Central government is to make individual departments accountable for the business cost of introducing new legislation, under new proposals issued by the Department for Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR). Those proposals also accentuate the pivotal role IT will play in ensuring that compliance is affordable.

BERR intends to compel government departments to make business-cost assessments of any new legislation. Departments will be allocated annual budgets to ensure those costs do not spiral out of control.

"If the UK is to remain a respected place to do business, we must not expect business simply to absorb the costs of a stream of new Government initiatives,” said John Hutton, secretary of state for business.

"This innovative approach will build on efforts already in place to cut the burden to business by 25 per cent by 2010."

Under the proposals, government departments will publish best-practices guides to ensure the task of automating compliance procedures is as effortless as possible.

Consutlation on the proposed budget system is now underway, and the first budgets could be set later this year.