After the UK left the European Union, a two-stage affirmative procedure applied to any instruments that amended or revoked secondary legislation originally made under the European Communities Act 1972 (most Directives were implemented that way). First the statutory instrument must be published in draft for 28 days to allow for comment. Second, when the instrument is formally laid, the Minister must make a “scrutiny statement” which sets out the Government response to any recommendations made by a parliamentary committee on the draft, and any other representations on the instrument (this will normally be published in the Explanatory Memorandum accompanying the following statutory instrument). The following instrument laid need not be identical to the published draft.
For more details on published drafts see paragraphs 13 to 15 of Schedule 8 to the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018. The procedure map for published drafts is also available to view.
The procedure was revoked as part of the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Act 2023
This query will show you all published drafts that Parliament was notified as being published on gov.uk.
This query shows all published drafts currently before Parliament:
If you have a specified time period you’re interested in then you can amend the query above by adding either of the following strings to row 21d in the Sparql query:
FILTER ( str(?itemDate) > '2017-06-01' && str(?itemDate) < '2019-10-09')
Or if you want to only see proposed negative statutory instruments before/after a certain point use the following (just remember to change the less-than/greater-than sign depending on your need for before/after):
FILTER ( str(?itemDate) > '2019-12-13')
Published drafts are not laid before Parliament but the responsible department does have a duty to notify Parliament. The following queries break down published drafts by their responsible department, as of December 2021 only Department for Transport has published:
During the published drafts 28-day scrutiny period, committees in either House are able to scrutinise the published draft and make recommendations to the Government (which the Government do not need to take up). In the House of Lords the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee (SLSC) have responsibility for considering published drafts. In the House of Commons, currently, no committee has decided to consider published drafts. However, Commons committees could decide to take up a published draft at any time.
As part of the notification process the Department must provide a written statement to the House of Commons alerting them that a published draft has been made available on gov.uk for the period of 28 days.
One a published draft has reached the end of its 28-day scrutiny period the Government can then lay a following Statutory Instrument. The following query shows all published drafts that were followed by an SI and by what type of procedure:
Under 14(6) of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 there is an allowance for Government to bypass this procedure fby reason of urgency and lay an instrument. They have agreed to provide a written statement to Parliament setting out why they have bypassed the procedure.