OK then; it’s 8pm on May 11th and the consultation on HMRC Penalties still shows up on the list of five open consultations from HMRC… but the consultation itself is shown as closed. Conclusive proof, I think you’ll agree, that by “12.00pm” the gov.uk website means “12 noon”.
I know, I know: I really will try and get out more.
Look at one small point from the list of open HMRC consultations: the closure date. Here’s a reminder of the current five:
So does the first one close at lunchtime or do we have till midnight? Do the next two close at midnight on May 14th, midday on 15th, or midnight at the end of 15th? The last two at least make it clear that they close at the end of the day on 5th and 10th, but, seriously, is representing midnight such a difficult concept in the twenty-first century? It’s a nice notes and queries question, but the Royal Observatory and Greenwich, the owners of GMT so to speak, tell us helpfully that there is no such thing as 12.00am. Noon is when the sun is at the meridian line, so it’s neither “ante meridian” nor “post meridian” – neither before nor after that point in time. The “correct” designation is either 12 noon or 12 midnight. Alternatively you should use the 24 hour clock, in which case it’s 00.00 for midnight and 12.00 for noon.
Please, gov.uk, can you just pick one?
There are 61 open consultations today, still the same 5 from HMRC and 8 from HMT. So nothing new from either department being snuck out on election day. There must have been a couple which passed their closing date and fell off the “open” list (and dear god in heaven is gov.uk ever going to work out how to let us filter them in the order in which they close????) because there is also a new one today from the Airports Commission (we have an airports commission???) on air quality.
I’m assuming the Airports Commission is some kind of quango with continuity that means the election passed it by. Because otherwise it’s an extraordinary time to be pushing condocs out there, surely?
Well, election day, actually. I’ve been and voted, and now I’m ready for a marathon night watching the results. I know, I know, I’m sad like that; and, of course, I’m semi-retired so I don’t have to be anywhere tomorrow so I can sleep in as long as I like.
You would think, in the hiatus between governments, that all would be quiet on the consultation front. I logged on to gov.uk out of sheer curiosity, thinking it would be interesting to see the consultation page with the counter set to zero.
But no! There are, in fact, some 62 open consultations listed. I don’t know about you, but I feel that 62 new laws and regulations would be a reasonable score for an entire parliamentary term, not the number of residual bits of leftover legislation not important enough to wait for the end of purdah. Can we just STOP making new law and try administering the ones we’ve got for a bit?
Sigh.
Of the 62 open consultations I have no objection to odds and ends of measures like Natural England consulting on restricting access to, for example, Widdybank Fell (which looks very nice, by the way). The world would still continue turning even if we didn’t have a government, (Belgium managed OK for 541 and then 135 days, after all) and so I suppose there’s no reason to stop the process of consulting. But I could have lived without seeing a serious consultation into reform of the Government Ombudsman service, a paper on what I suspect is the first salvo in the war of the next BBC licence fee and a call for evidence on creating a secondary market in our bloody pensions sliding quietly out while all our backs are turned to the polling station.
Anyway.
HMRC has five open consultations:
and the Treasury has eight, two of them also on the HMRC list, five which (from a quick look, anyway) aren’t connected with tax, and one which may be of interest: Travel and subsistence review. But which closes on 1 May 2016 at 11:45pm.
2016? Seriously? I suspect it should read 2015 and it’s an already closed consultation.
It’s the twenty first century. Keeping and maintaining an up to date list like this shouldn’t be this hard, surely?
Dear New Government: please get someone to make gov.uk work. Thanks.
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