Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill

Debate between Julian Lewis and Cat Smith

2nd reading
Tuesday 6th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)]

I begin by saying how lovely it is to see the Minister for the Constitution and Devolution, the hon. Member for Norwich North (Chloe Smith), back on the Front Bench after her absence, how well she is looking, and—without wishing the entire debate away—how much we are looking forward to her contribution at the end of this Second Reading debate.

As the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster said, the Bill seeks to do two things: it repeals the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 and it reinstates the status quo before that Act came into force. Effectively, it is turning back time. It is on those two points that I shall focus my remarks.

I suspect that we shall have quite a lot of debate today about whether the Fixed-term Parliaments Act worked. The Minister has set out clearly that he believes that it did not, but I believe there is an equally valid argument that aspects of it did work, although of course it was not without its pitfalls and flaws. The best example was the 2015 general election, which took place five years after the 2010 general election. It worked in the sense of holding the coalition Government to that timetable. However, I would argue that we could also say that the 2017 general election proves that the Act worked, because there were clauses within it for having an early election and those were gone through in the 2017 election.

The debate about whether the Act works probably centres around whether the 2017 to 2019 Parliament worked. That probably highlights the flaws in the Act. The fact that the Act said the Prime Minister could control the date of the election was, I would argue, one of the main sticking points of the Act, because at that point the Opposition felt the Prime Minister might abuse the Act to leave the European Union with no deal. Therefore, the Act was not without flaw.

There are also the issues around confidence motions and the questions that they raise. I think that will probably be explored in quite a lot of detail.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

I concede the hon. Member’s point that the Act did work as far as holding the coalition together until 2015 was concerned, but it did not work in 2017. If it had not been for the fact that the Scottish nationalists and the Liberal Democrats, for political reasons of their own, decided to allow the Dissolution, that stasis could have gone on for months, or years longer than it did. The Parliament would have been paralysed endlessly until the end of the five years. That cannot be right, surely.

[Cat Smith]

I will let other parties answer for their own actions. I certainly do not seek to speak for them. I think it would be a misinterpretation to say that the Act was purely for the purpose of holding the coalition together. I think that was a huge reason for support in certain parts of the then Government, but actually it was an idea that had been batted around in politics long before then. Indeed, I believe it had been a matter for various private Members’ Bills before the coalition Government came into office. It was certainly not an idea that was just thought up to hold the coalition together.