Since Tony Blair took office in 1997, the Law Commission says that more than 3,000 new crimes have been established with the effect that millions of people, including freelancers, are at risk of being criminalised.
The majority of these were designed to trap innocent business people and contractors who were treated like criminals. A lot of the offences were slid into law through the back door having never debated in parliament.
The Law Commission believes that the UK could save £11 million by using civil penalties for minor breaches of these laws. Relying on criminal law can be expensive and ineffective and the fines meted out are often smaller than those imposed under civil law.
Law reform advisers to the government have called for at least 1,500 of these offences to be scrapped and said that new crimes should not be entered into statute until they have undergone full-scale Parliamentary legislation and scrutiny by Members of the House.
They agree that a lot of these new 'crimes', such as giving away goldfish as prizes at fairs, should have been dealt with under civil law, with offenders receiving fines and bans instead of making them criminal offences.
As a measure of just how ridiculous our bureaucracy now is, consider that between 1351 and 1988, that's 637 years, the total number of crimes established fill one volume of Halsbury's Statutes of England and Wales. Compare that with all the new crimes created since 1989, a period of just 21 years, which take up 3,746 pages and fill three volumes!
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Image: Jail
Cell by Casey Serin