9 target of draftsman’s work when drafting a legislation.

There are a vast number of statutes in our country and they are being drafted
with a different styles. A statute has to cover what is intended, exceptions, limitations
and definition. There are a total of 9 targets of a draftsman’s work.
The first target is legal effectiveness. Draftsman must take generalised political
policy and convert that into legal form without losing its intended aims. Sometimes,
this is not always straight forward particularly as 1 bill may reflect multiple intentions,
not all of which may be equally practicable.
The second target is procedural legitimacy. Draftsman must ensure that the
statute is created according to the formal procedures laid down by Parliament.
However, if the draftsman omits a step in the pre-parliamentary, this will not
invalidate his Bill but it may cause difficulty or delay, and is to be avoided.
The third target is timeliness. Draftsman must manage the time constraint
imposed by parliamentary timetable. A government wishing to push through large
quantities of reforming legislation within a short time will impose great pressure on
the draftsman. This could result in increasing the risk of making errors and a lack of
opportunity to finally review draft legislation to tidy up structure and simplify its
language. Rhys Williams, a MP, once stated that “ill formed, ugly or premature
progeny” in relation to Bills being pushed through due to time constraints.
The fourth target is certainty. The draftsman has to be as precise as possible to
the term that was intended by Parliament. This target impose a big challenge to
draftsman because English language is not always a very precise tool. For an example,
the word “invention” could mean contraption, design, device, discovery, gadget etc.
He must be certain and clear as to what the Act had intended so that fabrication in the
form of a lie and the fantasy of someone would not be included within the Act. S. 9 of
Wills Act 1837 states that the signature should be at the ‘foot or end’ of the will. As
result, many wills came out with signature all over the document. Multiple amendment
was made but there are still problems as can be observed in the case of Wood v
Smith. The deceased had signed at the top of the will, then written out the various
bequest, and finally had it signed by his witness. At first instance, the High Court held
that it is not a valid will because it was the natural construction of the words of the Act
that the maker should sign the will after making dispositions, not before. The court of
appeal took a different view and decided that the signature need not to be after the
dispositive provisions, provided that the writing of the will and its signing by the
testator constituted one operation.
 The fifth target is comprehensibility. Draftsman must ensure that statute must
have clarity and good logical structure. It must be drafted in a way so as to be
comprehensible for lawyers and members of Parliament. Therefore, it is important for
draftsman to start with matters of general principal, before getting buried in
consequential detail. However, this good practice is often overlook. Sir William Dale,
had cited some example of poor arrangement in an article published some years ago.
An example is S.1 of the Unfair Contract Term Act. It is purely a definition section,
which makes no sense at all until we had read the rest of the Act.
The sixth target is acceptability. Draftsman must ensure that the language of
the statute must be acceptable in the way that it obeys the rules that were traditionally
prescribed as opined by Bennion. The phrasing of word/words must be apt and
worded as per the requirement of previous statutes that employed such terminology.
Bennion once drew considerable criticism from within the House of Commons for
using the phrase ‘tried his best’ rather than the more conventional ‘used his best
endeavour’.
The seventh target is brevity. Draftsman must know that brevity and clarity
does not go hand in hand. This is hard to achieve as many words are required to satisfy
the aims of what the statute was intended. Brevity itself is not always the answer as
stated in the case of Thorn v Dickens, where the will read as ‘All for Mother’. The
will appears reasonably but it was contested successfully – Mother was the term used
by the testator to refer to his wife, not his mother.
The eighth target is debatability. Draftsman must ensure that legislation ideally
be framed in such a way that the general principal are debatable in Parliament. This
requires counsel’s careful consideration of the complexity and the order of the clauses.
The ninth target is legal compatibility. Draftsman must be able to work out
how the proposal fit in with the existing law. To achieve this, he must first know what
the existing law actually says. This requires the draftsman to engage in research to
determine not just what the law says but how it says it. As a general principal, a
draftsman should use the same form of wording which appears in the legislation
covering the same subject matter. With an old or already complex legislation, this
principal may act as a further constraint on the draftsman, as he may be obliged to
import the same archaic terminology or complex concept into the amending act.
Finally, the draftsman must also indicate the manner in which and the extent to which
existing legislation is amended by the proposed bill and this requires very difficult
research.
In a nutshell, in order to create statute of high quality, draftsman must bear in
their mind that it is an obligation for them to conform and work strictly towards all the
above mentioned targets and this is important in the preservation of justice and a
healthy legal framework.