Legislation: Skeleton Bills and Delegated Powers

Lord Norton of Louth Excerpts

Thursday 6th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Norton of Louth (Con)]

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Cavendish, on initiating this debate. I too commend and endorse the powerful reports of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform and the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committees.

Governments are under pressure to produce results. The “something must be done, and done quickly” mentality affects Governments of all persuasions. The tendency is to resort to legislation—to passing a Bill. Whether legislation is actually needed is another matter. One indication that it is not is the volume of statute law that has never been brought into effect. One study found over 480 Acts of Parliament passed between 1960 and 2020 with at least one section or schedule not yet commenced. Governments are tempted to give themselves wide powers to cover all sorts of potential problems. Skeleton Bills represent part—but only part—of a wider, growing problem in the Government’s approach to legislation. We need to come up with a solution that addresses the problem holistically.

I wish to commend a proposal that has been raised before, including in this House by the Leader’s Group on Working Practices, in its report of 2011, and in the Commons by the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee, in its 2013 report, Ensuring Standards in the Quality of Legislation. Each endorsed the proposal for a legislative standards committee to examine each Bill against a set of objectives embodied in a code of legislative standards. It would be able to identify and report on skeleton Bills prior to their consideration in either House and it would not be constrained in the way our committees dealing purely with secondary legislation are constrained. As the Hansard Society told the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee:

“Parliament should at least be a partner in the process of setting the standards of what constitutes a well prepared piece of legislation, rather than permitting the executive to determine this from bill to bill. If Parliament is serious about checking the growth of the statute book and improving the quality of law-making, then it must be both more imaginative and muscular in asserting its role and function vis-à-vis the executive.”


The Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee recommends that both Houses and government agree procedures for determining what our skeleton Bills—and what the consequences of such determination—should be. If government and the other place are not too keen, I think we should be prepared to go it alone with our own legislative standards committee. That would play to our strengths.