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Examines the practices of regulation over central government. It starts from the observation that control based on mutuality has traditionally been of central importance and assesses the extent to which recent initiatives have been introduced more by way of oversight, and control through competition and contrived randomness. The chapter concludes that though the Whitehall has not been so sharply affected by processes of re‐regulation as other sectors examined in the study, such as schools and prisons, nonetheless it has not been immune from such reforms.

This book has investigated the implications of three decades of market-oriented economic reform for Asian workers. Using a conceptual framework that centers on labor systems and their regulatory regimes, it has drawn together disparate literatures on institutional change, labor relations, social policy, and development that directly or indirectly help elucidate the labor implications of market reform. It has also discussed the industrial sectors of the four Asian countries to illustrate contrasting contexts and trajectories of reform in the region. Finally, it has suggested a more general analytical framework that focuses on the dynamic relationship between two dimensions, or faces, of labor market reform: labor market deregulation and labor market reregulation.

This chapter shows that there are policy areas in which the national governing capacity is not significantly reduced by economic integration and in which European public policy is able to adopt regulations that match or exceed the level of protection achieved in the most advanced member states of the European Union. At the same time, however, there are policy areas that are of crucial importance for the legitimacy of democratic welfare states, in which national problem-solving capabilities are indeed severely constrained by economic integration, whereas European regulation, or even policy harmonisation, seems to be systematically blocked by conflicts within the underlying constellations of national interests. It is problem-solving deficits in these policy areas that present the most serious challenge to the democratic legitimacy of the multi-level European polity.

This chapter presents a mainly EC level analysis of the important questions surrounding the regulatory competence of public services in Europe. The analysis points out that public services lie at the crossroads of national and supranational regulatory regimes, each interacting and shaping their functioning directly or indirectly. In this self styled type of ‘shared competence’, the European regulatory level is progressively carving out its space either through direct EC intervention, or indirect regulatory influences by other areas of EC law and policy that affect public services when in the presence of an ‘economic activity’. De-regulatory pressures (mainly in the form of negative integration introduced by the ECJ) and re-regulatory initiatives are also present and are partly limited by competence questions. But perhaps the most interesting findings are those that point out at the cyclical and simultaneous interactions between deregulation and re-regulation, national influences, and EC pressures.

The chapter traces mechanisms through which the Labour Governments from 1997, then, from 2010, the Coalition Government, sought to embed a new regulatory agenda under the auspices of ‘Better Regulation’. What is described as a feverish and relentless programme of re-regulation consists of four central mechanisms: a long term rhetorical assault on regulation as burdensome, red tape and so on; the establishment of a plethora of institutions within and of Government; various legal reform initiatives which have delivered both de-regulation and re-regulation; and a constant stream of reviews of specific regulatory agencies and of the practice and purpose of regulation in general. Better Regulation is a concerted effort at re-regulation, an attempt to re-configure the relationships between state and private capital. Moreover, while the claimed effect is that capital is being set ‘free’, these processes in fact engender a deeper and more intense inter-dependence between state and capital.

This chapter analyses a range of country-specific pathways of re-regulation in relation to markets in healthcare, with a focus on the differences between broadly similar models of re-regulation. It analyses sector-specific institutional contexts from a cross-country comparative perspective based on five countries — Britain, Denmark, Germany, Italy and Norway. Medical governance is closely related to redistributive policies, where the influence of country-specific institutions tends to be pertinent. Medical governance provides a good basis for studying both the dynamics of governance and the difference institutions make.

This chapter is the conclusion of the book. It sets out a vision of immediate and gradual reforms needed for ending the era of unsafe regeneration and housing provision in the outsourced state. A first section sets out the scale of the housing safety and insecurity crisis that confronts us. A second section then sets out three policy lessons raised by Grenfell and my own research on outsourced regeneration under PFI still being ignored by government to ensure that all homes are secure and safe to live in and that residents’ voices are democratically enshrined in housing governance: the need to restore accountability and power to residents; the need to re-regulate construction and housing provision in the interests of safety; and the need to end the privatisation disaster through a programme of gradual reforms that will gradually phase out PFI and outsourcing, push back the financialisation of housing and land, and restore a reinvented public housing model based on the Bevanite principle of treating housing as ‘a social service’ and not a commodity that is democratically accountable to its residents.

This chapter explores the role of planning's publics within the emergent technocratic landscapes of planning. It does so by drawing on ongoing research into the localism agenda in England and in particular on neighbourhood planning. Neighbourhood planning was introduced in 2011 as a ‘community right’ to draw up a statutory land-use plan. The chapter explores the extent to which technical and ‘expert’ knowledge and the power of public and private planners is being challenged or displaced by the knowledge, emotions, and actions of citizen planners. As such, the chapter shows that technocratisation is a more varied and complex process than previously thought and that these seeming spaces of de-regulation are not immune to forms of re-regulation which seek to re-create local knowledge to align with technocratic language and purposes.