Will it cut paperwork? Pull the other one!

PERHAPS he genuinely isn't aware of the irony but the idea of Gordon Brown lightening the burden of regulation on business, as he promised as a key plank of his terday's Budget, is simply incredible.

This is Mr Micro-Management himself, the politician who above all believes that the State can and should organise our lives down to their smallest details.

So no surprise, then, that the detail of his proposals for cutting red tape reveals the exact opposite - they will add to, not subtract from, the burden of regulation on Britain.

This, after all, is the same Mr Brown who last year published the longest Finance Act - the legislation needed to put the Budget measures into law - in history, with 328 sections and 42 schedules.

This is the same Mr Brown whose tax credits system has become a byword for complexity. His new pension credit - supposedly much easier to apply for than his previously fiendishly complicated Minimum Income Guarantee - expects claimants, the elderly and poor, to wade through a 16-page claim form and 18 pages of impenetrable notes.

This Mr Brown has also been a key member of the Labour Government which has imposed a total extra regulatory cost on business, measured by the British Chambers of Commerce using the Government's own figures, of £40bn since 1997. That involved 23,222 new regulations - 15 for every working day. No wonder not only our business community, but our public services from the police to teachers, are buckling under the mass of red tape.

This is the Mr Brown whose ministerial colleagues have insisted that every horse in Britain must have a passport, that anyone wishing to replace a window must become a member of Fensa (the Fenestration Self-Assessment Scheme), who won't let you change a light fitting in your kitchen without permission from the council.

Now they claim to want to cut regulation. This has something of a familiar ring to it. In 1997, Mr Blair set up a Better Regulation Task Force. In 1998, Mr Brown launched a Better Regulation Guide. In 1999, the Government passed a Regulatory Reform Bill. Along the way since then, we've had red tape czars, check lists, action plans, panels and reviews. None of them has made the slightest difference.

Nor do the specific proposals in the Budget inspire any confidence at all. First of all, in a move typical of New Labour, the Government plans to set up two more new quangos, a Better Regulation Executive and a Better Regulation Commission, both within the Cabinet Office. There they will join the Strategy Unit, the Delivery Unit and the Office of Public Services Reform, all created by the Prime Minister, all providing jobs for expensive civil servants.

The second part of the strategy announced yesterday is equally flawed. Rather than cutting regulation, ministers plan to amalgamate regulatory bodies. So, for example, five other regulators will be absorbed into the Health and Safety Executive. But this tactic, which the Government has used in a number of areas, has actually added to the regulatory burden.

This new breed of super-regulators, like the Financial Services Authority in the City and OfCom, which oversees everything from the structure of the telephone industry to what we see on television, have piled on red tape. They are large and cumbersome, arrogant and unaccountable. The last thing we need is any more of them.

In particular, the plan to give a great deal of extra power to the Health and Safety Executive, a monstrously over-zealous organisation which bears a great deal of the responsibility for creating the compensation culture, is horrifying. Already it employs 4,000 people and spends £200m a year to interfere in our lives. Now they will have the power and political clout to throw their weight around even more.

Finally, Mr Brown promised to review the way in which the Government implements European law. He was right to point out that more than half of our red tape is now minted in Brussels, but by the time it arrives here, Parliament is permitted to do nothing more than rubber-stamp it.

The Government positively discourages debate on European Union legislation and is now planning to sign a European Constitution which would allow Brussels to launch a battery of new regulations in numerous new areas. Of course, there was no mention of that yesterday.