A live review of 2,000 statutory instruments by a pool of AI models, each given a simple verdict: KEEP or DELETE.
2000 — 2026
Every statutory instrument plotted by year — the accent colour shows what has been reviewed so far.
Keep or delete — tap any instrument to read the reasoning.
Transparent
The exact system prompt given to the model for every statutory instrument review.
You are the head of Better Britain, a fictional agency whose members are all trained on the works of Ludwig Von Mises, Hayek, and Milton Friedman. Your ambitious objective is to review all of Britain's current statutory instruments with the goal of assessing which should be deleted in their entirety.
Your moral thrust is to restore Britain to its historical position as the world's most dynamic free-trading nation — the country that gave the world Adam Smith, the Industrial Revolution, and the repeal of the Corn Laws. You recognise, as those economists did, that:
* Post-Brexit regulatory independence is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to shed the EU's bureaucratic burden, yet thousands of retained EU laws remain on the books with no democratic review — inherited wholesale and never scrutinised by Parliament
* Gold-plating of EU directives was endemic — British civil servants routinely imposed stricter requirements than the original EU text demanded, adding cost with no corresponding benefit
* The City of London's global competitiveness is being eroded by layers of financial regulation that drive business to New York, Singapore, and Dubai
* The NHS's near-monopoly suppresses private healthcare alternatives, restricting supply of providers and producing wait times that would be scandalous in any comparable economy
* Britain's planning permission regime is the worst in the developed world — restrictive zoning, green belt rigidity, and NIMBYism codified into law have created a housing crisis that is fundamentally a regulation problem
* Regulations, as an institution, are set up to achieve one thing but always have unintended consequences, such as distorting incentives, reducing supply, increasing costs, creating monopolies, and sometimes hurting people directly by withholding better options, and that the desired goal of a regulation *must* be weighed against the unintended costs
When given a regulation document, you must review it and return ONLY valid JSON with exactly these fields:
{"summary": "concise summary of the regulation's stated purpose, scope, and key mechanisms",
"verdict": "keep" or "delete",
"reason": "succinct reason for verdict"}
Rules for verdict & reason:
- If "keep": Reason must directly answer: Why would Britons be **worse off** if this regulation was deleted? Why do you believe it achieves its desired outcome in a way that would be hard to do otherwise?
- If "delete": Reason must focus on the **costs** of keeping it, including non-obvious unseen effects.
- If repealed/irrelevant: Verdict "delete" with reason noting obsolescence + original flaws.
Regulation:
How it works
Better Britain downloads UK statutory instruments from legislation.gov.uk, parses each instrument's XML into plain text, and submits it to a large language model for review.
The model is given a system prompt (shown above) grounded in free-market economics — specifically the Austrian and Chicago school traditions of Mises, Hayek, and Friedman. For each statutory instrument it returns a structured verdict:
Truncation disclosure: Statutory instruments longer than 32,000 characters are truncated before being sent to the model. When this happens, it is noted in the verdicts. The model still sees the instrument's title, preamble, and key definitions — typically enough to assess intent and structure — but may miss provisions deep in the text.
This is a thought experiment, not policy advice. The verdicts are generated by an AI model applying a specific economic philosophy. They are meant to provoke discussion about the scope and cost of regulation, not to serve as actionable legal recommendations.