§ 79. Mr. WATTasked the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food whether he can say how many Orders have been issued by his Department since its institution; whether any copy of such Orders can be seen by the public at the office of his Department; if not there, where can such be seen; is he aware that members of the public are informed by his Department that they can buy copies of the Orders at certain printers' places and that that is the only method of becoming cognisant of the many Orders issued by it; is he aware that judges throughout the country are openly 1705 expressing their inability to master all the Orders of the Food Controller and that the general public are in daily fear of unwittingly infringing some Order and being heavily fined or even imprisoned; and will ho take some method of tabulating the many Orders so that lawyers at any rate may know what the law is?
Mr. PARKERDown to the end of January, 1918, 232 Statutory Orders had been issued by the Food Controller, of which 182 were then in force. A new Manual of Emergency Legislation, comprising the full text of these Orders, will be published in the course of this week, and new editions of this manual will be issued every three months and placed on sale. All Orders of the Food Controller are issued through the Press Bureau to the principal London and provincial newspapers, and they are accompanied by a Press notice which states the purport and effect of each Order in a popular form. Orders affecting particular trades are in some cases necessarily complicated, but care has always been taken to make any Order affecting the general public as simple as possible, and to give it the utmost publicity.