Chainsaws are potentially dangerous machines which can cause fatal or major injuries if not used correctly. It is essential that anyone who uses a chainsaw at work should have received adequate training and be competent in using a chainsaw for the type of work that they are required to do.

Health and Safety Executive advice on working with chainsaws

Reducing regulation is suddenly on the top of everyone’s list. 

Argentina’s President Milei started up the chainsaw over a year ago following his election on a deregulatory manifesto. Since then the new administration in the US has expressed admiration for his approach and has sought to go much further, attempting to cut huge areas of activity and staff from a broad range of public services including health research, the Education Department, international aid and environmental protection to name just a few.

All of this looks to have a major impact on US higher education where the government is targeting DEI (diversity, Equity and Inclusion) programmes within universities, transgender athletes’ participation in university sport and those involved in student protests and insisting on major changes as a prerequisite for future government funding for research. This has resulted in huge anxiety in the sector with lots of job freezes and lay-offs being announced by universities around the country.

Huge swathes are being cut through regulatory forests in the US it seems. Some of the claims made about the levels of savings are already looking over-stated though and there are many legal responses in train seeking to reverse some of these cuts. Nevertheless the impact on higher education is looking pretty dramatic. Johns Hopkins University announced that it was cutting 2,200 staff because of cuts to international aid which funded their activity, manly overseas. Columbia University, which seems to be something of a target for the Trump administration, is losing over $400m in government funding 

 In the UK every government in living memory has said that it will cut bureaucracy in order to allow more investment in front line services, be that in the NHS, education or elsewhere. No government has a strong track record in that regard, either failing to reduce the regulatory burden at all or cutting it in such a clumsy and ineffective way it ends up growing back bigger and less efficient. Most recently, the Labour government has announced some major changes to the running of the NHS which are intended to reduce bureaucracy and improve the ability of Ministers to direct change. The abolition of NHS England, the arm’s length body (ALB, or quango) which has been running the NHS for over a decade, is just the first example of what is being talked of as a “bonfire of the quangos,” an attempt to significantly reduce the number and impact of these bodies of which there are over 300, spending over £350B a year.

Let’s light the bonfire! Again!

But, as the Guardian notes, we have been here before with David Cameron after his election in 2010 removing around 285 quangos out of about 1000:

However, an audit later found it did not save as much as the £2.6bn planned, with transition costs doubling to about £830m. About 184 new organisations were created at the same time…The former cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg attempted another bonfire of quangos in 2022.

Rees-Mogg said that the number of ALBs identified in the Cabinet Office fell from 463 to 295 between 2016 and 2019.

Quite a few of these bodies impact directly or indirectly on higher education, adding to the regulatory burden. Having been going on about this stuff for years you’d think I’d be a bit more upbeat about an approach which could seriously address the costly and burdensome higher ed regulatory architecture. 

I am a bit concerned though by all this loose talk about chainsaws. And I am still fretting about the approach proposed recently by Andy Haldane writing in the FT who argued that the UK should follow the US example in smashing it all to bits:

The instincts of the new US administration are to raze the regulatory tower to the ground and only then to build back on a needs-must (or needs-Musk) basis.

By design, this scorched-earth approach delivers a system shift in culture and practice. It eliminates the deadweight costs of regulatory overshoot at the risk of undershoot.

But, as is already emerging from the US examples, the scorched earth policy can have significant negative impacts too. Razing the entire regulatory architecture to the ground means everyone for themselves – there would be no bail out packages or loans or central government support for universities. Lots of the support mechanisms, agencies and grant allocating structures would all vanish as well. There would certainly be no polite discussions about whether on balance student number control re-introduction might be worth considering. 

A chainsaw? Nothing can possibly go wrong

Confident in your chainsaw skills though you might think this was all pretty low risk, that the consequences would be limited. After all, no-one dies if universities aren’t fully regulated, right? That’s possibly true, up to a point and it is probably the case that many of the effects would not really show for a while. But, following the departure of bodies such as the Office for Students, UKRI, AdvanceHE and  Jisc (meaning no JANET, no data provision and a big hole in journal access). UCAS will probably disappear too and all of the bits of professional bodies dealing with higher education will vanish along with bodies like NARIC, the designated UK national agency for the recognition and comparison of international qualifications and skills, which ensures that universities are confident that international students are ready to study with them. All of this will ultimately mean we are going to have some pretty big building requirements which will prove hideously expensive to re-provide. 

Those regulators which really do need to be tackled would disappear, which might feel good for a while, but then it really would be like the wild west out there with just about anyone being able to claim they were a university. Every institution would be on their own. And as for the lack of a death toll, we will eventually find that the lack of professional regulation of certain courses means that we will have future cohorts of doctors, architect, nurses, civil engineers, programmers, social workers, midwives, physiotherapists and more who might not be fully qualified to do the jobs we expect of them. That is going to be very bad news indeed and will, ultimately, cost lives. And those areas of regulation which survived would undoubtedly be much blunter instruments. You could certainly write off further support to attract international students to the UK for example as there would in all likelihood be a cruder immigration and visa regime.

This is the fundamental problem with this kind of approach. It looks theoretically attractive to remove all of that expensive real estate or regulatory forest but the chainsaw approach is pretty indiscriminate. There is no room to decide to keep some bits but not others and no space for fine judgements when you have a motorised chopper in your hands (am leaving aside that small group of people who claim to be chainsaw sculptors who hang around in those sheds at the edges of some National Trust properties).

The third way?

At the risk of sounding like a bit of an Alex Usher fanboy and just repeating my favourite quotes of his, I am still taken with his  comments following  his visit to the Wonkhe Festival of Higher Education in 2024 in which he mused on the British propensity for over-regulation:

And NONE of it is light-touch. Brits—academic Brits, anyway—are incredibly good at problematizing everything in higher education and so their regulatory systems are designed to be resilient even in the face of some exceedingly picayune critiques….So, the advice I gave them, from a Canadian perspective, was basically (not quite verbatim) “Stop. Calm the F— Down. Most of this is unnecessary”

“Canada has no REF, no TEF, no KEF. We have nothing resembling the Office for Students. External quality assurance, where it exists, is so light touch as to be basically invisible. This does not stop us from having four or five universities in the Global top 100, eight in the top 200, and twenty or so in the top 500. We may not punch much above our weight, but we at least punch at it. And with a minimum of fuss and nonsense.”

We certainly need a lot less regulation than we have now. In the absence of any new funding and pending the outcomes of a more comprehensive review, the government does need to find ways to reduce the cost and burden of HE regulation. There is a need to address this seriously and there are plenty of options for change as we know which would enable universities to address some of their current, in many cases severe, financial challenges.

Bearing in mind that if we do fire up the dangerous chainsaws there will be no further advice available about how to use them as we will have hacked away at all that troublesome Health and Safety Executive regulation, tediously trying to stop us killing or injuring ourselves or others, there is a real risk of indiscriminate laying waste to what is actually, at heart, a reasonably well-balanced ecosystem.

What we do need are some very sharp and well directed shears (I’m thinking high end Spear & Jackson rather than the budget Parkside end of the market here) which we can use selectively to chop those most overgrown pieces of regulation before getting on to some really neat trimming with our secateurs. This will get us to the right level of regulation, a more sustainable system than we have now but very far from a scorched earth approach.

There is absolutely a need to get serious about the regulatory burden and bold action is most definitely required, especially in higher education. But the sector, its staff and students would not be well served by destroying it all. So the chainsaws should not be deployed in the UK.