Legislative debt

Every amendment that modifies rather than replaces, every provision commenced in part, every schedule that inserts text into an earlier Act, adds to the work required to establish what the law now says. Nobody plans it. It accrues because amending is cheap and consolidating is not.

Why this is not just technical debt with a different noun

The analogy to technical debt is real, and the differences are the point of recording it separately.

The interest is paid in a different currency: not developer hours but the time of anyone who must determine the law, which includes people with no choice about whether to engage with it.

It is paid by people who did not incur the principal. A legislature that amends rather than consolidates imposes the cost on courts, advisers and subjects, most of them decades downstream.

And there is no equivalent of a refactor. Software can be reorganised without changing behaviour. Law cannot: reorganising it is codification, which is a political act requiring authority nobody has to hand.