start from scratch

As a result, governments defending gun laws are sometimes forced to start from scratch, hiring historians to build records on issues that haven’t been deeply researched.

Two of them managed to start from scratch in Canada.

"We'd lose it all, and we don't know how to rebuild it. It would be the equivalent of us going back 1,000 years and having to start from scratch."

He said that if IBM had tried to build new software without any of the IPR from Horizon, it would have needed to "start from scratch, which would have cost the Post Office hundreds of millions of pounds".

That gift proved quite useful when tackling the tough subject matter, all while managing her anxiety about what she called having to “start from scratch” with a new role for the first time in several years.