Source · Select Committees · Justice Committee
Recommendation 12
12
Paragraph: 29
A lesson from the covid-19 pandemic is that Parliament should play a more active role...
Recommendation
A lesson from the covid-19 pandemic is that Parliament should play a more active role in the creation, scrutiny and oversight of new criminal offences in response to emergencies. One of the primary functions of parliamentary scrutiny of legislation is to make the legislative process, and the law it creates, accessible and transparent. Parliament plays an important role in making sure that the law and any new criminal offences are so far as is possible intelligible, clear and predictable. It is not satisfactory in this context that Parliament was not always able to fulfil its function when Members were required to consider statutory instruments already repealed or already superseded. We recommend that the Government and the Procedure Committee of the House of Commons consider how future scrutiny of emergency regulations can be conducted in a timely fashion.
Paragraph Reference:
29
Government Response
Not Addressed
HM Government
Not Addressed
Government agrees that it is important to ensure that in an emergency the House of Commons is able to scrutinise the use of secondary legislation in a timely fashion. The biggest challenge of legislating for COVID-19 has been the need to legislate at an exceptional pace, because the cost of proceeding at a more normal speed would have been paid by the loss of lives. Proceeding at a more normal speed would have also resulted in costs to business, given that measures would have taken longer to revoke when no longer necessary, and resulted in greater uncertainty for both businesses and the general public. Though being made at pace, all statutory instruments brought forward in response to the pandemic have remained subject to parliamentary scrutiny and approval as set out in the terms of the parent Act. The creation of these powers and their terms would themselves have been scrutinised and debated in Parliament during the passage of the parent Act, informed by the work of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee and the departmental Delegated Powers Memorandum which sets out the proposed delegated powers in the bill, justification of their inclusion, the choice of procedure and justification for that choice. Under normal circumstances it can take between six and eight weeks for a draft-affirmative SI to pass through Parliament. Waiting this long to implement some of the measures in response to the pandemic, such as the national lockdown initiated in January, would have led to significantly more cases, deaths and would have placed the NHS under severe pressure. The Government has worked hard to ensure that parliamentary oversight of the Government’s legislative programme has continued during the pandemic. Where regulations have needed to be introduced rapidly in order to implement measures to combat the spread of the virus and save lives, it has been necessary to use the emergency procedure. In addition, the Government has, whenever possible, sought to ensure Parliament is able to debate and vote on measures of national significance before they come into force, and as soon as reasonably practicable where this has not been possible.