How to tell when Parliament is passing too many laws

A comment which was made in my hearing today struck me as a providing a perfect example of a test of whether the government is forcing too many laws through the creaking parliamentary machinery.

The test is this: if you regularly find that there are laws on the statute book which are almost impossible for the authorities to enforce or for anyone else to know how to obey, because the necessary supporting regulations have not get been published or agreed, it's a pretty clear sign that parliament is passing laws faster than they can properly be implemented.

I was at a private meeting and someone asked a question about whether a suggested course of action was legal, quoting a law passed within the past 12 months. It transpire that the necessary statutory instruments and regulations to implement the law have not been published yet ....

This is very far indeed from being the first time I have met this problem. At least the difficulty today was relatively minor. A few years ago when I was a council cabinet member for planning, I and the officers working for me were put into a similar and impossible position because the government was telling us with the one hand to proceed with urgency to update our local plan, but on the other hand they had not published all the proper guidance implementing laws they had just passed concerning how to consult the public on new style local plans.

When the guidance finally did come out I was put in the atrocious position of having to pull a massive £100,000 consultation exercise which had already been through full council.

If you try to pass legislation faster than you can think everything through,the result is always a mess. Strange that after 11 years in office the Labour government still has not worked this one out.

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