UK Constitution: Oversight and Responsibility (Report from the Constitution Committee)

Lord Bates Excerpts

Friday 4th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates (Con)]

My Lords, I join others in paying tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Beith, for introducing this debate and for the work of the Constitution Committee in another excellent report. I will focus my remarks on chapter 4, paragraph 46, and the role of the Parliamentary Business and Legislation Committee—PBL for short.

My argument is that we legislate too much and scrutinise too little. This is not a new problem. We have been legislating in this place for almost 800 years. The Statute of Marlborough of 1267, which addressed the misuse of power by feudal landlords—a kind of medieval renters’ rights Bill—is still on the statute book. When Halsbury’s Statutes was first published in 1920, it had 20 volumes. It captured all the laws still on the statute book from the previous 700 years applying to England and Wales. The current fifth edition published comprises 105 volumes. In the last century, we have added 85 volumes of law to the 20 volumes of the previous seven centuries. In 1921, we added 220 pages to the statute book. In 2005, we added 12,933 pages. In 1931, there were 51 Acts passed by Parliament, but their total number of pages was 322. This year, the Employment Rights Bill alone runs to 309 pages and requires another 191 pages of Explanatory Notes.

However, this is not just the Government’s fault—it is Parliament’s fault, too. The Institute for Government has said that the parliamentary process typically adds 40% to the length of a Bill. Rather than applying the brake to the legislative instincts of the Executive, we are applying the accelerator.

The main cause of the legislative burden on Britain comes from secondary legislation. Around 1,361 statutory instruments—around 10,000 pages of statues—went through Parliament last year. Despite the valiant efforts of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, the vast majority of those went through, in effect, on the nod. In 1949, Sir Winston Churchill, in this very Chamber, said:

“If you have 10,000 regulations, you destroy all respect for the law”.


Since then, we have had more than 100,000 statutory instruments presented to Parliament, of which only 17 were rejected. The last time your Lordships rejected an SI was 25 years ago; the last time the House of Commons did so was 46 years ago.

The two departments that legislate the most are the Treasury and the Home Office. I have been privileged to serve as a Minister in both, and spent my fair share of time before PBL. In the case of the Treasury, we can clearly see the effects of its legislative instincts in the length of the Tolley’s yellow and orange tax handbooks. In 1976, the handbooks ran to 1,626 pages. By 2024, they had increased to 23,185 pages—an increase of 1,325% in the tax code in 50 years. Every regulation imposes a cost, and those costs are ultimately borne by consumers and taxpayers. Legislation can also stifle innovation, creativity and risk-taking, which are the very lifeblood of economic growth. In a global economy, it also erodes our competitiveness.

I turn to the Home Office. Between 1983 and 2009, the Home Office published 100 criminal justice Bills and more than 4,000 new criminal offences were created. However, those 4,000 new offences were added to how many existing ones? Being a diligent researcher, I of course turned to ChatGPT. The answer that came was:

“It is impossible to determine the exact number of statutory offences in England and Wales”.


To me, that seems quite an important constitutional point. If the law is made for the people and not people for the law, one presumes that, between the Law Commission and the Cabinet Office, someone should know exactly how many laws there are, and informed citizens should know why they are necessary.

By definition, each new law impedes some freedom of the individual or the market. Laws are corrective of human, market or societal failings. Yet there is a balance in a good society between keeping people safe and secure and keeping people free and prosperous. It is not possible to eliminate all risk through legislation without eliminating all freedom too. Individual liberty is a core value of the British constitution; it is a cornerstone of our democracy.

In 2013, the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel in the Cabinet Office published an excellent review into the causes of complex legislation. The foreword states:

“Excessive complexity hinders economic activity, creating burdens for individuals, businesses and communities. It obstructs good government. It undermines the rule of law”.


I agree. We need government behavioural change to recognise that government is about leading, not just legislating; delegating powers, not just centralising them; protecting individual liberty, not inhibiting it; freeing enterprise, not binding it; and recognising that we best uphold the constitution not by strengthening the law but by strengthening the people under the law.

I need to insert a couple of caveats. First, for the record, I am not saying that all legislation is bad—far from it. Secondly, the statistics I have used are from a vast range of sources and, despite the great help of the House of Lords Library, we have not managed to corroborate them all. However, I think that people have the right to have a definitive list of all the rules and the laws by which they are governed; it is then our duty to ensure that they are all absolutely necessary.

Finally, today is Independence Day. We wish all our American friends and cousins—and, in my case, two wonderful grandsons—a happy Independence Day. On this day in 1776, the Declaration of Independence listed grievances against the King, the first of which was:

“He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good”.


That seems a noble test for our work here: to ensure that all our current laws are most wholesome, absolutely necessary and essential for the public good.