The news this week emerging from a 14 page document published by David Davis under the title “Future Customs Arrangements” is that there are two options under consideration for our departure from the EU and the transition period and despite all of the rhetoric that has emerged from people promoting our departure from the EU, that the red tape will be extended, not diminished. Back in March Iain Duncan Smith said “Let us leave and then the Conservative Party at the next election needs to say, ‘we can reduce the cost on business and on individuals by reducing regulations which will improve our competitiveness, our productivity and therefore ultimately our economy.'” His colleague and French resident Lord Lawson said the Conservatives must then swiftly seize the chance to “transform the British economy” by cutting “massive” numbers of EU regulations. According to this report back in May 2016 a survey by PwC suggested around 80% of the CEO’s of UK businesses were concerned about too much regulation and the IOD had stated that 60% of their members wanted the removal of unnecessary red tape from the EU. Both of these elements were being harnessed to argue for our departure from the EU. The truth is that promising to remove something which has been labelled as toxic and a damaging entity is hard to disagree with. One of the pieces of red tape which our own Government has created is called the Prompt Payment Code which calls on businesses to sign up to an agreement to pay all suppliers within a maximum of 60 days and an ideal period of 30 days or less. At present 2000 companies are signed up to this, as is the Government. For any company that supplies members of the PPC, this is not seen as a damaging policy, even though by definition it is a form of red tape. By the same token any company that has signed to it may find it restricting. Sadly the Government has not taken the princople and applied it to other areas of Government such as paying back the Big Lottery the money borrowed in 2007 to help pay for the Olympics, even though it promised to do so by 2012. Equally any Health and Safety regulations that saves lives or reduces accidents will be seen as a good thing to adopt, yet for people such as newspaper headline writers they are often treated as a toxic thing to deal with. Inevitably some H&S rules can appear unnecessarily rigid, which may be that the rules need adjusting or that the person forming the opinion does not fully understand the reason the rule exists. Any future trading with other nations will involve red tape. People who want the red tape removed may fall into the headline writers trap of exaggerating to sell a few more copies or gain a few more votes, or perhaps they simply live in a world that is detached from the reality which everyone else experiences. Red tape is here to stay, it is often a very good thing to work with although we should always treat it with a degree of caution, but the people who promise its reduction might well be subjecting us to some form of confidence trick.