by Catherine Needham and Emily Burn
When is a law not a law? When it gets passed into statute but never enacted. Lord Norton (a Conservative peer and expert on UK parliament) calls these cases ‘law but not law’. Such cases have been missed in the policy literature to date. Existing literature looks at the difficult process of policy design and policy making, taking it to the moment of legislative approval. Other literature takes it from the point of enactment to see how well the implementation fares. But there has been a failure to acknowledge a slim but important set of cases in which policies which gain legislative endorsement but are never enacted. A review by the UK House of Lords library found 480 such examples in the UK parliament between 1960 and 2020. In a system where the executive usually controls the legislative agenda and is not required to implement legislative mandates that it did not instigate (eg. Westminster in the UK), non-enactment represents a particular puzzle.
In our recent article in Policy and Politics, we explore the phenomenon of non-enacted policy through the example of long-term care funding in England. Two legislative interventions to reform long-term care funding in England have been abandoned prior to enactment. A package of reforms – including a cap on private liability for care costs and an increase in the means-test threshold – was passed into law in the Care Act 2014, but enactment was first delayed and then abandoned. A very similar reform package was then passed into law again in the Health and Care Act 2022, with implementation scheduled for 2023. This too was delayed and then abandoned.
This can be explained through looking at the configuration of ideas, interests and institutions. Key reasons for halting once the legislation had been passed were the complexity of the ideas, a lack of strong advocates for the reforms among politicians and organised interests, turbulence within the Conservative Party and a lack of institutional learning to ensure that the mistakes of the first care cap were not repeated. For the Conservative administrations, the risks of abandoning care funding reforms of both 2014 and 2022 came to be seen as lower than the risks of proceeding.
Stepping back from enactment may be purposively done by governments to position an area as unreformable. In this case, there seems to have been a strategy to portray long-term care as too complex to reform and to frame local government as unreliable partners. This approach helps to build a narrative of fatalism and an inevitability to the abandonment. Unpicking the constellation of ideas, institutions and interests that have led to this policy failure is an important part of helping future campaigners and policy makers consider how they might make it ‘third time lucky’ on care funding reform.
In this way, our article challenges existing claims that governments will tend to stick with legislated commitments for as long as possible and contributes new theoretical insights into non-enactment, arguing for the incorporation of non-enactment in the literature on policy failure.
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You can read the original research in Policy & Politics at
Needham, C., and Burn, E. (2025). ‘Law but not law’: explaining unenacted policy as a type of policy failure. Policy & Politics (published online ahead of print 2025), available from: https://doi.org/10.1332/03055736Y2024D000000057
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Trein, P., and Vagionaki, T. (2024). Why policy failure is a prerequisite for innovation in the public sector. Policy & Politics 52, 4, 586-605, available from: https://doi.org/10.1332/03055736Y2023D000000012
Dunlop, C. A., Radaelli, C. M., Wayenberg, E., and Zaki, B. L. (2024). Policy learning and policy innovation: interactions and intersections. Policy & Politics 52, 4, 547-563, available from: https://doi.org/10.1332/03055736Y2024D000000049
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