For the residents of Midland Road, Gloucester, it was not quite the worst thing that had happened in the neighbourhood — not compared with the discovery of the body of Fred West’s stepdaughter Charmaine under the basement of No 25 — but it was definitely the most irritating.

It began in the small hours of Tuesday when a suspected car thief clambered onto the rooftops after a high-speed chase and began pelting the police who had tried to follow him with bricks and roof tiles.

It ended with a siege that would waste the time of 50 police officers, close the street until 9.40pm and culminate in the maddening spectacle of the suspect being handed a bucket of KFC chicken, a two-litre bottle of Pepsi and a packet of cigarettes at taxpayers’ expense — all apparently to preserve his “human rights”.

“If I was in charge, I’d shoot this bloke down from there without any hesitation whatsoever,” said John Swatton, a local resident and retired Ministry of Defence security guard.

His disgust was shared by much of the nation. Partly it was the little details that irked, such as the fact that the man had initially been passed a can of Pepsi — which he had snootily rejected as being insufficient for his needs; and the leisurely kip that he had been allowed after his free lunch.

Mainly it was down to the gobsmacking excuse volunteered by a spokeswoman for Gloucestershire police to justify their kid glove treatment of the perpetrator. “Although he was on the roof being a nuisance we still have to look after his wellbeing and human rights,” she said.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” went a weary Britain, shaking its head in bewilderment and impotent fury. “Not the ruddy Human Rights Act again.”

The 1998 Human Rights Act: was there ever in recent political history a more loathed piece of legislation? Well yes, quite possibly. The Data Protection Act, for example. Or any provision that has to do with those dread words health and safety. Together these laws are widely held to be responsible for pretty much everything that goes wrong in modern Britain, from the premature release of murdering rapists and the featherbedding of Afghan hijackers to the failure of police to catch Ian Huntley, the Soham murderer, quickly enough.

In principle these laws might once have seemed a good idea; in practice it is almost as if they were expressly designed to prevent free-born, law-abiding Britons from going about their normal daily business. They are cumbersome, politically correct, ill conceived and a gold mine for Britain’s burgeoning population of not-exactly-impoverished lawyers.

How much of the fault lies in the laws themselves and how much in our over-zealous interpretation of them? Might it perhaps be that the worst thing about human rights, data protection and health and safety legislation is the way they are used by the ignorant, the lazy, the incompetent and the can’t-be-bothered as the perfect catch-all excuse to get themselves off the hook.

From his desk at the Information Commissioner’s Office — the independent privacy watchdog — James Ford, its spokesman, sounds almost tearful with gratitude that someone, somewhere, cares what the Data Protection Act is about. “It is a difficult piece of legislation, we accept that, which is why we try to provide the public with copious amounts of guidance. But basically it’s about common sense,” he says.

The act, he wants to emphasise, was designed to protect people from the growing amount of personal information about them being abused by the unscrupulous — not to stop the police issuing “wanted” photographs of criminals, nor parents taking photographs of their children’s nativity plays, nor Catholic priests from announcing in their prayers the names of sick parishioners, nor yet music examination boards divulging to the mothers of 11-year-old girls the results of their flute exams.

All the above are genuine examples of the way the Data Protection Act has been mistakenly invoked by organisations — police, local councils, the Catholic church — that have simply got the wrong end of the stick. Photographs and videos taken for personal use — for example, in school — are exempt from the act.