‘Time is the oxygen of Parliament’. So said the now Leader of the House Sir George Young MP in a speech to the Hansard Society in March, setting out his party’s agenda for parliamentary and legislative reform and the need for improvements to enable MPs to ‘undertake scrutiny in a measured and considered manner’.
But four months on, the parliamentary session ends with the Academies Bill securing Royal Assent after just one week of debate and consideration by elected members in the House of Commons. The coalition government’s approach to the timing of new bills demonstrates that MPs are not being given the time and space to undertake scrutiny in a considered manner.
Similarly, the timetabling of the new Fixed Term Parliaments and Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill is likely to mean that there is little time for effective scrutiny of these bills. Both have only just been published and will receive their second reading during the short September sitting period: as a consequence, there has been no pre-legislative scrutiny and the Political and Constitutional Reform Select Committee will not be able to conduct an effective inquiry in the limited number of days available in the interim.
Once again, it will be left to the unelected Upper House – through a Lords Constitution Committee inquiry held whilst the bill is going though its Commons stages – to secure comment and analysis from expert witnesses to inform what scrutiny of the constitutional reform bills is possible.
Despite having promised greater time for improved scrutiny, only one piece of legislation – the Parliamentary Privileges Bill – was allocated for pre-legislative scrutiny in draft form in the Queen’s Speech.
More broadly on the parliamentary reform agenda, the coalition government scores high marks for implementation of the Wright Committee reform proposals. As a result the House of Commons now has a Backbench Business Committee and the elected chairs and members of Select Committee – measures which together should go some way to empowering backbenchers and rebalancing the relationship between Parliament and the executive.
However, there has been no progress with the public engagement reforms proposed in the Wright Committee report – in particular the Procedures Committee has yet to announce what it is to do in relation to the trialling of petitions. Similarly, the coalition has yet to give any indication of how it plans to introduce a Public Reading Day into the legislative process and what form of public engagement this new procedure will take.
Speaking as the parliamentary session came to an end, Director of the Hansard Society’s Parliament and Government Programme, Ruth Fox, said of the coalition’s mixed end of term report card:
“On the positive side, its implementation of the Wright Committee reforms marks real progress that helps rebalance the relationship between Parliament and the executive. But there has been no progress with the important proposals to better link Parliament with the public, particularly through a new power of petitions, and no progress on the introduction of a new Public Reading Day.
“On the legislative side, political expediency has taken priority over Parliament’s right to properly scrutinise the executive. Good scrutiny is an essential prerequisite of good law-making and good governance. If ministers wanted legislation on the statute book by September then Parliament could have sat longer, instead it rose two days earlier than initially planned. If the coalition is to deliver on its warm reforming words in opposition then the mantra for the next parliamentary session is ‘must do better’.”
For further information, contact Virginia Gibbons, Head of Communications at the Hansard Society on mediaprog@hansard.lse.ac.uk
or 020 7438 1225 or 07812 765 552
Editor’s Notes
- The Hansard Society is the UK’s leading independent, non-partisan political research and education charity. We aim to strengthen parliamentary democracy and encourage greater public involvement in politics.