The Labour government picks up a bad Tory habit

LEGAL typesEUEUMP who were troubled by the previous Conservative government’s low regard for Parliament took heart from a speech delivered on October 14th by Richard Hermer, the new attorney-general. In an address titled “The Rule of Law in an Age of Populism”, he said that a decade of instability had “stretched the fabric of our constitution to its limit”. Lax lawmaking, he said, had “the effect of concentrating immense power in the hands of the executive”; he promised a “reset”.In its short time in office the Labour government has so far introduced 19 bills to Parliament. Think of them as a soil sample, an early gauge of how far Lord Hermer’s colleagues are living up to his fine sentiments. The evidence is not promising.Scrutiny of legislation . Less time was given to studying legislation; bills were rushed through Parliament. Such bad habits persist under Labour. Take the Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill, which will . Such a bill would typically be studied line by line in a committee, which could draw on expert evidence over many sessions. It was instead heard over just five hours in a “committee of the whole house”, a format that is good for grand speeches but bad for close textual analysis.Proper scrutiny is impossible without a clear picture of the impact of a law. Yet the impact assessment prepared for the railways bill did not provide an analysis of alternative commercial models to nationalisation. As often happened under the Tories, haste was to blame for this critical omission. It had “not been practicable”, the document said, as the bill had “been prepared to enable swift delivery of a government manifesto commitment”.Haste also explains the growing scope of secondary legislation—law that can be created by ministers via regulations under powers given to them by an act of Parliament. It is normal for primary legislation to set policy and secondary legislation to handle the detail of implementation. But, as Lord Hermer said, the expansive use of delegated powers “upsets the proper balance between Parliament and the executive”; he promised a “much sharper focus” on whether such powers were justified.One problem is the rise of “skeleton bills”, which hand ministers broad powers to set a policy while saying little as to what the meat of the policy might be. Such bills were used widely under the last government to deliver a hard break from the , empowering Whitehall to take on new responsibilities in areas such as fisheries.Now one will be used to steer a course closer to Europe. The innocuously named Product Regulation and Metrology Bill contains broad powers for ministers to issue rulebooks for goods, including ones that mirror law. A House of Lords committee report is scathing: the bill’s provisions have “almost no substance” on the policy “but give ministers very broad powers which confer considerable discretion to legislate in that area”. It is a similar story with the : only after it has become law will the government consult on how to implement many of the changes to Britain’s labour codes.An associated problem is the proliferation of once-rare “Henry VIII” clauses, which allow ministers to amend original acts of Parliament by secondary legislation. (They are named after the English king’s wish to rule by proclamation.) The employment-rights bill contains seven such powers; a bill to require terrorism drills in public buildings has eight; a bill to create a football regulator has ten. They are an easy short-cut: officials said it was “considered prudent” to insert a Henry VIII power in the railways bill “given the speed with which the bill has been developed” and “the high volume of legislation relating to railway services”.Tory s cry foul but they bear some of the blame. If rushed and expansive legislation is used to deliver the most interventionist economic agenda in Britain in 50 years, that is partly because Whitehall and Parliament have got used to this way of working. Stretched fabric seldom recovers its original shape.