The Oblivion Act (“The Bill”) is A ‘Great Repeal Act’. That phrase should not be used loosely. A Great Repeal Act can be drafted in two different ways. The narrow method lists the statutes and instruments to be repealed, then amends whatever supporting law must change. The wide method starts from the other end. It assumes that a large class of law should expire unless it is expressly saved. It can be downloaded, here:

The Bills

In May of 2025, I set about formulating a set of draft bills (legislation) capable of stabilising the ailing personal liberties of the modern United Kingdom, along with the demographic & economic death-spiral that Britain finds itself in. This effort is consciously upstream of politics entirely. They are freely given, for

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This Bill takes the wide course. It provides for the staged repeal of enactments made since 1 January 1900, subject to preservation by Parliament. Its purpose is to put the permanent state, the civil service, ministerial departments, government legal department and OPC (the office of parliamentary counsel) to task in identifying what legislation is actually used – vs what is a dead hand – and which of that is conducive to the national interest.

This is not civil service reform. That is another bill, for another day. The Oblivion Act does not alter recruitment, tenure, grading, discipline, departmental hierarchy, or the constitutional position of officials. Its pressure on the civil service is indirect, but real. It requires departments to account for the law they use and to defend the law they wish to keep.

Download the full bill (The Oblivion Act, February 11 2026 version), here:

The Great Repeal idea

In the contemporary British debate, David Starkey comes first as the progenitor of the term. He has put the case for a Great Repeal Act in his constitutional lectures, and Popular Conservatism reported his argument in January 2025 that a Great Repeal Act would be needed and that the work should be done before a future government arrived.

GB PAC then placed the expression into a more organised legislative setting. Its Legal Initiatives page states that its “Great Repeal Programme” is led by Martin Howe KC, and appears to have been added within the last year at time of writing. It describes the programme as a comprehensive legislative package intended to roll back bureaucratic overreach and damaging regulation. The website-section says “coming soon”. 

Publicly republished launch emails material from Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain (when it initially launched as a movement in July of 2025) called for The Great Repeal Act in 2029, and suggested they would begin work on one. Perhaps they are. 

Robert Jenrick has likewise been reported by the New Statesman as calling for a Great Repeal Act to unpick the domestic and supranational legal latticework which restrains ministers.

The important question is no longer whether the phrase has currency. It plainly does. The question is whether a Bill using that name merely produces a conventional repeal list, or whether it changes the burden of argument across the statute book.

How the Oblivion Bill works

Section 1 is the engine of the Bill. It provides that every enactment made in the relevant period is repealed on the oblivion date for the decade in which it is treated as made, unless preserved. The relevant period begins with 1 January 1900 and ends with the day before the Act is passed.

The definition of “enactment” is deliberately broad. It includes primary legislation and subordinate legislation. Primary legislation includes Acts of Parliament, Acts of the Scottish Parliament, Acts or Measures of Senedd Cymru, and Acts of the Northern Ireland Assembly. Subordinate legislation includes statutory instruments, Orders in Council, rules, regulations, orders, schemes, warrants, and other instruments made under an enactment.

This breadth is essential. Modern government is not contained only in the famous Act but also encompasses an array of instruments, schemes, procedural rules, ‘regulatory frameworks’, duties, delegated powers, administrative gateways and enforcement provisions. Take the implementation of Lockdown in March of 2020 as one such example of quite how powerful secondary legislation, accompanied by guidance, can be. A narrow ‘Great Repeal Act’ can remove the name of a statute, but if it were to leave operational system substantially (guidance, caselaw altered by statute) untouched then the effect would be almost nil. Section 1 of this model law is drafted to reach both the parent Act and the delegated law made under it.

The treatment of subordinate legislation is especially important. A statutory instrument is treated as made in the same decade as the enactment conferring the power under which it was made. Where more than one enactment confers the power, the earliest enactment controls. A recent regulation made under an older Act may therefore fall with the older decade. The department must then identify the legal authority for the scheme, not merely the date on the latest instrument.

Section 1 also protects the class of Restoration Acts from repeal by the oblivion programme. That prevents the repeal machinery from consuming the wider restoration legislation of which it forms part.

Schedule 1 and the timetable

Schedule 1 supplies the timetable. The repeal programme is staged by decade rather than triggered all at once. Enactments from 1900 to 1909 fall one month after Royal Assent, those from 1910 to 1919 fall after two months, and the process continues until enactments made from 2020 to the day before Royal Assent fall after thirteen months.

The timetable is severe, but it is not instantaneous. It creates a rolling audit. The state is forced to work through the statute book in a known sequence, while Parliament retains a preservation route at each stage.

Section 2 and preservation

Section 2 provides the preservation mechanism. An enactment survives if it is listed in Schedule 2, or if it is later added to that Schedule by regulations. A Minister of the Crown may add an enactment, or a provision of an enactment (with or without exceptions).

The preservation power is bounded by four heads of necessity which The Minister must consider; these include whether the provision necessary for constitutional government or the administration of justice, defence, national security or public safety, the protection of fundamental rights, or the continued operation of essential public services. The regulations require affirmative approval by both Houses of Parliament.

This is the central change in the burden of proof, it is designed to challenge the permanent state’s complacency around maintaining our ballooning array of law. Departments which want a law preserved must identify it, explain its current use, trace its dependencies (many of which will have been created by the relevant ministry), and justify its survival under the heads set out in the Bill. Ministers, the GLD and OPC must decide what they are willing to defend. Parliament must then approve those preservations.

Where an enactment is preserved, subordinate legislation made under it is also treated as preserved unless the regulations provide otherwise. That prevents an essential parent Act from being saved while the necessary operating instruments disappear by accident. It also allows the Minister to preserve the parent while excluding subordinate material that ought not survive.

Section 3 and parliamentary direction

Section 3 places the audit before Parliament. Not later than 30 days before the oblivion date for any decade, the Minister must lay a report identifying the enactments of that decade due to be repealed and the enactments proposed for preservation.

Either House may, within 14 days of the report being laid, resolve that an enactment or provision mentioned in the report is to be preserved. If it does so, the Minister must make regulations under section 2 giving effect to that resolution.

The Bill therefore gives the executive the work of producing the audit, but it does not leave preservation entirely to the executive. Each House has a direct preservation trigger. If the Government misses something, or refuses to save something which one House considers necessary, the House can require preservation.

Section 4 and legal continuity

Section 4 deals with the consequences of repeal. It applies sections 16 and 17 of the Interpretation Act 1978, so repeal under the Bill does not automatically destroy accrued rights, liabilities, penalties, investigations or legal proceedings. It also gives a Minister power to make savings, transitional or supplementary provision by statutory instrument, subject to annulment by either House.

This is the provision which makes the Bill administrable. A repeal exercise of this scale will expose old wiring. Some provisions will be obsolete. Some will be harmless but unnecessary. Some will be operationally essential. Some will be used only because departments never returned to first principles after the crisis or fashion which produced them. Section 4 allows the government to manage transition without abandoning the wider presumption of repeal.

Section 5 and constitutional protection

Section 5 gives the Act constitutional status. It states that the Act may not be repealed or amended by implication. Later legislation may alter it only by express words which identify the provision being repealed or amended.

The same section defines the class of Restoration Acts (Published as model law on Reiners.org.uk across 2025 and 2026). The Oblivion Act draft names the Oblivion Act itself, the Bonfire of the Quangocracy Act 2026, the Free Speech (Restoration) Act 2026, the British Indigeneity and Citizenship Act 2026, and the European Convention on Human Rights (Withdrawal and Workplace Rights) Act 2026. A Restoration Act is to be construed, so far as possible, as compatible with the other Restoration Acts. If inconsistency is unavoidable, the more specific provision prevails. Regulations under the Bill may not amend, repeal or revoke a Restoration Act, save for the limited treatment of the Oblivion Act itself.

The protective purpose is straightforward. A serious repeal programme cannot be left vulnerable to accidental implied amendment, departmental workaround, or the ordinary fog of later drafting.

Section 6 and Schedule 2

Section 6 gives the Act UK-wide extent, brings it into force on the day it is passed, and supplies the short title. Schedule 2 is the list of preserved enactments. In the draft it is blank. That blank Schedule is not a decorative omission. It is the place where the permanent state must show its workings.

What power this gives to a government

Taken together, the sections provide a government seeking to depart from the status quo with the practical power to do so, and, the statutory deadlines to prevent complacent continuation. The Bill makes preservation an affirmative act and require departments to identify the law they rely upon. They compel ministers to choose what they are prepared to defend. They bring the lists before Parliament.

This differs from asking each department whether it has any repeal ideas – it is likely that they would have none – besides perhaps statutes limiting taxpayer contribution to the civil service pension. The complacent party (the permanent state) should thus carry the burden.

The retained EU law lesson

Brexit offered an example of the same opportunity, and of how it can be missed. Retained EU law was created to secure legal continuity at the end of the transition period. The Government’s retained EU law dataset records that the category came into effect at the end of the post-Brexit transition period on 31 December 2020. The Government’s dashboard later identified 6,925 individual pieces of retained EU law and assimilated law across roughly 400 policy areas.

The chance after departure from the EU was to conduct a swift and disciplined audit of that inherited body of law. That was not done when it should have been done swiftly. The original retained EU law reform project began closer to a sunset model, but the final Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Act 2023 used a more selective structure. The House of Commons Library described the Act as giving ministers and devolved authorities substantial powers to change law accumulated during EU membership. A later Commons Library explainer recorded that nearly 600 pieces of EU-derived legislation were revoked at the end of 2023.

This achieved some revocation, but it did not amount to a full reckoning. Thousands of instruments survived. The state moved from the discipline of presumed expiry back towards the safety of selective repeal. The stock was renamed, catalogued and partly reduced, but the wider opportunity was allowed to drain away.

An Oblivion Act embraces that opportunity, but also asks the same is done in a managed way with domestic legislation, both primary and secondary. The retained EU law problem was a smaller version of the domestic statute-book problem. If independence from the European Union required the United Kingdom to ask which inherited laws should survive, a century of accumulated domestic administration requires the same question.

The risks

The risks are real because Schedule 2 is blank, the timetable is tight, and the Bill extends to England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland while reaching devolved primary legislation. Its rule for subordinate legislation may expose dependencies which departments have forgotten or never understood. The savings power is necessary, but it must not become preservation by another name.

Those risks are also the reason the Bill has force. Previous exercises avoided much of the danger by avoiding the underlying question. The retained EU law process began with the right opportunity and retreated. The Public Bodies Act changed the shape of part of the public bodies landscape, but not the general statutory ground underneath it. The Mansion House reforms adjusted incentives inside a sector. None of these changed the presumption of continuation across the modern statute book.

The Oblivion Act changes that presumption by asking the state to prove that a law deserves preservation, rather than requiring reformers to prove, provision by provision, that a law deserves repeal. That is why it belongs with restoration legislation rather than with routine deregulation.

Source note

This explainer uses the draft Oblivion Act 2026 dated 11 February 2026 as its legislative base. External source links are embedded in the text above. The principal public sources used are David Starkey Talks, Popular Conservatism, GB PAC, Restore Britain public launch material, the New Statesman report on Robert Jenrick, the Government retained EU law dashboard, the retained EU law dataset, the Commons Library briefing on the REUL Act, legislation.gov.uk for the REUL Act, legislation.gov.uk for the Public Bodies Act 2011, UK Parliament’s Public Bodies Bill page, Cabinet Office post-legislative scrutiny, Hansard, the National Audit Office, and the Institute for Government.