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about if someone or some people are going to be treated differently to
others.
Statutory Instruments are rules made under powers contained in an
Act of Parliament. Because they come from primary legislation, they are
sometimes known as secondary legislation.
The idea for a new law can come from a variety of sources:
1) An election manifesto promise;
2) A government department after an election has been
won;
3) The influence of pressure groups; 4) The influence of
experts within their field; 5) In response to an EU
directive.
No new law can be passed unless it has completed a number of
stages in the House of commons and the House of Lords. The monarch
also has to give a Bill the royal assent, which is now just a formality.
The first stage is the process of formulation. This is actually
deciding what is going to be contained in that bill. Both ministers and civil
servants acting on behalf of the government do this process. In fact, in
many instances, the details of a bill are left to experts within a civil service
department who are there to work for the government. Parliamentary
Counsels (government lawyers) are responsible for actually drafting the
bill. Only after a bill has been drafted and agreed on by ministers, does it
go to the House of Commons for its first reading.
After so much preparatory work, the bill that goes before the House
of Commons cannot be considered a mere ‘rough draft’. It is a lot more
than this. Even at this seemingly early stage of its ‘life’, the bill is what the
government wants to become law. If a government has a large
parliamentary majority in the House, a bill, even on its first reading,
frequently passes with relative ease (assuming that it is not a controversial
one) and with few, if any, amendments to it.
The First Reading is the first time that a bill goes before the House
itself. The First Reading is, in fact, when a bill is introduced after which
the bill is then put into print. Though the title "First Reading" conjures up
the image of a big parliamentary event, it is really the opposite in that
nothing actually happens other than the fact a bill goes before Parliament.
As the bill is not in a printed format at this time, MP’s can do little about
assessing content etc. From this purely formal introduction, the bill then
gets a Second Reading.
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