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Rachel Reeves is to unveil a “blitz on business bureaucracy” in a renewed push to cut red tape that she claims will save British companies nearly £6bn a year.
The UK chancellor will also pledge to make the regime regulating mergers and acquisitions more transparent and bring “greater accountability, consistency and predictability” to the decisions made by the Competition and Markets Authority, according to the Treasury.
Reeves will tell the first Regional Investment Summit in Birmingham on Tuesday that the government will be scrapping “pointless paperwork” and “needless form-filling” for small businesses.
The plans are designed to appeal to the gathering of around 350 business leaders, mayors and investors at Edgbaston cricket ground as the chancellor calls for their support in her mission to boost growth.
John Foster, chief policy and campaigns officer at the CBI, said: “For businesses to fully contribute to this mission they need room to invest, not be constantly battling costly regulation that adds little or no value.”
On the antitrust rules governing M&A, Reeves will propose regular reviews of market remedies for deals and initiate replacing the CMA’s panel decision-making system for investigations with a ‘board committee structure’.
The changes would mean that in-depth “phase 2” merger probes, used to determine whether a deal might limit competition, and market investigations into how well competition is working in a sector, would be carried out in-house by the CMA rather than by an independent group of experts.
Any change is subject to consultation and would require new legislation. The CMA has been in the crosshairs of Reeves, who recently said that she had “got rid” of the chair of the regulator and wanted to “take out” more regulators in her push for growth.
Tuesday’s gathering in Birmingham has been billed as the domestic-focused version of last year’s Investment Summit, which drew in £63bn of private investment largely from international groups.
The summit, which is being sponsored by Eon, HSBC, KPMG and Lloyds, will include bosses from British Land, Hammerson, Deutsche Bank, Kraft Heinz and Morgan Stanley alongside those of local football clubs West Bromwich Albion and Birmingham City as well as Birmingham Royal Ballet.
The government is expected to unveil £10bn of private investment into the UK, the bulk of which will come via a £6.5bn investment from US real estate firm Welltower in the care home sector.
The Crown Estate will also say that £4.5bn of new value will be unlocked after it bought land in Harwell East science park with the potential to build new manufacturing spaces and 400 homes.
The Harwell East project, south of Oxford, has been welcomed by chemical industry bosses at lobby group CATCH UK. They said “urgent corrective action is needed to ensure that UK chemical businesses can continue to deliver the raw materials and provide the industrial customer base”.
The National Wealth Fund is also due to unveil £104mn of financing for onshore and offshore wind projects in Norfolk and Orkney and a heat network in Hull.
The government-backed NWF — which has already made a sizeable investment in Sizewell C nuclear site — is also due to deploy specialists to local authorities to help speed up local infrastructure projects in Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, West Midlands and the Glasgow City Region amid criticism that local authorities do not have sufficient manpower or expertise to oversee large projects.
