Report

Hybrid bills

This report from UK think tank the Institute for Government explores how to improve the hybrid bill legislative process.

The government has set ambitious goals for infrastructure for its first term. The Plan for Change sets a goal of 150 planning decisions on major infrastructure by the end of this parliament.1 Hybrid bills can be a useful tool to deliver on some of these, particularly on rail. They bring various benefits: granting government certainty on a project at an early stage, allowing for a more flexible approach to a project, bringing in public legitimacy to the authorisation process and providing some protection from judicial review.

While the experience of the recent HS2 hybrid bills has created some nervousness about the procedure, the time taken to pass those bills was a product of that project’s complexity as much as the issues with the process itself. That is not to say the hybrid bill procedure is perfect. Some problems seen over recent parliaments have been due to procedure, some due to the management of past bills.

This paper outlines those problems and sets out a series of recommendations for future hybrid bills that would reduce the time spent on the hybrid legislative process, provide more robust parliamentary input, relieve the burden that the procedure can put on MPs and provide a better experience for those affected by the bill when they petition parliament.