PRESENTATION TO CAVE REVIEW OF COMPETITION & INNOVATION IN WATER MARKETS
UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK
9 JULY 2008
Australian Competition and Consumer Commission Regulatory Conference, Queensland, July 2008
The Traffic Management Act 2004 (TMA) provided for the introduction of a number of measures intended to address problems associated with urban and inter-urban congestion on the road network. This included providing the potential for permit schemes to be introduced by highway authorities such that street works (for example, utility repair work that involves occupation of some part of the highway) could not be undertaken without a permit, and a fee could be levied for the provision of such a permit. Secondary legislation was required in order to allow for the introduction of permit schemes, and more detailed enabling provisions were subsequently introduced under the Traffic Management Permit Scheme (England) Regulations 2007 (hereafter referred to as „the permit scheme regulations‟).
This report provides a review of the Regulatory Impact Assessment that was prepared by the Department for Transport (DfT) in the development of the permit scheme regulations. Some comments are also provided on the relevance that the issues raised in this review have for ongoing and future policy developments with respect to permit schemes
The OFT Report on the PPRS is 114 pages long and, collectively, the annexes add up to 924 pages. As might be expected of a text of this length, it contains a large number of different strands of argument/reasoning and covers a wide range of issues. Almost inevitably, there are inconsistencies in places, and, more avoidably (but also a very common tendency in this type of document), there are many points at which the reasoning drifts off into economic theorising that is only loosely related to the principal issues and evidence at hand.
For obvious reasons it is impossible in a review such as this to assess each and all of the elements of the Report, and some selection mechanism or filter must be applied to the material. The most straightforward way to deal with this issue is to focus upon those aspects of the analysis which the OFT itself considers to be the most significant, as indicated/revealed by what is said in the main text of the Report.
Written evidence of Professor George Yarrow, Director, Regulatory Policy
Institute.
Members of the Regulatory Policy Institute have been longstanding supporters of Cabinet Office initiatives to promote better regulation, from the earliest days of these exercises. The Institute has on occasion also undertaken research projects that have contributed to the initiatives. Whilst the following remarks are critical of the current proposals, they are nevertheless the views of ‘friends of the process’.
A presentation by George Yarrow to the Judicial Studies Board’s Competition Law Course, 9-10 January 2006.
Sparks & Flames, Amsterdam, 4 December 2003
This brief note responds to the MoJ’s call for evidence in the context of its review of legal
services regulation. It is based on past and current work of the Regulatory Policy Institute in
both the legal services sector and more generally across sectors of the UK economy and
internationally. It focuses on general principles rather than on specific detail.
Delivered at the Institute of Economics, Jagiellonian University and the Krakow Academy of Economics