The overwhelming majority of rules, regulations and laws are entirely pointless. The same or substantially the same outcomes can be achieved with much simpler shorter laws or already covered by existing laws.
Take the regulations surrounding, for example, electrical goods. These are subject to the 1994 Electrical Safety Regulations, which provide:
Requirement for electrical equipment to be safe etc.
"5.—(1) Electrical equipment shall be—
(a)safe;
(b)constructed in accordance with principles generally accepted within the member States as constituting good engineering practice in relation to safety matters and in particular shall be designed and constructed to ensure that it is safe when connected to the electricity supply system by providing a level of protection against electric shock which relies on a combination of insulation and the protective earthing conductor contained within the electricity supply system or which achieves that level of protection by other means; and
(c)in conformity with the principal elements of the safety objectives for electrical equipment set out in Schedule 3 to these Regulations.
(2) In determining whether electrical equipment satisfies the requirements of paragraph (1) above, no regard shall be had to any liability of the equipment to cause radio-electrical interference.
(3) In determining whether electrical equipment which—
(a)has previously been supplied to any end user; or
(b)is supplied solely by virtue of its being hired out whether in connection with the supply of other goods and services or otherwise provided that it satisfies the requirements of sub-paragraph (a) above
satisfies the requirements of paragraph 1 above, no regard shall be had to General Condition 1(b) of Schedule 3."
Everything highlighted in bold is, strictly, irrelevant. Equipment is either safe or it is not. But even the first bit is largely irrelevant, because there is a statutory implied term that goods are of satisfactory quality, which includes safety, and restrictions on excluding that implied term in consumer contracts.
There is then the existing common law tort of negligence, and health and safety at work act.
So what do these regulations add? Was electrical equipment in 1993 posing an unacceptable danger to life and limb? Is it the case now that electrical equipment does not cause injury or death? Absolutely not.
So why do we introduce ever more legislation to cover the same areas that are already covered by existing laws?
The answer is makework and boondoggling. Politicians have to appear to do something, so they re-legislate things that are already largely covered. And regulatory and legal complexity creates work for the legion of middle class university graduates who might otherwise be unemployed, or employed in a job that doesn't involve working with words.
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Eu law innit
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That’s why the government has got rid of all of those oppressive eu laws.
You know, the ones that made your life a misery.
C’mon help me out here hanners, all those awful eu laws that our newly liberated parliament has done away with, give me some examples.
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"safe" is a relative term
take stairs
stairs which have no handrails are not safe
stairs with handrails are safe
living in a bungalow is safer
ban stairs
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C’mon hanners, wouldn’t it be easier to just name some of those dreadful laws that have now been abolished
I mean there must be plenty, because that was the whole point, right?
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I certainly would have done yes
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Or you could just post a little picture if you can’t think of any and this is all getting a bit embarrassing for you
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If you can't understand why other people have done something which seems wrong there are two possibilities:
1) They are wrong
2) you simply don't understand the problem
In this case I'm going to go with 2) for the reasons Geoff said
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Your first sentence that equipment is either safe or it's not is complete nonsense.
There's obviously a sliding scale of safety with electrical appliances depending on their function and how they are used by the customer.
If you're going to declare that electrical items must be "safe" you have to create a functional definition of "safe" that does not include it being okay to use your toaster in the bath.
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Is your argument that health and safety is best enforced by an electrocuted person suing from the grave the local independent hardware store they purchased the faulty equipment from and that is preferable to just putting a requirement on manufacturers to produce safe equipment in the first place which enables the state to enforce it?
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Its an interesting and important subject. Im inclined to agree that much regulation is unncessary or overly complex and may in fact create risks as people assume that everything is (eg) safe rather than checking/thinking about it themselves. There is a danger that rules based compliance removes skin in the game.
Thats by the by actually - the bigger isssue is that it is very difficult to legislate effectively for a world that is growing in complexity. The legislation becomes ever more complex in an effort to keep up. But legislation can never fully reflect the complexity of the world. There will always be oddities or unnecessary problems created as legislator cannot imagine all possible current, let alone future, implications for different situations and use cases etc. But I think that the complexity increases in a non linear way because there is a multiplicative effect between the growing complexity of the world and the growing complexity of the legislation.
And of course simple individual humans cannot really keep up.
My suspicion is that the social investment in such complexity reaches a point of diminishing returns, until it goes into reverse. At which point, unless some new technological marvel can rescue society, one is likely to see a collapse in complexity, which can lead to a wider collapse.
This has been seen in many ancient civilisations and may one day be the fate of our highly complex global civilisation.
Read JP Tainter.
(That said I have so far been quite impressed by how resilient society/economy has been to Covid; tho I suppose of course the retort would be that Covid is not actually especially deadly as far as diseases go and look at the havoc it has already caused)
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