Democracy Denied (DPRRC Report)

Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts Excerpts

Thursday 12th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, my term of office as the chairman of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee comes to an end in a couple of weeks, but over the past three and a half years I have had the chance to see, at first hand, some of the ways that, almost imperceptibly, the Government have been gaining power at the expense of the two Houses of Parliament. It is that process that forms the background to our report, Government by Diktat.

We have just heard a very powerful speech from my noble friend Lord Blencathra, the immediate past chairman of the Delegated Powers Committee, our sister committee. I support entirely the points he made and the views he expressed. The DPRRC plays a vital role in drawing the attention of the House to the weaknesses in proposed legislation. However, once the legislation has gone through, its work, inevitably, is done. At that point, it is the SLSC that has to consider, examine and, where necessary, draw the House’s attention to the real-life consequences of what has been passed. The SLSC is supported by expert, informed and very hard-working staff, who will examine some 600 to 700 regulations every year. As my noble friend Lord Blencathra said, each of these binds on every citizen of the country as firmly as any primary legislation.

If I may use a cinematic analogy, the DPRRC takes a snapshot; the SLSC is a cine camera, recording the changes that go on week by week, month by month, as the regulations are brought forward. We have been concerned that our cine camera has seen yet more changes since the time we produced Government by Diktat. We have produced two subsequent reports: What Next? The Growing Imbalance between Parliament and the Executive, which we published in April last year, and then Losing Impact: Why the Government’s Impact Assessment System is Failing Parliament and the Public in October. While these two reports will come to be debated another day, they do provide important contextual background to the issues that concern us in Government by Diktat.

The concerns of the SLSC can be grouped into two primary pieces. The first is the growing misuse of secondary legislation. Secondary legislation should be restricted to what it says on the tin: issues of secondary importance. But, increasingly, this is not the case. My noble friend referred to the long-running saga of Henry VIII powers, but recent years have seen increasing use of what have become known as framework or skeleton Bills—or, perhaps more accurately, framework or skeleton clauses in Bills. As we pointed out in our report, these skeleton clauses are so devoid of content that they leave the real, practical application of the law to a ministerial pen or to regulation.

Now, again as my noble friend said, there are understandable reasons why regulation has to be used in various places. Particularly in the area of technology, the rate of change is faster than the rather stately pace of primary legislation can encompass. Regulation has to fill the gap. That is understandable and entirely reasonable. Less attractive is the impression that the intellectual heavy lifting required to think the policy right through has too often been avoided in favour of essentially making it up as you go along. Even more worrying is the possibility that Ministers do not even wish to have detail in primary legislation, because of the embarrassment if it proves that the wrong choice has been made: much easier to reset the policy direction by using secondary legislation.

Nobody in your Lordships’ House could reasonably argue that secondary legislation is as effectively scrutinised as primary. In part, this is a question of time—witness the number of regulations we have—but, much more importantly, it is a question of process. Secondary legislation is unamendable: it can be passed or rejected but it cannot be amended. For this reason, neither House has proved keen to press the button marked “reject”—and, on the very rare occasions where your Lordships’ House has pressed the button, we have had almost immediately the constitutional equivalent of full-scale nuclear war.

As issues coming through secondary legislation become more and more fundamental, I fear that the existing scrutiny procedures are proving less than adequate for the increasing weight placed on them. That is the summary of the SLSC’s worry about the big picture, but at the same time there are some disturbing short-term trends about the way the Government are increasingly casual about providing the information required under existing statutory provisions which is necessary to enable the House to scrutinise in sufficient detail and hold the Government to account.

There are two major areas. The first is impact assessments. I shall give the House some indication of what this means. Every regulation that has an impact of more than £5 million is supposed to have an assessment tabled at the same time as the regulation is tabled. I shall cite a practical example to give a bit of colour. The House will recall the controversy around the Government’s decision to require the compulsory vaccination of care home staff in the latter part of the pandemic. The wisdom or otherwise of that policy is nothing to do with the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, but the decisions that lie behind it are, and they are of such importance for the Committee to draw them to the attention of the House. The two essential issues were how many care home staff were likely to resign as a result of being forced to be vaccinated, either because they had religious views about it or, in the case of women, because they had worries about their fertility, and the long-term issue of the knock-on effects for the social care system and hence for the health service. When the regulations were laid on 20 June there was no impact assessment. We asked the Minister to attend our meeting on 13 July. He did, and we explained to him our concerns about the lack of an impact assessment. He agreed that there should be one and undertook to publish it. He did, on 9 November, four months later. In the event, by that point the policy was done and dusted.

The second area that we are very concerned about is that there is a statutory requirement for every regulation to be subject to a post-implementation review. In evidence to our committee, Christopher Carr of the Better Regulation Executive said that now only between 25% and 40% of regulations are so subject. Post-implementation reviews reveal what happened when hope and expectation met reality, and they surely have to be an important part of improving government performance and holding the Government to account.

Finally, and importantly, there appears to be absolutely no process for sanctioning Governments where their performance falls below what is statutorily required. Not only is this treating Parliament with disdain, but it is undermining confidence in the process of government more widely. As my noble friend Lord Blencathra said, providing opportunity for wider public scrutiny and challenge leads to not only better legislation but better accepted legislation.

So what needs to be done? It is no good just moaning on. There are two things the Government can do. First, they need to stop justifying the present procedures by claiming that this House has to approve all regulations. Technically that is true, but when the alternative is constitutional nuclear warfare, it is hardly a fair and open-minded decision. The Government should be more honest about this when they come to discuss these processes. Thy should also cease to claim that changing scrutiny legislation procedures would result in the whole work of government being gummed up. That is not right. Many aspects of the present procedure work perfectly adequately. What is needed is some form of triaging process to sort the sheep from the goats, the very important from the less important and the unimportant. About two-thirds of regulations that the SLSC examines are entirely technical. They are concerned with changing processes, upping fees or fines to reflect inflation and so on. There is no real concern as far as that goes.

Secondly, for the bulk of the remaining regulations, there needs to be a proper grip on process, the weakness of which I have talked about, so supporting documents and regulations are tabled in a timely manner and only in the most exceptional circumstances are regulations rushed through. That would have a sufficiently uplifting and effective result on this section to justify continuing with what we have at present.

Thirdly, for that small number of skeleton clauses, a new procedure needs to be developed. How might this work? I quote from the DPRRC guidance to Parliament:

“Skeleton legislation should only be used in the most exceptional circumstances. Where the government decides that such exceptional circumstances apply, the delegated powers memorandum should make an explicit declaration (“a skeleton legislation declaration”) that the bill is a skeleton bill or clauses within a Bill are skeleton causes.”


That should trigger a new scrutiny procedure to be agreed by the two Houses of Parliament, a process in which the House of Commons must play the leading role. As my noble friend said, this is not a Lords versus Commons issue and the Government must not be allowed to get away with that. This is about the legislature, the two Houses of Parliament and their powers vis-à-vis the Executive, the Government. For that new procedure to be effective, I have little doubt that there will need to be a power to amend.

We read frequently of a decline in confidence in our system of government to deliver effective, thought-through solutions. We are discussing today ways in which the system has been performing less well than it should. Within a few weeks, your Lordships’ House will begin proceedings on the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill, by any standards the grandfather of skeleton Bills and Henry VIII powers. If I judge matters aright, there is a mood in your Lordships’ House to see whether this Bill can provide a focus point to discuss the various suggestions for improvement in scrutiny that have been made. I very much hope that His Majesty’s loyal Opposition and my noble friend the Leader of the House on behalf of the Government will be able to respond constructively to these concerns.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, it was 12.09 pm when my noble friend Lord Blencathra got to his feet, and now it is not far short of 4.09 pm, so I shall be extremely brief. I begin by adding my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Prentis, for his extremely splendid maiden speech, and I add my thanks to the clerks, to Christine Salmon Percival and the team at the SLSC. I thank all Members of the House who have spoken today. We have had some tremendous speeches, and a rich menu of suggestions and ways forward have been put forward for us to consider and reflect on. If the House will forgive me, I would particularly like to thank my fellow members of the SLSC who have taken the trouble to come along and speak today.

I was not surprised, but I was very pleased, at the degree of Back-Bench support from across the House. The road to constitutional reform will be rocky, long, steep and stony and it will be traversed only with a maximum degree of cross-party support from the Back Benches. It will be vital that we reach out to our similar-thinking colleagues in the House of Commons, again on a cross-party basis, or the slur that this is the unelected Lords trying to tell the elected Commons how to do their job will be game, set and match.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Collins of Highbury, that I recognise what a difficult line he had to follow, with the seductive thought of government, perhaps, within a couple of years. As my noble friend Lord Blencathra said, he dealt with that well. I am delighted to hear his support for the recommendations. I think that he and his party hold an important key, to unlocking the way forward in this particular regard. Without wishing to flatter him, he has a particular responsibility and ability to make things happen, if he and his party so wish. So, we will be watching carefully what he thinks about this in a more measured way.

Finally, my noble friend, the Leader of the House is as ever a polished and practised parliamentarian. He does not give much away; he always gives a very well-thought-through performance, which I enjoy hearing. I am grateful to him for his reassurance about various aspects of impact assessments. I was also grateful for his undertaking to reflect on what we have been doing. As a background to that reflection, I remind him of Admiral Beatty’s saying at the Battle of Jutland. He said:

“Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead”.


If that was the conclusion of his reflections—that we should go full steam ahead and damn the torpedoes—I think that would be a mistake.

Motion agreed.