one in one out" applied to the introduction of new regulatory measures. In its
report to the OECD, the government claimed that "3,095 regulations were scrapped or improved and thereof 1,376 changes [had] a material benefit" – apparently amounting to more than £1.2 billion. The Deregulation Act 2015 enacted many of the reforms identified by this exercise.
The New Labour years saw the rise of Regulatory Impact Assessments for new legislation and policies (later increasingly known as Impact Assessments), and the ascendancy of the Better Regulation Executive and
Regulatory Policy Committee. This tendency might have been thought to have reached its apogee when the one-time Department of Trade and Industry (now the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy) became the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. However, it was under the Coalition Government that the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act 2015 introduced a statutory obligation on government to set and report annually on: "a target…in respect of the economic impact on business activities of qualifying regulatory provisions which come into force or cease to be in force" during each Parliament