Backdoor Executive Empowerment - Legal Studies journal
Journal Article: Backdoor Executive Empowerment
Journal: Legal Studies, the journal of the Society of Legal Scholars (SLS). See here for more on the journal.
Date of Publication: September 26, 2025
Author: Daniella Lock, Lecturer in Law, Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London
How to Cite: Lock D. Backdoor Executive Empowerment. Legal Studies. 2025;45(4):577-596. doi:10.1017/lst.2025.10079
Abstract: Recent UK legislative reform has further empowered the UK Executive, degrading horizontal and vertical constraints on powers interfering with human rights, and this has largely taken place via the ‘back door’ through repeated marginalisation of Parliament. Between 2021 and 2023, 11 pieces of primary legislation were given Royal Assent which narrowed Executive accountability mechanisms in relation to coercive and administrative powers identified as weakening human rights protections by the Joint Committee on Human Rights. Echoing both recent and long-standing trends in UK law-making, such reform has been sent through Parliament while employing mechanisms of parliamentary marginalisation, undermining the ability of parliamentarians and broader civil society to scrutinise the changes. The passing of a constitutionally significant group of legislation in this manner created a ‘back door’ through which the UK Executive was able to expand its powers with minimal scrutiny. Such backdoor Executive empowerment supports scholarship highlighting the lack of firm UK constitutional constraints of the Executive. While the paper’s analysis does not make a claim on the overall status of UK democracy, it does argue that the recent legal reform mirrors dynamics identified with respect to democratic erosion, suggesting the need for further assessment of the UK’s democratic health.
ISSE Comment: Unlike the constitutional structure of the United States, which is defined by three formally separate and co-equal branches, the United Kingdom operates under a parliamentary system within a constitutional monarchy, where the Government is drawn from and dependent upon a majority in Parliament. In principle, this fusion of executive and legislative authority is designed to ensure political accountability and coherence, avoiding the institutional deadlock that can arise in presidential systems when different branches are controlled by opposing parties. The loss of parliamentary confidence can rapidly dissolve a government and trigger new elections, reinforcing this model of political responsibility. At the same time, this structure affords the Government significant control over the legislative agenda, often to a degree not seen in more rigidly separated systems.
Against this institutional backdrop, Lock’s analysis in Backdoor Executive Empowerment identifies a concerning evolution in legislative practice. She argues that, notwithstanding the Government’s already substantial procedural advantages, recent reforms have increasingly relied on mechanisms that marginalize parliamentary scrutiny, such as compressed legislative timetables and constrained debate, to facilitate the passage of controversial measures, particularly those expanding executive authority and weakening accountability safeguards. While these practices do not invoke formal emergency powers or states of exception, they reflect a functionally analogous dynamic: the incremental reconfiguration of constitutional constraints through procedural means that operate below the threshold of overt crisis. In this sense, the trend raises broader questions central to ISSE’s work, namely, how exceptional forms of governance can emerge not only through declared emergencies, but through the gradual normalization of practices that diminish oversight, transparency, and democratic deliberation.
The text of the article can be found here, and a PDF version of this article is available here.
Photo by Peter Kostov on Unsplash.
