The rhetoric of reform has made legislation appear necessary when most of what is contained in this bill could be done without passing new laws

Would it matter if the government stopped passing laws? The Education Secretary, Ruth Kelly, may be asking herself this question after presenting the government's schools bill to the Commons. This legislation, hailed by the government as the "trust schools" bill, in fact contains no specific provisions to create these controversial independent institutions within the state system, because the framework to set them up exists already. The rhetoric of permanent reform has made legislation appear necessary when most of what is contained in this bill could be done without passing new laws.

Tony Blair has inflamed his backbenchers, the Labour Party and the teaching profession, and for what? No one really wants the Education and Inspections Bill 2006 and it will have little effect when it is passed. The evidence is that most schools do not seek further independence from local authority control: official figures from the Department for Education show that of the 20,000 or so schools in England and Wales, just six have this year opted for foundation status, an existing category under which the governing body or a charitable foundation owns the school buildings and land and employs the staff. The figure for the whole of last year was 11. The fear is that only the poorest-performing schools in the country will opt for "trust" status, thus making the category a byword for failure.

This government has a mania for legislation. Since 1997 it has introduced no fewer than 11 education bills to tinker around the edges of our bewildering school and university system. The genuine improvements that have taken place, especially in primary schools, have been the result of targeted investment and an improvement in the morale of the teaching profession. If anything, new legislation has hampered this process.

In other areas this fetish is more pronounced. According to the Home Office, there are now 404 forms of behaviour that were legal when the Labour government came to power and which are now outlawed. Some of these offences, such as "grooming" by paedophiles on the internet or the downloading of child pornography, recognise that the law must adapt to changing technology. But can all the 402 other offences really be necessary?

The Terrorism Act 2000 alone created 38 offences. Indeed, so effective was it that the government found it necessary to pass a whole wave of further anti-terror legislation: the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 created 19 further offences and the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 three more.

At least there was a public debate about this legislation, which was drawn up in response to a real threat. Across swathes of our lives we are faced with a blizzard of laws of which most of us will be completely unaware. Who could name one of the 69 criminal offences created by the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 or the 61 criminal offences "created, modified or re-enacted" by the Sexual Offences Act 2003? In some areas this has been truly absurd. In 1999 the Football (Offences and Disorder) Act created one offence, and then just a year later the Football (Disorder) Act created two more.

The latest Home Office information takes the tally only to April 2005. But the first four months of last year alone brought in the three new terrorist offences; the Drugs Act 2005, creating two criminal offences; and the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, establishing 26 more. In case you thought it was possible to get away with activities on the margins of these hundreds of new offences, don't forget that the government has invented a whole category - "antisocial behaviour", which, though not criminal, is deemed unacceptable in new Labour's Britain.

In asking for fewer laws, there is a risk of lending support to the libertarian right (I admit that the figures above are from a response by the Home Office minister Baroness Scotland to a question from the Conservative peer Lord Tebbit). But this should not be a left-right issue. This law pollution is astonishingly wasteful - not just the paper used to print these endless bills, but the public money spent on lawyers to draw them up and the parliamentary time spent debating them.

The government will be rightly celebrated for passing some genuinely ground-breaking legislation - early liberalising laws such as the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (which also creates several offences, by the way) as well as enabling measures on the minimum wage, gay equality and rights for women in the workplace. Now, however, it seems intent on law-making for the sake of it.

I have a suggestion: a moratorium on legislation. I suggest the following wording for a pledge in the next Labour (or, for that matter, Conservative or Liberal Democrat) manifesto: "We will introduce no legislation in the next parliament as there is quite enough already. We will make do with our flawed but probably quite adequate existing laws and concentrate on improving our schools, hospitals and railways." I'd vote for that.

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