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Consumer Protection Bill signed into law – plain language now obligatory in consumer documents

Frances Gordon | 11 May 2009 | 10:21
April 2009 saw the president of South Africa, President Kgalema Mohlante, signing the Consumer Protection Bill into law. This ushers in a new era of rights for the consumer.
The new Consumer Protection Act has lofty ambitions. According to the consumer site, ‘Get Closure!’ the Act aims to ‘improve protection for consumers against unfair business practices; increase fairness and equality among consumers; give consumers the information they need to make good choices and to know what their rights are; give consumers a better way to get compensation if things do go wrong; and enforce the new rules’.
We have yet to see how industry will take up large-scale implementation of this Act (see blog below for the definition of plain language given in the Act). After all, the National Consumer Commission is only planned to be established 12 months from the date of signing the Bill, and there is considerable work to be done after that.
However, in the field of plain language, here are some things that we can expect to see:
  • More guidelines on how to tell whether a document is in plain language. Simplified has been performing plain-language audits in anticipation of these guidelines for quite some time.
  • More templates such as the policy summaries that Zimele has launched in the long-term insurance industry. Although a step in the right direction, these documents need improvements if they are to carry out the intentions of plain language.
  • More user testing. A pitfall of many plain-language documents is that they have not been tested with the people who use them. In South Africa, we cannot blindly follow international norms, but must test our documents and develop local knowledge about how to apply plain language.
  • More interest in which language to use for which types of documents. We cannot assume that plain English or plain Afrikaans is plain language.
We hope that, in implementing plain-language laws, industry realises that plain language is a respected discipline and profession. It is not something that a copywriter or a lawyer can do, without proper training.
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