Jitinder Kohli’s route to the Cabinet Office has been a steady but speedy progression through Whitehall, with stints in several departments. At some of them, including his current employer, he’s even stopped off more than once.

Kohli has now been in his post as head of the Better Regulation Executive (BRE) for almost a year, joining shortly after the body was created. But he admits he is a rather nomadic character in government, having worked for four departments in ten years. But it’s clearly a lifestyle he enjoys, and one which has seen him race through the Whitehall ranks to the chief executive position he holds today.

The Better Regulation Executive was set up with the basic mission of cutting the much-maligned swathes of ‘red tape’ across the private, public, and voluntary sectors. It aims to find more effective ways of delivering protection without putting unnecessary burdens on those who are regulated.

The government says this will have the combined effect of driving up UK productivity, increasing prosperity, and modernising public services – and there are potentially massive cost savings to be made too. The BRE sits in the Cabinet Office but works across government, supporting departments and regulatory bodies to assess, reduce and remove regulation. This autumn we should be hearing a lot more about better regulation, as the government releases plans outlining how and where regulation will be simplified.

Kohli joined the civil service through the fast-stream process after completing his masters degree. His was essentially a “random” application, he says, “because I didn’t really know what working in the civil service meant”. He didn’t feel like he had any connections to the civil service through family and friends, but nevertheless saw the fast-stream scheme as a good opportunity.

“I was convinced that people who got through were not like me – they knew more about politics and the civil service,” he says. “I didn’t know anyone who had been a civil servant before – well, I didn’t appreciate the number of civil servants there are, it’s quite an invisible profession, and it was a world I didn’t know much about.”

But after attending a Cabinet Office seminar at university, which set out what working in the civil service was all about, Kohli decided this was the career for him. “From being a little half-hearted about the whole idea, I thought, this is really interesting I really want to do it.”
He started with a couple of years at the DTI before moving to the Cabinet Office in the Economic and Domestic Secretariat – which he describes as “a slightly unusual bit of government, because your phone only rings from people within government. It’s a role where you are essentially helping cabinet and government to work, but it was very interesting”.

His next project was looking at the future of the post office network in the Performance and Innovation Unit (now called the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit). Then it was on to the Treasury, and a two-year stint on the productivity team. The Home Office came next, where Kohli worked on the government’s response to the disturbances in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham, before returning to the Treasury,  to lead the productivity team he had previously worked in. Then back to the Home Office once again, to oversee the government’s relationship with the third sector.

Working with voluntary organisations and charities was actually good preparation for his current role in the BRE, Kohli explains. The burdens of regulation hit this sector hard and that is why the Executive has involved third-sector organisations in all its major projects. And so, last October, Kohli found himself back in the Cabinet Office for his current role of steering the newly formed Better Regulation Executive.

Even if his CV resembles that of a gadfly, Kohli says there have been links to most of the moves he has made through his career. “For example, the work on better regulation is related to work I did in the Treasury on productivity. We commissioned the Hampton review because we believed that badly enforced regulation can act as a barrier to productivity.”

The Hampton Review on regulatory inspections and enforcement was published by the Treasury last March, and Kohli worked on it during his second stint there. In fact it was this review that recommended the setting-up of the BRE. “So even though the jobs are in different departments, they are often quite related.”

“But I’m not particularly swayed by departmental boundaries any-way,” Kohli goes on. “I think because I moved so early in my career and then I kept moving, it’s not so daunting. And with civil servants there are ultimately very generic skills, working with ministers, using evidence to identify what the options are, understanding how the government machine works, developing relationships with outsiders – all of those things are used in lots of government jobs.”

The BRE was designed to be run jointly by civil servants and an executive chairman, which is currently William Sargent, the chief executive of Framestone CFC, a digital image company that has worked on such projects as the BBC’s Walking With Dinosaurs series and the Harry Potter films. Kohli clearly has great respect for Sargent and is enthusiastic about this model of working. “We’re a bit of a double act,” Kohli says. “I know how government works and William can bring the questions of ‘why do you work that way?’

“One of the things we are doing is encouraging others to contribute ideas,” Kohli says. “We have to listen to business and the voluntary sector and others, and ask if they have ideas. One part of that is the betterregulation.gov.uk portal where people can say if there is a regulation they feel is too onerous. It’s all about listening, gathering ideas and understanding the impact of regulation to deliver change on the ground. Everyone in the BRE will go on visits to the front line to gather ideas directly from those who are affected by regulation too.’’

The key work the BRE is currently involved in is four-fold: measuring the cost of regulation; simplifying regulation; streamlining inspection and enforcement and working towards legislation for reform.

The huge task of measuring the administrative cost of regulation and then setting targets to reduce it for each department in government has never been done in the UK before, Kohli explains. “We learned from the Dutch experience of carrying out a similar exercise, and over 9,000 businesses and voluntary organisations were involved with the measurements exercise – that basically gave us a massive spreadsheet, which gives us an indication of how much regulation is costing.”

The BRE will be tackling the broader impact of regulation. Government departments and regulators will have to assess the total cost of new regulations – for both the administrative and policy costs before they are implemented. The BRE is also helping departments to produce plans to reduce costs to frontline business, the third sector and public services. Kohli says, “Anyone reading a departmental simplification plan should get a sense that it is moving better regulation forward, a sense that the plans will make a difference. This difference can be measured and the proposals are credible and deliverable.”

The aim of these plans is to reduce regulatory burdens without removing necessary protections. Plans will set out how departments will tackle EU regulation, for example, and how they are working to rationalise inspection and enforcement arrangements. Streamlining inspection and enforcement is about encouraging departments to take a light-touch approach to regulation – for example, reducing the number of inspections, requests for information and form-filling.

And the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, which the BRE is taking through Parliament, is currently sitting between the committee and the report stage in the Lords. “The Bill the government introduced allowed us to make quite a lot of changes,” Kohli says, “possibly more than we even wanted. MPs were uncomfortable with it initially because they thought it was too wide a power, and we replaced the order making power in the Commons with one which was focused on better regulation, and it’s very much what we want.”

It’s still early days on this particular project, but Kohli is happy and satisfied with how the Better Regulation Executive is panning out. However, he is sure to be pressing for real results – and quickly.