Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts

Tuesday 10th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Norton of Louth]

My Lords, I had not planned to speak on this but, reflecting on what has been said, I am rather torn. I accept the logic of what the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, has said—I think that the argument he has advanced is impeccable—but I am reflecting on the value of the sessional cut-off, keeping it to a year, as has been advocated. It is quite right that the sessional cut-off is a discipline on the Government and it gives some leverage to the Opposition—capital “O”, and sometimes small “o”—because of the pressure. I am not sure that compression within one year as the length of the Session necessarily benefits Parliament, because legislation has to be got through in that time and it limits the two Houses in the amount of time they can devote to deliberation in Committee. In the Commons, there is a problem now with Public Bill Committees, because there is very little time between taking evidence and having then to consider the Bill in the normal way.

I am just reflecting on the fact that, while I accept the logic of what the noble Lord has said, maybe we need to think a little more imaginatively about how long each Session actually lasts. In a five-year Parliament, maybe we should think about a three or four-Session Parliament. There needs to be some discipline, but one has to try to get the balance on that right. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, because he has prompted me to think about that. We perhaps ought to reflect a little more seriously about it; there is a problem with the nature of rushed legislation of this sort, when perhaps we should be sitting back and thinking a little more constructively about how we want our Parliament to be run to the benefit of Parliament. As I say, there is that balance to be met between giving leverage to the Opposition and benefiting Parliament so that it has proper time to thoroughly scrutinise what the Government are bringing forward.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

I suppose we could do what the Scottish Parliament does, which is to have no sub-division into annual Sessions within a four-year term—apparently shortly to be a five-year term in the Scottish Parliament. I think that we should either go the whole way in abolishing parliamentary Sessions and having some kind of continuing, rolling process of legislation, or have a rational, predictable, orderly division of the time available in a Parliament.

The amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Grocott should not be necessary. It is clearly undesirable to legislate on internal proceedings in Parliament, but we have been driven to it by the behaviour of the coalition Government in awarding themselves a two-year Session in which they should have been able to get anything at all through. Their potential abuse of parliamentary strength has been mitigated only by their incompetence in failing to take advantage of the situation that they created for themselves. In the early months of this Session, we had almost no legislation introduced; we then had an immense amount of time spent on constitutional legislation, which the public did not want, culminating in the fiasco of the AV referendum. We now have the pause in the NHS legislation. I am given to understand that there are going to be new Bills introduced at Second Reading this summer, so that even with a two-year Session, they may run out of time to complete their programme; it really is pretty chaotic.

My noble friend does the House, and indeed Parliament, a service in drawing attention to this consideration. While I would not wish to see his amendment get on to the statute book, he very properly challenges the Government to think carefully about how they handle proceedings within this House. I do not want a written constitution but I want respect for the unwritten constitution.

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, for affording the House a further opportunity to consider and scrutinise this point, which, as has been indicated, he first raised in Committee. At that point I indicated that the two-year Session that we are currently in was intended as a transitional situation so that we could get into a position where we had 12-month parliamentary Sessions that fitted in, should Parliament pass a fixed-term Parliament Act.

I draw your Lordships’ attention to the Written Ministerial Statement made by my right honourable friend the Leader of the other place, Sir George Young, on 23 March. He reiterated the Government’s decision to extend the current Session of Parliament to spring 2012,

“in order to ensure a smooth transition towards five, 12-month Sessions over a Parliament, which would be a beneficial consequence of Parliament agreeing the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill”.—[Official Report, Commons, 23/3/11; col. 57WS.]

I hope that the House and the noble Lord will be assured that it is our intention that there should normally be five Sessions in a five-year Parliament. While the expectation is that future Sessions will last for 12 months, it remains inappropriate to enshrine that in statute; indeed, I think that I understood the noble Lord himself to indicate that he would prefer that working practices and conventions were not enshrined in statute. It is our intention that in future Parliaments there should be five 12-month Sessions.

In the Bill we have sought to do only what is necessary to establish fixed-term Parliaments for the United Kingdom. I am not convinced that the case has been made for legislating for the number of Sessions. The Bill does not abolish the prerogative power to prorogue Parliament, which will continue to be used to set parliamentary Sessions, nor does the Bill affect the powers of each House to adjourn. It is worth noting that the Constitution Committee has endorsed our decision not to abolish the prerogative power to prorogue.

Future Sessions after this one will last for only 12 months. The noble Lord asked me about the points that I made in Committee. When I talked about truncating this Session, that was on the basis that, as he acknowledged, when elections have been held in May or June it has been customary for that first Session to continue through to the following October or November. To have had a Queen’s Speech around now would therefore have meant truncating what had been expected at the outset.

I have made it clear that the decision to go for two years and thereafter to have 12-monthly Sessions was taken not in May last year but at a later stage. I am not aware that there was any consultation—I accept that criticism—but this was intended to be a transitional measure. By that stage, the Government’s legislative programme had been announced and it would have been very difficult if we had moved immediately to a 12-month Session for the first Session, although that could have been done if it had been thought about at the outset. I hope that the House will accept that that is the purpose of this being a two-year Session. It is not intended that this should be repeated. My right honourable friend the Leader of the other place has indicated that it would now be our intention to move to five 12-month Sessions in a Parliament.

I take the point made by my noble friend Lord Norton about this always being in the interests of Parliament. My experience in your Lordships’ House in the run-up to the most recent general election is that, with the final Session starting in November and finishing in March in order to accommodate a May election, we have tended to have a short Session that I do not believe allows proper scrutiny of legislation. This led to a very unfortunate situation in the wash-up where large parts of Bills were ditched, some of which are now on the statute book but certainly did not have the kind of scrutiny that we would normally expect. Having five 12-month Sessions will allow for proper planning of legislation. While it would be unwise to say that there will never be any kind of wash-up at the end of the final Session, one hopes that there will be far less than has been the case hitherto. One of the advantages of a fixed-term Parliament is that it will be possible to plan a legislative programme in a way that will not lead to these log-jams at the end, when much legislation is virtually nodded through.

The decision having been taken to move to fixed-term Parliaments, and since we seem—for better or worse—to have moved into a situation where elections are held in May, the Bill provides for elections in May. Therefore, it makes sense that we should have annual May-to-May Sessions. I repeat: the current two-year Session is a transition. No doubt what we gain here is that there is only a finite amount of legislative time in the Parliament as a whole if it lasts for five years. It would not be appropriate to put that in the statute. I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving me an opportunity to reiterate the position and to flag up what my right honourable friend the Leader of the other place has said on this matter. With these reassurances, I hope the noble Lord will be prepared to withdraw his amendment.