Clause 1 - Piloting conduct at European
European Parliamentary and Local Elections (Pilots) Bill
10:00 am
Mr Nick Hawkins (Surrey Heath, Conservative)
I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman's support. It is helpful to know that he is looking at the provision as blankly as I am. The fact that somebody from the Government Back Benches is similarly mystified suggests that I may be on to
something, and it may help to persuade the Minister that the provision could do with rewriting.
I disagree with the hon. Gentleman, however, to some extent. In the eleven and a half years that I have been in the House, I have worked with the Plain English Campaign on quite a few occasions. I have looked in particular at the kind of proposals that it has made for improving some of the most complex legislation that this House has passed—that was many years before I became an MP. When I was working as a lawyer, one of the fields in which I specialised for a number of years was particularly arcane and involved some of the most complex statute law in the Consumer Credit Act 1974. An academic of great renown, Professor Goode, drafted the original Act, but, from the minute that it was introduced in 1974, it was criticised by many practitioners for being too complex. For many years before I became an MP—from the time when I first studied law in the mid–1970s—practitioners were saying, ''Statutes like this have got to be drafted more simply if they are going to be understood by the public.''
Of course, the hon. Member for Glasgow, Cathcart is right. There are certain words that have a clear legal meaning, and, as a lawyer, I want to see those words used correctly. However, there is no reason why minds should not be concentrated—that it what Committee stages are all about—on making the law as clear as possible, while not ignoring the significance of legal terms of art.