A scheme to create a comprehensive online guide to English law is looking for £50,000 to fund its first phase.

The Free Legal Web, the brainchild of legal publishing consultant Nick Holmes, has already won a government-sponsored prize for innovative uses of official information.

Holmes says that, while large amounts of legal information are available on the web, it is ‘not joined up’ and of little value to non-experts. For example, the British and Irish Legal Information Institute database of primary law is ‘a very useful primary resource, but no use if you want to know what the law on a particular topic is today.’

It is not only lay-people who are confused, he said. In October last year, an appeal court judge, Lord Justice Toulson, blasted the ‘lamentable state of affairs’ that caused the HMRC to bring a prosecution on a set of regulations that turned out to have been superseded.

Holmes plans to launch Free Legal Web this month by raising funds for a pilot. This will probably cover housing law. Visit http://legalweb.wordpress.com for more information.