Parliament passes law it never checks: no working post-legislative or SI scrutiny system

The 2008 system (departments publish review memoranda 3-5 years after Royal Assent for select-committee scrutiny) has quietly collapsed: researchers found no post-legislative reviews published on gov.uk in 2023, committees rarely take memoranda up, and nobody owns the Cabinet Office–Commons agreement. Upstream, the Hansard Society's Delegated Legislation Review documents 'skeleton' bills that put powers rather than policy into primary legislation, pushing substance into statutory instruments scrutinised under a system it calls broken (SIs are effectively unamendable and almost never rejected). The Lords runs occasional ad hoc post-legislative committees; the Commons Liaison Committee has stopped steering the agenda. No organisation currently has the mandate to close the loop.

Parliament passes law it never checks. Without post-legislative review, failed statutes persist and successful ones are not scaled; skeleton bills shift real policy into instruments receiving minutes of scrutiny. Every implementation gap on this map is harder to detect when the feedback loop is missing.

A standing post-legislative scrutiny committee (or a renewed Liaison Committee mandate) backed by an enforceable duty on departments to publish review memoranda on schedule, plus a Statutory Instruments Act implementing the Hansard Society's single calibrated scrutiny procedure and a Parliament–Government concordat on legislative delegation.

// State-led: Instrument: Statutory Instruments Act plus standing post-legislative scrutiny committee; Parliament and government must change their own procedures.

Nobody owns the feedback loop: post-legislative reviews go unpublished and skeleton bills push policy into barely-scrutinised instruments, but the fix needs deep parliamentary reform with no deadline.