Good governance, he reminds, is a straightforward – but not simple – rule: laws should be more convenient for the people than trouble. At their best, legislation and regulation are instruments of the public health, safety and justice they preserve order amid social change while safeguarding individual rights. As these tools of order grow complex, opaque or restrictive in the extreme, they become counter-productive barriers to daily existence and lose the ability to build trust as they were designed. A law that is hard to understand or to comply with is also a law that fails in its basic goal.
The Price of Red Tape: When the Law Is a Taxing Proposition
A burdensome law is one that creates pointless friction in a citizen’s life. This tension is reflected in the following three primary areas:
Complexity and Opacity: Laws that are inscrutable because of their density, archaic or excessively technical vocabulary exclude people naturally. Ordinary citizens should not require legal education to grasp even in basic terms what they must do to comply with the laws concerning their taxes, registering property or obtaining public services. When the rules are muddy, citizens pay well-off intermediaries because they are forced to seek them out, effectively penalizing those seeking to play by the rules.
Redundancy and Duplication: Nothing is more infuriating in the bureaucratic process than having to repeat information or task multiple times for each government department involved. This is time and resource wasting on an epic scale, and a clear indicator that the government’s internal processes—rather than the public’s needs—are being placed before everything else.
Non-Responsiveness: Law and policy should meet the demands and realities of the community. For instance, a traffic regulation that does not consider the local behavior of pedestrians or an environmental policy that crushes small businesses for no sensible environmental gain is a burden. An effective governance also demands a living, dynamic consideration of the laws for their relevance and fairness at all times.
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Pillars of Convenience: An Inquiry into the Legislation Design for Humans
Governments need to move away from the concept of burden and towards one of benefit by building convenience, efficiency and reciprocity into the legal system:
Digital Simplification and Trust
The most immediate means to convenience lies in e-Governance. New systems ought to incorporate the motto ‘trust the citizen.’ A good case in point is the transition from notarized or Gazetted Officer attestation of routine documents. Replace that with self-attestation or a digital identity system (be it a national ID system) and everything gets much simpler. And in the same way that we need an approach to ‘enter once use many’ when information is digitised: data entered into government systems by citizens should only be captured once and then used multiple times, across multiple agencies.
Clarity, Predictability, and Plain Language
“When the law is clear, it leads to compliance. Our lawmakers should prioritize simple language writing. And administrative procedures, the judiciary of many nations acknowledges, must not be too complicated and laden with “redundant requisites” and requests for unneeded information that make one”s mind “harassed.” The objective is predictability: citizens should be able to foresee what the legal implications of their conduct will be, and what actions they need to take to gain access to their rights, without the danger of lessons learned from arbitrary or obscure rules.
Regulatory Offsetting and Review
If they wish to avoid the slow accretion of a default basis of oppressive regulation, governments need formal procedures for reviewing their existing regulations. Some countries have tried “One-In, Two-Out” rules whereby two existing regulations are repealed in order to introduce a new one. The philosophy on this is a (painful) consequence, even if the execution seems impossible to do perfectly: regulation is a cost, and that cost needs to be managed consciously towards as low level as possible. Laws are not forever; they must either be subject to regular review, and sunsetted if no longer in service of a social good equal to the cost that imposing them brings.
When laws are intentionally made as a convenience, they strengthen the Social Contract; they make people more likely to follow them because the system is helping them out, not holding them back. This is the real test of legitimacy: a law that helps, not hinders, the ordinary movements of people in their daily lives.
