Beware, Reading this
Could Really Get Your Goat
by Tom Stevenson

Warning: parts of this could make you extremely cross. Under Red Tape Commentary (bonkers regulation) (amendment) Act 2006, I am obliged to tell you that neither Tom Stevenson nor Telegraph Media Group can be held responsible for any shortage of breath, palpitations or cornflake spluttering that may result from reading further. First, however, could I ask you to take part in a short experiment? First, take your blood pressure. Next, read the following three paragraphs. Finally, take your pressure again and compare.

One. A wealthy environmentalist decides to turn an ugly chalk quarry into a wetland nature reserve, using £360,000 of his own money. Having attracted kingfishers, swans and geese he attempts to build islands for the birds and a path around the lake, using uncontaminated construction industry waste. The price for finding an imaginative and harmless way of disposing of what no-one wants - a £2.5m landfill tax bill.

Two. Norwich City Council orders 20 horse chestnut trees to be cut down on the grounds that passers-by might be injured by children throwing sticks to bring down conkers. Cheltenham Borough Council bans the planting of pansies in case gardeners hurt their wrists on tree roots. Tewkesbury stops handing out paper napkins with meals on wheels to prevent recipients mistaking them for food and choking. Contractors in Cumbria are forbidden from climbing ladders to change light bulbs - the council decides to buy folding lamp-posts at £1,000 a pop.

Three. After a complaint from a disability watchdog, South West Trains is ordered to remove 28 trains from its fleet because the lettering on its electronic information signs is too small for partially sighted passengers. As a result, SWT replaces eight carriage trains with four car services so disabled passengers are forced to stand. Brilliant.

How are you feeling? If you're getting prickly, I should warn you off the source of these illustrations of officialdom gone mad. If you're harrumphing already, the newly-published How to Label a Goat: The Silly Rules and Regulations that are Strangling Britain will severely test your sense of humour.

Here are some more teeth-grinding numbers from Ross Clark's priceless tirade against loony law-making:

In the 12 months to May 2006, the Government passed 3,621 separate pieces of legislation. That's 72,400 pages, plus a further 26,200 pages of explanatory notes - around 100,000 in total. Just 29 were acts of parliament, while 3,592 were so-called 'statutory instruments', new laws passed without any reference to our democratically-elected representatives. Red tape, arbitrarily handed down from on high.

In September 2005, Jose Manuel Barroso, head of the European Commission, announced a crackdown on nonsense regulation. He said 69 proposed laws would be reviewed and some might be scrapped. This piffling bureaucratic bonfire will leave around 22,000 EU regulations, a number that continues to rise exponentially.

According to a study commissioned from KPMG, businesses are liable to fill in a total of 279 different tax forms and supply up to 6,614 different pieces of information at an estimated cost of £5.1bn a year. That's just tax - it doesn't start to address the spiralling burden of health and safety, environmental and planning red tape. By the Government's own reckoning, regulation is costing Britain £100bn a year, 12pc of GDP and more than VAT and fuel duty raised between them.

Still not pulling your hair out? Try these:

The 'simplification' of the pensions regime in April this year, A-day, was billed as "offering simpler and more flexible retirement arrangements". The regulations governing the new system are so fiendishly complicated that seminars have had to be set up to explain the changes and the manual explaining them weighs in at 1,369 pages. The costs of running London's congestion charge in the first six months of its operation absorbed 67p for every £1 raised in revenue. Between 2000 and 2004 the number of administrative staff in the NHS rose from 159,141 to 211,690. I could go on, and on, because there is no end to the lunacy once you start looking.

Ross Clark, a writer with an angry swarm of bees in his bonnet, leaves no stone unturned in his mission to expose how far we have sunk into a Kafkaesque world of intrusive and often pointless nannying. But he does it with such a light touch that the barrage of bonkers bureaucracy never palls. He's the cabbie you forgive when he pulls the window across and shouts: "And another thing, guv..."

Clark is not an unreasonable man. Far from it. As he says: "Clearly there must be rules. Some things have to be registered and licensed, and beans must sometimes be counted. Yet the desire to regulate has reached the point at which it is beyond reason. Regulation has become an industry in itself." Only a pedantic pen-pusher could argue with his rueful conclusion: "Unlike most other industries, this is not one which makes us richer. On the contrary, it is a parasite breeding upon those parts of the economy which are productive. Every time you fill in a form, undertake some complex 'assessment', apply for a license to do something you have been doing harmlessly for several years, you end up with less time to spend on productive work: it is as simple as that." Amen.
How to Label a Goat is published this month by Harriman House.
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