UK Parliamentary Counsel Launch Good Law Initiative To Make Legislation Simpler And More Accessible
22-04-2013
During that lecture, I discussed, among other things, the fact we have too much law, too much complex law , law which is unenforced and unenforceable…. As many will also know , I have continued to write and lecture on these and related topics, with very little response from organisations which I thought , perhaps naively , might have been interested. Indeed some of you will no doubt be fed up with all this by now, but please read on.
Among those who were invited to that original lecture was the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel. For those who don’t know , they are the people responsible for drafting the Acts of Parliament , for better or worse. For some reason , as I now recall , they were all too busy to attend. However, I did send a copy of my lecture to that Office. I know things tend to move slowly but……………… imagine my surprise this week when a mere two years later a note pops up, which is summarised briefly below, relating to the first of my four core concerns , as noted above.
I am quite sure these topics are as important now as they were two years or twenty years ago. I could be over-critical in asking why this has taken so long to get some airtime but, better late than ever . I hope this is all part of the current government’s plan to continue to cut red tape and bureaucracy and indeed some of the links from the web-site below back me up in that view. I don’t know how they got to where they are , but I am glad they finally got there .
I often read that the only people who benefit from over-complexity in the law are lawyers. I disagree completely ( I would , wouldn’t I ) and suggest we add to the end of that statement , the following words “ who are not acting in the best interests of their clients “ because it is all too easy to lump all lawyers, good and bad , commercially minded or not, into the same heap. You will all , to a greater or lesser degree , be completely fed up with the complexity of the legal system—whether that is the uk system , or other systems in which some of you work as lawyers or otherwise carry on business. It might cost you significant amounts of time , effort and money to try and understand rules which , whatever the justification , are just too complex to easily interpret , often I believe for no good reason.
This initiative , could take decades , but it has to start somewhere so if you are interested , do have a look at the website below and meanwhile…………..onwards and upwards , however slowly that may be!
Credit: Nick Gould from Collyer Bristow
