Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Lord Armstrong of Ilminster Excerpts

Tuesday 1st March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Armstrong of Ilminster]

My Lords, I echo those who have expressed their pleasure at the arrival of the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, in this House and welcome him here among us. I did not have the pleasure of working with him in the other place, but I have enjoyed his friendship for a number of years and I believe that he will add greatly to the light as well as the enlightenment of our proceedings.

None of your Lordships would query the need for a statutory limit on the maximum term of a Parliament, even if there is room for disagreement on how long that maximum term should be. However, the case for a statutory fixed term seems to be much less clear. It would have been beneficial to have had much more pre-legislative scrutiny of these proposals, although that would mean that we would be talking about something else today.

If one introduces statutory provisions for fixed-term Parliaments, one immediately has to try to define, and prescribe for, the circumstances in which, despite that provision, political conditions make it necessary for there to be Dissolution before the end of the statutory fixed term. It is almost certainly impossible to define in the statute all the possible circumstances in which premature Dissolution should be permitted. As the noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall, has just reminded us, there were two elections in 1974, during both of which I was the Principal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister, first to Mr Heath and then to Mr Wilson. I have been scratching my head to think how those elections could have been fitted into the straitjacket of this Bill. Would Mr Heath have had to engineer a vote of confidence in the House of Commons by instructing a number of his members to abstain on the vote so that he lost it? Is that how Mr Wilson would have had to deal with the matter in October 1974? It is difficult to see how a situation of that kind could have been fitted into the provisions of this Bill. That suggests to me that more consideration needs to be given to this whole matter.

When a situation arises that is not covered by the statute, politicians will be obliged to devise some clever way of stretching the statute and precipitating the Dissolution of Parliament and a general election. While that process is going on, no doubt in an atmosphere of crisis, there will inevitably be doubt and uncertainty. I would be inclined to argue, therefore, that a fixed term for a Parliament is a political objective that can be considered only in the political circumstances of the time. If with a statutory fixed term in place that objective became for whatever reason unattainable, in circumstances in which the statute did not permit Dissolution, the Government would presumably have to introduce emergency legislation to override the statutory provision and take whatever time was required for that: or, conceivably, the Sovereign would have to be requested by the Prime Minister, or perhaps by Parliament, to grant Dissolution despite the legislation.

It is argued that the present system, which confers on the Prime Minister the right to request the Dissolution of Parliament at a time of his choosing, gives an incumbent Prime Minister an unfair advantage over his political opponents. As one noble Lord suggested, this is a matter as much, or more, of media speculation as of reality. In practice, the issue is rarely as simple as that. For one thing, a Prime Minister who exercised that right prematurely and purely to seek political advantage over his political opponents would run the risk of being punished by the voters for his opportunism. The exercise of the right imposes upon a Prime Minister, as I have seen, an agonising choice, in deciding upon which he puts his party's future in government and his own political career on the line. In practical terms, whether and when to exercise the right to request Dissolution must always be a very complex question. It is a lonely decision, but one that can be taken only after extensive consultation.

I recognise why it suits the present Government to create a presumption that the next general election will not be held until May 2015, but I question whether that justifies the introduction of this legislation. The objective could be just as effectively achieved by a commitment in a White Paper or even a Statement by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons that for the duration of this Parliament he will not exercise his right to request Dissolution before the end of the maximum period that he has stated unless ineluctable circumstances arising from unforeseen changes in parliamentary or political circumstances oblige him to do so.

I take some consolation in the thought that, even if this Bill is passed and this Parliament runs its full statutory course, no Parliament can bind its successors. The next Government and the next Parliament will not be bound by this statute if they do not want to be; they will be able to repeal it and revert to traditional practice. I therefore suggest to your Lordships that the question whether and, if so, when a Parliament should be dissolved before the end of its statutory maximum life should be determined pre-eminently by political process and is not really amenable to statutory provision.

If this proposal for a statutory fixed term goes forward, there is then the question of how long that term should be. I share the view expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Grocott. Experience shows that the imminence of a general election casts its shadow over government and Parliament for many months. Even with a term of five years, that shadow extends over the last year of the term and tends to reduce to no more than four years the period during which government policy-making and parliamentary debate can effectively be pursued without too much looking over the shoulder at electoral considerations. If legislation were to set a fixed term of, let us say, four years, that period would be reduced to more like three years. That would not leave enough room for sensible policy-making and good parliamentary debate before the imminence of the forthcoming election began to cast its distorting shadow. So I hope that, if this Bill becomes law, the fixed term will be five years, as is proposed in the Bill, and not some shorter term.