Time to take a Milei-style chainsaw to the nanny state
Ask any business what is the biggest barrier to growth and time and again they will tell you it’s regulation, says Jamila Robertson
In a recent talk at the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), the former Bank of England Governor, Lord King, reflected that the Bank of England staff had risen from 2,000 to 5,000 people, all working in regulation.
Much has been said about the damage to productivity of over-regulation, but little has been done – in fact, the opposite has happened.
In this parliamentary session (2024-26) alone, 343 bills have been tabled. Ranging from the ‘A34 Slip Road Safety (East Ilsley and Beedon) Bill’ to the ‘Bullying and Respect at Work Bill’ or the ‘Public Authority (Accountability) Bill’, a bill to set a requirement on public institutions, public servants and officials to act in the public interest with candour and frankness. One might presume this would be a prerequisite for the role, but this is what our legislators, our parliamentary representatives, are busying themselves with: proposing pointless legislation to negate the need for common sense. Nanny, they still believe, knows best.
In its Future of Regulation report, the CPS found that the gross annual cost to business of regulations introduced between 1998 and 2019 was £83.4bn.
When I speak to businesses, the biggest barrier to hiring, raised time and again, is overregulation. For those less affected by the Budget’s bombardment of business rates, National Insurance and minimum wage hikes, the Employment Rights Act, which the Conservatives monikered the ‘unemployment rights act’ due to the pernicious impact it will have on hiring in the UK, is due to come into force this month. It will legislate for the removal of minimum service levels for industrial action, but for every business, there is a reason to baulk at the Act. For coastal and seasonal companies, it is the ‘right to guaranteed hours’ that will be damaging; for the SME with a handful of employees, it may be day-one rights to paternity and parental leave, allowing an employee to give notice of leave from their first day of employment.
Unemployment
Nonetheless, this Labour government remains perplexed that in December 2025, payrolled employees decreased on the year by 184,000 and on the month by -43,000.
In industries where vacancies tentatively remain, such as housing, regulation continues to hamper growth.
In December 2025, the Chair of the Industry and Regulators Committee, Baroness Taylor of Bolton said “the scale of the delays caused by the BSR (Building Safety Regulator) has stretched far beyond the regulator’s statutory timelines for building control decisions”; observing that “it does not improve safety to delay vital remediation and refurbishments, nor to deter the delivery of new housing in high-rise buildings”.
The Renters Rights Act, which is due to upend the private rental market in May, boasts that it “will remove fixed-term assured tenancies. All tenancies will be periodic, with tenants able to stay in their home until they decide to end the tenancy by giving two months’ notice.” It will provide new protections for tenants who fall into rent arrears, increasing the mandatory threshold for eviction from two to three months’ of arrears and increasing the notice period from 2 to 4 weeks. Whilst claiming to recognise that landlords are also people “whose own circumstances might change”, tenants will now benefit from a 12-month period during which landlords cannot move in or sell the property. They will then need to provide four months’ notice if they want to move in or sell.
This misguided legislation offers little incentive (on top of recently imposed additional council tax penalties) for anyone to rent their home. It will surely be easier to sell or leave the property empty.
We are paralysing our promise with red tape and regulation, large and small; anyone who owns a business will have been recently bombarded by new Companies House ID checks – another unnecessary addition to the long to-do lists of those trying to start up, scale up, or keep the lights on.
Gone is the state’s confidence in collective common sense. Instead it seeks to increase our dependence upon it, determined that it knows best what we should think, how much we are permitted to spend and on what (even our ISAs are no longer our own).
We must, of course, take a Milei-style chainsaw to the swelling state and its engorging welfare, health, and civil service bills. But rowing back on regulation must top the list for Britain to return to growth. Like Milei, we must free the economy from its malaise, soaring unemployment, those working just enough to stay within a certain tax bracket, or strivers forced to sell a nest-egg to retain some autonomy over what happens to it.
Britain’s best days do lie ahead, but to get there, we must liberate ourselves from a nanny state infantilising the nation and cut the cord.
Jamila Robertson is director of the centre for the future of work