by Ross Clark - Wednesday, 5th September 2007 -

Until recently I assumed the only beneficiaries of the government’s fetish for petty bureaucracy were the state functionaries employed on fat salaries (and generous “final salary” pension schemes) to administer it.

But I have come round to realising that there is another form of parasite which makes money from over-regulation: professional conmen.

A London PR company recently passed to me a very official-looking form, a “final notice” purporting to come from the “Data Protection Agency”, based at a PO Box number in Blackpool.

“Despite previous correspondence,” it began, “your business is still showing on our records that it has not registered its activities following statutory requirements laid out in the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA) and the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOI).

"It is imperative that your notification reaches the Information Commissioner (in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998) within the next seven days. Failure to register is a criminal offence.

"Ensure that the document is signed and returned in the envelope provided, along with a cheque for £135”.

Faced with such a demand, and with many other things pressing on your time, wouldn’t you quickly write out a cheque for £135 and be done with it?

Many thousands of businesses have done just that. Filling out the form may seem a pathetic waste of time, but it is a good deal briefer than many businesses have to deal with, and £135 is hardly a king’s ransom after all.

Closer inspection reveals there is something a little dodgy about this form. Not only does it contain several spelling mistakes, it requests that the cheque be made out to “Registration Fees”: a somewhat anonymous name for a bank account which could belong to anyone.

Those in the know will also realise that there is no longer any such body as the Data Protection Agency, its functions having been assumed by the Information Commissioner, who, it just happens, also operates from a (different) PO box in Blackpool.

Nevertheless, red-tape scams have caught out thousands of businesses in recent months. Last December the perpetrators of another bogus data protection agency were jailed a total of six and a half years for conning firms of nearly £700,000.

That shocking sum says much about the state of mind of businessmen when faced with mountains of officialdom: the temptation is to get on and be done with it.

So great is the number of pointless government agencies, it is becoming extremely difficult to judge what is a genuine one and what is bogus.

With something like 6,000 quangos in existence, how do you tell that the impressive-looking letter asking for a hundred pounds is from a body collecting money on behalf of the state or whether it was dreamed up in a bedsit in Dewsbury?

Here is a good party game: read out the following list of agencies and ask your friends to judge which are the genuine article and which are made up.

The Accounts Commission Board, the British Potato Council, the Central Arbitration Committee, the Central Services Agency, the Concerted Inter- Agency Criminal Finances Action Group, the Energy Savings Trust, the Export Credits Guarantee Department, the General Social Care Council, the Implementation Review Unit, the UK Resource Centre for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology, the Learning Skills Council and the Wine Standards Board.

The answer is that all of them are genuine except the Central Services Agency, which is derived from the nightmare state bureaucracy in Terry Gilliam’s 1985 satirical film Brazil.

As for what, exactly, they do I am afraid I couldn’t tell you and I suspect that neither could they.

One thing that is quite clear, however, is that the government is steadily moving to a system by which businesses are expected to bear the cost of being regulated. Hence the rush of registration fees now being demanded from remote, unelected and not very accountable agencies of the state.

I was interested to read that some of the teenage muggers who prey upon their peers on the way to and from London schools have begun to use the word “taxation” to describe their activities. I am not surprised that they do.

The point is that the distinction between genuine taxation and the fees demanded by chancers and conmen is increasingly becoming blurred.