Even where an authority is enforcing a legal regime rather than delicately balancing competing or complementary interests, a number of factors may lead to a flexible approach to the task. Take for example the work of environmental health officers. The ultimate objective of the authority is to protect people against unjustifiable threats to health. Resources do not permit officers to police all possible occasions on which there is a threat to ensure that the law is complied with. The most efficient way of achieving the ultimate goal is therefore often to work as far as possible with potential offenders, helping them to develop their own systems for safeguarding public health without making their activities uneconomic. This will tend to mean that officers will regard education, encouragement and negotiation as the best way of dealing with people with whom they deal on a regular basis. Enforcement and prosecution will be relatively rarely used against such people, and then only as a last resort, usually only in cases of egregious breaches of rules; more regularly deploying enforcement powers would tend to interfere with the co—operative relationship on which effective protection of the environment depends. Never-the less, different departments and individual officers may strike a different balance between the use of what Dr. Bridget Hutter has called ‘persuasive’ and ‘insistent’ strategies, and the existence of an implicit or express threat of legal enforcement at some future time provides a significant incentive for people to respond connectively to officers’ exhortations.” A similar pattern was found in the ‘enforcement’ of antipollution law, where to some extent even the permissible level of pollution (and therefore the content of the applicable legal rules) is open to negotiation.