Personal Blogs

No doubt much has been written about today's Queen's Speech, and much will continue to be written, but I want to focus on just one sentence:

"My government will introduce legislation to establish an independent adjudicator to ensure supermarkets deal fairly and lawfully with suppliers."

Just think about that for a minute. We need new legislation to ensure that supermarkets act lawfully.

Er, hold on a minute: shouldn't existing legislation, by definition, be enough to ensure that everyone, even supermarkets, acts lawfully?

Apparently not.

Something has gone horribly wrong here. Why should we need new laws in order to make sure people act within existing ones? Well, I think the problem is this. Despite promises by governments of all parties to cut red tape, what actually happens is that governments seldom do cut red tape, but just introduce new laws in a steady stream. We end up with such a complete mess of laws that they become unenforceable.

After all, laws don't enforce themselves. We have the police to enforce the important criminal laws, but the police don't have the resources even to do that. When my office was broken into a few years ago, the police said they'd give me a crime number for the insurance, but that's all they would do. They simply didn't have the resources to investigate. And that was despite the burglers having a key, which narrowed down the potential list of suspects considerably.

So seriously, what chance is there that the police are going to enforce the niceties of employment or competition law?

No, the fact is that each new set of laws requires a new enforcement body. And most enforcement bodies are also under-resourced. The Information Commissioner's Office is supposed to enforce the Data Protection Act, but doesn't.

Even when laws are enforced, as I've written before, they are often not enforced in a meaningful way.

So I suppose there is some kind of logic to the new legislation. Supermarkets are probably breaking the law left, right and centre, but without anyone with the specific job of enforcing the law, they will continue to do so. So we need new legislation to enforce existing legislation.

This is madness. It is a clear sign that we have way too much legislation. What we need is to stop introducing new, unenforceable laws, and scrap many of the existing ones, which, let's face it, were mainly designed to make money for lawyers rather than serve any useful purpose. When we have a meaningful number of laws that are actually necessary, I dare say their enforcement will become a whole lot easier and stop needing new laws.