Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill

Lord Grocott Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 30th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, the House might allow me to mention that, in June 2014, a Labour Back-Bencher introduced the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 (Repeal) Bill. I happen to have a copy of it with me here. Modesty prevents me mentioning the name of the person who introduced the Bill, but it got nowhere; the Government ignored it. Had they not, we would have saved ourselves an awful lot of time and trouble. At least this allows me to deploy my favourite parliamentary phrase: “I told you so”. The intentions of the Bill before us are clear: first, to scrap the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 and, secondly, to return to the system of dissolving Parliament which existed prior to the Act. I very much agree with the first objective, but some significant improvement is needed to the second.

The Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 was a bad piece of legislation. It was a major constitutional Bill presented in haste, with no attempt at reaching consensus and no pre-legislative scrutiny. Perhaps most damning of all, the Bill was drafted in cynicism between two political parties, the Tories and the Liberal Democrats, that did not trust each other and wanted a mechanism that would keep them in office for a full five-year term. David Laws, in his book 22 Days in May, says it all:

“William Hague and George Osborne indicated that we needed a mechanism to build confidence in each other … That pointed to fixed-term parliaments”.


So much for David Cameron’s quote that it was a major transfer of power from the Government to the legislature. I was amazed that the noble Lord, Lord Newby, quoted that approvingly when, quite clearly and unarguably, the whole purpose of the Bill was to guarantee the Executive a five-year term. That is no way to make constitutional change. I would like to hear from the Minister on this; perhaps he could apologise on behalf of the Conservative Government at the time that this Bill was ever introduced, and say that no major constitutional change will be introduced without full cross-party debate and pre-legislative scrutiny as long as this Government are in office.

The 2011 Act led to serious damage to the way in which our democracy works. This was particularly evident during what I can describe only as the poisonous Parliament between 2017 and 2019. There were at least two deeply damaging episodes for which the Act was directly responsible. The first was in January 2019 when we had the first of the so-called meaningful votes on Brexit. The Government lost that vote by 432 votes to 203, with a majority against them of over 220. Prior to the Fixed-term Parliaments Act and the conventions that existed at the time, there is no conceivable way that a Government could have survived a defeat like that without either an immediate vote of confidence or by calling a general election.

An even more damaging consequence of the Act was in autumn 2019. This was when the Government had unarguably lost the confidence of the Commons, again on their European policy. Three times they tried to call an election to settle the matter and three times failed to achieve the two-thirds majority required by the Act. This meant that in our cherished parliamentary democracy, whose foundational building block is that Governments govern on the basis of the confidence of Parliament, we faced a situation in which a Government remained in office despite clearly having lost Parliament’s confidence. They could not pass their legislation nor enable the British people to vote in a general election. No wonder it is such a discredited Parliament.

What should we put in the Act’s place? I was privileged to be a member of the Joint Committee that examined the current Bill. There were two related issues that we must have spent half our time discussing. The first concerned the role of the monarch and the need to keep the Queen out of politics. The second was about the so-called Dissolution principles. These issues are fundamental to our democracy. They are, after all, questions about the circumstances in which the British people can exercise their most fundamental democratic right—the right to vote.

The Government’s answer to these questions is, on the surface, a very simple one. It is to return to the system exactly as it was before the Fixed-term Parliaments Act. This meant that, apart from in a very restricted number of conventions, a general election could take place whenever a Prime Minister requested that the monarch dissolve Parliament. But herein lies the rub: as we know, a request, as opposed to advice, from a Prime Minister means that the monarch still has discretion about whether to accept the request. Then inevitably you hit a serious problem. If you consider it essential to keep the monarch out of politics—I do—how on earth can you allow even the possibility of her deciding whether she can refuse a request from a Prime Minister for a general election? Such a decision would be a major constitutional crisis. There could hardly be a more politically charged subject.

There is a solution, which has been touched on by previous speakers. In my view it is a very simple one, and it is that a general election should be held not just when a Prime Minister goes to the monarch and requests one, but when a Prime Minister goes to the monarch armed with a House of Commons resolution and advises her to hold one. Remember that, in our constitution, advice from the Prime Minister is something that the monarch would accept. This simple requirement of a majority in the Commons solves every problem at a stroke. The Government get what they want because a Prime Minister—who of course would not be Prime Minister unless he or she enjoyed the confidence of the Commons—would get the necessary majority on such a fundamental issue. There would be no need for endless debates about Dissolution principles as the authority of Parliament is the only principle that you need. The Queen is kept completely out of politics; she is simply abiding by the supreme authority of a parliamentary majority.

There are other advantages. First, a resolution of Parliament would not be challenged by the courts, so the judiciary would be kept out of politics. Secondly, we would avoid the bizarre embarrassment of the Bill as drafted, which hands back power from Parliament to the monarch. The whole history of our democracy involves the steady transfer of prerogative powers from the monarch to Parliament. This Bill effectively says, “No, we don’t want these powers so please can the hereditary monarch take them back?” By the way, if the Minister when replying says that the whole purpose of the Bill is to give the power of Dissolution back to the Prime Minister to avoid the chaos of the last Parliament, the answer is simply this: on the three occasions when Boris Johnson wanted a general election, he would have got one under my proposal because a majority of MPs said yes. It was simply the requirement of a two-thirds majority that caused the chaos.

I also say to those who object to the idea of a simple majority of government-supporting MPs being able to call an election when it suits them, they can do that already. The Early Parliamentary General Election Act 2019 did just that with a simple majority. I am suggesting a solution that keeps both the monarch and the courts out of politics. It enables a Prime Minister with a majority in the Commons to secure a general election, just as Prime Ministers have been able to do in the past. It solves at a stroke all the problems of having to define Dissolution principles. All that is needed is to include in the Bill a provision that a Dissolution will take place when the Prime Minister arrives at the palace armed with a House of Commons resolution, which would then be granted automatically. I very much hope that the Minister can see that case when he winds up, and I look forward to his reply.