Britain slashes thousands of regulations

Prime Minister David Cameron said Monday the British government had identified some 3,000 regulations that would be scrapped under a policy meant to tear away red tape hindering economic growth in the nation, according to published reports.

The effort goes well beyond President Obama’s regulatory “look-back,” which has identified roughly 500 areas where federal rules could be eliminated.

In a speech to the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), Cameron touted the initiative as putting his administration in a position to become the first in the U.K. to decrease the number of federal rules on the books, according to a segment of the speech posted by BBC News.

“We’ve now identified those 3,000 regulations that we’re going to scrap and we have already got rid of 800 of them,” he said.

The Guardian is reporting 80,000 pages worth of environmental protections and building standards are among those to be tossed out, calling into question Cameron’s claim that he leads the greenest government ever.

The prime minister has imposed a policy under which two federal regulations must be removed for every new rule created. Some in Congress have called for a similar strategy in the United States, but legislation enacting that change stands little chance of passage in the current political landscape.

Meanwhile, the White House this month touted Obama’s own government-wide effort to cut unnecessary red tape. The initiative has identified more than 500 areas where regulations can be streamlined or scrapped entirely, and is on track to save over $10 billion, White House press secretary Jay Carney said this month. 

“The Obama administration has had a smart, pragmatic approach to ensure we are reducing burdensome regulations,” he said.