Tag Archives: Mark Elliott

House of Lords Constitution Committee reports on delegated powers

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photo_2017_1_cropped (1)tierney2.e1489415384219Last week, the Constitution Committee published its report on the increasing use of delegated powers by the government. Mark Elliott and Stephen Tierney highlight the key concerns raised and proposals made by the Committee in two principal areas: the ways in and extent to which legislative powers are delegated, and scrutiny of such powers’ exercise.

The House of Lords Constitution Committee last week published a major report on delegated powers. It is a component of a larger, four-part inquiry that the Committee is undertaking into the legislative process. The first report in this series, concerning the preparation of legislation for parliament, was published in October 2017; reports on the passage of legislation through parliament and post-legislative scrutiny will be published in due course.

Delegation of power

The Constitution Committee, unsurprisingly, does not begin from the unworldly premise that parliamentary delegations of law-making authority are inherently problematic; after all, they are, and will remain, a fact of life. The Committee does, however, adopt as its premise the position that the legitimacy of such delegations is governed by ‘constitutional standards’ whose enforcement amounts to a ‘constitutional obligation’ on parliament’s part.

The Committee goes on to articulate two key principles by reference to which the legitimacy of delegations of power ought to be judged. First, it is ‘essential that primary legislation is used to legislate for policy and other major objectives’, with delegated legislation used only ‘to fill in the details’. Against this background, the Committee laments the ‘upward trend in the seeking of delegated powers in recent years’. Second, and relatedly, the Committee states that it is ‘constitutionally objectionable for the Government to seek delegated powers simply because substantive policy decisions have not yet been taken’ — a phenomenon in which there has been ‘a significant and unwelcome increase’. Having thus nailed its colours to the mast, the Committee goes on to identify a suite of constitutionally dubious trends and practices to which its attention was drawn during the course of the inquiry and which it has itself discerned in recent years through its constitutional scrutiny of all Bills that reach the House of Lords. Continue reading →

The executive’s Brexit: the UK Constitution after Miller

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The judgment of the Supreme Court in R (Miller) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union required the government to seek parliamentary approval (through legislation) for the triggering of Article 50, which formally started the Brexit process. In this post, Mark Elliott, Jack Williams and Alison Young argue that parliament has failed to capitalise on the court’s decision and that it is the executive, not parliament, that is truly in control of the Brexit process.

Whether you like your Brexit ‘hard’, ‘soft’, or ‘red, white and blue’, one thing is clear – this will be the executive’s Brexit. Despite the Supreme Court decision in Miller handing parliament a golden opportunity to shape Brexit, Theresa May’s government has been in the driving seat, largely unimpeded, ever since the 2016 referendum in favour of leaving the EU. Parliament has consistently been a passenger.

The first pitstop on the executive’s journey to Brexit was the triggering of Article 50. As is by now well known, the government claimed that it already had the power to trigger the process of the UK’s leaving the EU by virtue of its foreign relations prerogative. Indeed, the government’s initial intention was to trigger Article 50 by the end of 2016, necessitating an expedited process in the Miller litigation, leapfrogging the Court of Appeal to ultimately reach the Supreme Court by the end of the year. If one believes that the triggering of Article 50 (in March 2017) was premature, then it is troublesome to imagine what would have happened if, in the absence of the litigation, it had been triggered six months earlier.  

The Supreme Court came down firmly in favour of parliament, ruling that the government would be able to initiate Brexit only if parliament were to empower it to do so, albeit that the UK parliament could lawfully go ahead and authorise the triggering of Article 50 whether the devolved legislatures liked it or not. This was on the basis that the foreign relations prerogative does not extend, by its very nature, to changing or affecting domestic law or rights. At the time, Miller therefore appeared to be of immense political significance because it put parliament so firmly in the Brexit driving seat. However, 18 months on, the picture looks rather different, and the judgment has proven to be far from the final word on the underlying controversies. Continue reading →

House of Lords Constitution Committee reports on ‘English votes for English laws’

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The House of Lords Constitution Committee reported on the first year of the House of Commons’ ‘English votes for English laws’ procedure last week. The committee took the view that it is as yet too early to fully evaluate the impact of EVEL, especially as the current government has a majority of both the whole House of Commons and constituencies in England and Wales. It is therefore recommended that an extended trial should take place for the remainder of this parliament, with a final review by a joint committee early in the next parliament. Mark Elliott and Stephen Tierney offer an overview of the report.

The House of Lords Constitution Committee issued its report on ‘English votes for English laws’ (‘EVEL’) last Wednesday. The report examines the new arrangements for the passage of legislation introduced by the government in July 2015 and agreed by the House of Commons twelve months ago. The committee was asked to review the constitutional implications of these procedures by the then Leader of the House of Commons, Chris Grayling, and to report in the autumn of 2016, its conclusions feeding into the government’s own review of the new system.

In this post we reflect upon the evidence gathered by the committee and the report’s main conclusions. We do so in the context of the committee’s recent reports on devolution, in particular its inquiry into the Union and Devolution, published during the last parliamentary session, where the committee considered issues relating to the governance of England while also criticising the ‘ad hoc, piecemeal’ approach to devolution in the UK.

Reviewing the new ‘EVEL’ arrangements

The particular anomaly which the EVEL system is intended to address is of course the West Lothian question, whereby, in the words of the new report, ‘MPs representing the devolved nations are able to debate and vote in the House of Commons on laws only affecting England, while MPs for English constituencies cannot debate or legislate on devolved matters in the other nations.’ Various proposals have been put forward in recent years to deal with this issue, most nobably the recommendations of the McKay Commission which were in the end not implemented. It was not until the 2014 Scottish independence referendum that the issue of lopsided parliamentary representation was addressed. Speaking on the day after the referendum Prime Minister Cameron declared: ‘We have heard the voice of Scotland – and now the millions of voices of England must also be heard. The question of English votes for English laws – the so-called West Lothian question – requires a decisive answer.’

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Theresa May’s ‘Great Repeal Bill’: some preliminary thoughts

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On Sunday Theresa May announced that a ‘Great Repeal Bill’, repealing the European Communities Act 1972 and providing for EU law to be translated into UK law post-Brexit, would be included in the 2017 Queen’s speech. Mark Elliott offers some preliminary thoughts on what this will mean in practice. He writes that it is likely that the legislation will seek to confer upon ministers substantial powers to carry out the process of deciding which aspects of domesticated EU law are to be retained, which are to be amended and which are to excised from UK law altogether. This fits with the overarching message from the speeches on Brexit at the Conservative conference – that the government is committed to an executive-led withdrawal process, and is unprepared to tolerate interference in that process by either parliament or the devolved institutions.

‘Brexit means Brexit’ was only ever going to cut it for so long. And although, in her first speech to a Conservative Party conference as Prime Minister, Theresa May has repeated that well-worn phrase, she has evidently come to the view that Eurosceptics – or Brexiteers, as we must now call then – now require more by way of red meat. Such nourishment was, on the face of it, supplied in abundance in May’s speech – by way not only of the announcement that the government plans to trigger the Article 50 withdrawal process by the end of March 2017, but also by means of signalling that the next Queen’s speech will include a ‘Great Repeal Bill’. Since the primary object of the proposed ‘great repeal’ is the European Communities Act 1972 (ECA) itself – the bête noire of the Europhobic right – the announcement of the new bill is undoubtedly a clever piece of political theatre, the aim being to satisfy those who have grown weary, not to say sceptical, of May’s tautological mantra. But does the announcement of the Great Repeal Bill amount to anything more than this?

Announcing the repeal of the ECA is doubtless a sensible tactical move by the Prime Minister given the demands she faces from her right-wing. The ECA gives not only effect to EU law in the UK, but also priority to EU law over UK law – including over acts of parliament. Focusing on the proposal to repeal the ECA fits very neatly with the narrative developed by the Prime Minister in her speech about making the UK a ‘fully-independent, sovereign country’. Or, as David Davis put it in his speech , repealing the ECA will deliver ‘what people voted for: power and authority residing once again with the sovereign institutions of our own country’.

There are, however, two caveats that make the announcement of the ECA’s repeal far less legally significant than might at first be assumed. On the one hand, although the Great Repeal Act (as it will by then have become) will be on the statute book before Brexit day, it will not take effect and repeal the ECA until Brexit day. This announcement does not, therefore, amount to the sort of immediate, shock-and-awe ECA repeal that was floated by some on Brexit’s extreme fringes. That was a suggestion that was never likely to be implemented, given that it would have placed the UK in breach of its EU treaty obligations pre-Brexit. On the other hand, however, repealing the ECA upon Brexit is hardly a big deal. Indeed, a natural assumption would be that the ECA would inevitably be repealed upon Brexit, given that it would make no sense, after leaving the EU, to retain legislation providing for EU law’s effect and priority in the UK. However, we can in fact go further and say that repealing the ECA post-Brexit is legally unnecessary, and will in fact amount to nothing more than a tidying-up exercise. That is so because the ECA only gives effect and priority to such EU laws as are, at any given point in time, binding upon the UK thanks to its EU treaty obligations. Post-Brexit, the UK will have no such obligations, and the ECA will therefore give effect and priority to no EU law whatever.

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The government must fundamentally reassess its approach to devolution to safeguard the integrity of the Union

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Last week the House of Lords Constitution Committee published a major report on ‘The Union and devolution’. Mark Elliott and Stephen Tierney summarise the report, in which it is suggested that the government should fundamentally reassess its approach to devolution and that, in future, any new proposals for devolution ‘should be considered within an appropriate framework of constitutional principles that safeguard the integrity of the Union’.

The House of Lords Constitution Committee’s report on ‘The Union and devolution’, published last week, declares the Union to be ‘under threat’, and recommends that the United Kingdom government ‘needs fundamentally to reassess how it approaches issues relating to devolution.’ The report is the culmination of a major inquiry which began taking evidence in October last year. The committee heard from 66 witnesses including academics, think tanks, the chairs of commissions on devolution, the UK and devolved governments, as well as party representatives from across the UK and a wide range of civil society groups. The committee also held evidence sessions in Cardiff and Edinburgh.

In its 142 page report the committee takes stock of the United Kingdom’s territorial constitution. Its assessment of the lack of vision with which devolution has been allowed to develop is particularly hard-hitting:

‘Power has been devolved to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in an ad hoc, piecemeal fashion. Successive Governments have taken the Union for granted. Proper consideration of the cumulative impact of devolution on the integrity of the Union itself has been lacking.’

Nor does the committee see any convincing evidence that the UK government has now come to appreciate the difficulties inherent in this casual approach to constitutional design. It concludes that Oliver Letwin, the minister responsible for constitutional reform, ‘does not recognise the concerns expressed by this Committee and many others at the pressures being placed on the UK constitution by the manner in which the devolution of powers has taken place’. The committee is clear that this approach must end:

‘An inattentive approach to the integrity of the Union cannot continue. Following the significant changes that the territorial constitution has undergone in recent years, the time has come to reflect and take stock. While the constitution should reflect the wishes and interests of the nations and regions, that must not be at the expense of the stability, coherence and viability of the Union as a whole. Should any proposals for further devolution arise in the future, they should be considered within an appropriate framework of constitutional principles that safeguard the integrity of the Union.’

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