But the alarm bells should start ringing when the growth of health and safety legislation becomes an opportunity to make money for others.

Directors Stuart Speechley and Kevin Brown have worked hard for the last 10 years to build up a highly successful printing and direct mail business.

They provide jobs for local people – 14 in total – and create wealth for the local community. Their company, KJS Print to Mail Services, has an annual turnover of £2.5 million and growing. And they provide opportunities for other firms with their continual investment – between £200,000 and £300,000 a year in the latest technology.

Yet, as we feature on pages 6 and 7, they receive four cold calls a day from so-called consultancy firms promoting services to ensure the latest health and safety legislation is enforced.

These companies rightly recognise that, for small and medium-sized companies, meeting the requirements of modern legislation is an uphill struggle, a distraction from the day-to-day running of the business and that advice and help is needed.

Mr Speechley estimates he has to work on health and safety matters every week. And, to be sure the company is up to scratch, has employed advisers, at £500 a month.

They aren't alone – it is a story mirrored in thousands of small and medium sized enterprises up and down the land.

And the growth of health and safety regulations is not a spectre conjured up by bosses who only have the bottom line at heart.

Just a cursorary glance at the Health and Safety Executive's website shows how the number of regulations has soared during the last 18 years.

Some 98 new regulations were spawned during the '90s and the first seven years of the 21st century. Contrast that with the preceeding four decades, when the total created was 86. Between 1898 and the '40s there were about 10 regulations created.

It maybe a sign of the times and it maybe progress, but the implemention of legislation should not be allowed to become a big business in its own right.

It's time Prime Minister Gordon Brown sat down with his enterprise boss John Hutton to thrash out new ways of implementing the Government's social legislation rather than regarding companies as a cash-rich enforcer for government.