A new day
May 7, 2015Well, 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:
- HMRC penalties: a discussion document (Closes 11 May 2015 12:00pm)
- Proposed Commissioners’ Directions on reporting of passenger and crew information for customs purposes (Closes 15th May 12.:00am)
- Tax-advantaged venture capital schemes: draft legislation and explanatory notes (Closes 15th May 12:00am)
- Removal of manual customs declarations (Closes 5 June 2015 11:45pm)
- Reform of the Landfill Communities Fund (Closes 10 June 2015 11:45pm)
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.
tiintax 
Leave a Reply