A Little Light Reading

A working day, which was supposed to finish at 2 pm, but I was still looking at this document well into the evening after it was published during the afternoon.  The regulations bring into force the new tiers of restrictions in England from one minute past midnight on Wednesday 2nd December.  While the information so far published by the Government would fit on to two pages of A4 paper, this document is 70 pages long.

We always hear the term the devil’s in the detail.  It is never truer than when it comes to the legislation that creates the law
of the land.  Even a quick flick through the pages and you realise that it will not be easy to interpret how the legislation will be applied in a myriad of different situations.  Even in relation to some of the queries we have already received, I know it will take careful review of the regulations, often cross referencing different paragraphs to pull together the different strands of logic required to find an answer to a question as simple as ‘can I do this (or that)?’.

You have to give some credit to the lawyers that draught the regulations and acts of parliament, along with other legal documents.  It’s no wonder we so rarely read the terms and conditions we often sign or tick that we’ve read before accepting them when we download a new app, software, or join a new website.