An invitation from the Federation of Small Businesses, “the UK’s leading business organisation”, to a meeting to discuss regulation leaves us with mixed feelings.

On the one hand, the opportunity to hurl vitriolic abuse, to anyone who will listen, about the idiots in government who have landed us with such a damfool regulatory environment may well prove cathartic.

One the other hand, nothing will change. It will simply be a box ticking exercise for some government official who can then claim the business community has been consulted, only promptly to ignore all the concerns we have expressed.

Anyway, the Federation has asked us what five regulations we would most like to change.

Only five? Here are the first five that spring immediately to mind – if we think about it for more than a few minutes, we could probably list twenty or thirty.

But, if anyone else has anything they really want said, please tell us by commenting below and we will happily pass it on the FSB – the Federation of Small Businesses, that is, not Russian state security, even if the latter would probably be more ruthless at sorting things out.

1   To start with the Big One, paying tax may be a regrettable necessity, but the paperwork that goes with it is usually unnecessary. For most businesses, VAT forms are relatively simple: other taxes could easily be simplified in the same way, given the will to do it, and tax yield would actually increase.

2   “Data protection” might be a modern day necessity but there is no reason why compliance should be so complicated and burdensome. What’s the point of having a costly and complicated registration system when every business has to register? Better to have a simple set of rules by which everyone can comply easily and affordably.

3   “Generous” parental leave imposes a considerable burden on a small business: it makes it responsible for situations over which it has no control.

4   Disability access is a socially desirable objective – but, that being so, should it not be the elusive “society in general” rather than individual businesses that bear the cost?

5   Most of us accept the need for some health and safety controls, but the credibility of the whole system is being undermined by taking it to absurd extremes.