Can we identify the main source of new law in the UK?
<p>IIUC the primary sources of law in the UK are:</p>

<ul>
<li>statute (acts of Parliament)</li>
<li>delegated legislation (statutory instruments)</li>
<li>case law</li>
<li>EU law</li>
</ul>

<p>But can we pick one of those as being the main source of new laws?</p>

<p>By volume, it's almost certainly Statutory Instruments (SIs).</p>

<p>From the <a href="http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi" rel="nofollow noreferrer">relevant page on legislation.gov.uk</a>, we can see that the number since 2010 has ranged from 1241 to 3485 per year. Compare that to, say, <a href="http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Acts of Parliament</a> (23 to 41 per year in that period).</p>

<p>The EUR-Lex page has some numbers relating to EU law. For example, <a href="https://eur-lex.europa.eu/statistics/2018/legislative-acts-statistics.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">in 2018</a>, there were a total of 430 "legislative acts", and 1496 "non-legislative acts". Note that while EU Regulations become law directly in member states, EU Directives have to be implemented by domestic legislation. In the UK, this is normally done with SIs, which contribute to the numbers in the previous paragraph.</p>

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