THIS has not been a good week for the law and those paid to uphold and implement it to the satisfaction of those they are supposed to protect. I'm talking primarily about the Soham murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman and the fact that school caretaker Ian Huntley, their killer, evaded all the vetting checks, despite a history of violence against young girls.

Sir Michael Bichard's report into the case revealed a catalogue of errors involving police forces in Humberside and Cambridgeshire. Some defy belief, especially those in Humberside, where Huntley's record of sexual predation was deleted because of fear that it breached the Data Protection Act. Holly and Jessica would be alive today had that information been acted upon.

In the wake of this damning report, Home Secretary David Blunkett says that the passing of information between police forces must become mandatory. Surely files on people like Huntley should be kept on police databanks, given that computers have been running our lives for a good many years.

Anyone who has tried to obtain credit will know that the finance company, shop, business, whatever, from whom you are seeking funds of any description, will have a comprehensive record of your fiscal dealings within a nanosecond. So you can get away with being a serial sex attacker but not a dodgy payer! That might be over-simplifying things but I'm sure you see what I mean.

I have written in the past that our laws seem to come down with particular severity on those found guilty of crimes involving money. The sentences handed down are no doubt meant to discourage similar fraud as well as punish the offender but what they do is provide evidence of the imbalance between "white collar" crime and violence.

Recently a company secretary was found guilty of milking her wealthy employers' bank accounts of several million pounds, buying property in Cyprus, flash cars and jewellery. Her victims, high-fliers in the City, somehow managed not to notice their coffers being systematically plundered, so one must assume that they weren't exactly short of a bob or two.

This redistribution of wealth brought the perpetrator a sentence of seven years in jail. Proper thing too, I hear you say, although to be fair, no-one was hurt, except in the pride department. It's one thing to be a mover and shaker in the City; another to be dramatically fleeced by an employee. Don't they check their bank statements? I do mine.

Anyway, contrast that with the derisory 11 years given to a 23-year-old driver, high on alcohol and drugs, who ploughed into two families at high speed, killing a mum and two children, and seriously injuring another mother and child. The father of one of the dead children, a five-year-old boy, said in an emotional, post-sentence interview outside court that the justice system had failed his family and that of the other victims. "He should have been given life imprisonment," was his parting comment. There can't be many who would disagree. I certainly wouldn't, but then I genuinely believe UK laws are too soft.