Of course it could just be coincidence, but scarcely hours after my post last week concerning the dearth of the employment law candidates for the Brexit red-tape bonfire, out pops a Gov.uk policy paper on “Smarter Regulation to Grow the Economy” containing the first five suggested victims.
And what a woeful little bunch they are, showing a smallness of imagination and ambition completely at odds with the tone of the rest of the paper. This is essentially an extended rehearsal of how the UK is going to make better regulations by, well, thinking about how they will work first, rather than (now it can be told) “defaulting to regulation with scrutiny of decisions to regulate left too late to materially change course” (or in motoring terms, putting them on the road first and then carrying out the crash-testing). The view is advanced in the paper that this will limit the number of regulations which “simply make people’s lives that little bit more difficult and annoying“, though it has the grace to admit that being annoying is not solely the province of regulation derived from the EU. No indeed, the UK can hold its head high in any company when it comes to annoying rules entirely of our own creation, and to reinforce that, the document has music by Elgar, a flypast by a Spitfire and all the Union Jack bunting left over from the Coronation. In addition, Gov.uk traditionalists will be reassured to note the continuing presence in it of a very pre-Brexit level of grammatical errors.
...Abbott Laboratories agreed to pay $385 million to settle U.S. allegations related to poor manufacturing practices at two facilities, including one involving an investigation of a contaminated faci...