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The purpose of the instructions

The purpose of instructions to draft a Bill, or the provisions for a Bill, is to give the OPC team everything they need to produce a draft. The intended readership for the instructions is limited to the OPC team, and they will be known to the author. At the very least, the author will know, from this note what the main characteristics and needs of the likely reader are.

The governing principle when drafting instructions should be to structure them and to decide their contents on the basis of what is likely to be most useful to the OPC team to whom they will be delivered. When the department are sure they know who the OPC team are, what is known about them should be taken into account.

It is not necessary to produce arguments to convince the OPC team of the virtues of the policy, and any temptation to minimise known difficulties with it should be avoided. On the other hand, the OPC team is likely to have an interest in, and should be told, how the argument for the policy will be presented and how it is thought any difficulties with it can be overcome.
The authors of instructions should put themselves in the shoes of the drafter and ask what they would need to know if they were drafting the Bill.

The task of preparing instructions is not at all easy. In an ideal world the policy needs to be thoroughly thought through and analysed and then presented in a coherent and structured way to the OPC team. The better the instructions the better the Bill will be, the more value Counsel will be able to add and the less time will be needed for the drafting stage. Short-cuts taken at the instructing stage can lead to delays at the drafting stage that are much longer than the time saved by the short-cut.

However, Counsel do know that this is all much easier to say than to do. The conditions for preparing instructions are seldom ideal, and it is not unusual for compromises to have to be made to cope with the pressures of the timetable, or a delay in decision-making. Where this is the case, it is important to discuss the problems with Counsel and to agree the best way to deal with them. There are very considerable gains for the department, as well as Counsel, if everyone can get as close to the ideal as is humanly possible.