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Making law in a digital world: the Universal Credit experience
Blog post from Nicolette Sanders, from the Government Legal Department on how Government lawyers have simplified Universal Credit legislation using ‘Agile service development principles’.
‘The starting point for lawyers was to ask their policy and operational colleagues who were designing and implementing UC what they liked about the law – and what they disliked. The outcome was interesting. They liked practical provisions, such as formulae and also provisions containing tables and steps that help the user navigate the legislation. And they disliked cross-references to other legislation, which required the user to go off and search for that legislation, and they particularly disliked language such as “subject to” and “for the purposes of”. In short, the demand from those implementing and those drafting was for plain language.
Taking those principles as their guiding light, lawyers set about reducing the hundreds of pages of existing legislation to something more manageable…..’
That’s a very long winded way of saying - we basically cut and paste the existing regulations from the ‘legacy benefits’ which had been duplicated by previous governments when they replaced Income Support for many claimants with ‘look alike’ benefits governed by exactly the same regulations but with a different name. We did have to think up a few new bits where we couldn’t make various subsequent amendments made to the individual legacy benefit regs fit back together again and also for some new ideas IDS wants to introduce in the name of ‘simplification’ and ‘making work pay’. So really we havn’t been very clever lawyers and reduced the existing provisions only the future printing cost because they won’t have to copy out the same old ones umpteen times anymore. Of course no on else understands the legislation so they’ll never know that’s all we’ve done in reality!
they particularly disliked language such as “subject to” and “for the purposes of”.
The Universal Credit regulations have 56 ‘Subject to’s and 96 ‘for the purposes of’s.
they particularly disliked language such as “subject to” and “for the purposes of”.
The Universal Credit regulations have 56 ‘Subject to’s and 96 ‘for the purposes of’s.
I really think you ought to post that on her blog Gareth :)
Substance apart, it was all going so well until the end of the penultimate paragraph where we see the phrase ” going forwards”
Substance apart, it was all going so well until the end of the penultimate paragraph where we see the phrase ” going forwards”
DWP must have paid £Ks to management consultants to come up with that new buzz phrase - bet you can’t work it into your next appeal submission!
they particularly disliked language such as “subject to” and “for the purposes of”.
The Universal Credit regulations have 56 ‘Subject to’s and 96 ‘for the purposes of’s.
I really think you ought to post that on her blog Gareth :)
I have - subject to moderation.
they particularly disliked language such as “subject to” and “for the purposes of”.
The Universal Credit regulations have 56 ‘Subject to’s and 96 ‘for the purposes of’s.
I really think you ought to post that on her blog Gareth :)
I have - subject to moderation.
Yours or hers :)
they particularly disliked language such as “subject to” and “for the purposes of”.
The Universal Credit regulations have 56 ‘Subject to’s and 96 ‘for the purposes of’s.
I really think you ought to post that on her blog Gareth :)
I have - subject to moderation.
My comment (on the several hundred pages of commencement orders etc subsequent to these regulations) has been in moderation for a while now.
And, there is a good reason why the phrase “for the purposes of” is commonly used. It brings clarity and some degree of certainty to legislation. For example, for the purposes of this Act, “complete halfwit” means….. Otherwise, words could mean whatever the government say they mean. See Humpty Dumpty. Likewise “subject to” qualifies legislation, making rules conditional on certain factors being present (or even absent), thus putting restraints on decision makers. That said, the frequency of their use in an Act or SI can often reflect the legislation’s complexity but that is a somewhat different issue.
That’s because the basis of drafting in the UK has been to make a general rule and then selectively defeat it. FTPO tends to be used to redefine the meaning of terms.
This tends to make direct computerisation of law difficult as machines like a label to consistently mean the same thing. cf. My interesting experiences in the Alvey Project.
It appears moderation does not welcome comments from ‘benefit specalists’ who do understand the legislation!
And, there is a good reason why the phrase “for the purposes of” is commonly used. It brings clarity and some degree of certainty to legislation. For example, for the purposes of this Act, “complete halfwit” means….. Otherwise, words could mean whatever the government say they mean. See Humpty Dumpty. Likewise “subject to” qualifies legislation, making rules conditional on certain factors being present (or even absent), thus putting restraints on decision makers. That said, the frequency of their use in an Act or SI can often reflect the legislation’s complexity but that is a somewhat different issue.
The reason, historically, why these laws were and are written in “archaic” language is that they were written by lawyers in a language that stopped commoners from actually understanding it .
The problem as we go digital, (which requires IT experts, computers, and most of the population to participate) is that nobody (with the exception of judges, government lawyers, welfare benefit experts) have the faintest idea what the legal language actually means, which means, I am afraid, that the project is doomed to expensive failure.
Getting some geeky IT literate lawyers in to simplify things into Plain English and then getting IT experts to translate this into computer speak simply wont work, even it it did, in a few years time the caselaw will have all been changed back by non geeky, It illiterate judges, on the basis of old archaic precedent….........