News & Insights

Institute FOI on the UK Internal Market Bill Consultation

We’ve been writing for weeks about the controversial United Kingdom Internal Market Bill, following its passage through Parliament and highlighting our own concerns about the consultation behind it. Rather than just doing another update in the Week in Parliament, we thought we’d update you on how and why we’re pursuing this one a little further.

Usually, when we see an interesting or controversial consultation, we examine it, decide if we should make a comment, and then write some sort of article on it. As with consultation generally, however, ensuring you have the right information is important. As we are interested in the process behind consultations, rather than the subject matter of it, this can sometimes mean reaching out to those behind the project for further information.

The Internal Market Bill is an example of this. The nature of the legislation has caused much controversy, both because of its provisions affecting the rule of law, and because of the potential impact, it might have on the devolution settlement that forms a part of the modern British constitution. In and of itself, a consultation being controversial (even if it is the controversy of this level of importance will not be enough to pique our interest). What does draw our attention however is where the consultation behind the proposed changes seems to be lacking.

In this case, it was this latter point that made us decide to pursue this more. When we put our heads together and examined the consultation, we quickly decided we wanted to know more. As the underlying documents and analysis were not publicly available, we submitted a Freedom of Information request, seeking both a list of the consultees and a copy of the detailed analysis.

A few weeks ago, we reached the date at which the Department’s response to our FOI said we would be responded to. In light of the current circumstances, we thought we’d give them a little longer before pursuing it further. In the course of our Parliamentary monitoring; however, we picked up that similar questions were also being asked by parliamentarians, which didn’t seem to be being responded to.

Last week, with the response date over two weeks overdue, we chased the request. In addition, we contacted a parliamentarian who had raised their own questions. That parliamentarian has subsequently passed along our message to a colleague. In the meantime, with the Government still reluctant to respond to questions in the House on the detailed analysis of the consultation, we shall continue to pursue our FOI in an attempt to see what stakeholders thought of a bill that could significantly shake up the public and private spheres in the UK.

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