Measuring the burden of regulation, we should be under no illusion that's an easy thing to do. Red tape, and more broadly regulation, is a hidden tax on business, so it is hard to make that tax visible because most of the cost is compliance. It's not the administrative burden that government faces but it's the compliance of the private sector.
We are making some progress, but I also think there's more to do because right now even the administrative baseline is still more narrowly focused on regulatory red tape and the private sector definition of red tape is broader than that, and it encompasses some other things.
In 2007, the government did a measure that was broader. I'm hopeful that this administrative baseline burden is the first step to getting back to a broader measure. Those two things together, the one-for-one rule and a broadly based administrative baseline count, would be extremely powerful in helping us understand the burden of regulation and then continue to control it.
If you don't measure it, you don't know whether it's growing, whether it's staying the same, or whether you're making progress at reducing it. You need to measure it and you need to have good measures.