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[00:00:00] Intro: You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production, supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/pm

[00:00:17] Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

[00:00:24] Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark Darcy, and coming up in this special edition of the pod, we talk to author and researcher Sam Freedman about his book, Failed State, which attempts to diagnose what's going wrong with government in Britain.

[00:00:36] Ruth Fox: He told us a big part of the problem was bad laws pushed through a Parliament that was unable to scrutinise them properly.

[00:00:43] Sam Freedman: I see the lack of scrutiny given to legislation as being an increasingly important part of our state's function. It's really the focus of the second part of my book, and though I blame Parliament itself less than I blame the executive for using its historic sort of power, an unusual level of power, versus other countries to sort of ignore and avoid scrutiny as much as possible.

[00:01:09] As I say in the book, this is not a new phenomenon. We've always had a very strong executive. But in the last 20, 30 or so years, you've seen executives fight against even the sort of smallish amount of scrutiny that Parliament was giving before with a variety of tricks and changes, which has left the Commons, I argue, extremely ineffective in performing a scrutiny role, which in turn has then led the Lords to have to do a lot more.

[00:01:38] Which puts a huge amount of pressure on a, on an unelected chamber, and then ultimately, I argue it's led the courts to have to do a lot more. The courts have ended up stepping in to try and deal with the lack of scrutiny provided by the Commons, and then that has also created its own sort of constitutional crisis because you have people arguing that the courts aren't elected, and why are they getting involved in politics?

[00:02:00] So, I have um, uh, several chapters where I explore how the sort of fundamental dysfunction of the Commons is, is having quite a widespread ripple effect, now across the whole of the way our politics works.

[00:02:11] Mark D'Arcy: One of the big structural flaws you identify is this idea that Parliament had become a part-time house. You know, barristers would roll in at tea time after a day at the courts. And so the structures of Parliament had evolved to cope with part-time MPs. And nowadays MPs are more or less a fully professional group who spend all their time there, but the institution hasn't caught up with that.

[00:02:35] Sam Freedman: Yes, and I think that sort of part time Parliament was there from when this modern conception of Parliament arose.

[00:02:42] And so you always had this system in which you had, since we've had tight parties, that they have had backbenchers who were largely supportive of what the government wanted to do, had other jobs, were there, you know, if they were on the Tory side, were there because, you know, you know, they were sort of aristocrats who came in from the countryside or were lawyers who did their job in the morning. If they were on the Labour side, it's because they'd been in the trade union movement.

[00:03:04] And they were there. It was sort of, the parliamentary seat was a sort of almost a reward for a lifetime of, of work. And you were expected to then just go through the lobbies on behalf of your party. So parliamentary rebellions were very uncommon 30, 40, 50 years ago, and they've become much more common, which I, as, as you say, I argue is because of this sort of professionalisation of modern politics, which was really kicked off with the televisation of Parliament, the rise of media interest in it, the Nolan Commission in the 90s, which reduced the amount of outside work MPs could do, Blair cut the link with the trade union payment, so all of this sort of led to MPs essentially doing the job full time, not everybody of course, but most of them now do the job full time.

[00:03:44] And people coming in expecting to be professional politicians, as a career, And that's fine if you get to be a Minister, then you've got a clear function in our system, but if you're not a Minister, it's not clear what you are supposed to be doing. You can do constituency work, obviously, but in terms of your role as a legislator, it's very limited.

[00:04:04] I mean, you can be on a select committee, but they have very limited power as well. You can do your two minutes in debates, which has no effect on anything. So I think you've, you've seen, politicians, MPs, get more and more frustrated with the lack of role they have in our system, and then that in turn has led to more rebellions, which in turn has led to the executive using their unusual power in our system to find alternative ways to avoid scrutiny.

[00:04:30] Ruth Fox: One of the things that comes through your book is that within government - the fact that they're able now to push the legislation through the Commons, it isn't much of a block, they know they can always override the Lords- is that the civil service and the wheels of government have become a bit more relaxed about the quality of legislation because they don't have to be so concerned about scrutiny.

[00:04:51] I just wondered, reflecting on your time in government at the time of the coalition when you were working with Michael Gove and so on, what was the approach to Parliament? What was the sort of the attitude of mind within departments and has that changed over the last 14 years now?

[00:05:08] Sam Freedman: I think the attitude is very unhelpful.

[00:05:10] It is essentially, this is a barrier to us doing what we want to be able to do. We need to get through it as quickly as we can, and through whatever mechanism we need to do that as quickly as possible. I experienced that directly in 2010 when we did the Academies Act, which was passed very, very quickly through the Commons, using procedures usually used for emergency legislation.

[00:05:29] And there's nothing to stop that, right? You can do that. There's no rule that says you're not allowed to do that or any way of challenging it. And of course, you'd had a Labour opposition at that point who just lost the election. They were out of sorts and trying to sort themselves out, pick a new leader, weren't even able to provide the sort of basic level of scrutiny they might have been able to do a few years later.

[00:05:47] So it really did pass through the Commons with almost no real scrutiny at all. It did get more in the Lords, as is often the way, but the Conservatives and Lib Dems, it was the coalition had a comfortable majority in the Lord's, ultimately it was always going to get through and they weren't going to block it.

[00:06:03] So that was the kind of always the attitude. It's just like get it through as quickly as possible. Not maybe we should check if people think it's a good idea or not.

[00:06:10] Ruth Fox: Yeah, you can't see it from outside because it's not a formal parliamentary procedure, but to what extent does a Secretary of State or a ministerial team engage with MPs? And you say what is their role, you know they don't have enough role in terms of legislation, they're obviously doing a lot of constituency work - this sort of link between constituency surgery sort of social work type activity and the proceedings of Parliament - the extent to which the sort of the alarm bell of the constituency work runs into sort of formal engagement with ministers, and you, an impact on policy always seems to be missing that, that link between between the two. And would a good Secretary of State for example not be holding regular sort of monthly meetings with MPs to ascertain in their departmental area where the alarm bells are going off and you know they might have spotted for example that the post office was a bigger problem than they realised at the time does that sort of thing happen is that part of at all of the thinking within government departments

[00:07:09] Sam Freedman: It happens when there's risk to a piece of legislation.

[00:07:13] So, I mean, pretty much the only time a government with a majority is going to lose anything, is if its own MPs have a problem with a piece of legislation. And, you know, one of the jobs of your Parliamentary Secretary should be to identify if there are a number of people who might have a concern or an objection to a bill that your department's pushing.

[00:07:30] Mark D'Arcy: Did you ever see a Parliamentary Private Secretary sidle up to a Secretary of State and say, I'm getting a lot of flack about this from the chaps, we've got to do something about it?

[00:07:38] Ruth Fox: Or chapesses.

[00:07:40] Sam Freedman: I didn't, because the Tory MPs were very supportive of Gove on the whole. And we didn't really have any issues getting the two bills we did when I was there through.

[00:07:50] I think later on there would have been examples of that because, you know, after Gove had gone and, and, and future attempts at education legislation did go wrong because Tory MPs objected to trying to make all schools academies, for instance, and that did lead to some rebellions and stuff. But you do get that phenomenon.

[00:08:07] And then, you know, you'll often get 20 or so rebel MPs or potential rebels being brought into a department. And that can be a kind of telling off, or it can be an attempt to persuade, it depends on the personality of the Secretary of State and the mood of the party and so on, but yes, I mean you'll get attempts to do that, but on the whole, people are expected to vote for their party.

[00:08:27] Mark D'Arcy: Would it be wise for a Secretary of State and maybe the wider ministerial team in a government department to have almost a surgery in Parliament? What's happening in our area in your constituency, MPs? Come and tell us if you know something's going wrong as an early warning system so that they can react to stuff that's perhaps boiling up at ground level.

[00:08:45] Sam Freedman: Yeah, I mean, I think so. And again, I mean, as you'll know, you have ministers of varying degrees of engagement with Parliament. So you have some who spend quite a lot of time in the tea room talking to colleagues and trying to get a sense of how people feel and others who just lock themselves in their department and never come out again. Except when they have to vote. So again, it depends on the personality. If you're the latter type, you're very dependent on your whips and sort of party discipline rather than people liking you or persuasion and those people often end up coming a cropper later on. But yes, it's, it really depends on the individual.

[00:09:19] And those who do engage tend to have longer, more successful political careers.

[00:09:23] Mark D'Arcy: You talked a lot about programming of government legislation - saying that it has to get through its parliamentary report stage at a certain time. It has to be finished in a certain number of hours - as one of the original sins of this process, one of the things that really limits the amount of scrutiny Parliament gets.

[00:09:40] There are other people who say that actually parliamentary scrutiny is somewhat over romanticised, and in the old days you had these long, windy, flabby report stages of bills where actually nothing of any great value transpired. Are you perhaps over romanticising the idea that MPs are all gimlet eyed scrutineers who want to get into the depth of a bill and really see how it works and take it apart and put it back together again?

[00:10:03] Sam Freedman: I mean, they're not at the moment on the whole, and I wouldn't want to pretend that they are. Because that's not what they're trained to do. It's not what they're supported to do, not what they're expected to do. So, you know, if you just gave more time for debates, you might get a bit more effective scrutiny.

[00:10:19] You'd have an opportunity to ask questions that currently get squashed by timetabling, but I don't think it would make a huge amount of difference. So what I'm arguing for in the book, and I know you've argued for in papers as well as at the Hansard Society is more about creating some formal structures and systems that allow for that scrutiny.

[00:10:35] So it's a pre-scrutiny model of legislation. I think it's quite effective. That should be happening for everything, not just occasional bits of legislation that are particularly technical, you should have ways in which select committees can be much more formally engaged with that process as well, where you've got a group of MPs who actually have got some interest and knowledge about a particular area.

[00:10:54] And they should be able to force debates on specific questions, so rather than that kind of flabby, all over the place type debate, you have the opportunity to push a question that is awkward or difficult for government, which at the moment, outside of opposition days, is pretty hard to make happen.

[00:11:10] Ruth Fox: Yeah, I think Sam, we share a view on this, having read your book.

[00:11:13] My critique of the legislative process is we're shoving 21st century legislation through a system that was designed largely in the 19th and early 20th century. And it's not fit for purpose. And that's both for primary legislation and for secondary or as we call it, delegated legislation in the form of Statutory Instruments.

[00:11:32] But the big challenge that we discuss a lot on this podcast and which Mark alluded to, is how do you persuade the executive in a system designed in their interests, how do you persuade them to change? Even modest, incremental changes are incredibly hard to bring about. And actually, we need to change the debate and the framework in which we make the case for these reforms, much more in almost like a business case, changing the incentive framework to persuade Ministers why this has to happen.

[00:12:00] And your book articulates it in a way, about the nature of the failed state. Why governance needs to improve and why parliamentary reform has to be part of that. But I guess in terms of what you're specifically then talking about, changing the role of MPs, a little, greater equality in terms of pay and perception alongside ministers, and changing the approach of select committees, how do we persuade ministers and government to do that?

[00:12:28] Sam Freedman: Yeah, I mean that's obviously the hard question here and why it's so difficult. I mean you do get shifts in the right direction very occasionally. We saw it with the creation of select committees back in 1979 and then again with the strengthening after the expenses scandal.

[00:12:43] Often it takes some extreme bit of embarrassment about the political system to force through a change but you need to be ready with the right proposals when those moments of embarrassment and opportunity come along. But the argument I try and push in the book is that it's in their self-interest, I do think, ultimately, uh, political parties do operate in self interest.

[00:13:02] And, for two reasons. Firstly, because it will just lead to better legislation. Ultimately, uh, the biggest problem that both of our main political parties have at the moment, having both, you know, had some time in government, the Conservatives a lot longer, is that they haven't, weren't able to achieve anything in the real world.

[00:13:17] And there are lots of reasons for that. But one reason is because the quality of legislation was very poor and was never going to work. And, you know, immigration is a great example. We've had a series of bits of asylum legislation that were dreadful. And lots of people on the outside knew they were dreadful.

[00:13:31] If it had got proper scrutiny in the Commons, and that that had been listened to, you would have better legislation, and you would have a better functioning asylum system rather than one in which, you know, you've had literally hundreds of thousands of people left in hotels at great expense to everybody.

[00:13:45] So, there's a sort of self-interested but also kind of, In the good of the country type argument. Which is there in the whole book, because ultimately, Tories and Labour are both in the mid twenties now. If they keep going like this, they're not going to exist. If they keep going in the current system. The other argument is around MPs.

[00:14:02] You look at Labour, they have four hundred odd MPs, a hundred of them are ministers. You've got fifty or so have been given other non ministerial payroll jobs that are of varying degrees of usefulness, but at least give them some foot on the ladder. But then you've got all the others, at the moment they're being relatively well behaved because the government's still new.

[00:14:21] But that's gonna, if poll rating stays low, if they get increasingly frustrated with the fiscal environment, that's going to lead to rebellions, to frustrations. Essentially, you've got all of these people who are footloose and don't have a clear functioning role in the system, who are going to cause trouble for you.

[00:14:36] So it's actually in your interest to structure that properly. And yes, they might still make trouble for you, but at least they'll make trouble for you in a structured and sensible way that will relate to actually forming better legislation rather than just in a kind of taking you by surprise when they all suddenly get really angry.

[00:14:51] Mark D'Arcy: How frightened are Ministers of their departmental select committee as compared to just the wider Commons? You know, they think they can get their way through a question time all right, or they can get their way through the debate on a bill. Are they more frightened of really deep scrutiny by a select committee?

[00:15:07] Sam Freedman: Uh, so they would definitely be more concerned about, say, a select committee appearance than a question time for their department in Parliament. A question time, you know, you plant some friendly questions, you kind of have a pretty good idea of what the unhelpful questions will be, and you can bat them off without sustained sort of comeback.

[00:15:26] It's quite easy to deal with. Whereas a select committee, you know, you can get sustained questions, you can get into quite a lot of trouble if you don't know your stuff. When I was in Education, we used to do these kinds of practices for select committees, where we'd all, me, the other advisors and officials would sit around the table and sort of bombard Michael Gove with all the difficult questions we could think of.

[00:15:45] I think what was frustrating about it was we were always much more effective at doing it than the select committees. We always got him quite wound up and annoyed, whereas the select committees would ask much softer questions. So I do think whilst they are tougher they could be quite a lot tougher still if they were better resourced and MPs were given more support in that work.

[00:16:08] They tend to have a researcher or two and so on, but it's a bit kind of typically British the way we do our select committees. If you compare it to, uh, US and not saying there's plenty of things about the US political system we wouldn't want but their committee system is quite impressive.

[00:16:21] Mark D'Arcy: Do you get the impression that MPs are properly prepared as they come into Parliament for the sort of work they're actually going to be going to do.

[00:16:28] Sam Freedman: I mean, I think what's been really interesting watching this sort of huge influx of new MPs arriving over the last few months It's just a huge variation In how much they're ready and and and how much they understand the system.

[00:16:40] So you've got some who've been advisors. They've been officials, they've worked in Parliament in various different ways, and they kind of understand the system, and they know what they want to prioritise, and what they want to focus on, and they've gone for the select committee that they know, and so on.

[00:16:53] And then you've got people who've just turned up without a clue. Literally no idea. Tell you quite honestly, they just, they won. Often unexpectedly, turn up. There's very little support from parties. It is actually woeful the support parties give to new MPs. There's a little bit of support and training from Parliament, but not a huge amount.

[00:17:11] And yeah, some of them have ended up on sort of select committees, because they all sort of felt they should do something, but kind of quite randomly and don't really know what to do. And there's no, you know, if you did want to rebel on a bill, or you do want to sort of make your own mind up about a bill, there's no real support for understanding what these complicated, you know, they're not written in a way that makes them easy to understand.

[00:17:31] You get a bit of explanatory guidance. So yeah, I think it's incredibly difficult, particularly if you haven't had any experience of the Westminster system up to that point.

[00:17:39] Ruth Fox: That's something we hope to plug a bit, Sam, because we're going to be doing some support for MPs next year now, uh, 2025, in understanding the legislative process, reading bills, understanding delegated powers and so on.

[00:17:51] Started doing that with Private Members Bills, didn't anticipate that coming down the line quite so, quite so early as it did, but yeah, so we'll be doing a lot of that next year. When you talk about political parties, obviously they're the gatekeepers for our politicians, and it seems to me that one of the things that's missing in a lot of the books that have been written about essentially the nature of the state, whether it's your book, Ian Dunt's book, Rory Stewart's book, is how we deal with the vexed question of political parties as the gatekeepers, because, compared to lots of other organisations, they've not really changed that much.

[00:18:24] They've not really reformed themselves that much. And obviously the membership is getting smaller and smaller over the years compared to say the 1950s and 60s, if you like, sort of the golden age of party membership and how we sort of tackle that early stage in a parliamentary career. Because my concern is by the time politicians get to Westminster, they are fully formed constituency social workers.

[00:18:48] They've been doing that usually for months by the time they get there, because that's how they operate as a candidate, and they can't and won't let it go. And it's then quite difficult to get the balance between your constituency work and your Westminster work. And actually since the pandemic, I mean, we've, we've heard from a lot of MPs in the last Parliament that whereas they might have been able to carve out two or three days at Westminster and feel that that was protected time, now it's even more difficult because constituents expect them to be on Zoom for a meeting even at 12 o'clock on a Wednesday. How do we deal with that, sort of the, the role of political parties in this?

[00:19:25] Sam Freedman: I mean, parties, there is a kind of, um, existential threat to the model of political party that we're used to, not just in this country and in a lot of countries, as you say, you know, there's Tory membership is now 130, 000 still falling.

[00:19:41] Labour membership is like below 400, 000 now. That limits the pool of people coming into the parties, which means you're choosing from a much narrower talent pool in your MP selection processes. And they're being chosen often by very small numbers of local members who are often quite eccentric. So there's, there's only, Isabel Hardman talks very well about this in her book on, uh, why we get the wrong politicians, this sort of selection process and what you might be able to do about that.

[00:20:06] I kind of think you may see some quite dramatic shifts in the way our political system functions over the next decade or so in terms of how our political parties are formed due to the fragmentation of political identity.

[00:20:18] The other sort of point is about as a constituency social worker and how you deal with that. And something I don't talk about in the book, but I've thought about subsequently is, you know, one of the arguments I do make is around decentralisation and the importance of developing regional, Mayoral authorities, which Labour seem to be keen on doing. And I think you could create a kind of mechanism whereby all the MPs for an area in which you had a Mayor could operate as a local group, both to hold the Mayor, partly accountable and to have a relationship with the Mayor, but also so that that kind of social work element of their job had a sort of proper, institutional place rather than just sort of be randomly placed on them as an individual MP.

[00:21:01] Use the fact that you're pushing a lot more stuff down to the local level to allow MPs to gently nudge a lot of their constituency work towards regional authorities, local authorities, but you need to strengthen those bodies in order to do that. It's a function of centralisation that MPs are being asked stuff that really should be being done by local government.

[00:21:24] Mark D'Arcy: You talk an awful lot about how over centralised the British state is. What are the steps that could be taken? I mean, you mentioned one of them just there, but what are the steps that the government could take to move away, to let go?

[00:21:36] Sam Freedman: By far the most important is creating some formal institutional layers of government. So the regional combined authorities, the Mayors, are I think the best route we have and ones the main parties seem committed to at least. I want Labour to go much further than they've indicated so far. I want them to give Mayors fiscal powers, which I think is essential if they're going to be properly independent.

[00:21:55] Mark D'Arcy: So tax raising abilities of some kind.

[00:21:59] Sam Freedman: Exactly. I mean, first you could try it with some fairly small taxes before you start going for local income taxes or anything, but I think pushing in that direction is important, uh, giving them more authority over public services, which they have very little over at the moment, uh, things like that.

[00:22:14] So I think building up that, supporting local authorities a lot better than we're doing at the moment. One of the big arguments of the book is we've just sort of completely destroyed state capacity outside central government. pretty weak within central government but outside that it's been obliterated and as a result you know we're way too dependent on big for profit organisations to provide a lot of public services and

[00:22:34] Mark D'Arcy: You're fairly devastating about Ministers having to decide planning applications or sell off school fields and stuff in individual schools.

[00:22:41] Sam Freedman: Right, well I mean the school field is a good example right. Why is it the case that the Secretary of State personally has to sign off the sale of a school field? The level of centralisation that just doesn't exist in other countries, and it means the centre is far less strategic because it's trying to do everything, and it also means you've got no local capacity.

[00:22:58] Mark D'Arcy: Would you fancy becoming an MP yourself to tackle all these? I mean, I get the impression reading your book that actually your experiences in politics have sent you running in the opposite direction to some degree. But would you actually fancy going into Westminster and trying to get a grip on some of this?

[00:23:12] Sam Freedman: Well, I'm not a member of any party, so I don't know, I don't know how I would become an MP.

[00:23:17] Mark D'Arcy: You'd have to sell a small portion of your soul to do that, perhaps.

[00:23:19] Sam Freedman: Yeah, that's the problem. But I think that's increasingly a problem, you know. As you have more and more people who don't have that party identity, the sort of obvious route to being an MP is cut off because, and I'm not a Tory, I don't feel like I'm, you know, I'm not a member of Labour, where would I do it?

[00:23:33] And I think a lot of people who might otherwise be interested feel like that. But I think even if I wanted to, my wife would be very clear that that wasn't going to happen under any circumstance. And I'd rather stay married, so.

[00:23:46] Mark D'Arcy: Well, Sam Freedman, thanks very much indeed for talking to Ruth and I on the pod today.

[00:23:49] Ruth Fox: Thanks, Sam.

[00:23:50] Sam Freedman: Thank you.

[00:23:51] Mark D'Arcy: So Ruth, what are the takeaways from that? What really impressed you about what Sam had to say?

[00:23:55] Ruth Fox: Well, I think his theme reiterates some of the themes that other books have looked at over the course of the last year, but he really brings it together in a comprehensive way and he sort of places the emphasis on, we're too centralised as a state, we need greater decentralisation.

[00:24:10] Mark D'Arcy: All this ridiculous stuff about ministers having to authorise the sale of bits of school playing field across the country.

[00:24:16] Ruth Fox: Yeah, but he does place considerable emphasis on the role of Parliament here as an institution that needs to be, if you like, fixed, in his view, in order to address the governance problem at the heart of the country.

[00:24:28] And this is where I do slightly worry about where the government's positioning is at the moment, because they've got these missions, they've got these foundations, they've got all this project management speak objectives, but the reforming the structures and institutions of the state, falls, it seems, quite low down on their list of priorities, if at all.

[00:24:47] And, you know, the Government's talking about modernisation of the House of Commons, but hasn't really got a plan or a vision that you can discern. And essentially, he's saying that reform of Parliament, as well as some of the other institutions of the state, the civil service, the way government works, is absolutely imperative if we're to improve our performance as a country.

[00:25:05] Mark D'Arcy: And while people may not be talking about this in the snug of the Dog and Duck..

[00:25:09] Ruth Fox: Yeah.

[00:25:09] Mark D'Arcy: the point about it is that you get better government and better outcomes for people in this country if the system works properly. And fixing the system often sounds very technocratic. and very focused on Westminster insider trivia.

[00:25:24] But it's absolutely essential to getting the right decisions out of the Whitehall machines, that you're not just sort of cranking the whole thing and nothing really very much is coming out of it. It's not just about conferences full of constitution nerds trying to be sort of tidy minded about building some great elegant constitutional structure.

[00:25:40] Ruth Fox: And I think that's where the emphasis falls on organisations like ours. That the days when you could talk about reform of Parliament in grandiose terms about constitutional principle and liberal democracy and so on, that's all very fine and I might well believe it. But the reality is it's not convincing the politicians in office in successive governments over 10, 15, 20, 30 years. And we've actually got to position the argument and frame it in ways around the effectiveness of the state. We've got to frame it around not just democratic principles, but a business case.

[00:26:13] Mark D'Arcy: I take as my text here a guy called Douglas Carswell, a Brexiteer MP, first in the Conservative Party and then he defected to what was what was then UKIP, and now he's not an MP at all and lives in America.

[00:26:25] But Douglas Carswell was very involved in campaigning for Brexit long before it was fashionable even within the Conservative Party, but he was very keen on changing the terms of the discussion away from grand constitutional narratives and down to bread and butter issues about money being spent and how it affected the lives of actual voters.

[00:26:44] And that's a principle, whether you agree with Douglas Carswell's politics or not, that can certainly be transferred to this constitutional argument.

[00:26:51] Ruth Fox: Yeah, and I think the challenge though, is how you demonstrate good or bad that has emanated from a particular piece of legislation because often, you know, they're, they're quite big picture pieces, you know, big policy principles, frameworks and so on.

[00:27:03] But the distance between the the Act being passed and then the impact being felt on the ground can sometimes be quite lengthy. And in between all of that, you've got regulations being laid, which will have their own impact and sometimes tracing the links between the failing policy on the ground and where the legislative initiative came from can be quite difficult.

[00:27:24] And that's something we're trying to do with our delegated legislation review.

[00:27:26] Mark D'Arcy: And it's something, of course, Parliament almost never does. Parliament is not very good at looking at delegated legislation, made under umbrella legislation, and actually it's not very good at looking at the outcome of the laws it passes either.

[00:27:37] It's something it does once in a blue moon, and perhaps should do rather more often.

[00:27:40] Ruth Fox: Yeah, that's, I think, a challenge we will certainly be throwing at the Modernisation Committee of the House of Commons, is that there needs to be much greater emphasis. Sam talked about pre legislative scrutiny. I think there needs to be just as much emphasis on post legislative scrutiny.

[00:27:54] Squaring that policy and legislative circle to review and keep under consideration what's working, what isn't working, and why, and learning from the experience rather than, I'm afraid, what happens all too often is that we repeat the errors of the past.

[00:28:09] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. Enough of fire and forget laws. Well, with that, Ruth, I think we've, uh, we've managed to conclude this podcast on, I hope, a semi optimistic note.

[00:28:18] Ruth Fox: Quite. Yes, Mark. So we'll, uh, see you next week.

[00:28:20] Mark D'Arcy: Join us then. Bye bye.

[00:28:21] Ruth Fox: Bye.

[00:28:28] Well, that's all from us for this week's episode of Parliament Matters. Please hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast app to get the next episode as soon as it lands.

[00:28:36] Mark D'Arcy: And help us to make the podcast better by leaving a rating or review on Apple or Spotify and sharing your feedback. Our producer tells us it's important for the algorithm to give the show a boost.

[00:28:46] Ruth Fox: Mark, tell us more about the algorithm.

[00:28:48] Mark D'Arcy: What do I know about algorithms? You know, I write my scripts with a quill pen on vellum and then send it in by carrier pigeon.

[00:28:55] Ruth Fox: Well, before we go, a quick reminder also that you can send us your questions on all things Parliament by visiting hansardsociety.org.uk/PMUQ

[00:29:05] Mark D'Arcy: We'll be discussing them in future episodes, including our special Urgent Questions editions dedicated to what you want to know about Parliament.

[00:29:12] Ruth Fox: And you can find us across social media @HansardSociety to get more content related to the show and the wider work of the Hansard Society.

[00:29:20] Intro: Parliament Matters is produced by the Hansard Society and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. For more information visit hansardsociety.org.uk/pm or find us on social media @HansardSociety.