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Select Committee on the Constitution DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE THE CONSTITUTIONAL STANDARDS OF THE HOUSE OF LORDS SELECT COMMITTEE ON THE CONSTITUTION THIRD EDITION Jack Simson Caird, Robert Hazell and Dawn Oliver ISBN: 978-1-903903-77-3 Published by the Constitution Unit School of Public Policy University College London 29-31 Tavistock Square London WC1H 9QU Tel: 020 7679 4977 Fax: 020 7679 4978 Email: [email protected] Web: www.ucl.ac.uk/constitution-unit © The Constitution Unit, UCL 2017 This report is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. First Published November 2017 Contents Genesis of this project ..................................................................................................................... 1 Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 2 Methodology .................................................................................................................................... 5 A Code of Constitutional Standards Based on the Reports of the House of Lords Constitution Committee ....................................................................................................................................... 6 1) The rule of law ................................................................................................................................................. 6 1.1 Retrospective legislation ...................................................................................................................... 6 1.2 Legal certainty ....................................................................................................................................... 6 2) Delegated powers, delegated legislation and Henry VIII powers ............................................................ 7 2.1 Defining the power ............................................................................................................................... 7 2.2 Safeguards in delegation of legislative powers .................................................................................. 7 2.3 Appropriate uses of delegated powers ............................................................................................... 8 2.4 The parliamentary justification of delegated powers, delegated legislation and Henry VIII powers .................................................................................................................................................. 9 3) The separation of powers ............................................................................................................................. 10 3.1 The judiciary ........................................................................................................................................ 10 3.2 The Government ................................................................................................................................ 11 3.3 Parliament ............................................................................................................................................ 12 4) Individual rights ............................................................................................................................................. 13 4.1 General principles ............................................................................................................................... 13 4.2 Access to justice .................................................................................................................................. 14 4.3 Due process and procedural fairness ............................................................................................... 14 5) Parliamentary procedure ............................................................................................................................... 15 5.1 Pre-legislative scrutiny ........................................................................................................................ 15 5.2 Explanatory notes ............................................................................................................................... 16 5.3 Bills with constitutional implications ................................................................................................ 16 5.4 Fast-track legislation ............................................................................................................................ 18 5.5 Responding to a committee’s report ................................................................................................. 19 5.6 Amendments ........................................................................................................................................ 20 5.7 Post-legislative scrutiny ...................................................................................................................... 20 Appendix: List of the Reports of the Lords Constitution Committee 2001-02 to 2016-17 ............. 21 1) 2001-2002 ....................................................................................................................................................... 21 2) 2002-2003 ....................................................................................................................................................... 21 3) 2003-2004 ....................................................................................................................................................... 22 4) 2004-2005 ....................................................................................................................................................... 24 5) 2005-2006 ....................................................................................................................................................... 25 6) 2006-2007 ....................................................................................................................................................... 27 7) 2007-2008 ....................................................................................................................................................... 28 8) 2008-2009 ....................................................................................................................................................... 30 9) 2009-2010 ....................................................................................................................................................... 34 10) 2010-2012 ..................................................................................................................................................... 36 11) 2012-2013 ..................................................................................................................................................... 40 12) 2013-2014 ..................................................................................................................................................... 42 13) 2014-2015 ..................................................................................................................................................... 43 14) 2015-2016 ……………………………………………………………………………………....44 15) 2016-17 …………………………………………………………………………………………46 Genesis of this project Dawn Oliver first advocated the development of legislative standards in her article ‘Improving the Scrutiny of Bills: the Case for Standards and Checklists’ in Public Law in 2006. Robert Hazell provided supporting arguments in two other articles in Public Law, ‘Who is the Guardian of Legal Values in the Legislative Process: Parliament or the Executive?’ (2004), and ‘Time for a new Convention: Parliamentary Scrutiny of Constitutional Bills’ (2006). In 2013 these ideas were revived at a panel session on ‘Parliament and fundamental values’ at the Study of Parliament Group’s annual conference. The panel was organised by Murray Hunt, Legal Adviser to the parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights. After the panel Robert Hazell suggested to Dawn Oliver that it was time to demonstrate that a set of legislative standards could be developed, and this project was born. Jack Simson Caird has done the hard work of going through all the reports of the House of Lords Constitution Committee, extracting their standards and assembling them into coherent form – a code. The first edition of the code was published in January 2014. During discussions at two seminars held to consider the report, one organised by the Study of Parliament Group and the other by the Constitution Society, it was suggested that the code should be updated to keep pace with the Constitution Committee’s reports. A second edition of the code was produced at the end of the 2010-15 Parliament, and this third edition updates the code to the end of the 2015-2017 Parliament. The work of extracting constitutional standards from a further 19 reports was done by Georgina Hill, a research volunteer at the Constitution Unit during the Summer of 2017; we are very grateful for her contribution to this project. The original study was kindly funded by the Constitution Society. The detailed work for the first and subsequent editions has been done by Jack
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