overdue; Bermuda is drowning in red tape.

Along with churches, golf courses and liquor stores, Bermuda must have more regulations per square mile than any other country in the world.

This is due in part to the size of the Island, which needs rules and ordinances which a small town might require and all the apparatus that a country with world class industries needs.

But there has also been a tendency for Government to identify problems and to solve them with a new rule or regulation. Each one requires a bureaucracy to enforce it, and fines and punishments to ensure that it is obeyed.

Many of these rules and regulations are put in place with the best of intentions and taken on their own, may make sense. But taken together, they amount to a stifling atmosphere in which you can walk down the street and find yourself breaking one law or another.

Mr. Robinson notes that the level of red tape means that getting anything done becomes complex and time-consuming.

The Planning Department, which generally does a fine job, now requires planning permission for the smallest of internal and external renovations -- and other agencies, like the Fire Service, have to put their two cents in as well.

Sometimes, as in cases like asbestos removal, this makes sense. At other times it is nothing more than a nuisance.

The decision to introduce the harmonised Customs tariff may make sense on the surface, but for businesses small and large, it means added bureaucracy for the already time consuming task of getting goods off the docks.

Recently, it was stated that where it took a meeting with one person to get the ball rolling on a new hotel development, it may now take four, none of whom feel able to make a decision. The result is gridlock.

"It's mind boggling you have to go through so much for relatively simple matters,'' says Mr. Robinson, and he is right.

This is no-one's fault. But the time has come to take a hard look at all of the Island's rules and regulations and decide which are helping the Island to progress, and which are holding it back.

BREAK-OUT EDT Break-out The break-out on Monday night of Brian Carlton Rogers should give added ammunition to the efforts to get St. George's Police Station moved or renovated.

That's the good news, at least for the officers serving in the East End.

The bad news is that Rogers escaped, and as of last night was still at large.

Commissioner Jean-Jacques Lemay has promised a full investigation into the escape and on this case, heads should roll.

Rogers, as reported in this newspaper, has escaped before, and on that occasion caused havoc before he was recaptured.

Someone, somewhere in the Police Service must have known that he was an escape risk, yet he still got out, apparently by pushing a wall out of the station.

Even given the decrepit state of the Police Station, that could not have been easy and must have taken some time. How was he able to perform the task undetected? That is the question the Police must answer; so far, no explanation has been forthcoming.