EXTENSIVE powers contained in the Coronavirus Act should not have remained in force two years on from the start of the pandemic, legal experts told MPs today. 

The emergency measures were fast-tracked through Parliament after just four sitting days on March 25 2020, in order to enable public bodies to respond to the pandemic. 

Among the most controversial powers were those allowing police to detain anyone “potentially infectious,” suspending mental health and social care safeguards as well as the postponement of local elections. 

MPs have been required to vote every six months on the renewal of the Act, which is set to automatically expire in March, two years since it came into force. 

But MPs heard today that this was too long for the sweeping powers to have remained in place. 

Giving evidence to an MPs inquiry into the Coronavirus Act today, Hansard Society director Dr Ruth Fox said the legislation should have been given “six months to a year at most.” 

Dr Fox said the 90-minute window given to MPs to debate and vote to renew the legislation every six months was “arguably inadequate” and “diluted member scrutiny.”
 
Ronan Comaicane, a senior research fellow at the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law, said the government should no longer rely on emergency laws but use “ordinary laws to regulate the pandemic.”

“At the start we were reactive and we had to be, but now we’re two years on and we’re still using urgent procedures. We’re still making legislation signed at 1am, coming into force at 4am the same day. 

“I don’t think that is acceptable anymore — there needs to be more forward planning.”

The impact of rushing the legislative process “means we have a huge mass of legislation which is indecipherable,” he added. 

“Speaking as someone who has written many of these regulations, I don’t know how anyone else could possibly understand them.”

Civil liberties groups have long been campaigning for the act to be repealed, branding it the “greatest limitation on liberty in a generation.”

But MPs were warned on Tuesday that a provision in the Act to extend it beyond two years allows the government to “continue the Covid Act indefinitely providing it has a vote every six months.”