Question to the Department for Business and Trade:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, what assessment he has made of the potential impact of sector-specific administrative cost baselines on measuring the 25% reduction in business compliance costs targeted under the Regulation Action Plan.

We have established a baseline of the annual administrative burden of regulation on UK businesses, including SMEs. As set out in the technical annex to the policy paper ‘A new approach to ensure regulators and regulation support growth’, we used a pragmatic, top-down approach, building on the previous Administrative Burden Reduction Programme (2005-10), which was based on detailed feedback from businesses, including SMEs, in individual sectors.

Our approach was also informed by DBT’s Business Perceptions Survey, which draws from a large, representative sample of businesses across sectors and sizes to ensure our reforms are targeted effectively.