The Adam Smith Institute’s latest paper, by Robin Ellison, a Visiting Professor at City, University of London, explains why the UK needs to reduce, simplify, and properly catalogue the law:

• The law is constantly changing and growing — increasing in length and complexity — placing growing burdens on citizens and businesses. 

• Citizens must comply with an ever expanding array of legislation, regulations known as ‘statutory instruments’ (of which there were over 1,000 in 2020), imported European Union legislation, and tens of thousands of pages of materials issued by dozens of regulatory agencies.

• The United Kingdom lacks a depository of all laws and regulations. We are all expected to follow the law, yet there does not exist a proper list of the legislation and regulations that citizens must abide by. 

• The lack of single regulatory source undermines the rule of law, severely burdens business and leads to the creation of more red tape. 

• Judges and lawyers, let alone citizens and businesses, often complain about the difficulty ascertaining the state of the law. The inability to identify the law has led to unfair application including common sentencing mistakes.

• Businesses spend thousands of hours attempting to find and interpret the law, employing costly external regulatory consultants and professional legal advice. 

• The extent of legislation and regulation creates substantial economic costs, including pushing up prices for consumers, reducing wages for workers and creating disproportionate burdens on small businesses.

• The estimated annual cost to businesses of regulation is £100 billion a year, a substantial portion of which is spent simply searching for the law.

• In addition to clearly cataloguing laws, regulations, and departmental guidance, there is a need to reduce and simplify the burdens on citizens to a point at which the legal responsibilities of citizens is comprehensible and clear.

• Previous efforts to reduce regulatory burdens have failed; a new approach is required to ensure the law is easily identified and is no more burdensome than necessary.

• If the Government wishes to maintain the rule of law and reduce burdens on citizens and businesses they should:

  • Adopt the Australia/New Zealand system of holistic law publication;

  • Introduce standard methods of intelligent rulemaking to remove unnecessary legislation — including requirements for one-in-three-out (also to be applied to regulators), embracing the RegData (US) methodology, extending the use of sunset clauses — and continuing consolidation and codification exercises;

  • Apply a code of behaviour and practice for lawmakers;

  • Declare that ‘Henry VIII clauses’, allowing departments to amend primary legislation, are no longer to be introduced;

  • Improve drafting of laws and rules;

  • Introduce personal accountability for senior lawmakers, who should put their names to new rules;

  • Provide additional support for legislation.gov.uk;

  • Require all rules to have externally validated cost calculations;

  • Require government agencies to provide time-travelled codified rules;

  • Require regulatory authorities to publish compliance with government policies on better regulation including, for example, ‘one-in three-out’ etc.; and

  • Introduce training and qualifications for lawmakers and rulemakers.