Understanding Legislation

Understanding Legislation

Hosted by David Youll

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This group is currently on hold.

UK legislation is now online, providing easy access to over 4,000 Acts of Parliament and over 100,000 pieces of legislation dating back to 1267.  Great!  But on reading many pieces of legislation, it quickly becomes obvious to the layman that UK legislation can be difficult to understand.  While there has been some progress made in adopting “plain English”, the structure and the contents of legislation reflect long term historical practices that make little use of modern standards and technology (e.g. the layout is still largely aimed at paper-based display, rather than viewing on a computer screen).  It’s no wonder the legal profession is required by most people to defend them in court.

The internet contains many examples of good practice that are being adopted by legislation drafters around the world, but changes to practice in the UK are very slow.  Recent years have seen a huge change in UK legislation driven by both Brexit and the Covid pandemic, leaving little time for making changes to improve legislation.  Also, Parliamentary budgets for improving legislation have been low in recent periods of austerity.

How can things be improved?  You may have heard about “Citizen Scientists” who are being recruited to help scientists analyse the huge amounts of information being gathered by recent advances in the technology employed.  So, can “citizen legal advisers” be employed from the ranks of the U3A to work together to understand what our legislation is trying to say and provide summaries and propose improvements to our legislation?  While some knowledge of legal matters would be required in the team, there is a great need for some people to review legislation and comment along the lines of “I don’t understand this – can others help to clarify the intent and redraft this in a way that lay people can understand”.

Some of our U3A members, without formal legal training, have been investigating this problem for many years and have created this U3A community with an aim to share their experience and seek the power of a large community to make improvements to legislation.  If you have the time and the interest in this subject, why not join this team to help our legislative drafters improve our national library of legislation?  While legal professionals and IT professionals are primarily required, we also need people who are simply keen to see the law made easier to access and understood by everyone.

Note that the objective of proposals on this web site is to improve existing legislation. None of our proposals are written with an objective of introducing legislation that contains provisions that bring in new ideas as to what should be included in legislation.

How can you help? Where do you start? If you are very new to this topic, we suggest you start by following the links below. The initial links will inform you about what is being done to improve legislation around the world and the latter links take you to some proposals as to how legislation could be improved.

On this site, you will find:

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