Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Monday 18th July 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rennard]

My Lords—

[Lord Cormack]

My Lords—

[Baroness Verma]

My Lords, perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, could carry on and the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, could speak after him.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Jay of Paddington]

My Lords, the committee’s position, and certainly my personal position, is that given the inadequate processes that have produced this legislation, some form of post-legislative scrutiny was needed. I do not remember whether the noble Lord was present when the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, led the previous debate on a similar subject, but the discussion included the issue of whether there was some way not perhaps of preventing the present Government fulfilling their five-year term, which the Constitution Committee certainly thought was the primary aim of this Bill, but of giving Parliament an opportunity to think again about whether this was an appropriate way for the constitution to be changed.

[Lord Cormack]

My Lords, I wish to make a brief speech in support of the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, and to focus the House’s attention on one or two points. First, whatever our views on fixed-term Parliaments, we have debated that. The House, in its wisdom, has made its decisions and has not stood in the way of another place. We are to have a fixed-term Parliament and the next general election will take place in May 2015. That is not the issue this afternoon. However, we have also decided that it is entirely proper to seek to improve and amend what many of us consider to be an ill thought-out, unnecessary and bad Bill. That is what the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, seeks to do. I hope very much that we will support him if he decides to press his amendment to a Division, and that we will do so because we recognise the circumstances in which this Bill was produced.

This Bill is the creature of coalition. It came into being because of the coalition agreement. None of us has sought to deny the right of the Government to decide when the next general election will be. As I said, it will occur in May 2015. Attempts to bring forward that date were defeated—in my view, understandably, and probably rightly—when we sought to amend the Bill. However, because this Bill is the creature of coalition, there should be an opportunity for the next Parliament to consider whether it truly wishes to continue with this experiment. The next Parliament may well be one with a Conservative majority—I sincerely hope that it will be—but whether it has a Conservative majority or a Labour majority it is unlikely that it will be another coalition. This amendment merely gives the opportunity for the new Parliament to make its decision. Indeed, this has already been recognised on the Floor of this House by my noble friend Lord Howell of Guildford when he was dealing with the sunset clause on the European Union Bill. He pointed out that the two things were different. He said:

“As was explained in the debate”—

that is, the debate we had just had—

“one can see perfectly well why”,

our amendment had been passed. He continued:

“The coalition exists, and I hope that it continues to exist in strong fine form during this fixed-term Parliament, but after that we have a new landscape. Who knows who will govern? Who knows what the pattern will be? It made perfectly good sense for that legislation to have a limited life before coming to be re-examined”.—[Official Report, 25/5/11; col. 1861.]

My noble friend Lord Howell made a similar point when he wound up the debate on the sunset clause at Report on the European Union Bill.

We have before us the opportunity to say to the other place, “Please reflect on what you have done. Please recognise that we have not wrecked the Bill that you sent to us and that we have made no attempt to change the date of the next general election, but also recognise that what we have done is to give an opportunity for the Parliament elected in May 2015 to re-examine this matter and to decide whether, in the light of experience, it wishes to continue with fixed-term Parliaments”. We are giving that Parliament the opportunity to make that decision without burdening it with the necessity of introducing full-scale constitutional legislation at the beginning of a new Parliament if it generally desires to move away from what we have decreed.

As we know all too well, constitutional legislation takes a long time to get through Parliament. We may learn that lesson yet again in the not too distant future, so we are being exceptionally kind to the next Parliament in giving it that opportunity to ratify or nullify without long, protracted debate. Because of that, I very much hope that the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, will be listened to and heeded, and that if he decides to put this to the vote the majority will be more than six this time.