The room in The Hague was small for a conference tackling such a big idea. Maybe eighty people, laptops open, coffee cups empty. Rain outside. Inside, a debate about whether legislation is, in fact, code.
Rules as Code isn’t new. But the conference on 10 and 11 March made one thing clear to me: people are finally taking it seriously. The premise is simple. Write laws so that computers can read them too. You get less translation, fewer errors, and a better chance that people actually receive what they’re entitled to.
How it works today
At SVB I deal with the mess of that translation every day. The Sociale Verzekeringsbank administers schemes like the state pension and child benefit. Every scheme is a law. Every law has exceptions, and every exception comes with context. Somewhere down the line, an IT system has to make sense of all of it.
Here’s what happens now. Lawyers draft policy, policy officers interpret it, and then developers turn it into system logic. By that point we’re three steps removed from the original intent. That’s where errors creep in. They aren’t technical bugs. They’re human ones.
Rules as Code suggests starting that translation earlier. Not after the law is written, but while it’s being written. You draft the decision rule straight away in a format that people can read and systems can run.
In practice
On paper it sounds revolutionary. In practice it’s a lot of work. You need lawyers willing to write differently. You need developers who understand what a word like “household” means in legal terms. And you need a government that treats this kind of collaboration as normal rather than exceptional.
At the conference I heard about projects from Australia, New Zealand and Scotland. These countries are further along, not because they’re smarter, but because they started sooner. New Zealand has spent years mapping social legislation as decision logic. Scotland is testing the approach for local tax exemptions.
The Netherlands isn’t far behind, but here the conversation still happens behind closed doors. Proofs of concept. Pilots. I understand the caution. The stakes are high when something goes wrong, and the systems stay fragile once you roll them out more widely.
Why it still has to happen
Even so, I think the moment is arriving. Not because the technology is ready, but because the alternative is getting too expensive. Every time a law changes and the systems only catch up three years later, people pay the price. Sometimes they pay it literally.
That’s why, at SVB, I don’t see this as an IT question. It’s a question about how government lives up to its responsibility, and about whether citizens can trust that the rules written for them are actually carried out.
Someone at the conference put it like this: “If you can’t explain legislation to a computer, maybe you never understood it well enough for a human either.” That stayed with me. Not as a technical point, but as a question for everyone who writes laws.
So the real question isn’t whether legislation should become machine-readable. It’s when we’ll stop pretending we can keep putting it off.