According to a study undertaken by the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel, parliamentary legislation is excessively complex and its confusion undermines the rule of law.
In his study entitled When Laws Become Too Complex, Richard Heaton, permanent secretary at the Cabinet Office, calls the law “intricate and intimidating” and calls for regulations to be made easier for non-specialists to understand.
He also says that the volume of legislation, along with its detail and interaction with common and European law leads to a complexity that “hinders economic activity, creating burdens for individuals businesses and communities”.
The review coincides with the launch of a “good law initiative”, which is aimed at simplifying legislation, particularly the way it is presented through the Government’s website legislation.gov.uk.
The good law initiative hopes to ensure that legislation becomes as accessible and readable as possible in a bid to avoid confusion and facilitate its interpretation.
The initiative is intended to complement the Government’s campaign against red tape and bureaucracy, with procedural bureaucracy in the areas of planning and environmental applications being perceived to be a particular problem for businesses.
It adds that most European countries have set up processes to simplify national legislation and established departments dedicated entirely to better regulation and reform of the law and suggests that we do similar in the UK.
At the moment, the report suggests, users perceive complying with legislation to be onerous and the law as being extremely difficult to navigate, while cutting down on the number of protracted appeals up through the hierarchy of the courts to ascertain the precise meaning of some obscure legislative clause is one aspiration of the project.