Hold the front page
June 13, 2012Well, all right, not the front page. But hold the consultation deadline, please! I thought I would step outside of tax today and respond to the government’s consultation on equal marriage. This closes tomorrow (and I urge you all to take the time to respond).
There’s a simple way of replying, by filling in a web form to be found here – it’s pretty self explanatory. However I wanted to read the actual, full, consultation document and found that the link to it on the consultation page is a self-referral, ie it takes you back to the same page that you’re looking at already, ie the web form.
Well, Messrs Google fixed that for me, and I found the full condoc here, and I emailed and tweeted the Home Office to ask them to fix the technical problem.
However I can’t find the Impact Assessment.
No, seriously, I googled it, and the google link that said it was a link to the IA just took me back to the web form page again. Either my google fu has deserted me altogether, or there’s a serious problem with the links on the Home Office website.
There is a commitment to publish an Impact Assessment with any legislative proposal of a regulatory nature. In other words, you can’t make a sensible decision on whether a piece of law is a good or bad idea unless you know the size of the problem it’s addressing, how much it will cost to implement, and what kind of unintentional side effects there are likely to be. I suggest that the Home Office is vulnerable to judicial review if it doesn’t make all the relevant documents available, and that a website with broken and self-cancelling links doesn’t qualify as making them available. I suggest they need to check their links and make the full condoc and Impact Assessment available before the consultation period closes tomorrow, and that it would be a good idea if they were to extend the consultation period by a few weeks in order to give all the interested parties time to look at all the relevant material.
tiintax 
I think you should be a civil servant who makes government get things right.