Plain Laws Understandable By Singaporeans

In 2013, the Legislation Division embarked on a project to improve and modernise the Singapore statute book (online as well as hardcopy) in terms of its content and its design. The Legislation Division’s PLUS project, or the Plain Laws Understandable by Singaporeans project is an on-line public survey with a view to modernising our legislative drafting practice and improving the readability of our laws so that Singaporeans can better understand them. The online public survey was conducted over a period of one month from 12 November to 12 December 2013.

In total, 1,058 respondents participated in the survey. The respondents comprised administrators or regulators (46.1%), the general public (34.3%), legal professionals (17.1%), non-law students (5.8%), law students (5.5%), the judiciary (4.5%), the law academia (1.4%), librarians (1.2%) and parliamentarians (0.6%). The majority of the respondents were between 20 to 49 years of age (80.3%) with at least a university degree as their highest educational qualification (78.9%).

The detailed report of the survey results is as follows: Plain Laws Understandable By Singaporeans