There is a version of this story that begins with a specific piece of legislation, a particular government, a dateable moment of decline. The reality is less dramatic and more troubling. The weakening of parliamentary scrutiny in Britain has been gradual, cumulative, and — this is the part that should concern us most — largely uncontested.
Consider the figures. The average time between a bill's introduction and its Royal Assent has fallen by roughly 30 per cent over the past two decades. The number of amendments accepted by governments at committee stage has declined in parallel. Select committees, once capable of producing reports that genuinely embarrassed ministers and occasionally changed policy, now find their recommendations acknowledged in anodyne written statements and quietly shelved.
None of this is the result of a conspiracy. It is the product of institutional drift, of governments discovering that the path of least resistance runs through the whipping office rather than the chamber, and of an opposition that has, at various points, been too weak, too distracted or too ideologically uncertain to mount a sustained defence of parliamentary process as a value in itself.
The consequences are not merely procedural. Legislation passed without adequate scrutiny tends to contain errors — sometimes significant ones — that require correction later at additional cost. The Windrush scandal, the Post Office Horizon affair, the early handling of the pandemic: in each case, parliamentary oversight that might have caught problems earlier was either absent or ineffective. The connection between scrutiny and good governance is not theoretical.
What would it take to reverse the trend? The answer is probably less structural reform than a change in political culture — a willingness, on both sides of the chamber, to treat the process of legislation as something other than an obstacle to be managed. That is a harder thing to legislate for than a new committee system.