Hello everyone and welcome to the first of a series of videos on delegated legislation. And I have to say that delegated legislation is one of my favorite um topics to study in terms of prepare preparing for exams partly because of its simplicity. It's easy to understand and it's easy to gain good marks on and that's especially if you are studying for the AQA series of exams where it forms its whole a whole set of questions. So, there'll be about four videos in this um series and this first one is going to be dedicated to an introduction, an understanding of why we need delegated legislation, why it's important, what it is. And the easiest place for me to start is with the um definition. And we'll start by, as is often the case in the law, looking at the simple meaning of the word. And the best place to do that is in the dictionary. And delegate is a verb to delegate. And it means to pass power. And in terms of legislation, it means to pass power to make law to somebody else. Now the reason why that's important and why this is such an important area is that parliament as we know is the supreme law makingaking body. So parliament is the supreme law maker. And the reason why it is the supreme law maker is that through the process of democratic elections, we elect MPs to make decisions on our behalf. And those decisions are at the heart of the laws that parliament makes. Now when parliament passes that power to somebody else that's very important for us to be aware of in order to understand why it is that parliament might want to pass that power over and what are the implications of passing law makingaking power to somebody else and does that undermine parliament's position as being the supreme law maker. So you can see that there's an awful lot of complex questions that are contained in this process of delegated legislation. But in short, Parliament couldn't function if it didn't delegate legislation. So let's have a look why most laws that are made by parliament are just legal frameworks. Not all laws. Some laws are standalone. and they're full of details and they stand alone on their own. But a great number of laws in parliament are just frameworks. And I've used the analogy here or is it a metaphor of a skeleton and then that skeleton having flesh put on the bones. If you can imagine that a large number of laws in parliament are just a framework and that framework could be a skellington. their skeleton. They contain the sort of basis, the background to the law. What does Parliament want to achieve? What's missing from a great number of those laws is detail. And what happens in delegated legislation is the detail is put on by somebody other than parliament. So you might have an instance where parliament passes a law that is a framework for what it wants to achieve and then it hands over the power to put the detail of that law to somebody else. That in in essence is a very brief snapshot of what delegated legislation is. And the reason for that is based around the concept of time. Parliamentary time where parliament passes laws is very limited and the government who are elected because they have a majority obviously want to use parliamentary time to get their all of their manifesto promises enacted as law. If they were to spend time putting all the detail on themselves, that would mean invariably that they would not have time to finish their electoral program, their law makingaking program. So what they do frequently is they make framework law and then pass the detail making to somebody else. Now that that's a a very very simple um rationale if you like is the limited debate time to be able to hold government to account has to be passed on to somebody else in order to put detail on. So why would parliament want to do it? Why is it that we need to pass that power on? Well, one is about simple geography. Parliament is full of MPs, 600 over 600 MPs from all over the country. Some laws need to be made that are specific to areas. I live in Suffukk and there are loads of laws that are made that are just specific to Suffukk. You might think um people that live in coastal towns, live by the sea. There might be areas of the sea that are not accessible during certain parts of the year. Well, that will be different for somewhere in Suffukk than it will be for somewhere in Dorset. And the technical knowledge, the local special knowledge means that perhaps parliament uses its time better by asking people who are local specialists to create laws that are to do with specific geography, specific areas. Now the second reason is about technical matters. MPs are very um adept. They're very talented in certain areas but they are not going to be talented in all areas. So therefore technical matters let's say for instance health are best the details of a piece of health legislation is best completed by the department of health. So it may be that because of the technical nature of a law that the government parliament will want the department of health to fill out the detail. And thirdly in times of emergency and in this case this is the foot and mouth disease by the way. These are cows being burnt. At times of emergency or when a new situation arises there may be the requirement for a new law to be passed quickly. So speed might be an essence and if speed is important then the parliamentary process might not be quick enough. If you will have studied um unit one in AQA or law makingaking in OCR then you will know that the time it takes to go through the process of um a green paper a white paper a draft a first reading a second reading right the way through to royal ascent can take a great deal of time. So for these reasons it does mean that parliament frequently delegates the detail of an act to somebody else. Now, in order for them to do that, they need to create in parliament something known as the parent or the enabling act. So, in order to delegate, you need a parent or enabling act. And if you remember my analogy earlier on, the parent or the enabling act would be the skeleton. It would be the rough idea, the rough outline of what parliament wants to achieve. And this is known as primary legislation. So the parent act or the enabling act is primary legislation. Parliament through the parent or the enabling act gives authority to others to make law. And the law that it gives authority to make is known as secondary law. And secondary law is also known as delegated legislation. Let's just run through that again very quickly. The parent or the enabling act which is the skeleton the idea that parliament has this is what we want this law to do is also known as primary legislation. Primary legislation. Primary legislation gives authority to somebody else then to fill in the detail and that is done through the process of delegated legislation and delegated legislation is known as secondary legislation. I've got law there but I mean legislation. So you've got primary legislation which is the parent or the enabling act. The parent or the enabling act allows for the creation of delegated legislation which is secondary legislation secondary law. Okay. So the parent act and within the act that it will be named so that within the parent act there will be a named department an authority a minister. So in this case the department might be the education department and the minister of course this is Mr. Gove. So if it's an if it's a um an act of parliament that looks specifically at education, parliament might make the primary legislation or the parent act and then it might pass the detail to the minister for education through the department of education to fill in the detail the expertise. It may of course pass it to a local authority. So here the local authority is Essex County Council. So the parent act might pass power to Essex County Council to pass laws that are just about Essics. It may also of course pass power to um a body and in this case I've used Virgin Trains and I'll talk about that in a moment. It is these provisions in the parent act that delegate laws to make powers elsewhere. The act the parent act will specify the area in which the law will be made. So in this case it might be education. There might be a parent act that specifies um access to the sea in certain areas or it might be about drinking in the high street or of course the procedures that the delegated body or the person must go through. So who you have to consult with before you can pass a piece of delegated legislation. And it's normally passed to people or to bodies that are equipped with the knowledge and the resources very specialized or technical knowledge is given to the government minister. So this is where technical knowledge is given. So technical knowledge is given to the government minister. If it's geographical knowledge, it will be given to the local authority area somewhere that understands the local area. If it's given to a particular body, in this case, Virgin Trains, it will be for something like setting fairs on the railway. Okay, that sort of area. And there are three main types of delegated legislation through which this is done. The first main type is known as an ordering council and this is the delegated legislation that deals with emergencies and new situations. The second area are known as statutory instruments and these are created by government ministers. and they are about technical expertise. And thirdly, we have what are known as bylaws and bylaws are geographical um it's geographical legislation. So they go to geographical specialtity and these are created by local authorities or bodies. Okay. So that's it. That's all I really want to talk about. So a very very quick recap. We'll run through it all again. Um delegated legislation means to pass law makingaking power to somebody else. And that's because what happens is parliament creates frequently creates a rough framework and it asks somebody else to put the detail on that framework. And the reason it does that is because it just doesn't have enough time to do everything itself. And it might do it for three key reasons. One is to do with geography, one is to do with technical specialtity. And one is to do with emergencies. But in order to do it, parliament has to pass the skeleton, the parent or the enabling act. And the parent or the enabling act is known as primary legislation. And primary legislation gives authority to another body or a group of people to pass delegated legislation or secondary legislation. The parent or the enabling act allows either a government minister through his or her department to deal with issues of technical knowledge, a local authority to deal with issues of geographical specialtity or a body to deal with things like setting fairs. So the parent act allows those three types of organizations to pass or to to make delegated legislation and there are three types. The first is an ordering council which deals with emergency legislation and new situations. The second is statutory instruments which deals with or gives power to government ministers and they will deal with technical expertise technical um legislation and thirdly are bylaws which are about a geographical specialtity and they're given to local authorities or bodies. So that's the introduction to delegated legislation. The one thing that I will suggest is that I'm doing a series of videos on um how to read legislation and how you can look at primary acts, neighboring acts, um parent acts, and neighboring acts and then a piece of delegated legislation that is created on the back of that. So, make sure that you read those two at the same time. Thank you very much and I will see you in the next video.