Don’t Rush To Pass Bills And Make More Shoddy Laws, Labour Warned

As the new Labour Government prepares to launch its legislative agenda, a leading left-leaning think tank is warning ministers to slow down passing new bills or risk putting more bad laws on the statute book.

The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) said recent Tory administrations “failed to fulfil promises of democratic renewal following Brexit” and instead “centralised power and reduced parliamentary scrutiny”. This, the think tank said, led to legislation that had to be amended, abandoned or simply failed to deliver what it promised.

In a new report published this weekend, the IPPR advises Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his ministers to “be the Tortoise to the last government’s Hare” on passing bills, and called on them to use its new Modernisation Committee to reform law-making for all future policy.

Its authors are highly critical of the approach in the last Parliament, which they said saw laws passed with “limited or no public consultation” and with little time for scrutiny by MPs, evidenced by the fact the House of Commons sat “for significantly fewer days per session and for fewer hours per day on average than in previous decades”.

As a result, they said that “major pieces of legislation in the last Parliament failed to meet their intended goals and caused harm while doing so”, and required fixes or U-turns.

They added: “This approach to law-making is a tremendous waste of parliamentary time and resources at best and littered with harmful side-effects at worst.”

The report, entitled 'Delivery vs Deliberation', shared exclusively with PoliticsHome, suggests these new laws "frequently undermined the quality of democracy”, and that the last government “regularly strained constitutional norms” and clashed with