by Ross Clark - Wednesday, 5th September 2007 -

Like every other business transaction these days, the simple matter of selling a bracelet over the television is mired in bureaucracy.

Sit-up TV is ranked 40th in this year’s Hot 100 list of Britain’s fastest-growing businesses, with a turnover exceeding £200m a year.

Yet the four-year-old firm hasn’t achieved its phenomenal success without being thwarted by the growing burden of red tape.

There are stakeholder pensions for the company to administer, foreign staff visas to check on and the Data Protection Act to obey.

“We handle 25,000 calls a day,” says managing director Chris Manson. “And every time we are obliged to go through a procedure asking the caller whether they mind receiving promo-tional material from us.

"It is very time-consuming. We are also obliged, under the threat of severe fines, to fill in forms giving information as to the ethnic origin of our staff.” Then, there are trading standards regulations to comply with.

“Why do there have to be 57 separate trading standards offices around the country to deal with?” says Manson. “Why isn’t there just one?”

Sit-up TV isn’t the only successful business to be burdened with red tape. In our poll of Hot 100 companies, red tape is the second most important challenge these entrepreneurs have overcome, with 12 per cent saying regulation is a serious barrier to growing their business.

And it’s not just petty, headline-grabbing health and safety regulations (such as the need for a full inspection of every office kettle) that they cite (mentioned by only 15 per cent of respondents).

A bigger bugbear (mentioned by 30 per cent) the Employment Act 2002, which makes it illegal to dismiss an incompetent member of staff without going through a five-point procedure involving a formal meeting, two written warnings, a hearing and an appeal.

While burdening businesses with red tape, the government, naturally, gives the impression of doing exactly the opposite. Ministers promise “bonfires of red tape,” but we have heard it all before.

Remember the Better Regulation Task Force set up by Tony Blair after the 1997 general election?

The task force came up with the stark conclusion that over-regulation costs Britain one per cent of GDP. But the task force’s former chairman, Lord Haskins, recently came clean about what it has really achieved: i.e., not very much.

Government departments, he said, would make positive noises about the task force’s recommendations before completely ignoring them. “The bigger departments say ‘to hell with that,’ and go off and regulate.”

It wouldn’t be so bad if law and order were imposed as enthusiastically as petty regulations.

After a hard day filling in government forms, Chris Manson’s staff leave their office to do battle with the muggers who seem to rule Ealing’s streets with impunity. Several have recently been attacked.

“I’ve written to the police, local MPs and the council, and I’ve had absolutely no response,” he says. “You might expect a bit better given that we are the largest local employer and we pay huge sums in taxes and national insurance contributions.”

Even if the authorities are too timid to put Ealing’s muggers out of business altogether, might they not at the very least impose upon the criminals the same burden of form-filling as they impose upon lawful businesses?