It wants police forces to boost their income by seeking business sponsors. So in future our bobbies will be emblazoned with the logos of McDonald’s or Marks and Spencer.

One’s first reaction is who on earth would want to advertise their business on a policeman’s coat?

It can’t be too good for business if you are trying to run a chain of pubs and customers start getting pulled over on suspicion of drink-driving by a policeman bearing the logo of your business.

On second thought, I wonder how long it will be before businesses dare not decline to push a few hundred pounds in the direction of their local constabulary.

Given the choice of investigating three break-ins on a busy evening, which one are the police likely to make a priority: the one at a shop which has handed over sponsorship money, or the one at a business which has not bothered?

Sponsorship of the police will turn out to be a protection racket by official sanction: give us the money and we will make sure nothing horrible happens to you.

You can bet that over time “sponsorship” become compulsory. Businesses will have to make payments to the police specifically for policing their premises – even though, of course, they already pay for their local coppers through business rates.

After all, this is merely an extension of a trend which has been going on for some years, whereby government departments, agencies and quangos earn their keep by charging the people they are regulating.

Hence businesses now have to pay for the privilege of being visited by a health and safety officer, or having their premises gone over by a building control officer. You use a service, goes the logic, so you should pay for it.

There is just one fault in this logic. Businesses don’t exactly choose to be regulated. They don’t gain anything when an officious figure with a clipboard comes to sniff around their premises.

Quite the reverse – it costs them dearly in time. What the system does achieve, on the other hand, is greatly to swell the coffers of public officials – without voters in general having to foot the bill.

Needless to say, once the principle is established, authorities have realised that they can line their pockets by pushing for ever more forms of regulation.

To cite but one bizarre example, butchers’ shops have to pay £100 for a licence to sell non-meat products, such as the odd packet of stuffing to go with their turkeys.

Admittedly, you wouldn’t want butchers to serve, say, loaves of bread with hands dripping in blood from a pork steak.

But surely something like this can be covered in the normal hygiene checks. To charge an extra £100 for the privilege of selling non-food products is just officiallysanctioned extortion.

In another case, the owner of a London pizzeria was asked to provide an emergency exit to the rear of the restaurant.

Nothing wrong with that, and there seemed to be a perfectly good option: to build an escape route to latch onto an existing fire escape used by the adjoining block of councilowned flats.

“The council said no, we’re not giving permission,” he says.

“They asked me to build a fire escape over the kitchen, at a cost of £50,000. I said in that case I won’t be able to build a fire escape, my restaurant will have to close down and you will no longer be receiving the £10,000 a year I pay in business rates.

"They didn’t seem bothered at all. It wasn’t until I wrote a letter to my local MP, and he passed the letter onto the chief executive of the council, that I finally got somewhere.

"But even then the council wants to charge me £500 a year for a licence – for the use of part of a fire escape. And we can’t use it anyway, because it’s padlocked! All I am trying to do is to protect the public in the event of a fire.”

Unlike the businesses forced to pay for their “services”, planners seem to be doing suspiciously well out of the planning system, too.

“I saw the chief planning officer the other day,” says the restaurateur. “He was driving a Range Rover Sport, with a personalised number plate. Hmm.”