What is the impact and significance of Pepper v Hart?

Answer 1

Before Pepper, it was impossible to use Parliamentary discussions as evidence in court cases; William Blackstone wrote in the 18th century that to allow judicial review of "unreasonable" legislation was to "set the judicial power above that of the legislature, which would be subversive of all government".[22]Historically, the courts had been more lenient; while this suggestion first appears in the 14th century, with the intention that legislation was best interpreted by those who had written it, the principle was not strongly followed. In the 1678 case of Ash v Abdy,[nb 1]Lord Nottinghamchose to refer to the parliamentary history of the Statute of Frauds, and in Millar v Taylor,[nb 2] in 1769, the first case to explicitly state this principle (as "The sense and meaning of an Act of Parliament must be collected from what it says when passed into law, and not from the history of changes it underwent in the House where it took its rise"),[23]the court chose to depart from it.[24]The principle was most used during the 19th and 20th centuries, with a noted example being Beswick v Beswick,[nb 3] where Lord Reid maintained that it would be inconvenient and expensive for lawyers to have to refer to Hansard when preparing cases.[25]Both the English and Scottish Law Commissions agreed with the rule in their 1969 Report on the Interpretation of Statutes.