Gavin’s Gaily Gigest

It appears bloggers (including myself) may have jumped the gun in stating that Part 6 of the Constitutional Renewal Bill grants the same powers to the executive as the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill. From the Save Parliament blog:

The scary-looking provisions in the Constitutional Renewal Bill don’t let ministers make arbitary law, they just let them make “consequential amendments”.

A court is unlikely to accept the use of the power in a surprising way. Despite its short title, the Constitutional Renewal Bill is pretty narrow and pedestrian in character, so any consequential regulations are unlikely to be very exciting.

Provisions like these are relatively common in modern acts of Parliament. Its usual to have a rather more limited set of powers – but legislative drafting becomes ever more lazy and so its no surprise that a simple general provision is present.

Clause 3(6) of the Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Act 2007 is a recent example. It is more limiting than the clause in the Constitutional Renewal Bill. Clause 90 of the Serious Crime Act 2007 is an example much more like that in the Constitutional Renewal Bill. The blogger Head of Legal gives more examples and details.

We should worry about the general trend of pushing more and more law into regulations and having less and less of it debated in Parliament (or anywhere), but thats a trend that has been long building. The amendments in the Constitutional Renewal Bill are hardly unusual or controversial and certainly not a place to make a stand.

Rather than fighting what turns out to be a fairly innocuous provision, signing up to TheyWorkForYou’s new campaign to Free Our Bills might be better.