With it came recognition that businesses up and down the country are once again paying the price for a piece of legislation that has been poorly designed and implemented.

Like the Fire (Scotland) Act 2005, and other recently-introduced legislation, the 2005 Licensing Act leaves much to be interpreted and decided at a local level.

In principle, this could be a good thing: policies set at a local level can take better account of local circumstances and local opinion.

In reality, this legislative model results in confusion about what is actually law and what is merely someone's interpretation of the law.

When legal requirements are not pinned down within the legislation, businesses find it hard to determine whether they are operating legally or not.

Local officials are left to decide whether they should enforce only the most basic requirements of the legislation, or a gold-plated version, that will ensure they are entirely fulfilling their legal responsibility. The cost of complying with the legislation then becomes a postcode lottery.

Alcohol retailers claim to have spent £60 million on trying to comply with the new legislation. Much of this expenditure may have been unnecessary. For example, 37 per cent of FSB members surveyed employed an architect to draw up the floor plans needed for a premises license application. When the act was introduced, the FSB's fears that businesses would incur these costs were dismissed.

There have been reports of small retailers spending considerable sums of money installing CCTV and additional litter bins outside their premises in an effort to comply with the legislation.

And, at the end of the day, many found themselves operating illegally because their local licensing board was unable to cope with the administrative burden and could not process all the new licences on time.

The FSB has been at the forefront of raising concerns about this legislation and pressing the Scottish Government to look again at how the current confusion and inconsistency can be addressed.

As a first step the FSB is calling for the 2005 Licensing Act to be referred to the body which advises ministers on better regulation.

The confusion and inconsistency surrounding recent legislation has achieved few of the intended benefits and has cost businesses dearly. It is not "better legislation".

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