Comments on: Article: Access denied to the laws that govern us http://heatherbrooke.org/2006/nofreelaw/ Heather Brooke is an award-winning writer, journalist and activist Wed, 08 Sep 2010 21:08:24 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 By: Nick Evans http://heatherbrooke.org/2006/nofreelaw/comment-page-1/#comment-1042 Nick Evans Tue, 22 Aug 2006 08:44:26 +0000 http://www.yrtk.org/2006/nofreelaw/#comment-1042 I can see that the government might be reluctant to make a current version of the law publicly available for free, because in a lot of cases it's not alway clear exactly what the current version of the law is. For instance, there used to be a fashion in parliamentary drafting of amending by implication, or by an obscure reference such as "all references to X shall be read as if they were references to Y", without bothering to spell out all the amended statutes. There's a substantial bit of work involved in doing all that checking, and I can understand why the government might feel that the cost of carrying out that work should fall on those who make use of the end product, rather than being borne by all tax payers. But that's no reason for them to refuse to make the legislation as passed freely available. I can see that the government might be reluctant to make a current version of the law publicly available for free, because in a lot of cases it’s not alway clear exactly what the current version of the law is. For instance, there used to be a fashion in parliamentary drafting of amending by implication, or by an obscure reference such as “all references to X shall be read as if they were references to Y”, without bothering to spell out all the amended statutes. There’s a substantial bit of work involved in doing all that checking, and I can understand why the government might feel that the cost of carrying out that work should fall on those who make use of the end product, rather than being borne by all tax payers.

But that’s no reason for them to refuse to make the legislation as passed freely available.

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