Parliamentary Proceedings: Statistics

Lord Butler of Brockwell Excerpts

Wednesday 18th January 2017 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Butler of Brockwell]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are planning to take to include statistics on the time spent on parliamentary proceedings on each Part of an Act in the Explanatory Notes on Acts of Parliament.

[Lord Butler of Brockwell (CB)]

My Lords, I start by confessing that behind this dry request to the Government for statistics lies an ulterior motive. However, it is one that should commend itself to all true parliamentarians. The suggestion in the Question is one I owe to Daniel Greenberg, a former parliamentary counsel and a campaigner for high legislative standards. I declare a personal interest as a member of the executive committee of the Better Government Initiative. I am very grateful to the most distinguished galère of participants for giving up their dinner to take part in this short debate, which I attribute to the general issue of the importance of our parliamentary legislative processes—particularly relevant as we approach the challenges of Brexit.

Making law is central to our job as parliamentarians, but it is not a job that the Executive always helps Parliament to do well, although I think we all feel that the House of Lords does it more thoroughly than the House of Commons. Even so, the results are not reassuring. There is a widespread feeling that, under pressure from the Executive, Parliament makes too much law. To give one illustration, in 2010, legislation covering 2,700 pages was added to the statute book. This was more than three times the amount of legislation passed 50 years before. That takes no account of all the guidance and other notes issued to specify the application of such legislation.

So much of this legislation is unsatisfactory. Some time ago I asked a Question about how many Acts passed by Parliament between 2005 and 2010 had never been brought into effect. The answer was that part or all of 77 Acts passed by 15 departments had never been brought into effect, despite being passed by Parliament. They had been found to be impracticable or had been overtaken by second thoughts.

It should be the job of Parliament to prevent or improve such defective legislation, but in truth Parliament is overwhelmed. Your Lordships’ House does its best, but one sometimes feels that, with the introduction of programme orders and family friendly hours, the House of Commons has virtually given up. To take one particularly flagrant example, the Finance Act 2005 contains 106 sections and 11 schedules, covering 202 pages of legislation relating to income and corporation tax, trusts, film relief, stamp duty and various anti-avoidance measures. It was passed by the House of Commons in four hours and two minutes of one day and by the House of Lords in 40 minutes on the following day. Admittedly, this was in the rush before a Dissolution, but that is surely no excuse for allowing complicated legislation, affecting the lives of citizens, to pass with such blithe lack of detailed scrutiny.

To take another more recent example, the Immigration Bill in the last Session started in the Commons with 56 clauses, eight schedules and 107 pages. It left the Commons with 65 clauses, 12 schedules and 168 pages. When the guillotine fell at the end of Report, eight new clauses, one new schedule and 10 amendments were added to the Bill with no debate whatever.

There are honourable exceptions. I have spoken in this House of my admiration of the process to which the then Investigatory Powers Bill was subjected. This included three reports by independent bodies, pre-legislative scrutiny of a draft Bill, and many hours of detailed scrutiny in the Lords and Commons. But that was the exception.

This Question asks whether the Government, when publishing—as they do—Explanatory Notes on Acts of Parliament after they are passed, will include the parliamentary time spent by each House of Parliament on each part of the Bill. These post Royal Assent notes already include a schedule of Hansard references for the different stages of the Bill, and, as we know, Hansard shows the times at which debates start and conclude. This information is readily available. The House of Commons already publishes such information for each Bill in its sessional returns, but that information is lost in a plethora of other information. The House of Lords’ statistics on business and membership include time spent on the various stages of Bills, but in aggregate, not for individual Bills.

The Cabinet Office recently introduced a new format for these Explanatory Notes, intended to be simpler and easier to navigate, but that format does not include the time spent on each stage of parliamentary proceedings. It can be easily added. I should also like the information to include new provisions added during each Bill’s process without debate.

I repeat that this is purely factual information, already gathered and easily available. The purpose of publishing it is, of course, to bring to light where parliamentary scrutiny has been inadequate and, by doing so, to encourage more effective procedures. I believe that neither government nor Parliament would want it to be shown that legislation had been passed by Parliament with ineffective scrutiny. If the result was that more parliamentary time was given to a smaller volume of legislation, that would be no bad thing.

This is only one small contribution to improving parliamentary scrutiny of legislation, on which I am delighted that the Constitution Committee of your Lordships’ House is currently conducting a major inquiry. It is practicable and a virtually costless change simply in the method of publication of material already collected.

I find it difficult to envisage how the Government could refuse a request to publish this readily available information in this more convenient form. I suppose that I could always get it by putting down a Parliamentary Question after every Act received Royal Assent, but that would give everybody more trouble and I hope that I will not have to.