Volume 14: Responsibilities for Human and Animal Health
1. Introduction
The legislative process

1.7 Ministers, and officials acting on their behalf, could generally only take action where Parliament had granted them specific powers or authorisation to do so. The legislative process is described in Chapter 3 of vol. 15: Government and Public Administration. To summarise, UK legislation was of two kinds:

1. Acts of Parliament, known as 'primary legislation', granting specific powers or authorisation, or 'enabling powers' for the Minister to take action in certain circumstances or if certain conditions were fulfilled; and
2. Orders or Regulations, known as 'secondary legislation', setting out how the enabling powers in an Act of Parliament were to be used in a particular case.

From July 1987, when the Single European Act came into force, there was increasing harmonisation of legislation throughout the European Union (EU) ¹ designed to eliminate barriers to trade and ensure uniform standards of regulation, monitoring and enforcement throughout the Member States.

1.8 As vol. 15 indicates, the legislative process imposed constraints on Ministers and officials:

1. they usually had to work with the powers given to them by existing legislation. New primary legislation was time-consuming and difficult to obtain, as it was subject to detailed scrutiny by Parliament. Even new secondary legislation involved parliamentary procedures and, sometimes, scrutiny;
2. if they decided that new legislation was required, the legislation itself took time to introduce, especially if consultation was required. It could not be done overnight;
3. they could not legislate without reference to any EU legislation on the same subject; and
4. once they had obtained new legislative powers, they had to use them reasonably and be prepared to justify their actions to Parliament and to the courts.