Non-Legislative Scrutiny Mechanism

Task: Select any policy topic of your choice. Focusing on at least one non-legislative scrutiny mechanism, critically analyse how parliament scrutinised this policy topic since 2017.

you must collect data from primary parliamentary sources, and drawn on at least four pieces of high-quality academic literature (per answer) about the relevant weekly topics (beginning with the most important texts from the reading list). And, you should have systematically collected larger amounts of primary data, and/or drawn on a wider variety of high-quality academic texts.

Instructions
For this task you are required to write an analysis of how parliament scrutinised a policy topic of your choice. You should focus on one or more non-legislative scrutiny mechanism (e.g. debates, questions, EDMs), but you must not look at the formal scrutiny of legislation (i.e. in the legislative process).
You must draw both on primary sources (including parliamentary records) and secondary sources (including relevant academic publications). While you may include some description, you should keep this brief. Most of the task should focus on critically analysing how parliament scrutinised the policy topic, for example by critically engaging with the academic literature.
Non-legislative scrutiny
For the purposes of this assignment, ‘non-legislative’ means ‘not on legislation’. In other words, you should not look at the formal scrutiny of bills (including private members’ bills) or secondary legislation. This means you should not focus on debates that form part of the legislative process on a bill.

Selecting your policy issue
You can select any policy topic of your choice: the idea is for you to pick something that interests you. It could be something very specific (e.g. the cladding crisis) or something broader (e.g. education policy). Obviously, it must be something that falls within the responsibility of the Westminster parliament. Before you commit to your policy issue, check that there is enough parliamentary material available through the parliament website for you to draw on.
Examples of issues selected by students in previous years include: Universal Credit; counter-terrorism; university tuition fees during the pandemic; education; climate change; Heathrow expansion; reform of the criminal justice system; benefits sanctions; military action in Syria; Brexit; reproductive health; restrictions on sport during the pandemic; UK government foreign policy towards Bangladesh; LGBTQ+ rights.
To find scrutiny activity, you may find it helpful to first search the parliament website. Good first ports of call are Hansard and the pages of select committees.
Scope of analysis
It is essential that your assignment critically analyses how parliament scrutinised the policy topic. In other words, don’t just describe what happened, but use the primary source material to critically engage with the academic literature (and/or vice versa).
The task instructions have been worded deliberately broadly to give you flexibility in what angle to focus on in your analysis. If you need some inspiration, the following provides some (non-exhaustive) suggestions of how you could focus your analysis:
• How effective was parliament’s scrutiny in achieving success (however defined)?
• How effective was parliament’s scrutiny in representing various concerns or interests?
• How did the effectiveness of the scrutiny observed compare to similar mechanisms studied in the academic literature?
• How did the effectiveness of parliament’s scrutiny differ between two specific non-legislative scrutiny mechanisms?
It is not essential for your assignment to cover every form of scrutiny on the policy topic. It is fine for you to restrict your analysis to a particular period, mechanism and/or chamber. Whatever you do, make sure you very briefly explain your focus, and obviously the narrower your focus the more detail you will go into.
You need to demonstrate that you can conduct independent primary research into parliament and write up your findings concisely.