It's a start

摘要

No matter how short of cash they are, chancellors always find a little for electorally important groups. But in his ninth budget, Gordon Brown was wooing not just pensioners and first-time buyers, but businessmen as well. He endorsed the conclusions of two reports designed to deal with their biggest complaint-the proliferation under Labour of rules, regulations and red tape. The first was from the Better Regulation Task Force (BRTF), which recommended copying a Dutch scheme to measure the administrative burden that government rules impose on firms. Armed with an estimate of the size of the problem, it said, ministers could then go about reducing it. Mr Brown stopped short of setting a government-wide target for cutting paperwork (the Dutch have pledged to reduce costs by 25% over four years), instead promising targets for individual departments.