If you are one of those who mutters about the “red tape” and the “Health and Safety” that is holding back Innovation, Creativity, British (or any other nations) Profitability, the recent Titan disaster should make you pause and think hard. As a past Board member of BSI (the British Standards Institute I am not one of those people).  Red tape and Health and Safety are there for a reason.  They are some of the building blocks of good Risk Management. Regulations are too often introduced because something has gone horribly wrong.

 Admittedly there are some regulations where the world has moved on and they could do to be reviewed, but in general they are there to save lives.  10 people a month still lose their lives in the UK workplace from accidents in spite of all the “Health and Safety Red Tape”.  The designers of Titan railed against those in the industry who were trying to delay the use of new technology by asking for it to be subject to industry standards. They have been proved wrong. 

 All new technology comes with risk, the job of standards and regulation is to minimise those risks to acceptable levels.  We had 1695 deaths in road accidents in the UK last year, each one a tragedy, but the price we are prepared to pay for our car and lorry based society.

 The danger we face from regulations is not that it holds things back, but that given the speed at which technology is moving it can’t hold them back enough.  Regulators are under-resourced and way behind the curve. It’s just possible, though hard, to regulate nationally, but most technology is now global and the chances of everyone agreeing to global regulations are close to zero.  

 The debate over the regulation of AI is making it clear that while a lot of people are very afraid there is no appetite to stop its progress because everyone fears being left behind.

 Whatever the “bonfire of red-tape” brigade may say we need more regulation and better funded, more agile regulators and standards setters if the world is not going up in the bonfire along with the red tape.

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