Delegated Legislation Review: Preliminary Recommendations (members’ briefing)

Events / Members

Delegated Legislation Review: Preliminary Recommendations (members’ briefing)

26 Jan 2023

The UK Houses of Parliament at dusk. CC BY-ND 2.0

Ahead of publication of the Preliminary Recommendations of the Hansard Society’s Delegated Legislation Review, Members of the Society are invited to a special pre-launch briefing to learn about the key changes that we think are needed to reform how the delegated legislation system works.

1:00pm, 26 January 2023 Private briefing for members (webinar)

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About this event

The Society’s research team will give an advance briefing to Members of the Society ahead of publication of the Preliminary Recommendations of our Delegated Legislation Review.

Over the last 12 months, we have been working with an expert Advisory Panel to develop proposals to reform how the delegated legislation system works.

This briefing will explore our key proposals that have emerged to reset the system so that it is more efficient and effective.

There will be an opportunity for Members to question the research team about the proposals and to discuss our plans for the final stage of the Review.

Key themes

We will be setting out and discussing how we propose to:

reset the boundary between what should go in Bills and what should go in Statutory Instruments (SIs);
improve scrutiny of SIs by replacing the current scrutiny model of ‘negative’, ‘affirmative’ and ‘strengthened’ procedures;
support scrutiny by introducing a sifting mechanism for all SIs;
introduce an amendment provision into the SI process;
enhance the resources available to MPs in the House of Commons to improve scrutiny of SIs (at present, legislative scrutiny is significantly under-resourced compared to select committee scrutiny);
introduce stronger safeguards around the use of SIs in an emergency.

Our Preliminary Recommendations will be published shortly to enable us to gather feedback from stakeholders inside and outside Parliament.

This briefing is an opportunity to get an early insight into the Review’s proposals, the thinking that lies behind our recommendations, and how we hope to take them forward and persuade Government and Parliament to adopt them.

Speakers

Dr Tom West Researcher and manager of the Delegated Legislation Review, Hansard Society

Dr Ruth Fox Director, Hansard Society

Who funds this work?

This work is supported by the Legal Education Foundation as part of the Hansard Society's Delegated Legislation Review.

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