• deliberately confuse the administrative costs of regulations (that might legitimately be called red tape) with the costs of implementation, so that the costs of paying the minimum wage are counted as red tape, not the (minimal) costs of administering it.
• describe measures that have wide support and clear benefit such as controlling asbestos in the work place as red tape but refuse to say whether they want them repealed.
• do not accurately reflect the views of businesses - a detailed DTI survey of a representative sample of small business showed that twice as many backed new employment rights as found them a burden.

TUC General Secretary, Brendan Barber, said, 'Employers have every right to complain about unnecessary bureaucracy or badly drafted regulations. But they lose support the moment they start saying that essential protection for people at work, such as protection from asbestos, is no more than red tape. Nor do they have any evidence to suggest that the UK economy has been held back by regulation or that British business is affected more than in other countries.

'The red tape campaign is spin, smoke and mirrors. It's time employer lobbyists put up or shut up. They should tell us they want to abolish the minimum wage, paid holiday rights and cleaner vehicle emission standards or stop calling them red tape.'

Other myths exploded in the report include:

• 'regulation has hit jobs' - the truth is that employment has increased across the UK economy including those in low paid sectors where employment regulation has more effect
• 'the UK is more heavily regulated than other economies' - the truth is that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), say 'The UK is among the leading economies in the OECD in terms of liberal product market regulation and ranks highly in most aspects of labour market flexibility. Recent OECD work that constructed a composite policy indicator of flexibility ranked the UK the highest among all OECD economies'.

source: TUC