O'Connor Greg; Boyack RachelPart 2 Plain language requirementsCHAIRPERSON (Greg O'Connor): Members we now come to Part 2. This is the debate on clauses 6 to 11 Plain language requirements". The question is that Part 2 stand part.RACHEL BOYACK (Labour—Nelson): Thank you Mr Chair. I know everyone has been very excited to begin the debate tonight on Part 2 which has a lot of the substantive parts of the bill and which we've already had some questions on tonight so I will possibly take a slightly longer call depending on how long it takes to get through some of this information.Part 2 states that "A reporting agency must take reasonable steps to ensure that all relevant documents for which it is responsible use plain language." We amended at select committee stage clause 7 so that it was clear that the commissioner "must issue guidance" rather than "may issue guidance". We were quite clear as a select committee that requiring the Public Service Commission to have oversight of this legislation without actually requiring that they must issue those guidelines was inconsistent so we made that change.One of the important points we discussed at committee which I do want to ensure is referenced a number of times throughout the debates in the House is about the Public Service Commissioner looking at international best practice. There was a very specific reason why we did that. There is currently work going on internationally to develop an international organisation for standardisation (ISO) on plain language. For those watching that's an international standard that can then be applied for and applied by organisations internationally in order to show they comply with that standard. It's very common in areas like health and safety and accounting practices and we have some of our experts on plain language in New Zealand like the Write group who are actually actively part of the development of that ISO. So what we want to point to quite clearly is that when that ISO is in place—and it could still be a few more years away—at that point we would expect the Public Service Commissioner to be looking specifically at that ISO in order to develop the guidance.I do want to take some time just to talk about accessibility. I've had members of my community come to me for example who are vision impaired and there are really basic tools that can be used on documents—on things like PDFs—where all you have to do is push a button and the document is read out to you. I had a constituent come to me where that hadn't been applied to a letter she received from the Ministry of Social Development (MSD). She phoned the call centre to ask for the document to be read out to her because she couldn't read it. They refused to actually read it out to her over the phone and said "Maybe a friend could do that for you." Considering the amount of time that she waited on the phone the amount of time that that call took the amount of time that it then took that person to go and find someone to read a document out to her that's all transactional time that didn't need to occur if a simple tool like adding the button to turn into a reader had been used. We had representation from members of the disabled community who said that guidance on some of these types of things—particularly on websites—had been issued by Cabinet but hadn't been followed enough. They were really clear that they wanted to see legislation because they wanted the strength of legislation to actually show just how important these particular issues are to that community.Madam Chair—it's nice to see you Madam Chair. We've had questions tonight about plain language officers and I do want to talk about this quite specifically—about what their role will be. The plain language officers will have a very important role in terms of education and training of people within an agency. It is my view that there will be many agencies where that work will be picked up by an existing person working probably in a communications team within the agency. We have a number of public sector agencies that already have people assigned to do this work that work very carefully on plain language within their documents and that engage organisations like the Write group and others to consult on those documents and to train their teams in order to be able to write in plain language. When I was a junior public servant myself in my first role I was sent on some of those courses specifically for that reason. There could be times when an agency does not have someone that would be able to fulfil that role. There may be times when an agency is very small and does not have the ability to have someone in their team where they may need to outsource that work. Each agency will need to be able to assess that on their own merits.There has been a lot of commentary in previous readings and in the media around suggestions from the Opposition that this is going to add cost to bureaucracy. I want to actually tackle that head-on. What we know is that when information is not presented to the public in a clear way it adds an enormous transactional cost to that agency and to the members of the public struggling to understand those documents. The United States has legislation in place and this legislation is based off that legislation—or they've been amended now but it was based off the United States' legislation. When that legislation was introduced the compliance for people to pay things like taxes and fines actually went up as a result because information was presented in a clearer way for people to understand. There is evidence from a Toronto-based organisation that actually studied the business impact when members of their organisation had to introduce plain language. They collected the performance data on that organisation. They found that by introducing plain language it improved employee productivity by 36.9 percent it decreased employee errors by 77.1 percent it decreased the frequency of calls to the helpdesk by 17.4 percent and it decreased the duration of calls to the helpdesk by a forecasted 10 percent. They then forecasted a positive return on investment. What they found was that it had positive financial benefits for their organisation in introducing plain language. It's that classic case that sometimes you need to invest in order to actually get the results.So there may be some agencies that do have to make a small investment in a staffer who is able to support that agency through this change but what the evidence shows and what the research shows is that it will ultimately have positive net benefits for the organisation in terms of transactional costs compliance costs and people for example paying their fines people not having to phone MSD to have a document read out to them over the phone because a simple reader application wasn't added to that document. I really wanted to tackle that head-on because I think that there's been a lot of comments in the media that have been in my view a bit inaccurate around what this will mean for those agencies. The other thing about plain language officers which I think will be really helpful will be the ability to receive concerns from the public. This is something that happens with privacy officers in agencies where you can find an agency find out who the privacy officer is and contact them to say "We've had an issue and I'd like to refer that." That's something that I certainly would find helpful as an electorate MP when a document does come through that is very clearly not clear and being able to send that somewhere for it to actually be looked at.There was a specific addition we made into this part which has had some commentary around 10A being added which is the "[Bill] does not confer or impose legal rights or obligations". We were very clear and there was I guess some temptation at times to think that maybe it might actually confer some legal obligations but we're very clear that the duty from an agency is through to the Public Service Commissioner and then through the reporting mechanisms that exist that way—as opposed to potentially opening up the Crown to legal action. I know that the Minister of Finance will appreciate that the select committee included that clause within the bill. Thank you Madam Chair."