by Ross Clark - Wednesday, 5th September 2007 -

I had some sympathy with John Prescott when he protested that he was in fact working while wielding a croquet mallet on the lawns of Dorneywood.

If you work on the production line in a baked bean factory it is very easy to tell the difference between when you at work and when you are off-duty.

It is rather harder to do this if you lead a professional life and your working day revolves around breakfast meetings, train journeys accompanied by your laptop and supper at home interrupted by several business calls.

Notwithstanding Mr Prescott’s plight, the government has nevertheless declared that henceforth all workers must tot up the hours they work - presumably taking great care to separate the time they spend actually taking their croquet shots from the time they spend discussing business between hoops.

The reason is the Working Time (Amendment) Regulations 2006, a little-noticed, one-line document issued in January.

The original Working Time Regulations limited most workers to a 48-hour week unless they personally signed an "opt-out" agreeing to work longer hours.

There was an exemption "in cases where a worker’s working time was partly unmeasured or determined by the worker himself."

An obvious case was the managing director of a small company, who is paid not by the hour but to take on a responsibility. The time it takes to discharge that responsibility is up to the manager himself.

In future, such people will still be able to opt out of a 48-hour week, but only if they enter into a formal agreement with their company and they agree to keep a record of the hours they work.

This leads to the bizarre situation in which somebody running their own business must now add up the hours they work - purely so they can make a formal agreement with themselves to work more than 48 hours a week.

What about the time you spend in the bath contemplating whether to expand into Belgium: is that work, leisure, or does it come down to whether you are soaping yourself at the time?

What if you have a dream about the new branch in Nuneaton: does your time in bed then count as work? Running your own business is so demanding that you are rarely off-duty: no matter what you are doing people may still need to reach you.

It is absurd that legislation aimed at saving low-paid workers from exploitation at the power looms or burger-fryers is being used to "protect" businessmen from exploitation by themselves.

The only sure thing is that from now on businessmen will have to spend a little extra, unproductive time at work: trying to count their working hours for the week.

It may well be that the Working Time (Amendment) Regulations 2006 are shortlived. Last year the European Parliament voted to abolish Britain’s partial opt-out from the working time directive - hoping to force everyone to work a maximum of 48 hours a week.

Needless to say, extending the working time directive to senior managers will achieve absolutely nothing other than to increase the incentive for them to fib when filling out their log of working hours.

Look what happened in France when the compulsory 35-hour week was introduced. The official figures for productivity per hour of French workers increased sharply - yet productivity per employee stayed pretty much the same.

Were French workers really producing just as much in less time - or did the 35-hour week simply give them an incentive to fib about the number of hours they were working, thereby rendering the figures meaningless?

If we are going to have tighter working time regulations, let’s at least hope they will be forced upon our leaders.

That doesn’t appear to happen now, given the number of occasions we are told ministers and officials have worked through the night to make a deal on the latest nannying EU directive.

If all the ministers attending European summits were obliged to clock off as soon as they had finished their photocalls, banquets and working games of croquet, they wouldn’t have any time left to sign any more pettifogging legislation.