Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill

Debate between Lord Norton of Louth and Lord Hope of Craighead

Committee stage
Tuesday 25th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Norton of Louth]

My Lords, I shall also speak to my other two amendments in this group. The amendments would ensure that the ouster provisions in the clause did not apply to the purported exercise of the powers to dissolve Parliament contained in Clause 2. There are two principal arguments that I wish to develop in support of the amendments. The first is that they are necessary to give effect to the Government’s intention that the Bill restore the status quo ante. The second is that including the “purported” exercise of powers within the clause is objectionable in principle.

The purpose of the Bill is to restore the position to what it was before the 2011 Act was enacted. As paragraph 23 of the Explanatory Notes concedes, the purpose of Clause 3(c) is

“to address the distinction drawn by the Supreme Court … as regards the court’s role in reviewing the scope of a prerogative power, as opposed to its exercise.”

As the Law Society of Scotland pointed out in its helpful briefing note, that takes us further than the pre-2011 status quo ante. It considers that extending the clause to the purported exercise of the Clause 2 powers, or a purported decision in relation to those powers, may go beyond the bounds of the previous law as expressed in the 1985 case of Council of Civil Service Unions v Minister for the Civil Service. As the note goes on to say:

“We take the view that the inclusion of ‘purported’ appears to be designed to address the decision in R (on the application of Privacy International) v Investigatory Powers Tribunal and others … where the absence of the word ‘purported” was treated as significant by some of the judges.”


Either the Bill restores the status quo ante or it does not. If the Government are to be consistent and achieve the situation as it existed prior to September 2011, the references to the “purported exercise” and “purported decision” of powers under Clause 2 need to be removed from the Bill.

The second and fundamental objection is one of principle. The use of “purported” means that the exercise might be beyond the power vested in Ministers. I am not in favour of Ministers having the capacity without it being open to challenge in the courts. The Minister in the Commons, Chloe Smith, said that the clause provided

“an opportunity to Parliament to be absolutely clear on whether it thinks that such things should be outside the jurisdiction of the courts.”

She went on to say that

“the check on the exercise of power is for the electorate to decide on rather than the courts.”—[Official Report, Commons, 13/9/21; col. 723.]

“Purported” decisions might conflict with the rule of law. The Minister in the other place was effectively saying that it was not for the courts to determine whether Ministers were acting beyond their powers. I do not think that the letter from my noble friend Lord True really engaged with that point.

It is important to stress that the clause should not be viewed as an attempt to restrict the courts from encroaching on the position of Parliament. That might be how Ministers wish to convey it, but the senior courts have been exercised by the use of powers by Ministers, not by Parliament. Indeed, the most recent high-profile cases that appear to have motivated the Government to use this wording were ones in which the courts sought to protect, not undermine, the position of Parliament in relation to the Executive. In this clause, the Government seek to confer on Ministers wide-ranging powers in a way that I consider dangerous.

The wording of the clause might also be counterproductive. There is no evidence that the courts would want to encroach on the exercise of the prerogative in dissolving Parliament and calling an election.

With these amendments, we are also discussing whether Clause 3 should stand part of the Bill. My contention is that if there is an ouster clause, it needs to be true to the purpose of the Bill, which is to restore the position to what it was before 2011, and that it should omit provisions—in this case reference to “purported exercise” and “purported decision”—that are constitutionally objectionable. If the Government persist in wishing to retain such wording, that serves to reinforce the case for removing the clause. I beg to move.

[Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)]

My Lords, I added my name to the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, and to join the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, in seeking to remove Clause 3 from the Bill. I agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Norton, said in both respects. He dealt with the point that the provisions he seeks to remove from the Bill are unnecessary and objectionable in principle. I will say a few words in support of what he said.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Norton, I cannot help feeling that references to “purported exercise” and what we see in Clause 3(c) are a reaction against, or motivated by, as the noble Lord said, the decision of the Supreme Court in Miller II, although that case was about Prorogation, not Dissolution. There is a very clear distinction between the two, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, said at an earlier stage in our debates. It is also very important to bear in mind that the court in Miller made it absolutely clear that it saw its function as being to serve the interests of Parliament against the Executive. It sought to ensure that the Government did not use the power of Prorogation to prevent Parliament carrying out its proper functions, including holding the Executive to account.

We have here a remarkable paradox. On the one hand, the court saw itself as under a duty to preserve parliamentary democracy against actions taken by the Executive. On the other hand, Parliament is being used here by the Executive to deprive the court of that power. I stress that because ouster clauses may seem to be a matter of concern only to lawyers, but that is not so in this context: their use here should be a matter of concern to all of us in this House who value the part that Parliament plays in our democracy.

Scotland Bill

Debate between Lord Norton of Louth and Lord Hope of Craighead

Tuesday 8th December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)]

My Lords, I do not want to take up any more time on this issue. However, I remind the noble Lord, Lord Dunlop, that when I followed the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, at Second Reading I asked him a question. The question was whether, having regard to what we see in the Bill, he felt that the Scottish Parliament was able to cope with the additional powers that we are passing to it. Of course it is a matter for that Parliament to work its own procedures; I absolutely understand that. However, we do have an interest, since we are devolving these additional powers. It would be very unfortunate if the Parliament as presently constructed, and designed for a totally different situation, was so overloaded that it could not fulfil its function.

[Lord Norton of Louth (Con)]

My Lords, for similar reasons, I will keep my comments brief, not least since I see that the target is to reach Amendment 42 this evening.

There is general agreement that the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, has done us a service, because he has identified a problem. The question is how we address that problem, and there are two facets to it. One is how to ensure that there is a review of the present Chamber, but the problem has also been identified as to how, as responsibilities grow, it is going to cope with the demands made on it.

Scotland Bill

Debate between Lord Norton of Louth and Lord Hope of Craighead

Tuesday 24th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Norton of Louth (Con)]

My Lords, for the past 18 years, we have seen significant measures of constitutional change enacted on an almost unprecedented scale. For most of those 18 years I have drawn attention to the fact that the measures have been disparate and, crucially, discrete. There has been no attempt to locate them within an intellectually coherent approach to constitutional change. They derive from no clear view of the constitution as a constitution. The constitution of the United Kingdom is being fundamentally altered without any attempt to stand back and make sense of where we are going.

We have before us just one of many measures of major constitutional importance, but one that, as the report of the Constitution Committee puts it, devolves powers,

“in a reactive and ad hoc way”.

I declare an interest as a member of the committee. The Bill derives from what the committee identified as a “disjointed approach”. We have a Bill that is rushed and coheres with no clear view of constitutional change. Perhaps when my noble friend the Minister comes to reply to the debate he will explain what, precisely, is the intellectually coherent approach to constitutional change taken by the Government.

The report of the Constitution Committee draws out the problems with the Bill’s constitutional implications. I wish to pursue problems associated with Clauses 1 and 2 that build on and go beyond the committee’s report.

There is a problem with the first two clauses, in terms of not only the basic issues they raise regarding parliamentary sovereignty but the very purpose of legislating. They have been drawn up in the face of the Government’s own guidance on drafting legislation. I quote paragraph 10.9 of the Cabinet Office Guide to Making Legislation, published in July, which states:

“Finally, when writing instructions it is important to keep in mind the general rule that a bill should only contain legislative propositions. These are propositions that change the law—they bring about a legal state of affairs that would not exist apart from the bill. It can sometimes be tempting to ask the drafter to prepare a provision that is not intended to change the law but is instead designed to serve some political purpose or to explain or emphasise an existing law. However, non-legislative provisions of this sort are likely to go wrong because the courts will be inclined to attribute legal effect to them on the grounds that Parliament does not legislate unnecessarily—and the legal effect attributed may be one the Government could not have predicted”.

The Scottish Parliament is already permanent under the terms of the Scotland Act; it remains in being unless this Parliament legislates otherwise. New subsections (1) and (2), introduced by Clause 1, do not make it any more permanent than it already is. Under the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty, this Parliament could legislate to suspend or abolish the Scottish Parliament. One could provide, as new subsection (3) does, for a referendum to be held before it is abolished, but this Parliament could legislate to remove this provision. The purpose of new subsections (1) and (2) is therefore not clear; they add nothing unless they seek to create some body of higher law and thus conflict with what has been termed the cornerstone of the British constitution.

[Lord Hope of Craighead]

I am fascinated by what the noble Lord is saying, but the problem is that the Smith agreement was to create these undertakings in law. The difficulty I have is how you can reconcile that proposal with the memorandum that has been quoted, and then provide a formula that the courts can adjudicate on. I find that extremely difficult, but one cannot slide round it by saying that this is simply a political exercise.

[Lord Norton of Louth]

I agree with the noble and learned Lord. It puts us in a very difficult situation because there is a commitment to it, but it creates problems by being embodied in the Bill. It raises a problem that should not be there and should perhaps not have been made in the first place, because the Smith commission’s recommendation falls outside the commission’s terms of reference.

Clause 2 is a novel provision. There are precedents for transposing a convention of the constitution into statute, but once it is in statute the convention ceases to exist. The most recent example of this replaces the convention that a Government who lose a vote of confidence in the House of Commons either resign or request a Dissolution with Section 2 of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011. The Act provides legal certainty. It was amended in your Lordships’ House to ensure that it did so.

Clause 2 does not transpose the Sewel convention into statute. It simply states the convention. The convention does not cease to exist. We thus have the convention and we have statute. The flexibility inherent in conventions is not displaced by the certainty of a statute. This creates uncertainty in a way that has not existed when conventions have given way to legal certainty before. Conventions are not enforceable in the courts. What we have here is a statutory provision. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, said, it is not immune from being challenged in the courts. It may never be challenged, but there is no immunity. Will my noble friend the Minister therefore explain why these provisions are in the Bill? How does he justify them, given the Government’s very clear guidance on the purpose of legislating?

The Constitution Committee’s report makes a compelling case for standing back and making sense of where we are. Some may see that as justifying the case for a constitutional convention, as we have heard. I do not. I fear that a convention may rush and produce skewed recommendations. I have argued for a different type of body—one that looks at how the changes we have undertaken, or are undertaking, fit together and how the basic principles underpinning our constitution are maintained. The more that Bills such as this come before us, the more the need for such a body becomes urgent. Does my noble friend the Minister agree that the time has come for us to take stock of where we are, and, if not, why not?