Measure it by the foot!

The publishers of Tolley's tax guide, the handbook of tax legislation, tell us that it now runs to 11,520 pages, a thousand pages more than last year. (The increase may reflect in part the taxation changes which form part of the counter-recession measures.) The figure is more than double the number of pages when NuLabour took over in 1997.

There has been a massive increase in the amount of tax legislation and in its complexity over the past 12 years.

This will mean massive compliance costs for business, extra staff employed and resources devoted to trying to meet all requirements of the law. There will also be extra costs in employing consultants and auditors, etc. On the government side there are more staff in Revenue and Customs. So one result of the expansion shown by Tolley is the vast extra resources devoted to administering and compiling to satisfy the law. (This is true of individual taxation, where our time is demanded to assemble and report, even paying for postage, where many tax allowances are now effectively "means tested".)

Greater complexity, as is shown in the many mistakes and subsequent adjustments in Family Credit benefits, leads to the possibility of errors which need detection and correction.

We are told that massive savings must be made over the coming years. One way would be to sweep away all the complications so enjoyed by G.Brown, and release resources in the private and public sectors to more productive use.