By Guy Dawson, CEO

For reasons hard to understand, the profession seems to have gone along with the growth of regulation and the slow demise of common law.

It needs to be said loudly and clearly that common law allows for individuality, flexibility, and common sense, whilst regulation equates to conformity and rigidity.

It is time to reaffirm that personal responsibility should determine our behaviour, with resort to the good offices of the bench if we stray outside the reasonable bounds set by the laws of contract, crime and tort. The wrong worked on our freedoms, by regulating our behaviour is now ever present.

Each day I am assaulted by the mindlessly inflexible rules designed for everyone and yet suiting no one.  These well-intentioned rules are developed to comply with suffocating regulation and administered by impersonal apparatchiks in government and big business, all of whom have lost sight of everyday common manners and friendliness, and all are securing their jobs and protecting their backs against some imagined threat.  At the forefront of this unconsciousness are the privacy rules followed closely by the consumer credit rules and verification of identity rules.

It seems that we are no longer to be trusted with the discretionary freedom to choose, contract, and speak, as the imperfection of individual behaviour is no longer preferable to standardised impersonal behaviour produced by controlling regulation.