The coalition government is introducing a crowdsourcing initiative to enable employers to pick which of the current 21,000 business regulations should stay or go, starting with the retail sector.

 
The initiative will be announced by Business Secretary Vince Cable later today in a speech at the Federation of Small Business conference in Liverpool along with a three-year moratorium from next month on “new domestic regulation” for all companies with less than 10 staff. Domestic legislation applying to larger firms will henceforth include a sunset clause, giving it a fixed date for review.
 
The crowdsourcing initiative will see all 21,000 regulations arranged by theme, starting with the retail sector next week and followed by heavy manufacturing. Employers will be given the opportunity to express their views on which rules they do not like and the least popular will go before a ‘Reducing Regulation Committee’ chaired by Cable, ideally within months.
 
The Business Secretary will say at the conference: “We are giving those affected an opportunity to tell us which rules are badly designed, or straightforwardly a bad idea. The onus of proof will then fall on Whitehall to prove why the regulation needs to stay, or if there is another way of achieving the same outcome.”
 
Among the regulations that the coalition government already intends to scrap are the extension of flexible working request rights to parents of 17-year old children and the right to request time off work for training among employees of companies with less than 250 staff. It will not remove maternity and paternity rights for people working in small-to-medium enterprises, however.
 
The government faced criticism this week that deregulatory initiatives such as the ‘one in, one out’ rule have failed to gain traction. Of 200 regulations passed in the second half of last year, only 106 were revoked.