There cannot be many examples of muddled or misguided legislation which compare to the Hunting Act introduced by the last Labour Government.

More than 700 hours of Parliamentary time were devoted to this legislation banning hunting with dogs, which for all accounts has been confused and unworkable.

The Bill was forced through Parliament on November 18, 2004, when the Speaker of the House of Commons invoked the Parliament Act enabling the House of Commons to pass legislation against the wishes of the House of Lords; a measure that had been used previously only in times of national emergency.

When it became law on February 18 2005, it was unsurprisingly roundly condemned. A group of former senior civil servants said it was a "notorious example of bad government".

In June last year, William Hague described the Act as "a piece of legislation so deeply prejudiced and so ridiculously unworkable that its existence weakens and discredits the laws of the land" and repeated the Conservative promise of a Government Bill to repeal the hunting ban.

And at the Conservative Party Conference, David Cameron described the Act as a farce and confirmed his pledge that repeal of the Hunting Act would form part of the Tory manifesto.

Yet despite the pledge, a move to repeal the legislation was not in the Queen's Speech and if there is to be a vote it may be only on a Commons' agreement to have a vote.

According to critics, the major problem has been that the Act contains a confusing series of exemptions which are both illogical and unclear, whose definition was ultimately left up to huntsmen, the police and the courts but which inevitably placed law-abiding people at risk of prosecution. The League Against Cruel Sports disagreed and launched a concerted campaign of monitoring hunts in an attempt to prove that the law was being deliberately broken.

Since February 2005, the 325 registered hunts in England and Wales have carried out approximately 70,000 days of hunting and nine registered hunts – the Exmoor, Isle of Wight, Flint and Denbigh, Heythrop, Ullswater and Percy Foxhounds, the Minehead Harriers, Quantock and Devon and Somerset Staghounds – have faced prosecution.

Three prosecutions resulted in convictions, six prosecutions have failed, three were dropped before trial and three resulted in all defendants being acquitted.

The first huntsman to be found guilty, in a private prosecution taken out by the League Against Cruel Sports relating to an incident in April 2005, was Tony Wright, huntsman of the Exmoor Foxhounds.

He was found guilty in August 2006 and had his conviction overturned on appeal on November 30 2007.

The CPS sought to appeal against this judgment on points of law, but this application was refused on the grounds that it was frivolous.

To add to the confusion the three biggest anti-hunt campaign groups have joined forces to co-ordinate lobbying against coalition plans which could clear the way for the ban on hunting with dogs to be lifted.

The League Against Cruel Sports, the RSPCA and IFAW are preparing to work much closer together to see off the prospect of a "return to cruelty".

The danger here is that the Government is dragged into a side-show when the main focus of the Coalition should be resolving the financial crisis.

Surely it is time to have the free vote and sort this issue once and for all.