This week we turn our gaze away from Tower Shamlets and the other one party states of East London and cast our watchful eye on the South West for our non-job of the week.  Gloucestershire County Council has applied for a spin doctor for their waste department.  Yes, rubbish needs PR.  In their advert they laud their “excellent” status in waste management – so they have to spend thousands of pounds of your money telling everyone how great they are.  So, from the Guardian jobs page we give you our non-job of the week from Gloucestershire County Council:

“Community Liaison & PR Officer (Waste)

£22,293 – £28,221 per annum
Waste Management Unit, Shire Hall
Full-time: 37 hours per week

You will not find a better time to join our waste management team. Judged "excellent" by the Audit Commission, waste is seen as one of the authority’s highest priorities. We have an ambitious change programme focussing on diverting waste from landfill, increasing recycling and composting, changing householder behaviour, and the delivery of new waste infrastructure in partnership with our district council colleagues.

In order to deliver our programme it is vital that we communicate and consult extensively with a wide range of organisations including the local and national media, community groups, elected representatives, and residents. That’s where you come in. You will be self-motivated and enthusiastic, with excellent communication skills and a determined approach to getting your point across.

You will be educated to at least degree level in a relevant subject, and will be able to demonstrate experience gained in a marketing, community liaison, PR, or journalism role.”

For far too long the language and rhetoric of international trade
agreements has been depressingly mercantilist.  If one country agrees to
reduce its protectionist measures it is talked of as a "concession" and
a "sell-out", whilst politicians and diplomats who dogmatically cling
onto their ridiculous trade policies are saluted and commended for
defending their country’s interests.  Even the most basic understanding
of economics would be enough to realise why such talk is not only
fallacious but hugely damaging. 

Trade, as Adam Smith so famously pointed out, is a non-zero sum game -
trade is not a fight for a finite, fixed supply of wealth where one
country’s gain is another’s loss, but a wealth creating process, that
allows us to benefit from the resources, skills and specialisation of
other countries.  International trade benefits both trading parties,
leading to better allocation of resources and so lower prices and higher
incomes.  That one country wishes to "protect" its borders from the
benefits of trade is no reason for us to deprive ourselves of these
benefits.  The fact that one country chooses to throw rocks into its
harbour is no reason to throw rocks into ours. 

It is thus very reassuring to hear David Cameron talk of unilateral
reduction and elimination of trade barriers, particularly in developed
nations.  The only engine to sustained growth in human welfare is embracing free markets.
The most successful developing countries have been those that have
traded their way out of poverty.  Not only is it economic madness to
deprive ourselves of the benefits of free trade, it is immoral to
protect ourselves from goods from developing nations, as this only keeps
these nations in poverty.  First-world tariff and subsidy reduction
would do more than any aid package ever could to reduce third-world
poverty.

We are not going to pretend that eliminating western protectionism will
be a magic bullet.  To start with, many of the highest trading barriers
are actually between developing nations and many third world nations
continue to pursue infant-industry protectionism, both of which only
hinder the growth of these impoverished nations.  Too often poverty
campaigners simply choose to ignore the protectionism of developing
nations, in fact in a depressing number of cases they argue in favour of
its continuation as it flatters their ideological commitment to the
neo-Marxist school of dependency theory, and so ignore the fact that
such protectionism is often just as damaging (if not more
so) than developed world protectionism.  In fact, the Conservative
Party’s policy review – headed up by Peter Lilley – proposes some
interesting steps to provide incentives to encourage developing nations
to reduce their protectionism, such as providing compensation for lost
tariff revenue.  This again is to be welcomed.

Our fear is that many of these rigorous and noble ideas will simply be
impossible to implement within the framework of the European Union, as
our hands are tied by French farmers and Italian clothes makers and any
new trade agreement would have to be a collective one endorsed by the EU
Commission and every other member, which, as we previously noted, has been making plenty of protectionist noises of late. 

Speaking to a half-empty Rwandan Parliament yesterday, Mr Cameron said:
"Forget the endless, torturous negotiation about getting something in
return [for dropping tariff barriers] … Just do it. We can afford it,
Africa needs it and we will all benefit from it."  A refreshingly clear
and principled statement.  Unfortunately, given that British politicians
in our puppet Parliament no longer control trade policy (unlike elected
members in America, Australia, China, India, Brazil or Russia), it is
difficult to know how such a speech can ever be translated into action,
short of EU negotiation to take these powers back.

Last year, Gordon Brown committed the Government to reduce the total cost to businesses and charities of regulation from £20 billion a year to £16 billion a year by 2010. In response, Whitehall departments have drawn up plans to abolish unnecessary regulations and reform others.

But a National Audit Office survey of 2,000 firms has found that 85 per cent have no confidence that the Government would reduce the regulatory burden as pledged, 75 per cent felt the cost of red tape would actually increase next year and 60 per cent said it was even now holding their businesses back.

NAO director Ed Humpherson also criticised the Government’s method of measuring the burden of regulation, saying that the figures of the cost of red tape were "indicative and not statistically reliable". He described the 25 per cent reduction target adopted by most departments as "arbitrary", and said: "What is clear is that [red tape] is an inhibitor to making business decisions. What evidence there is suggests it makes businesses reject projects that they would like to accept."

This all points to yet another government failure – the burden of regulation is being measured in the wrong way, and so targets to reduce the cost to businesses are more likely to be missed.

There is a better way to go about the worthy task of reducing the cost of regulations to businesses. And if ministers had looked hard enough overseas, they would have found the perfect way to do it. The Canadian province of British Columbia, five years ago staggering under the weight of one of the worst regulatory codes in the country, adopted a simple and successful plan to reduce the burden by a third in three years.

To measure what the regulatory burden was, the provincial government simply counted the number of “regulatory requirements”, which were defined as “a compulsion, obligation, demand or prohibition placed on an individual, entity or activity by or under the authority of a provincial Act, regulation or related policy”.  In plain English, a line for filling your name on an official form is counted as one regulatory requirement. This is far easier than trying to measure cost.

The first count revealed a staggering 382,139 regulatory requirements on the books in British Columbia. Finding a way to reduce this number was not a difficult task.  Each government department had to reduce the number of regulatory requirements it was responsible for by a third over the next three years.  It was a task as simple as reducing the number of lines on a form: halve the number of lines, and you’ve just halved the number of regulatory requirements coming from that form. The results exceeded expectations and went further than the target of a one-third reduction.  By June 2004, there were 237,604 regulatory requirements in British Columbia, a decrease of 38 per cent from the June 2001 total.

Not only do the numbers look good on paper, they are also making a real difference to businesses in the province.  The Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses’ 2005 survey of its members found that more than half of businesses in British Columbia thought that the regulatory burden had stayed the same or decreased in the last three years, the only province in Canada with such positive business opinion.   

If only unnecessary regulatory requirements could be reduced so simply in Britain.