Why Parental Leave Changed in Eleven Months
A parental leave reform moved from idea to law in under a year. Eleanor asks what was different, from a ready-made evidence base to a budget window, with a former deputy minister and a payroll officer…
The Plastic Bag Ban, Draft One to Draft Nine
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Show notes
The Plastic Bag Ban, Draft One to Draft Nine
A ban that sounds simple took three and a half years and nine drafts. Eleanor walks through each stage with a former environment department director who held the pen on four of them.
- The two page memo that started it and what a memo is actually for
- Why the options paper listed four choices and recommended none of them
- The regulatory impact statement: what gets costed and what does not
- Sixty days of consultation and the three changes it produced
- The gap between a cabinet decision and a regulation in force
Next episode: a parental leave change that moved faster, and the reason it could.
Transcript
Hello and welcome to From Memo to Law. I am Eleanor Whitcombe, and for fourteen years I wrote the kind of documents we are going to open up on this show. Today we follow a single-use plastics ban, which sounds like the simplest policy in the world. You decide bags are bad, you ban bags. In practice it took three and a half years and nine drafts, and by the end the thing that passed was quite different from the thing that was proposed. I am joined by a former director who held the pen on four of those drafts, and she is going to explain what an options paper really is, why it never recommends anything, and what sixty days of consultation changed. No scoring, no sides, just the machinery. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.
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