Subordinate Legislation: Transparency and Accountability

Debate between Lord Young of Cookham and Lord Rowlands

Thursday 21st February 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I pay tribute to my noble friend, those who with him work on the JCSI and the lawyers for their important if unglamorous work in scrutinising subordinate legislation, not least because their work rate has had to increase substantially due to the increased flow of SIs.

On corrections and errors, the Government have laid more than 1,500 SIs in the Session to date, not all related to Brexit. As of a recent report, the committee has for one reason or another reported on 136 of them. In nearly three-quarters of those cases, the Government either made a correction, provided further information or gave an undertaking to do so. On delays, of the 582 SIs considered by the committee since its report in June last year, only one has been reported for an unjustified delay and only one has been reported for an unjustified breach of the 21-day rule. Clearly, we hope to improve on both performances. More resources have been given to departments to improve their performance. I note that in its interim report on the current Session the committee states that,

“the overall percentage of errors in SIs has decreased”.

We are working hard to maintain progress.

[Lord Rowlands (Lab)]

My Lords, it has been a privilege to have served on this committee for a number of years; indeed, at various times I have chaired the committee and I was very much involved in the preparation of this report. As the Minister said, scrutinising statutory instruments can sometimes feel a rather remote, distant, especially technical thing to do, but one must never lose sight of the fact that a statutory instrument can seriously influence or affect a citizen’s rights or duties, so it is particularly important that statutory instruments are accessible. In our report we make specific recommendations to make sure that statutory instruments and the relevant documents are available and accessible to individual citizens. Paragraph 4.9 says:

“Accessibility to legislation is … of obvious importance for the maintenance of the rule of law”.


I hope that the Minister will impress upon the department the significance and importance of making these instruments and relevant documents accessible to citizens.

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I agree with that section of the report that deals with accessibility. Given their increasing availability on the internet, we hope that statutory instruments are more accessible than they were when they were available only in hard copy. We are in touch with the National Archives, which has responsibility for putting these SIs online, and we have taken on board the one specific recommendation in the report about making sure that those who originally had access to a document that was subsequently changed have access to the change without having to make special efforts to find it. I endorse the words of the noble Lord about the importance of SIs: that is why the JCSI and the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee have a key role to play.