by Ross Clark - Wednesday, 5th September 2007 -

If, as listeners to Radio Four’s Today programme were invited to do, you were asked to nominate a single law or regulation to be abolished, what would you consign to the legislative dustbin?

How about the Trades Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992

onerous piece of legislation requires unions to hold a ballot every ten years just to check whether their members still wish to have part of their contributions diverted into Labour party coffers.

Not top of your list? Me neither.

It did, however, make it on to the list of laws that the government’s Better Regulation Commission nominated for abolition in its 93-page report, Less is More.

That just about sums up the government’s “war” on red tape, which it has been waging since 2000. What ministers mean by red tape is laws which make life inconvenient for them.

The rest of us, on the other hand, can get stuffed.

You won’t need reminding about some of the laws that have arrived on the statute book over the past seven years – beneath the noses of the red tape busters.

How about the Employment Equality Regulations, which warned companies they can be sued if they hold important meetings on October 31, thus preventing committed pagans from marking the festival of Samhain?

Or the European Directive of Electrical Waste, which obliges manufacturers to take back the vacuum cleaner they sold your grandmother 50 years ago, before anyone dreamed of recycling it?

In December, the DTI produced its latest proposals for cutting red tape, the Better Regulation Simplification Plan.

Never mind that the report was published in the same week that Acas sent employers a leaflet entitled Happy Christmas Party Advice, warning that they can be sued if they fail to select for workplace parties a mixture of music to suit all ages and tastes.

Let’s take the Better Regulation Simplification Plan seriously, and give the DTI officials their due. Some of the 77 proposals contained within it are very sensible.

In fact, I am going to list five of the best proposals which, like New Labour’s famous “pledge card” distributed before the 1997 general election, you can cut out and keep – and hold the government to in five years’ time.

The report suggests scrapping the rule requiring private firms to hold an annual general meeting and appoint a company secretary.

It wants to do away with the need for companies to send out hard copies of all their communications, allowing them to cut costs by using email instead.

It wants to simplify the planning application procedure, with a single, common form used by all planning authorities.

It wants to replace 22 separate pieces of consumer legislation and replace them with a single act and it wants to halve the procedural obligations for resolving disputes with employees.

If the government achieves these changes it will deserve warm congratulations. 

But I have a sense that ministers will simply use the exercise surreptitiously to abolish laws which make their own lives a misery – the Honours Act 1925, for example.

This column does not usually call for new laws, but I am tempted to propose just a little one. How about bringing political promises under the scope of the Sale of Goods Act?

It would certainly add some interest to the government’s latest drive against red tape. What regulations do you want to see simplified? The government is asking for your views.