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

The 2008 system, under which departments publish review memoranda three to five 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 and Commons agreement behind the system. 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; instruments are effectively unamendable and almost never rejected. The Lords runs occasional ad hoc post-legislative committees, and the Commons Liaison Committee has stopped steering the agenda. No organisation has the mandate to close the loop.

Failed statutes persist and successful ones are not scaled, because nothing reviews them. Skeleton bills shift real policy into instruments that receive minutes of scrutiny. Every implementation gap on this map is harder to detect while 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. A Statutory Instruments Act would implement the Hansard Society's single calibrated scrutiny procedure, with 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Nobody owns the feedback loop: reviews go unpublished and skeleton bills push policy into barely-scrutinised instruments, and the fix needs deep parliamentary reform with no deadline.