Parliament no longer able to scrutinise bills, draftsman claims

Parliament is no longer able properly to scrutinise legislation, and too much power is now concentrated in Government ministers as a result, according to a UK parliamentary draftsman in a report published today.

Daniel Greenberg's report, Dangerous Trends in Modern Legislation... and how to reverse them, warns that the length of new bills is so great that Parliament is unable to give them effective scrutiny.

Published by the Centre for Policy Studies, the report reveals that the average number of clauses included within bills has more than doubled since the 1960s, from 24 between 1960 and 1965, to 49 between 2010 and 2015.

In a further indicator, the 1960 Annual Volume of Public General Acts – the official edition of all Acts passed in that year – was 1,200 A5 pages long. In 2010 the same document had grown to 2,700 A4 pages.

Even though committee stage is often referred to as "line by line scrutiny", Mr Greenberg says it is "incontrovertible fact" that "there are often lengthy and significant parts of a bill that receive no detailed scrutiny at all at any point in its parliamentary passage".

"No business of any size would allow its board and shareholders to take strategic decisions without the inclusion in its end-of-year report of detailed information about its progress and activities in the past year", Mr Greenberg states. "Parliament, which is in the business of controlling the lives of citizens through a range of legislative activities, should feel the need to ensure that both it and its citizen-shareholders are properly informed."

"An attempt to impose rigid rules on the management of parliamentary business would be bound to fail for a number of reasons", the report concludes. Rather, to counter these trends, Mr Greenberg suggests that publicity and transparency on the degree of parliamentary scrutiny of bills could be a low cost method of raising awareness of the issue, "and thereby give Government a practical incentive to solve it". To this end, he proposes the introduction of two new elements to the legislative process:

• the explanatory notes for each bill and Act should record the level of scrutiny given to the legislation in each House; and also record incidents of certain powers for subordinate and quasi-legislation that undermine parliamentary control;
• and this information should be consolidated into a yearly review, which would be debated in both Houses of Parliament.

These changes would not require any legislation or procedural change to implement.

Mr Greenberg commented: “A number of recent developments in legislation and the legislative process can be seen to have concentrated power in the hands of the executive and to have diluted the role of parliamentarians. The concern is that these trends threaten the effective protection of the rule of law."

He stated that whether or not there was ever a time when legislation received full and effective scrutiny, "what is not open to argument, however, is that it does not do so now".

More substantively, "the use of subordinate legislation and various forms of quasi-legislation has become extended in recent years in ways that give the executive significantly greater powers and make it difficult or impossible for Parliament to scrutinise effectively the exercise of those powers".

Click here to read the full report.