GOVERNMENT steps to appease small businesses over issues of red tape and bureaucracy in the South moved a stage closer yesterday when A Cabinet Office minister stopped off for meetings with the region's business leaders.

Graham Stringer MP, parliamentary secretary at the Cabinet Office, was at pains to spell out the government's ambitions to cut the volumes of red tape faced by business and commerce at a meeting called by the Southampton and Fareham Chamber of Commerce and Industry at Southampton International Airport.

Chamber president Caroline Stennett made feelings clear when she told the minister: "Red tape is an immense burden to industry.''

Mr Stringer fielded a series of questions during his two-hour meeting with businessmen and women from the South about needs and anomalies faced by business and commerce in coping with government regulation.

The Cabinet Office has set up a task force to advise government on improving the effectiveness and credibility of government regulation.

It is attempting to do this by ensuring that regulation is necessary, fair, affordable, simple to understand and administer, taking account of the needs of small businesses and ordinary people.

Mr Stringer said one of the principal concerns was to see that regulation did nothing to harm the economy, but made it clear that one of the concerns was to protect the environment.

He argued that Britain was less regulated than many other countries, and said that self-regulation could achieve the same objectives as regulation.