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This article focuses on the use and abuse of delegated legislation in Great Britain. Inadequacies in the scrutiny of delegated legislation have been a recurrent of subordinate theme in the reform of parliamentary procedure. Some safeguards are said to exist in the process of consultation before the parent Bill is introduced. The courts exercise a form of restraint over delegated legislation, because they are able to inquire whether a piece of delegated legislation has been drafted within the powers conferred by the parent Act. This article presents an elaborate discussion on the use and abuse of delegated legislation relating to the provisions of Jews and Sunday trading.

In recent years a growing number of scholars have developed cognitive and ideational theoretical frameworks for the analysis of policy-making processes: their underlying belief is that ideas (conceived as beliefs, causal theories and paradigms) really do matter. The concept of policy paradigm has been particularly useful in studying both the contents and dynamics of policy change. The present paper takes this concept, partially reformulates Hall's definition in terms of the distinction between the hegemonic and dominant paradigm, and then uses it to come to terms with the contents and dynamics of the Italian administrative reforms implemented during the 1990s. Mixing the conceptual lenses offered by the ideational and cultural path taken in the field of public policy and by historical neo-institutionalism, this article attempts to explain the Italian trajectory, and to underline how normative and cognitive elements represent an important influence on the ‘design’ and ‘strategy’ of policy change. Our analysis of the consistency of the reformers’ documents and policy strategy shows that, despite their claims, the contents and strategy of reform do not represent a paradigmatic about-turn, but constitute an evolutionary adaptation to external pressures imposed by the hegemonic administrative paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regulation is normally thought of as government regulation of the private sector, particularly business. However, there is a developing literature on regulation inside government, exploring the ways in which government regulates itself through a range of bodies which set standards for public sector organizations, monitor them and seek to bring about compliance with those standards. Reading across economic theories of business regulation to regulation inside government, this article suggests that the current wave of reform inside the UK public sector implicitly reflects a public interest view of regulation. However, the analogous public interest justification for the regulation of business has been heavily criticized and regulatory failures have been suggested including regulation in the interest of regulated bodies, regulation in the interest of regulators and the high costs of operating regulatory systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the promotion made by the British government regarding the use of compliance cost assessment in order to quantify the impact of business of proposed new regulations. The article considers the nature of rationality in social regulation and forces which may drive regulation towards irrationality. This article describes the evolution of compliance cost assessment as a means of arresting such tendencies, contrasting it with the requirement of regulatory impact assessment imposed upon U.S. federal regulatory agencies. It analyzes the practice and processes of compliance cost assessment and concludes with some evaluation of its role and efficacy. What has emerged is very different from the cost-benefit analysis required under the American system of regulatory impact assessment in terms of the scope of the analysis, its institutional setting and its formal status within the legislative process.

Despite several attempts to reform the structure of the water industry, little was achieved in the inter-war period. Three phases in the perception of water-use planning can be discerned, namely the period of post-First World War reconstruction, the years 1929-34, and those of 1935-39. The allocation of water resources affected property rights so closely that Parliament was particularly reluctant to delegate its regulatory powers over the industry to ministers and their officials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the performance of written policy guidance in air transport licensing and the reasons for its decline in governmental favor in Great Britain. The guidance system served a useful purpose in the period up to 1977. It replaced appeals and traffic rights as the medium of governmental control. It provided a framework upon which the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) might hang its own system of case law and rulemaking and it allowed long-term policy making on the basis of research and a developing expertise. The factors that diminished the predominance of guidance in air transport licensing includes the effect of Skytrain decision and the increased in publication by the CAA of its own guidance.

The article studies the workings, effectiveness and administrative constraints that beset the operation of government wages inspectorate in Great Britain. Inspectorate system ensures observance and compliance with the provision of government legislation in the important areas of economic and social life. Wage inspector is responsible for coordinating and monitoring the work carried on in the regional divisions, advising on more difficult cases and considers all cases that may involve the possibility of prosecution. Under an inspectorate based system of enforcement a rise in the detected non-observance of regulations can be due either to an increase in the overall extent of actual non-observance, or simply to an increase in the detected proportion of an unchanged stock of actual non-observance.

The article presents an examination on the proposals to reform the independent regulatory agencies in the U.S. The discussion includes an attempt to identify the political inspiration of these proposed administrative reforms, the reform suggestions emanating from the executive branch of American government, the political origin and the purpose of the reform proposals, the inquiries on regulatory agencies by the Brownlow Committee of 1937 and the second Hoover Commission of 1955, and the recommendation by the Ash Council involving the abolition of the agencies into independent agencies.

The article presents a speech addressed during the annual meeting of the RIPA on October 1978. According to the speaker, the traditional relationship between the government and the courts in Great Britain is that the court does not interfere with the government. The court sometimes scrutinize the propriety of the executive action but would never question the validity of a statute. More recently, the courts have developed the declaratory remedy to be able to declare in appropriate cases the act of the minister or of the government department as illegal or contrary to law.

This article presents generalizations of the publication "Questions of Procedure for Ministers" which provides rules in dealing with questions of ministerial propriety in Great Britain. The document has been variously described as a codification of rules, a secret code, a body of regulations and a collection of precedents. But the status of the document should not be misconstrued. It is normally circulated by a Prime Minister soon after the beginning of each administration. It does not seem to be in daily use as a repository of rules, any more than the Cabinet Office Handbook or the list of precedents kept by the private secretary to the Secretary of the Cabinet. It should be seen as an accumulation of the principles developed by successive prime ministers and a document which is consulted as a source of doctrine after any event which raises questions of ministerial propriety.

This article addresses the scope of legal Europeanization with regard to Austria, a 1995 accession country. Depending on the choice among several plausible indicators of legal Europeanization, the relative impact of the EU varies greatly. The share of EU-related legislation peaked in the pre-accession period when most of the acquis communautaire needed to be adopted. In the membership period, legislation that relates to the EU accounts for almost 25 per cent of the enactments. Although government decrees outnumber laws as the means of transposition, EU-related rules constitute a much smaller share of delegated legislation. Collectively, EU-related rules constitute a tenth of Austrian legislation. Yet by mid-2003, 42 per cent of Austria's original laws—the core of its legislation—were related to EU rules. While falling short of some inflated expectations, legal Europeanization is indeed a major feature of Austrian legislation. The article confirms expectations derived from the political controversy of EU affairs, federalism, and legal traditions. When we refer to ‘legal orders' in the article we mean the entire body of legislation in force; we use the term ‘legislation’ to refer to recent additions to the body of legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of European directives on Dutch regulation is fairly limited when compared to the claims that are made by academics and politicians. We found that 12.6 per cent of all parliamentary acts, 19.7 per cent of all orders in council, and 10.1 per cent of all valid ministerial decisions were actually rules transposing EU directives. The total overall impact for all three types of legislation was 12.6 per cent. Departments generally employ the same type of rules in similar proportions both when transposing EC directives and when producing national rules. Departmental autonomy is a defining feature of Dutch central government in general, and this pattern persists in the coordination and implementation of EU directives. Nearly 90 per cent of the European directives in The Netherlands are transposed through delegated legislation in which no involvement of parliament is required. If we take into account the fact that the majority of formal laws are actually drafted by the executive and submitted to parliament, we could easily state that virtually all national rules that transpose European directives into the Dutch legal system are drafted by the executive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By mid-2003, the legal orders (the entire bodies of legislation in force) of three EU member states – Austria , Denmark, and The Netherlands – contained between 10.5 and 14.2 per cent of rules devoted to the transposition of EU directives. Only a few ministerial jurisdictions contain more than 20 per cent of Europeanized rules. The member states show remarkable differences in the use of parliamentary versus delegated legislation as a means of transposition. The comparison of the three cases tentatively suggests that different legal traditions and the parliamentary involvement in EU affairs are important factors that account for cross-national differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reopening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999 marked a great opportunity to create a modern government connected to the people. In spite of this, work on responsiveness and the functioning of policy‐making in Scotland since devolution has not been as extensive as it could be. This is certainly true of one of the most common and numerous policy‐making activities undertaken by Scotland and indeed all UK governments, the production of secondary legislation. This article uses time series cross‐sectional analyses to assess the effects of attention by the UK government, the EU, public priorities and the media on Scottish statutory instruments. It finds strong effects for the UK media on Scottish instruments although that effect is lower for policy areas technically, but not practically, outside the competencies of Scottish government. This work hints at a government responsive to events, but also a government that largely sets its own independent priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the impact of European legislation on the British public policy making. Assessment of the impact of European on domestic legislation based upon an examination of Statutory Instruments (SI); High level of `Europeanization' in the Ministry of Defence; Increase in the impact of European legislation.

What determines the bureaucratic agenda? This article combines insights from models of bureaucratic behaviour with agenda-setting models of government attention to test the effects of elected government, public, and EU agendas on the bureaucratic agenda. Using time series cross-sectional analyses of subject and ministry coded data on UK statutory instruments from 1987 to 2008, I find strong effects for both the elected government and EU legislative agendas on UK statutory instruments. Furthermore, by breaking the data into different sets based on their relationship with the EU, several logical differences in these effects are found. These results include the EU agenda having exclusive influence on instruments implementing EU directives, and the UK agenda being the sole driver of bureaucratic attention on those instruments that mention the EU but do not implement EU legislation. This article opens a new avenue for research on bureaucracy by approaching it as a unique policy-making institution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies show that the EU institutions have strong preferences with regard to the design of the EU comitology system which, consequently, is the result of intense inter-institutional negotiations. However, the exact choice of comitology procedure to install in a given legislative proposal has received much less scholarly attention. Based on a behavioural logic of control maximization, this article investigates the comitology preferences of the Commission, the Council, and the European Parliament in the legislative process. The findings from an analysis of all new directives and regulations in the years 1999-2006, a total of 686 acts, show that the Council seeks strict comitology control while the Commission and the Parliament both seek permissive control. This holds even though the legislative process is characterized by a high degree of agreement on comitology. The analysis indicates that this is because the actors strategically anticipate each other's preferences, not because there is a true alignment of preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits the Whitehall Programme and Rod Rhodes' crucial role in setting it up. It examines the research commissioned for the Programme and how research in this field has changed since the mid 1990s. It confirms that research on Whitehall has become more diverse and specialist - reflecting its apparent hollowing-out - but that research employing a longer historical perspective does not support an interpretation that government in the UK was ever strongly filled-in. It also suggests that the study of Whitehall now demonstrates more theoretical ambition than hitherto, and, in the light of the dominance of qualitative research in this field, calls for a more sophisticated methodological debate about qualitative approaches to the study of government and especially their potential contribution to theory-building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on comitology has largely ignored the European Commission's actual behaviour in the daily workings of the numerous comitology committees that were designed to control it. On the basis of survey data of Danish and Dutch representatives on nearly all comitology committees, this paper investigates the Commission's role in the system. We find that the Commission acts both as a mediator and as a policy advocate, but to varying degrees. We take a first step towards understanding this behaviour by an inspection of four arguments found in the literature on comitology and the Commission: the constraining or enabling impact of the comitology procedures; the institutional position of the responsible Directorate-General; the nature of the cases dealt with by the committees and, finally, the intensity of the member states' preferences in relation to the committees' cases. In comitology, each of these arguments shapes the mediating or the advocating behaviour of the Commission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Membership of the EU and the scope of European integration are still contested issues in Danish politics. However, the impact of EU legislation on Danish legislation is relatively modest and highly concentrated within the field generally related to the regulation of the internal market. Strong upstream procedures at both the interdepartmental and the parliamentary level have been installed that effectively protect Danish policy-makers against political surprises in EU legislative politics. Upstream procedures are much stronger than the downstream ones for overseeing the implementation of EU policies and they ensure a high degree of consensus on specific EU legislation, both among the political parties in the Danish Parliament and among affected interests. As a result the transposition of directives is mainly a ministerial responsibility, and within the well-established fields of cooperation, the decree is the preferred legal instrument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on debates about the nature and significance of quasi-autonomous government organizations, this article asks what happens when trends towards agency creation by government and trends towards stakeholder participation in policy processes come together. Issues are considered through an examination of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, one of a series of new regulatory bodies set up in Britain after 1997 and given the task of providing national guidance on treatments and care for people using the health service. The analysis points to the emergence of a new form – the dialogic intermediary organization. Such an organization, while maintaining close and informal links with government, attempts to build legitimacy for its activities through multiple and potentially competing engagements with diversely constituted publics. The potential theoretical and political importance of dialogic intermediary organizations, and some implications for their fuller empirical study are briefly explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How are government policy commitments converted into legislation and what happens in the conversion? The role of civil servants in preparing legislation is far more important than is generally assumed. By looking at the work of four recent bill  teams in Britain – teams of civil servants given the task of developing Acts of Parliament – their crucial roles in initiating policies, placing them on the political agenda (even helping secure their place in a party manifesto), developing them, making sure they pass through parliament and enacting them once they have reached the statute books are assessed. The article explores the composition and working methods of bill teams. These teams work with considerable autonomy in developing legislation, but it cannot be assumed that they operate outside ministerial control. Teams see themselves as reflecting the priorities of the government in general and their ministers in particular. Yet ministers typically know relatively little about the law they are bringing in until they receive the submissions and briefings from their officials. Perhaps the biggest danger for democracy is not a civil service putting forward proposals which a minister feels forced to accept, but rather that ministers do not notice or fully appreciate what is being proposed in their name despite having the political authority to change it and a civil service which bends over backwards to consult and accommodate them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies the escherichia coli chain of contamination in its social context and highlights the practices in the British food industry and regulatory environment which led to this tragedy. Financial pressures in the meat industry; Implications for food safety and hygiene; Key elements in the design of the legal and policy-making framework as it relates to food safety.

Discusses three factors which underline the urgent need in Great Britain for greater collaboration and convergence between the disciplines of public law and public administration. Accumulation of research-based academic literature on public law; Machinery for the redress of citizens' grievances against the state; Transformation of the agenda of British law and politics by developments in the European Union.

Presents a re-appraisal of public participation in bureaucratic decision-making, demonstrating that the use of public administration as a means of legitimating the actions of public agencies represents a misunderstanding of the concept. Bureaucracy and the liberal state; Interest group model.

Introduces several books that are of interest to people engaged in, or studying, public administration. 'Local Government in the Modern World,' by A.H. Marshall; 'Political Philosophy or Political Science,' by A.H. Hanson; 'The Civil Service in Britain,' by G.A. Campbell.