risk is tantamount to protecting them from childhood. I doubt if there is a single recorded case of a child being injured by tripping over a plaster cast. Shoelaces, now, are a totally different matter…

Bismarck famously suggested that those fond of laws and sausages should not watch either of them being made. We have just been watching a law being made in Britain to ban smoking in places that also serve food. Mick Hume (Times) tells us that the Department of Health document

proposes a legal definition, not only of "smoke" and "smoking", but also of "enclosed", "roof" and "wall", and specifies that those countless non-smoking signs must all be "at least 280mm by 200mm".

Public buildings, workplaces, football grounds, pubs and bus stops are to be adorned with shop-a-smoker telephone hotlines, so that people can inform on transgressors and call upon the army of inspectors to enforce the law. As for food, it all depends on the type of food.

Drinking/smoking pubs are to be given a list of ready-made bar snacks that they are permitted to sell, and inspectors will crack down on unlicensed snacks. There is even a proposal to ban smoking within one metre of the bar in smoking pubs. The document admits that "there is no evidence that this would provide any health benefits."

I imagine that white lines will be painted on the floor, so that people can use their mobile phones to inform on any smoker who mistakenly crosses one of them. Watching this law being made has quite put me off sauages…

Britain's bossiest government has published its plans to ban smoking in public places like pubs, cinemas, restaurants and shopping centres. Lighting up will carry a penalty of £50. Members' clubs, and (mysteriously), pubs which do not serve hot food are exempted. But landlords of pubs and restaurants will be fined £200 if they permit smoking.

Just to make sure, environmental health inspectors will be snooping around public places, ready to pounce on smokers and owners who engage in these unspeakable crimes. It really is a case of the 'smoke police' coming to town - as the Canadian band The Intended warned us in their chillingly amusing song of the same name.

The environmental health inspectors, of course, think the ban should extend everywhere. "Our members, who are regulators and people in the industry, both want the same thing - simplicity," said Ian Foulkes, director of policy at the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health. Others predict all kinds of problems trying to define what counts as an 'enclosed space' or 'food'.

I don't much like people smoking around me, but smokers these days are more self-aware, and I find it tolerable. What I find less tolerable is for people to be told that they can't allow folk to smoke on their own property - even if they have totally effective smoke-extraction technology and their customers are all happy with smoking.

It can't be long before publicans are forced to stop us bad-mouthing the government on their premises - which will really bring it home to us how quickly our freedoms can be eroded if not rooted in strong principle.

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]

Our civil servants famously insist on enforcing all regulations. We gold-plate directives from the EU, so they affect us more than other member states.

It is obvious, nonetheless, that some regulations matter more than others. It might cause concern to have 5,000 gallon fuel containers stored next to primary schools, but the risk caused to us by someone selling cheese by the pound instead of the kilo is minimal.

As a first step to sensible regulation we should grade all regulations. The ones which put life and limb at risk should be designated as grade-1, whereas those which hardly affect anyone should be given grade-5.

Given limited resources to deploy in enforcement, we obviously have to put them into areas which matter. Breach of grade-1 rules might carry a serious penalty, whereas anyone breaking a minor rule could be let off with a caution. Since the inspectors would be directed to cover important areas, the chances are that small businesses would not be bothered overmuch with the annoying trivia which eats into their time and costs without benefitting anyone.

As well as bringing some common sense to regulation, this would have the added advantage of exposing sham deregulation. If all that were abolished were grade-5 rules concerned with selling meths on Sunday or brewing mead, we would spot the exercise for the hype and spin it was.

Tony Blair has attacked Britain's compensation culture. According to Francis Gibb in the Times, the UK prime minister attacked the risk-averse attitude which underpinned much regulation.

"If we start to believe that every possible problem must be avoided at all costs we end up with a mindset that says nothing good should happen in case it leads to something bad. Irrational decisions should not be made through fear of litigation. Rather, there should be a commonsense culture, not a compensation culture." He announced measures to ease regulation and end risk-averse cultures in the science and business communities and the public sector.

The problem is that this is talk. Polls of public and business opinion indicate concern that excessive regulation is hampering both commercial enterprise and daily life. The prime minister echoes that feeling, but the odds are that after his words have grabbed the headlines, it will all disappear into impressive-sounding initiatives which achieve nothing. The last five deregulatory initiatives all left more regulation in place at the end of them.

John Hutton, the Cabinet Office Secretary, will review regulations, an issue that will be a priority of the British EU presidency, Mr Blair said.

Bravely the prime minister identified the problem and threw a review at it. His Chancellor Gordon Brown has talked of a one in, one out rule, under which each new regulation must be matched by the demise of an existing one. As John Guthrie remarks in the FT (subscription), this "will merely create scope to cull archaic statutes regulating mead-brewing."

You cannot deal with regulations by a check list. Each one has its defenders, and for each one reviewed a civil servant will stand up to highlight the risks faced if it is abolished. You have to tackle the culture itself, which is that of a government and bureaucracy which thinks it knows what people should do better than they know themselves, and which wants to spell that out in detail. It wants to leave nothing to their judgment because fundamentally it thinks its own judgment is superior.

Is EU regulation past the high-water mark? It's encouraging, ASI author Keith Boyfield told our seminar on deregulation this week, that all important EU legislative proposals are to be screened for their impact on competitiveness. EU Commissioners seem keen to axe regulations and look at voluntary or other arrangements.

And the Commission says it will move to stop national governments 'gold plating' its directives (a practice at which the UK excels).

A third hopeful sign, said Boyfield, is EU expansion:

Having only just liberated themselves from unwelcome state intrusion in their business and personal lives, the last thing that Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary or Slovakia want is a raft of EU regulatory measures forced on them by Franco-German social democrat politicians.

Indeed, we might even see "regulatory competition" along the lines of tax competition. Financial services might re-locate to Malta – light regulation, not too many annoying civil servants, and even those struggle to implement the EU rulebook. The latest EU scorecard reveals that Malta has failed to implement a total of 617 directives. It's even sunnier than London or Edinburgh. Sounds like the place to be.

On Tuesday (24 May) at 6.30pm, the authors of our Roadmap to Reform report on Deregulation, Tim Ambler and Keith Boyfield, will lead off a Westminster seminar aimed at charting the way forward for politicians.

Ambler and Boyfield identify three major sources of regulation - the EU, Whitehall, and the regulators themselves. And they see three ways of tackling each - stemming the flow of new regulations, reducing those which exist, and having more sensible enforcement centred on risks not rulebooks.

In areas well covered by EU regulation, they say, existing UK regulation should be presumed unnecessary and phased out. And we should find the overall cost of regulation, and then set targets to reduce it. Regulators who cut or simplify regulations should be rewarded. Small businesses should have to deal with only one person for tax and one inspector for all other regulation, and should be compensated for form-filling – all of which might induce officials to make regulation easier and less bureaucratic.

Responsible business conduct is more likely to be achieved by a few general rules and the marketplace, than by thousands of pages of detailed instructions, say Ambler and Boyfield. Should be a refreshing event, so contact steve@adamsmith.org if you would like to come.

To see a B17 bomber in flight is an awsome sight. But the legendary World War II 'Flying Fortress' will be conspicuously absent from the Memorial Day ceremonies at the American military cemetery near Cambridge next weekend.

The reason, according to a report by Peter Amond (Telegraph) is a new European regulation that categorizes the B17 as an airliner, raising its insurance premium five times. It is ironic that the plane flown by many of the 5,124 Americans interred in the cemetery is now grounded, not by the Luftwaffe, but by EU insurance rules. Ironic, and rather sad.

And shockingly typical. Because Britain is, as usual, enforcing the new EU rule with the full might of its Department of Transport - while France, of course, is not. So if you want to see one of these huge, magnificent planes actually flying, you have to head to France. Their last surviving B17, called the 'Pink Lady', is flying as normal.

America's 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, now entering its first year of enforcement, was supposed to stop the next Enron or WorldCom. It won't of course. What it will do is impose annual costs of $35bn on US companies.

Sarbanes-Oxley is a one-size-fits-all rulebook dictating the structure of boards, the duties of corporate officers, and financial control systems. Sure, it may help make accounting more transparent, protect whistleblowers, and expose insider deals. Yet while the Act's fine-grained approach might mesmerize accountants and managerialists, it is unlikely to catch the mega-abuses that brought down Enron and WorldCom.

You can't make corporate life risk free. It's built on risk. But the exposure of Enron and WorldCom was proof that corporate America's scrutiny system was working, not that it needed to be scrapped. If only political scandals could be exposed so easily.

The cost of Sarbanes-Oxley will fall most heavily on small companies, which cannot easily afford fleets of compliance officers and zillion-dollar IT systems to churn out all the data that the regulators demand. But small companies produce nearly all the new jobs. So it's goodbye to all that.

Why force businesses to accept governance structures that are wrong for them? Let them choose their own rules. Some will want to reassure their investors by adopting the Sarbanes-Oxley system. But if others think it Sarbanes-Oxley is wrong for them, let them explain why and then get on with their own business.

In most countries the TV programme Yes, Minister is considered humour, but in Britain it is regarded as biting social realism. Here's an example.

Recently, Downing Street established a Panel for Regulatory Accountability. Its purpose: to consider the cost-benefit calculations on proposed new regulations, and judge which should stay and which should be thrown out. It was heralded as a great boon to over-burdened business.

One of our regulation experts, Francis Chittenden, innocently enquired what exact bits of red tape had in fact been scrutinized by the Panel. The (eventual) answer from the civil service: "Sorry, we can't tell you because this information falls under the exemption in Section 35 of the Freedom of Information Act."

"So," as the London Evening Standard reported, "there you have it: a regulation that prevents ministers from disclosing which regulations are under review. Sir Humphrey would be proud."

Monday's report from the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) says that deregulation so far has been mostly talk. In fact the number of business regulations has increased by 46% in the first half of 2004 compared with a year earlier. And despite a tendency to blame Brussels, the vast majority of the new regulations come from Britain.

Authored by Tim Ambler (London Business School) with Francis Chittenden and Chanyeon Hwang (Manchester Business School), the report evaluates the Regulatory Impact Assessment system, introduced seven years ago as to monitor the costs and benefits of policy proposals.

Gary Duncan of the Times quotes co-author Tim Ambler:

The government says there is a huge amount of deregulation going on, but it's just nonsense frankly.

Although the Budget Red Book claimed more than 400 deregulatory measures under the 2003 Regulatory Reform Action Plan, the new report notes that only four such measures were delivered last year. Mr Ambler notes that one of these four was the scrapping of a 'trivial' rule which prevented the sale of methylated spirits on Sundays.

The Better Regulation Task Force is the fifth deregulatory initiative I can remember within about 15 years. All of them left far more regulations in place when they finished than there were when they started.

The London papers report a new UK government ruling that insurance companies are not going to be allowed to use the results of genetic testing in order to make a judgement on whether or not to insure people.

If so, this is very bad news for people who buy insurance. Because folk who are worried that they might die young, or suffer some long-term debilitating illness, will immediately get themselves tested. Then, if their fears are confirmed, they will pitch up at an insurance company demanding cover. And the insurer, kept in ignorance of the real risk, will end up writing some very bad business to a lot of people.

Which in turn means that insurance premiums will go up, even for people who are at low risk and who choose a healthy lifestyle. Or insurers will just stop offering life or long-term illness cover entirely.

If politicians think it's important to help high-risk people, then fine: but they should pay for it, after public debate. What they are trying to do is to foist this "social cost" on to private business. And when you try to push market players around like that, you do more harm than good. Civics is the business of government, not the business of business.

Road Map to Reform is a new series of reports looking into different areas of government activity. The first of this series is Deregulation.

The report argues that EU rules should be applied equally across all member countries, utilities should no longer have to pick up the cost of customers who cannot pay their bills, and small firms should have to deal with only one official on all aspects of business and workplace regulation.

Senior Fellow of London Business School Tim Ambler and economic consultant Keith Boyfield also demand that the 16,000 pages of EU laws must be radically boiled down, that new regulations should expire automatically after three years, and that the official consumer watchdogs should be wound up.

"Over-regulation depresses corporate profits, consumes valuable management time and saps entrepreneurial morale," say the authors. "It makes the UK less attractive to investors and destroys the wealth creation on which the whole of government depends."

There are three big sources of red tape - the EU, Whitehall, and the regulatory offices like Ofcom and Ofwat. For each one, we need to make sure that fewer new regulations are created, that existing ones are rationalized, and that enforcement does not become over-zealous.

Download PDF of the report

The UK Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell MP is bidding hard for the title of Mrs Scrooge. Her contribution to the festive season is a proposed tax on fun. The Times reports her proposals to charge social events from music festivals to country shows "to cover the costs of health and safety checks by officials."

The charges are to apply to events which attract more than 6,000 people that involve temporary accommodation and serve alcohol or late-night refreshment. The minimum charge will be £5,000, rising to £50,000 for larger numbers. The future of charity pop concerts is threatened, as are the many country food shows and game fairs held in the grounds of historic houses. Literary and folk festivals and garden shows also face prohibitive extra costs.

As the faceless army of officialdom marches on, yet more of the innocent pleasures will be lost, and a little more fun taxed out of existence. Some might think it a better idea to allow such events to go ahead untaxed, with messages on their posters and tickets saying "this has not been inspected by government officials." It could become a badge of honour.

The UK television company ITV is attempting to buy out its small US shareholders, according to the Times, in order to get their numbers below the 300 threshold which requires compliance with US stock exchange regulations. ITV estimates the cost of providing separate US accounts at £3m per year. Instead it plans to offer small US shareholders a $500 bounty and 15% above the share price.

Given that US courts have long had jurisdictional problems, and do not seem to recognize that independent countries prefer to make their own rules, the move seems prudent.

The broadcaster’s move reflects mounting criticism by European companies of US listing corporate governance rules, which they say are too onerous for many businesses whose primary listing is outside the US. In recent months Lastminute.com, the online travel company, and Autonomy, the software group, have sought to quit Nasdaq because of the mounting cost of regulation. Siemens, the German electrical group, and Intershop Communications, a German software company, have also threatened to delist from US exchanges.

Among the benefits of a global economy is the ability to move production to where costs and overheads are lower, and to a more sympathetic tax regime. To this must be added the ability to locate and be listed where regulation is more sensible and proportionate (the UK is not exactly a financial sweatshop).

There are excess regulators in the EU, too, and this ability to shop around is precisely what they would like to stop. Their over-the-top regulation is actually restrained by the ability of companies to locate beyond their jurisdiction. That ability enables firms to be more efficient by avoiding the excess costs of compliance with their pointless and burdensome rules. It means less costly goods and services, which is good for all of us.

For a century or more, people have been swimming in the ponds on Hampstead Heath. Some, like me, swim occasionally in the summer. Others swim all year round. It is said to be deeply therapeutic to get up at 6, make your way to the ponds, plunge into the icy water in total darkness, and then get to your city desk by 9.

Then came the Health and Safety Inspectorate. Now Health and Safety is only meant to apply to work places, but soon all swimming baths were classified as places of work, and then all ponds were classified as swimming baths. And all need two life guards to be on duty at all times.

There are three ponds on the heath, one (the best) for the ladies, one for the men, and one (summers only) mixed. This means that 4 (in summer 6) life guards need to be on duty for 12 hours or more a day. The cost is said to approach £500,000 a year. And naturally the Corporation of London wants to cut it back.

Now the solution is simple - do away with the guards. Before they came, people had been swimming for a century without a single fatal accident. Even if there were to be an accident, other swimmers would help before the guards could get there.

The United Swimmers Association have proposed that winter swimmers should form a self-regulating association to swim at their own risks without guards - thereby saving a huge amount of money. They are currently suing the Corporation of London for this to be allowed - but the Corporation is resisting this money-saving proposal and calling in lots of highly paid lawyers in order to oppose a proposal that would save them a lot of money.

Michael Foot, who introduced the original legislation, and is a local resident and Heath enthusiast, is said to be horrified at the unintended consequences of his legislation.

Andrew Selkirk is Editor of Current Archaeology.

Regulation is not only Britain's biggest industry; it also gives people something to do with their time.

The Times reported on Monday that Rother District Council in East Sussex had ordered 1,000 'dangerous' gravestones in Bexhill and Rye to be pushed over in case they fell on people.

Now the council’s officers report that the flattened monuments are still a hazard "because people could trip over them." Sigh.

It's official. Regulation is now Britain's biggest industry. David Arculus, the Chairman of Severn Trent Water and head of the government's Better [sic] Regulation Task Force, suggested last week that the cost of regulation to the UK economy was now more than £100 billion a year. That's more than a tenth of our gross domestic product (GDP).

That's bigger than tourism (£76 billion), or our much-vaunted financial services industry (£66 billion), or even the National Health Service (£67 billion and rising - and rising).

I no longer believe any of the politicians' promises to 'sweep away red tape'. Michael Heseltine, another businessman and self-made millionaire, tried it when Industry minister in the 1980s. His deputy, Neil Hamilton, headed up a commission to reduce regulation. Tony Blair has been talking about it for years. But the number and intrusiveness of regulation continues to grow.

One reason, says regulation-watcher Christopher Brooker, it that "for every single new law, however made, it is always possible to find some seemingly altruistic justification. Once health and safety, conservation, the environment or fighting discrimination has been invoked, no one seems capable of asking whether the law actually achieves its purposes." In other words, any time you suggest suspending a regulation, scores of people will cover you with contempt. And you will be blamed for anything that goes wrong without the aegis of this 'protection'.

The trouble is that, when you have tens of thousands of regulations, nobody can run a business free from the fear that they are transgressing some rule. So businesspeople waste vast amounts of money trying to find out what the rules are, and then making sure they have enough 'compliance officers' to stay on the right side of them.

Unless you have any ideas, Britain's biggest industry is going to carry on growing even bigger.

There's a myth being put forward that government action - the Disability Discrimination Act - is making websites more accessible to the visually impaired. Politicians might like to take the credit, but they don't deserve it.

The organization doing the good work is the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This is a private sector regulator of web standards, set up by Sir Tim Berners-Lee - the British inventor of the World Wide Web. There's no legal requirement to follow W3C standards, yet people follow them. In doing so, it easy, and almost costless, for modern websites to provide versions for visually impaired people. Increasingly websites across the world are becoming more accessible - and it's thanks to a private sector standard setter.

On October 31st, the FSA will regulate mortgages. Is this desirable? The UK mortgage market provides a text book example of how a free market gives true consumer protection.

Twenty-five years ago getting a mortgage resembled buying a car in East Germany. You joined a queue and six months you might be given one. It would be a variable rate based on a rate agreed by the Building Societies' cartel. It was virtually impossible to switch lenders without buying a new property.

Today there is a free market. Mortgages can be fixed, discounted, cap and collar, cashback, etc. Consumers can also vote with their feet, switching from one lender to another. Choice though brings problems. You can choose the wrong one. A fixed rate may seem attractive but if rates fall you pay more than if you had taken a variable rate.

The idea that a consumer might make the wrong choice is anathema to regulators and the consumer lobby hence regulation of mortgage advice. As with financial advice consumers will believe that this removes risk and the compensation fairy will come along and make it better if they make a wrong choice. Inevitably someone will argue that they were "mis-sold" a variable rate mortgage if interest rates rise. Anyone who goes into arrears will complain they shouldn’t have lent them the money.

Lenders will become cautious issuing more documentation. They will recruit people to check all the relevant boxes have been ticked. This will be paid for by the consumer. Lenders may refuse to discuss the pro’s and cons of each package as it might be construed as giving advice which could end up with them being hauled up before the Ombudsman.

And will consumers be better protected? I don’t believe they will be. They already enjoy the best protection which is the ability to move from one lender to another. If they choose not to do so, that is their choice. Do we need any more protection than that?

Snooty academics have been gleefully asserting how bad British managers are, and how we should all copy Continental social policies, following a study which says UK productivity is 20% lower than France and Germany. The study comes from the state-financed Economic and Social Research Council, which might look to its own productivity (costs £100m, up 14% in a year, same boring reports).

Remember that 42% of the UK economy is public sector, whose productivity is probably negative. The swarms of tax collectors and regulatory officers that it unleashes on business can't do much for the other 58%, either. And when seven million adults who have been through state education can't read well enough to find a plumber in the phone book, it's a wonder that business can produce anything at all.

"Ah, but France and Germany are more productive because they invest far more capital in research and mechanization than Britain," gloat the academics. True. But unlike those countries, Britain has a flexible labour market. It's simply impossible to fire anyone in France and Germany, so you don't hire them in the first place. You hire robots instead.

And that's why Britain's unemployment is non-existent and France and Germany's are through the roof. Frankly, as I wrote in The Business, I think we've got the better of that deal.

A Czech farmer's goat's cheese does not meet the rules imposed by the EU since his country joined it in May. The Telegraph today reports that it would cost him about £64,000 to build "a changing room, bathroom and lavatory, a cheese production room, a cellar in which to store the cheese as it ripens, and a packing room."

Since the farmer, Mr Haiek, makes about 3 or 4 kilos of cheese a day in his kitchen, leaving it to ripen in his cellar, his weekly earnings of about £97 hardly justify the investment. So he advertises that his cheese has failed to meet EU norms and sells it as animal fodder. Meanwhile,

Armies of health inspectors have taken to standing outside the farm, interviewing customers about what they plan to do with the cheese. One customer, a pensioner living in a one-bedroom flat whose only pet was a goldfish, denied eating it himself, saying it was for a neighbour's dog.

Presumably like other EU bureaucrats they have nothing better to do. Now the officials are trying to claim that because it is mixed with herbs and spices, the cheese is unfit for animal consumption either.

Those who can think of better things to do for the people who implement the EU's Common Agricultural Policy, and better ways of spending its money, are invited to make suggestions.