David Cameron understands these points and the latest official estimate is that regulation has been cut by £1.5 billion a year. In fact, British businesses are more regulated now than they have ever been. Rather than cutting red tape, new analysis shows that the Coalition Government has increased it by at least £3.1 billion. This is a conservative estimate. The real burden is certainly larger but it is impossible to tell because the Government’s presentation of its figures is opaque. For the first two and a half years, for example, it simply ignored the cost of European regulations altogether. These figures are now published but they do are not included in the “official” total.