Recommendation 2

More care must be taken by the Government to distinguish between advice, guidance and the law, in media announcements as well as in official online sources. There must be certainty—for Government, the public as well as lawyers and the police–as to what is prohibited by the criminal law. In particular, more must be done to make the up to date regulations themselves (not only guidance) clearly accessible online, particularly as the law has changed, on average, once a week. It ought to be straightforward for a member of the public to find out what the current criminal law is, nationally and in their local area, without having to trawl through multiple sets of confusingly named regulations.