 Thank you all so much for taking the time to come here. Normally I sit there and I'm calling in a speaker, so it's quite unusual for me to be in the spotlight. This piece of research is based on desktop review, obviously, and some limited interviews. It is not as a consequence as Tarot was one would want and it was also not and did not look at the benchmarking in other jurisdictions which if you were to do a full piece of work which I may well do would involve an extra layer of research. The report is available on the EPS website for those of you who want to read it. It's designed to facilitate a discussion on regulation and better regulation which was very popular and very much to the fore up to about three to four years ago and as I would argue it's fallen off everyone's radar screen for varying reasons. Regulation is acutely important to any state, acutely important to the citizens of any state because there's one of the three formal levers of state power, taxation and expenditure being the other two. So we obviously spend a lot of time talking about taxation and expenditure and as you will see we spend probably a little bit less time talking about what is good and bad about regulation. Regulation covers the entire policy cycle from initial ideas to scoping ideas right the way through to the evaluation of implemented policy and the regulatory impact analysis comes in at the front end and also can inform policy revision at the tail end. There are 213 public bodies with regulatory power in Ireland and bear that in mind when I start presenting because you can well ask yourselves how many of these are actually DNAed to do or IA's which is the jargon for regulatory impact assessments. The basic argument is that good regulation is based on robust and comparative evidence informed by stakeholder inputs. The corollary is bad regulation. It's based on hunch going through the motions and involves imposing a solution without consulting anyone and there's a lot happens in between. You will be familiar, most of you, with what's called the regulatory impact analysis which is a system of vetting and approving policy options that was approved by government and implemented with great gusto and good effect to look at the likely impacts and effects direct and indirect of all legislation involving statutory change and also if it's responsible or IA's to looking at alternatives to regulation. So what it would typically do is to see whether a bill was justified or whether the same result could be achieved by perhaps not introducing legislation. The cabinet guidelines in RIA is dated from 2006 and they require as cabinet guidelines have a certain effect that all memos to government involving changes to the regulatory framework including significant statutory instruments and that's relevant to the implementation of EU directives. All of these must be subject to an RIA and that all options in an RIA must be assessed and all impacts must be assessed. These are cabinet guidelines. The cabinet also decided eight years ago that RIAs should be published and made available on departmental websites. So when I did my desktop survey I checked the departmental websites searching for RIAs. It is also a requirement of government that a cost-benefit assessment be carried out and quote, significant impacts result. So for every major proposed regulation it is also a cabinet requirement that a CBA be carried out in addition to a regulatory impact assessment or analysis. And very interestingly which I wasn't aware of up to recently till I did this research which by the way concluded last January is that an RIA is required within four weeks of the publication of every EU proposal and that these RIAs should be made available to the relevant ORACTAs committees. More about that and on. The RIA guidelines also apply to policy review which might involve stopping short of the introduction of legislation. So the disciplines and the methodology of an RIA also applies to policy reviews. The government initially had two types of RIAs which were the screening RIA which was sort of an executive summary RIA and full RIA and in 2009 abolished the distinction so there's only one type of RIA now. There's no distinction between screening and full. The guidelines also say that the RIAs apply not just to policy departments but to all government bodies and organisations of which as I said they're in excess of 200. The RIAs do not apply to finance bills to emergency legislation and to security and to some criminal legislation obviously. The key principles are fairly straightforward. They're set out in guidelines published by the Taoiseach's office in 2009. I'm not going to go through them all but every single RIA should cover these principles. The fact of the matter is they don't with some exceptions. The exception which is the current only just published bill for unlobbing which contains a very very detailed RIA one of the best I've seen. It asks a number of questions and responds for example as regards to the necessity test it says is the regulation necessary? Can we reduce red tape in this area? But bear this in mind that most RIAs don't answer these questions. It asks in relation to effectiveness is the regulation property targeted? Can it be complied? Can it be enforced? And proportionality? Do the advantages outweigh the disadvantages? Fairly basic, you know, questioning and querying and because the lobbying bill was subject to so much detailed consultation it was easy for the Department of Public Expenditure to respond in this regard. On transparency, have stakeholders been consulted prior to regulating? Is there good explanatory material? Who's responsible? For whom and for what? Is there an effective appeals procedure? And these are standard questions that apply to every piece of policy review and legislation. Are there anomalies and inconsistencies? Are we adopting best practice etc? So the principles have been implemented in Ireland as an exception and I said the most recent one the lobbying bill was probably the only one that I could find of late that systematically addressed these six principles in detail. There also are stakeholder guidelines approved by government. A lot was made of these about six, seven years ago and effectively they say and they haven't been amended to my knowledge or abrogated that RIAs must be used as a basis for consultation with wide stakeholder involvement and that the RIAs must be actively disseminated to stakeholders. So in other words, if the government is considering legislation before it actually takes a decision it should publish its RIA to the wide stakeholder group get feedback and that feedback should inform the draft legislation that subsequently published. And ideally, which doesn't happen very often the views of respondents would be commented upon whereas typically up and recently all that happens is the list of respondees would be listed but their views would not be commented on on a one-to-one basis. Some general issues might be covered but generally speaking it has not been practice in Ireland with detailed views of individual respondees have been looked at. In contrast in the European Commission when you look at their RIAs if a major interest group expresses a view you would get a critique of the view and a conclusion as to whether and to what extent the views expressed are accepted or not accepted and what the rationale is. Also the stakeholder consultation states that all affected party should be consulted. Now it has been practice in Ireland that in some instances only those in a particular sub-sector are consulted. So in doing that there is a danger that those outside the sub-sector don't get involved and don't hear about the RIA much later. So what's best practice? Well the OECD has adopted conclusions on smart regulation. Ireland signed up to these you'll see the details in the appendix to my report. We also during our presidency signed up to EU conclusions on smart regulation which are the Competitiveness Council which are Bruton signed this in May 2013. Forfoss are on records that quote high quality regulation is a critical tool for competitiveness. The high level group on business regulation are also of that view. Another incident of best practice is the European Commission's impact assessments. What I do typically when I'm advising a client I look at and they ask me to review say the water reform bill I check is there a similar impact assessment for a similar piece of legislation at European level and typically the RIAs of the impact assessments at Brussels level are far far far more detailed and robust than their counterparts here in Ireland. Understandably with 28 member states and there are resource issues which I come to. Also in several jurisdictions including and also in the European Commission there are what are called independent regulatory policy committees which is a independent group reporting typically to the Prime Minister's office comprising of academics and policy people who look at the quality of the RIAs and have the option of criticising or sending the RIAs back to be redrafted if they're not off to scratch. This happens frequently in the European Commission and there have been several instances where draft RIAs didn't actually pass muster and were sent back for addition. So the RIAs should be conducted before and I quote the government's guidelines before a preference for new rules crystallizes so it is strict government policy supported by guidelines published and sent to the entire public sector that RIAs should be prepared before legislation is published. I'll stand corrected on the statistics bearing in mind this is desktop review but there were 137 bills enacted or submitted between March 2011 and January 2014 and I could find RIAs published in only a small fraction of them. 42% were the subject of an RIA but the figure is a bit near 50% it doesn't really matter this basically shows that the RIA guidelines are not being implemented across government departments. Related to this is the annual cost of regulation which the EU reckon is around 3.5% GDP on average across the United States. If you take that figure for Ireland it's 4.5 billion the government target is to reduce the minister of burden on regulation by 25% it's not happening we'll talk about that in a minute which would release a billion per year into the economy from SMEs and others who are trying to comply with legislation a very significant burden in terms of the compliance cost arrives in about 5% of legislative requirements so quite of legislation is an act that doesn't have dramatic impacts on business not one RIA and again I'll stand corrected has been conducted in Ireland at the level of detail carried out by the European Commission the impact assessments in Brussels typically run to 200 to 300 pages the best two that I have seen would be the legal services reform bill RIA, the companies bill RIA and the lobbying bill they're all about 40-50 pages they are excellent, don't get me wrong but they don't go into the level of detail that is typical of what happens in Brussels when a draft proposal has been initiated there's some very good examples of RIAs and the lobbying bill which I've cited the legal services bill RIA is a fascinating piece of research to justify legal services reform but it was only published three quarters of the way to the committee stage of the bill, it was not published when the bill was published it was not subject to public consultation in accordance with the government guidelines and if it had been published and debated at the front end of the bill I would imagine the legal services bill would be enacted by now because it made the case and makes the case for a thorough reform of the legal services profession but as I said it came into play and was only made available far too late in the procedures in the erotic committee and as a consequence some of the amendments at committee stage were blocked at committee level and were deferred for six months the idea of multi-disciplinary practices the harbours bill is a summary RIA it is not a full RIA so again while it's a very good level of detail about the harbours of the bill which is transferring harbours to local authorities the RIA is not at a level of detail that would be required under the cabinet procedures on the climate change and low carbon development bill no RIA was carried out on the other hand the NESC did fantastic rework on terms of the research but it didn't actually conduct or nobody conducted an RIA there was public consultation and there was an erotic committee but the erotic committee did not consider a regulatory impact assessment and still hasn't and there's no published RIA on that bill again if there is one I couldn't find it the company's bill again is best practice it was published there were subsequent amendments and the department of jobs, enterprise and innovation has published an up-to-date and revised RIA based on feedback that's what you're supposed to do so the RIA will change depending on feedback and obviously when new options are looked at good example is the green paper on energy policy complies and full with the stakeholder consultation requirements and presumably in due course that there will be an RIA not best in class is the water services bill setting up Irish water I couldn't find an RIA for this bill PricewaterhouseCoopers produced a fantastic report justifying that the delivery of water should be through a public entity but did not conduct an RIA and with the bill more or less gone through now I couldn't find anywhere again understand corrective somebody can produce it for me an assessment as to the pros and cons the effects and the administrative burden cost and impacts on the entire community including the business community wasn't published the forestry bill, a screening RIA was published well after the forestry bill went into committee stage the idea of a screening RIA was abolished six years ago and the bill quote says there will be no impacts or significant costs imposed as a product sector which is, I've done some work for that sector is absolutely baloney because the latest series of amendments of committee stage are imposing among other things a fine of a half a million euros for breaches of certain parts of the act or when it once is enacted the health insurance reform bill is a private members bill and doesn't have an RIA now you could argue that the Iraqis should be providing support for private members bills to initiate an RIA a regulatory impact assessment when the private members are mindful to put legislation forward the EU procurement directives huge impact we spend 9 billion a year on procurement should have been subject to an RIA they have, I don't know what it is and the RIA will be very relevant because there are significant impacts on business because business and SMEs are involved with procurement again, no RIA very recently the NAMA amendment bill was published no RIA the social welfare and pensions bill was published in the last 2 weeks I couldn't find an RIA and again bearing in mind that the guidelines state that within 4 weeks of the publication of EU proposals regulatory impact analysis should be prepared, I couldn't find one on the EU's 2030 goals for climate change and energy that should have been published and sent to the relevant Iraqis committee if it was, I couldn't find a record of it a policy review would be the better energy finance policy review again, great work going on it should be subject and producing an RIA if it is doing so, I'd like to see it I couldn't find it effectively talked about the minister burden on business the bottom line is the government has agreed to reduce the minister burden by 25% but the department that's primarily responsible for this the department jobs is doing the heavy lifting counting for 72% of the total target you could argue that the target which was 500 million initially is way way way below what the actual minister burden is and I did some consultancy work for the department as well in order to that so I love comparing what people promise for what they deliver and this is what was promised in the programme for government the column on the left states what's in the programme the column on the right are my views departments are required to carry out and publish RIAs before government decisions are taken that's a restatement of the government guidelines it isn't happening in the majority of cases the cost of government imposed red tape would be reduced as far as I can see only one department is actually making a significant effort regulatory enforcement agencies would be streamlined in fairness the government has introduced a statement on economic regulation but that concerns state companies and state regulators only it's a good piece of work and it isn't full compliance with the programme for government again it says RIAs would be prepared and all EU directives and be sent to the relevant OROCTAs committees I couldn't find one RIA sent to any OROCTAs committee when I was doing my searches if they do exist I'd love to hear from those of you who found them so this effectively tells me that the cabinet procedures on RIAs are not being fully respected I haven't found evidence of any major policy reform that's the subject of a full cost benefit assessment including water reform, property tax legal services reform because there's a list of 20 other major reforms underway I couldn't find RIAs on EU proposals which is a requirement of the cabinet against this the Department of Public Expenditure Better Regulation Unit as you know has been scrapped and all the people who are in the unit that went from the t-shirts to deeper have been reassigned so we don't have a better regulation unit the Department of the T-Shift Better Regulation Unit was best in class of its type when it existed we got accolades across the OECD for a fantastic piece of work and the way we addressed better regulation up to the time of the recent government where everything changed the focus now is on economic regulation which is quite different what the economic regulators are doing is assessing public sector impacts only assessing value for money and looking at the impacts on the public sector they're not looking at the impacts on the private sector so while it's a good initiative it is partly achieving public policy objectives there are quality issues with some of the RIAs I decided not to get into this in my work but we take a random sample of some RIAs some are pretty dreadful the quality is very, very uneven so my assessment is that the carrying out of regulatory impact assessment at government level is not a priority it's fallen off the agenda now the government has just initiated the T-Shift's office a document called National Risk Assessment last April and I've submitted this report because regulatory risk is an issue in Ireland and again if we're not implementing the basic rules of regulation what defines good regulation we have a problem so many policies are not based on robust evidence many policies are not informed by stakeholder inputs public policy guidelines happen but it is rare to see a critique offered of the views expressed and if so it's never done in public and options of alternatives to legislation really don't exist the programme for government primarily looks at legislating for X, Y and Z whereas not legislating or doing something on a voluntary or code or practice basis can actually achieve the same results the administrative costs and burdens on business are not been systematically quantified with some rare exceptions and to quote the high level group and business regulation RIAs are actually not informing government decisions they've been introduced to justify government decisions and that is not what's supposed to happen that is total no-no at OECD and at EU level there have been positive statements made last September about doll reform and to quote the T-Shift to bring civil society interest groups and experts into the logistical field at an early stage in the context of doll reform but a lot of what was promised is a toky at odds with the government regulations on public consultation and on RIAs and these regular guidelines have not been changed to reflect doll reform so you have a situation where an Iraqis committee can be looking at legislation or draft legislation in the heads of a bill and it doesn't have an RIA in front of it and it will go out to consultation with the policy maker, it's the legislator whereas the departments who are supposed to be informing policy have handed over responsibility for a lot of the policy making process not the legislation making process to Iraqis committees and the approach is not uniform for example the Iraqis committee as we know well in this house did fantastic work on climate change but the Department of Environment chose the root of the Iraqis committee to get consensus on climate change whereas the Minister for Communications and Energy has chosen the root of a green paper to get consensus on energy policy which is the opposite side of climate change so there's an inconsistent approach so strictly speaking if the Iraqis committee is to do its job and it is doing good work and some great examples of Iraqis committees own initiative reports they should be based on RIAs the high level group there's a H missing there somewhere the high level group and business regulation this is their quote and I think this is not me, this is their quote so a lot of what I'm saying is supported by the evidence of the government group which is social department representatives and major departments there's a patchy approach to commissioning and quality of RIAs departments are not carrying out RIAs or producing them late in the stage in the policy and the legislative process to justify decisions already taken that's the view of the experts in government this is a misapplication of the RIA process which is meant to guide policy developments and not be a tool to justify policy decisions that's a pretty serious criticism and some of the members of the group including IVEC have gone on record and have used even stronger language than that this other quote is the larger systemic problem appears to be the lack of centralized oversight given that the department of teaching is no longer involved in RIAs and the difference deeper seems limited again that's a slight understatement so what can be done again bear in mind that we're post Troika for the last two to three years probably other priorities we do need I would think a reintroduction of a smart regulation or better regulation capacity in government in most jurisdictions it is located in the Taoiseach's office or the Prime Minister's office it's in the secretary general of the commission so it is the agency that's responsible for policy coordination typically hosts a smart regulation unit it needs to be resourced if we're going to take this agenda seriously somebody should really and it's not for me to do look at putting pressure on government to consider the reintroduction of a smart regulation unit the cabinet guidelines on RIAs and indeed on public consultation must be updated we've signed up to best practice within the OECD and at EU level only in the last 18 months but we haven't changed any of the guidelines which are now eight years old to reflect what is best practice across Europe and the OECD I would go as far as to say that some of the draft legislation which were there's very significant cost benefit cost benefit impact requirement say the burden on businesses maybe 50 million euros a year you'd be required by law to carry out a CBA, a cost benefit assessment at the moment the guidelines are voluntary so it's not happening but for a major major piece of legislation that has significant impacts I think it would really inform a good debate in the Iraq the sandwich stakeholders if they could see what the cost benefits and what the arguments are but the high level group of business regulation doesn't have a mandate to drive this agenda it is driving the agenda primarily on the administrative burden on business and I think if they had resources they should be looking at the smarter regulation agenda the statement on economic regulation published gave allocated responsibility for regulation across major departments but dropped effectively leadership responsibility for better regulation and there is an argument if this agenda has been taken seriously and obviously only and seriously that some form of a small wouldn't call fiscal council for regulation but some capacity, independent capacity be put in place so that very poor quality or inadequate RIAs or those where no RIAs are being undertaken there would be an appeal court that can view the quality and the necessity of RIAs to make sure they're fit for purpose to conclude here's a few quotes again to justify some of the recommendations this is from the high level group a regulatory environment which fosters growth and investment is essential to economic recovery and job creation the regulatory environment is not working we're not getting the same bang for our book we're not being as smart we're not being as dynamic as we could be quote from ibeck an effective, efficient and appropriate regulatory regime is a prerequisite for the government's commitment to make Ireland the best small country in the world in which to do business so ibeck we're on board the action plan for jobs actually said something about it a smart approach to regulation balances cost etc so there's an awful lot of good intention that we must introduce smart regulation but the harsh reality is it ain't happening we have all the essentials in place we have the tools in place we wear best in class like what we were doing four to five years ago but all of that best practice seems to be cast aside for other reasons and i would argue finally that evidence based research must be central to the DNA of good policymaking not just in Ireland but elsewhere thank you chairman