Question to the Department for Business and Trade:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, with reference to section 2 of her Department's policy paper entitled New approach to ensure regulators and regulation support growth, updated on 31 March 2025, when the administrative costs of regulation baselining exercise will conclude.

The government has committed to cut the administrative costs of regulation to business by 25% by the end of this Parliament. To do this, we must determine the cumulative administrative costs of regulation which has not been done for 15 years. At that time, the exercise took approximately 18 months, which was consistent with efforts of other countries that have undertaken similar exercises.

We are working in partnership with businesses to understand their real-life experiences of regulatory compliance to establish a robust regulatory baseline. We will publish an update on this baseline exercise and our expected timelines in due course.