From: RegBlog | Penn Program on Regulation
Dame Deirdre Hutton, DBE serves as the Chair of the UK Civil Aviation Authority. Previously she served as the Chair of the UK Food Standards Agency.
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So my starting point for excellent regulation with consumers in mind is to keep the following principles firmly in mind:
- Only regulate for risks that are real and cannot be better managed by a competitive market.
- Only regulate those things that consumers cannot regulate for themselves. For example, consumers can see, smell, and assess the food on the shelf at the supermarket; they cannot see or affect what goes on further back in the food chain at the farm or the processing factory.
- Understand what consumers really care about. Regulatory over-confidence can lead to regulating things that do not matter to consumers. There is a well-documented example in the UK when, during the course of the infectious BSE/CJD crisis, the government took the precautionary action of banning beef on the bone. This meant no more T-bone steak or rib roast. Consumers were outraged. They saw this as a step too far, an instance of the government taking control of a risk that consumers wished to assess for themselves.