Delivery vs deliberation? Lessons in law-making from the last parliament

Few people believe they have a real say in how our society is governed. In the run-up to the EU referendum, the Vote Leave campaign’s message of ‘take back control’ spoke directly to this sense of democratic voicelessness. The return of wide areas of legislative power from EU institutions to UK and devolved parliaments would, the campaign’s argument ran, lead to laws that better reflected the interests of people in this country.

But this promise of democratic renewal has gone largely unfulfilled. Across much of the UK’s post-withdrawal legislation, the UK government exercised its greater freedoms by centralising power and limiting parliamentary scrutiny, rather than empowering citizens. That is in part because the government sought to trade ‘delivery’ (actual implementation of its policies through new laws) against ‘deliberation’ (discussing and scrutinising laws before they are passed).

The result was twofold. First, new laws were often ineffective. Major pieces of legislation in the last parliament failed to meet their intended goals and caused harm while doing so. And second, new laws frequently undermined the quality of democracy. The last government proposed legislation that regularly strained constitutional norms, removed crucial rights protections for some of the most vulnerable groups in society, and clashed with international law.

This report draws lessons from the experience of the last parliament and sets out proposals for renewing the law-making process.