Introduction
1. Over the years Parliament has enacted statutes which establish departments of State. The statutes make provision for such matters as the departments' Ministers, their staff, their functions, duties and powers, their annual reports, and their funding. This practice has been inconsistent in two major ways. First, a large number of departments have been set up over the years by executive action-and not by legislation (although in many cases legislation "establishing" or "continuing" such departments has been enacted later); and, second, the departmental legislation which has been enacted has varied greatly in the range and the terms of its provisions. Sometimes the variations can be explained by the different requirements of the department, but that is not always so.
2. The main purpose of this paper is to review the practice, to assess the reasons for departmental legislation, and to propose more principled and consistent treatment of the issues presented by such proposals for statutes.
3. Our principal conclusion is that in the usual case such general departmental legislation is not needed, and that it should not be enacted.