Limiting laws

I can’t help but feel that the legal system in the UK is totally out of control.

On the one hand we have hundreds of laws which most of us are entirely unaware of yet, by statute, are required to obey in every minute detail; a legal system which is dependent upon the niceties of precedent but which often delivers anything but true justice; and a police force which is now totally overwhelmed. Indeed some constabularies appear to have given up the unequal struggle and don’t even send out officers to take evidence over offences such as shoplifting and petty theft. Meanwhile, hundreds of officers are dealing with so-called ‘hate’ crimes. Nothing anyone does seems to make things better, despite everyone complaining that this is not the way to police the community.

I have a revolutionary idea for sorting this out.

We have a finite number of officers. We have finite finance with which to support them. Why then do we allow potentially an infinite number of laws all of which need to be policed?

The cure is so obvious that everyone seems to have missed it. We need fewer, simpler laws: laws which are easier to understand and define (and therefore hopefully more straightforward to prosecute); but above all we need to stop ‘creating a law for everything’. We need to have a national debate about which actions really need to be considered beyond the pale, and therefore to be dealt with; and which other actions can sensibly be be decriminalised.

I’d like to see a Royal Commission go through all our laws, taking out the ones that no-one needs any longer and simplifying those that remain. I’d also like to see one further principle enacted: no laws should be created without the simultaneous removal of a similar number of other, existing  laws. In other words, our finite police force would always have a strictly limited number of felonies that it was required to police.

This approach would have three main effects: firstly, no one would be inclined to introduce further law just for the sake of it: it would have to be very obvious that the new laws were needed — to such an extent that the country was prepared to ditch other laws to make room for them. Secondly, by making the law simpler, smaller and better defined it would make cases easier to prosecute, leading to shorter trials and far less pre-trial uncertainty with the CPS um-ing and ah-ing about whether an offence actually had been committed. And finally the police force would at long last have a limit on the work they were being expected to do.

Additionally, the public would feel much more in control of the legislative process. There is currently a huge wave of disillusionment in the UK among those who have been assaulted or burgled, when the police don’t respond to a cry for assistance, especially when resources are made available for the investigation of the badly-drafted law around hate speech but not for patrolling the streets and preventing physical assaults and sexual attacks. By making open the discussions about new definitions of crimes the public would be able to feel that they were in charge of deciding which activities were and which were not worthy of the police’s attention.

I’m sure that this would also make the police feel much better about their role. To have limited time, limited manpower but unlimited demand is soul-destroying for the workers involved – the NHS has had this for years and it’s a quick route to burnout and disillusionment. I’m sure that the police feel the same. So one of the important benefits of this approach would be an instant improvement in police morale.

Rationalising and limiting the legal system isn’t something that could be done overnight, or even over five years: nevertheless, the sooner we start to do this the quicker we will get our legal system under control. If the first thing we did was to insist that any new law had also, before its enactment, to be assessed for the demand it would place upon the police and the courts, and prior to its enactment be accompanied by the formal removal of a similar amount of work, the more the nation will find that its legal system is slowly and gradually being tidied up and made more fit for purpose.