Peers keep powers of rejection

Proposals to change the way the House of Lords scrutinises secondary legislation have been firmly rejected by a committee of Peers.

The Strathclyde Review outlined three options for change. These were: no scrutiny at all by Lords; reframing an earlier convention to the effect that Lords’ ability to reject secondary legislation would be “left unused”; and new legislation removing Lords’ powers to reject secondary legislation but allowing them to ask the Commons to “think again”.

However, the Lords Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee rejected all three options. It recommended that the Lords retain their power to reject secondary legislation, albeit in exceptional circumstances.

Lord Trefgarne, chairman of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, says: “Several of our witnesses, including Lord Strathclyde himself, raised the issue of the boundary between primary and secondary legislation, and a concern that a lack of detail in Acts leaves too much to be implemented by statutory instruments.

“If primary legislation presented by government is adequately fleshed-out, subsequent secondary legislation will be subsidiary in the proper sense of the word, and unlikely to face serious Parliamentary challenge. We think that the current ‘convention’ should be re-affirmed, in the knowledge that the House of Lords, as a self-regulating institution, can be expected to make a reasonable judgement of whether, and when, it should challenge a statutory instrument.”