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What we found: laws passed, then left switched off

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Almost 1 in 4 Acts passed since 2010 still had parts not in force five years after becoming law.

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Once a law stalls, it stays stalled: 58 of 79 stuck Acts haven't had a single new switch-on order in five years.
Starter Homes: 200,000 promised in 2015, a law passed in 2016, none built, and those sections never switched on.
The care cap: passed in 2014, never switched on, still on the books.
The government doesn't publish a regular list of laws left switched off. So we made one.

Bar and line chart of UK Acts of Parliament by year passed, 2010 to 2025. Between 23 and 57 Acts were passed each year. For each year from 2010 to 2021, between 4 and 11 Acts still had parts not in force five years after Royal Assent, peaking at 11 for 2016. Dark bars show Acts with parts still not in force today, including 18 of the 57 Acts passed in 2023. — Acts passed each year, and how many still have parts never switched on. Source: legislation.gov.uk data, MatrixReHashed.Com analysis, 9 Oct 2026. Open the full-size chart See the chart

Explore the detail

What we counted: all 544 UK Public General Acts passed from 2010 to 2025, using legislation.gov.uk's open data. A "part" is a section or schedule paragraph. "Not in force" means legislation.gov.uk marks it as never in force and its text is still on the statute book.
The five-year measure: 369 Acts passed from January 2010 to October 2021 have reached their fifth anniversary (consolidation Acts excluded). 88 of them (24%) still had at least one part not in force at that point.
Stuck Acts: 79 Acts at least five years old still have parts not in force. For 58 of them, no new commencement (switch-on) order has been made since 9 October 2021, and 11 of those have never had one.
By size: most Acts are switched on in full. Of 58,925 live provisions, 2,433 (4.1%) have never come into force and 2,194 (3.7%) are only partly in force.
Starter Homes: the 2015 Conservative manifesto pledged 200,000 Starter Homes for first-time buyers under 40. The Housing and Planning Act 2016 set up the scheme, but its Starter Homes sections were never switched on. The National Audit Office reported on 5 November 2019: "No Starter Homes have been built to date."
Repealed or expired without starting: counted separately, not as "not in force". 435 provisions in 29 Acts were repealed or expired without ever being switched on, so the five-year figures are conservative.
No official list: the last full official list of Acts not yet in force was a one-off in 1997.
Caveats: a snapshot as of 9 Oct 2026, and legislation.gov.uk has not yet applied some commencement updates to 29 Acts. A one-line amendment counts the same as a whole scheme. Some gaps are deliberate (emergency backstops, schemes replaced by later laws). Consolidation Acts, which carry over older uncommenced changes, are left out of the headline figures; the chart includes the Sentencing Act 2020.

Explorer Pointers: legislation.gov.uk: UK Public General Acts (opens in new tab) · Housing and Planning Act 2016 (Starter Homes, Part 1) (opens in new tab) · NAO, Investigation into Starter Homes (5 Nov 2019) (opens in new tab) · Conservative Party Manifesto 2015 (Starter Homes pledge) (opens in new tab) · Care Act 2014 (opens in new tab) · The register: every Act with parts not in force (our data, free CSV) · Care Act 2014, section 15 (the cap on care costs) (opens in new tab) · Hansard (Lords), 2 July 1997: the first official list of Acts not in force (Cm 3595, Acts of 1979 to 1992) (opens in new tab)

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