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Essays in Regulation

Obesity issues and public regulation

The prevalence of obesity has featured prominently in the news alongside a range of other diet and lifestyle issues, attracting a good deal of attention from various parts of government and from other public authorities.

Regulatory reactions to the observed tendencies exhibit familiar pathologies: a repeating pattern in which (a) one of more aspects of human conduct comes to be defined as a problem (problematisation), (b) there are calls for government or a public authority to do something about the problem, and (c) the authorities oblige with simplistic actions whose wider, more diffuse consequences are frequently ignored.

Our intention is not to set out a comprehensive analysis of the relevant regulatory issues associated with the prevalence of obesity, but rather to provide an indication of how best-practice policy development might begin to approach those issues.

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April 30, 2007
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Documents

Revising the Regulatory Impact Assessment: Response to the BRE’s consultation

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’.

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October 31, 2006
Documents

Reverse eAuctions and NHS procurement: Full report

The primary focus of this paper is the contribution of “reverse eAuction processes”, characterised by on-line, descending price bidding, to NHS procurement strategies. There has for some years now been considerable interest in the use of such auctions in the procurement of goods and services by both private and public sector organisations. Over the last year or two, this interest has been particularly intense in the UK public sector, and it has been accompanied by claims of substantial gains when these types of arrangements are introduced.

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March 30, 2006
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Documents

The regulation of radioactive waste management in the UK

The substantial quantities of radioactive waste which exist in the UK largely as a result of the activities of government agencies or government owned companies since the 1940s, raise important and difficult questions concerning how trade-offs between both the levels and distribution of costs and environmental quality/safety associated with different waste management decisions.

This paper is concerned with how the institutional arrangements for dealing with issues surrounding radioactive waste management can best be developed. Our main focus is on those factors that at other times and in other industries have been shown to influence regulatory developments.

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February 28, 2002

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