Ireland is suffering from “regulatory drift”, according to business lobby Ibec, which has identified 48 areas to the Government where “poorly designed, overly complex or excessive regulation” has increased costs for businesses of all sizes.
The group has published a new paper on regulation, which it will present at the first meeting of the Cost of Business Advisory Forum, which was set up by the Department of Enterprise on foot of a commitment in the programme for government.
Ibec said the paper is part of its broader “business ambition campaign” and was compiled in response to the Government’s plan to publish a new plan for competitiveness and productivity.
The report calls on the Government to bring forward a new policy statement on regulation in the country.
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“It is now two decades since Ireland’s last comprehensive policy statement on regulation and a decade since we had central Government oversight of how we manage the process of regulating,” the report says.
“This policy drift is now evident both in business feedback and in objective measures of the way we regulate. We have identified 48 priority areas of regulation which can materially reduce the regulatory burden on business whilst benefiting broader society.”
One issue the measures aim to address is waiting times for licensing and permits. “Members report planning and environmental licensing timelines for investments in Ireland taking years longer than other EU countries,” it says.
“This was recognised in the Draghi report, with Ireland having some of the longest timelines for renewables projects in the European Union. It extends to expanding existing industrial sites, renewal of existing permits and efforts to adopt decarbonisation plans.
“There is a critical need to properly resource regulators to do their jobs quickly and effectively and to make sure processes are optimised for users, such as allowing for parallel processing of licence applications and planning applications.”
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The report further calls for greater co-ordination on standards and implementation of rules. “A lack of common standards, designs, or interpretations between different arms of the State duplicates costs and makes economies of scale difficult to achieve,” it says.
In addition, it argues for reducing administrative burdens where their costs “clearly exceed their benefits”.
“There are many examples where State bodies introduce rules or request data where the benefits for them are small but the costs across thousands of businesses are substantial,” the report says.
“Companies often face the prospect of sharing the same data a number of times with State bodies during the same process, even though the underlying data and purpose of the data is largely the same. This is because systems within those bodies don’t speak to each other.”
Ibec says Ireland is “well behind” leader countries when it comes to the complexity of our regulatory environment and the way new regulations have been implemented over recent years.
It further adds that “unnecessary regulatory burdens” could be reduced by establishing an independent regulatory policy oversight committee to quality control the evidence and analysis used to inform Government regulatory proposals.
