The Lord Chancellor will be forced to update Parliament annually on plans to implement Law Commission recommendations, the commission’s chair said this week.

Sir Terence Etherton told journalists the proposal was a sign of a ­closer working relationship between the commission and government.

He said the development signalled a move to the ‘real world’ in which the commission has to be as cost-effective and as useful to the citizen as possible. ‘In order to make that happen, we have to work closely with government,’ he added.

From now on, all reforms proposed by the commission will come with an assessment of economic impacts, he said. The lack of an assessment was the official reason given for the government shelving the commission’s proposals on cohabitation last year.

Introducing the commission’s tenth programme of law reform, Etherton rejected calls for changes to privacy laws. He said the right way to deal with this ‘very, very controversial area’ would be either in Parliament or in case law.

Criminal law simplification will focus on treason, ‘an area where the criminal law could be simplified and pruned’ and on abolishing the common law offence of public nuisance.

Etherton welcomed plans to move the commission’s support group to the Ministry of Justice.

‘For the first time, we have been placed in a policy area where our objectives are clearly recognised,’ he said.

The commission has also won a fast-track parliamentary procedure for non-controversial reforms. The first to benefit will be a report on perpetuities and accumulations, which has been awaiting parliamentary time since 1998.

The Law Commission’s tenth law reform programme includes:

  • Adult social care – to end a 60-year-old divergence in the laws covering NHS and local authority care. A scoping paper is due later this year;
  • Intestate succession – to review the law of intestacy and the Inheritance Act 1975;
  • Railway level crossings – the laws controlling the UK’s 7,000 level crossings are ‘extremely complex’;
  • Marital property agreements – reforms might make pre-nuptial agreements ‘more determinative on the consequences of a dissolution’, Etherton said;
  • Private rights of redress under the unfair commercial practices directive; and
  • Unfitness to plead and the insanity defence.