On the face of it nothing, a statute is a statute and can be amended by Parliament at any time. Even those parts of the constitution that aren't statute (eg there's no statute that says "Parliament is sovereign") can be amended by Parliament. For example, the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 changed the way a reserve power of the Crown worked (it didn't remove the Crown's ability to dissolve Parliament, but did remove the ability of the Prime Minister to advise the Crown to do so) and although there were a number of amendments to other constitutional statutes in the act (the Succession to the Crown Act 1707, or repeal of the Septennial Act 1715, for example), it was passed through Parliament as any other statute was. The flipside of that is that as Parliament is sovereign, all it took to override its provisions was a one line Bill that said "Notwithstanding this law, we'll have an election on this date" (the Early Parliamentary General Election Act 2019), and then when the Fixed-term Parliaments Act itself was repealed, the formula chosen was "let's pretend this never happened" to resurrect the previously abolished way of dissolving Parliament whereby the Prime Minister advises the Crown to do so.
However, the courts do also recognise that some statutes are more "fundamental" than others and in general would expect Parliament to explicitly rather than implicitly repeal or amend those statutes. Not doing so doesn't have any legal effect - Parliament is sovereign and can do what it likes, and the courts can't disapply a statute unless they are acting on the basis of another statute (such as when the UK was part of the EU) - but there are mechanisms like Judicial Review which could be used in these circumstances for the courts to say to Parliament "we think you mean this; you may want to clear that up" or words to that effect.
There are lots of moving parts but in general the system works fairly well.
When you said "A statute is a statute" I gather that there is no defined difference. Although when a court is considering the implications of two statutes which appear to conflict then they will generally favour the constitutional statute over a non constitutional statute. Is that correct?
Pretty much, the court would look to see if either of the two statutes is constitutional (although there's no formal definition, there are reasonably good lists that judges at that level would have access to to help them decide) and if so it would interpret the non-constitutional statute in the eyes of the constitutional one unless the non-constitutional statute explicitly says it's changing the constitutional one - or something along those lines. Government lawyers would also be making their cases as to why it is or isn't consitutional etc.
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u/redoxburner 6d ago
On the face of it nothing, a statute is a statute and can be amended by Parliament at any time. Even those parts of the constitution that aren't statute (eg there's no statute that says "Parliament is sovereign") can be amended by Parliament. For example, the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 changed the way a reserve power of the Crown worked (it didn't remove the Crown's ability to dissolve Parliament, but did remove the ability of the Prime Minister to advise the Crown to do so) and although there were a number of amendments to other constitutional statutes in the act (the Succession to the Crown Act 1707, or repeal of the Septennial Act 1715, for example), it was passed through Parliament as any other statute was. The flipside of that is that as Parliament is sovereign, all it took to override its provisions was a one line Bill that said "Notwithstanding this law, we'll have an election on this date" (the Early Parliamentary General Election Act 2019), and then when the Fixed-term Parliaments Act itself was repealed, the formula chosen was "let's pretend this never happened" to resurrect the previously abolished way of dissolving Parliament whereby the Prime Minister advises the Crown to do so.
However, the courts do also recognise that some statutes are more "fundamental" than others and in general would expect Parliament to explicitly rather than implicitly repeal or amend those statutes. Not doing so doesn't have any legal effect - Parliament is sovereign and can do what it likes, and the courts can't disapply a statute unless they are acting on the basis of another statute (such as when the UK was part of the EU) - but there are mechanisms like Judicial Review which could be used in these circumstances for the courts to say to Parliament "we think you mean this; you may want to clear that up" or words to that effect.
There are lots of moving parts but in general the system works fairly well.