Introduction

A local authority cannot know what ‘significant harm’ means from the words of the Children Act alone. It is only through repeated use that meanings for ‘reasonable cause’, ‘likely to suffer’ and ‘significant harm’ have emerged. The concept of causing harm to children is, therefore, understood from its effects. It has no clear prima facie meaning, and it succeeds in attaining the pragmatists’ maxim of Charles Sanders Peirce that the ‘conception of … effects is the whole of our conception of the object’. So, why might this approach to framing policy be useful to policymakers? When legislation is indeterminate in meaning, its words can be used flexibly to address a variety of problems, both predicted and unforeseen. In other words, context determines text. In a similar vein, post-structuralists argue that words often precede their meanings (see, eg, Lyotard et al 2006). Policymaking is cheapened by this use of language in that the same supply of language can perform multiple tasks and can allow legislation to be promulgated despite incomplete information on what policy tools are desirable.

This, in essence, is why Parliament's use of language has changed. The increased indeterminacy in legislative language, as observed in Chapter Two, can be explained by a theory of increasing pragmatism in policymaking. Steady increases in the use of adjectives and adverbs have allowed policy concepts, such as the meaning of ‘harm’, to be altered. Conjunctions, by conjoining multiple conditions on policy, allow policy implementation to be shaped by variable contexts. As an example, action under the 1989 Act can be taken when a child ‘is suffering, or is likely to suffer’, harm.