Lords set sights on Digital Economy Act review
The Digital Economy Act could be reviewed by the House of Lords next year, if peers are given the right to scrutinise legislation after it has been passed into law.
On Monday, the leader of the House of Lords, Lord Strathclyde, announced a review of the house's working practices that includes a proposal to give peers powers of post-legislative scrutiny. Legislation in the United Kingdom generally gets examined by the Lords before it goes to the Commons, which in turn passes it into law.
Shortly after Strathclyde's announcement, Labour's Baroness Royall of Blaisdon, the Liberal Democrats' Baroness Hamwee, the Conservatives' Lord Lucas welcomed the proposal and argued that the Digital Economy Act should be the first candidate for review.
"Like many other noble lords who have spoken on this in the past, I believe that the house is particularly well suited to this scrutiny," Royall said, according to Hansard. "We have the expertise, we have the time, and it would be an opportunity to identify good practice in terms of process and content. One suggestion that has been made by my noble friend Lord Puttnam is that the recent Digital Economy Act 2010 should, in due course, be subject to post-legislative scrutiny. I believe that that is an excellent suggestion."
Hamwee agreed, saying in the Lords that the Digital Economy Act was a "prime candidate" because it was "only half-discussed before it was passed into law and is full of controversial stuff".
The Digital Economy Act was rushed through the tail-end of the last parliament in a process known as the wash-up, meaning it got mere hours' worth of scrutiny by the Commons before becoming law. Conceived largely as a way of defending the UK's creative industries against the effects of online copyright infringement, the legislation establishes the framework for suspected unlawful file-sharers to have their bandwidth throttled or even potentially for their internet connections to be severed.
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