Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee

The Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee (formerly the Merits of Statutory Instruments Committee) is a select committee of the House of Lords that refers secondary legislation, such as statutory instruments, to the House that it considers interesting or important. This is unlike the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments and Commons Select Committee on Statutory Instruments, which only scrutinise instruments for legal and drafting defects. The specific criteria used by the committee are whether the legislation—

1. is politically or legally important or gives rise to issues of public policy likely to be of interest to the House
2. may be inappropriate in view of changed circumstances since the enactment of the parent Act
3. may inappropriately implement European Union legislation
4. may imperfectly achieve its policy objectives.

The committee adopted its current name on 15 May 2012 principally because of the addition of Public Bodies Orders under the Public Bodies Act 2011.

Due to the number of additional instruments specifically related to Brexit, the committee expanded into two sub-committees from October 2018 until April 2019.

Membership

As of January 2025, the membership of the committee is:

Member	Party
Lord Watson of Invergowrie0(Chair)		Labour
Lord Bethell		Conservative
Baroness Harris of Richmond		Liberal Democrat
Lord Kempsell		Conservative
Lord Kerr of Kinlochard		Crossbench
Baroness Lea of Lymm		Conservative
Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick		Labour
Lord Russell of Liverpool		Crossbench
Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd		Crossbench
Lord Watson of Wyre Forest		Labour

External links

• The records of the Merits of Statutory Instruments Committee are held by the UK Parliamentary Archives