Sensibly, Parliament is about to put people selling séance services under the same legal obligations as those selling second-hand cars.

New rules on track to become law in May will mean that someone selling psychic services will need to reach the same standards of reliability as everyone else who sells services. You can advertise that, without charge, you’ll heal someone or contact their dead grandmother, but if you charge for such services you’ll be open to prosecution if you use misleading or aggressive sales techniques.

Supernatural activities used to be governed by the Witchcraft Act 1735 which was used right up to 1944. It was replaced with the Fraudulent Mediums Act 1951 which provided for the punishment of “persons who fraudulently purport to act as spiritualistic mediums” and those who “exercise powers of telepathy, clairvoyance or other similar powers”.

This law, however, required prosecutors to prove dishonest intent. That was very difficult and the law resulted in just a handful of convictions. Under the draft Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008, the 1951 law would be repealed, and spiritualist commerce would be governed by rules that prohibit “unfair commercial practices”. Various offences against consumers are created relating to misleading statements or omissions and aggressive selling. Punishments range up to heavy fines and imprisonment for two years. The best clairvoyants, presumably, will have been prepared for this change for some time.

The new regulations implement European Directive 2005/29/EC (which is about unfair business-to-consumer commercial practices) and they will bring UK law into line with European standards. They will mean that the UK will not be an easy place in which to rip-off consumers.

The offences include unfair selling of services where the use of false information or the “overall presentation” of information deceives, or is likely to deceive, the average consumer - defined as being reasonably well-informed, reasonably observant and circumspect. The offences cover representations about the benefits of a service to be provided or the results to be expected from it.

Aggressive commercial practices prohibited under the regulations include those that impair the consumer’s choice through the use of “harassment, coercion or undue influence”. The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has uncovered widespread malpractice such as direct mail scams. In one case a mailing told consumers that the place that they were living in was “a zone which has been 'booby-trapped' by negative waves”, and it offered a solution for a payment of £29. The new law would apply if, skidding to a halt outside customers’ homes, came a spiritualist van (Negative Wave Solutions Ltd) from which emerged red jump-suited ghostbusters with cylinder spray back-packs. The law would apply to any situations in which people unfairly traded on bogus science.

Carole McEntee-Taylor, a spiritualist healer from Essex, has said that being legally compelled to put consumer warnings on spiritualist services was regrettable. She said: “No other religion has to do that." That rather misses the point that the law is not discriminating against her religious beliefs, it is just saying that if you charge people for providing a service, you must trade fairly or risk prosecution.

If a psychic charges a customer to communicate with dead people, or to give a spiritual healing for a medical ailment, the service is set to be judged in just the same way as where a company charges to provide walkie-talkie handset communications or a paracetamol-based medicine - such companies cannot take customers’ money, provide useless fake goods and then, if prosecuted, say "don’t persecute our corporate belief system".

Swindles proliferate in the considerably ker-ching market of spiritualism. Last year the OFT research indicated that more than 170,000 consumers fall victim to clairvoyant scams every year, losing around £40 million.

Mrs McEntee-Taylor said the new law persecuted spiritualists and marked a return to the Dark Ages. It does no such thing. The new law sheds legal light where there was darkness and exposes those who trade in psychic services to the halogen lamps of consumer protection.

The law should always work on rational assumptions. In 1927 Mr Justice Eve presided in a copyright case in which Geraldine Cummins, a psychic medium, said she had recorded the thoughts of a spirit about the ancient site of the Abbey of Glastonbury. Litigation followed about who owned the copyright in the words she had scribbled down: her, the dead man’s spirit, or another man who helped to transcribe the scribbles into an ordered text. Awarding the copyright to the scribbler, the judge wryly noted it was interesting that although the man in question had died more than 1,900 years ago (and would have spoken a language unintelligible to most 1920s people), Miss Cummins scribbles were conveniently in the sort of Shakespearean English people learn at school. He said he could not rule on whether the dead man had a good claim as “I have no jurisdiction extending to the sphere in which he moves”.

Professor Gary Slapper is Director of the Centre for Law at The Open University

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