Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill

Lord Lansley Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 30th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I am very glad to follow my noble friend and like him, of necessity, I come to bury the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, not revive it. It has been a privilege to listen to so many excellent speeches this afternoon, not least the maiden speech of my noble friend Lord Leicester. As a fellow East Anglian, I too have much enjoyed visiting the Holkham estate in years past. We look forward to his contributions here as well.

As we get towards the latter stages of this debate, I have reached three hesitant conclusions for Second Reading, which should take us towards thinking about the Bill further in Committee. If the Government believed that the prerogative was in abeyance, they should simply have repealed the Fixed-term Parliaments Act. Lo and behold, the personal prerogative of the sovereign would be revived in the way that it existed previously. Clearly, they did not believe that, which is why we have the legislation in the form that it is rather than a simple repeal. Therefore, we must conclude that we are seeking to set statutory provisions around a defined personal prerogative of the sovereign. We all want the personal prerogative of the sovereign to be responsible for the Dissolution of Parliament and to be untrammelled and not interfered with, but equally we want it to be so precisely delineated that the sovereign is not drawn into political controversy as a consequence.

My reason for participating in this debate is that we looked at the question of the prerogative at length during debates on the Trade Act. The position I come to it from is this: every time Parliament comes into contact with the prerogative in statute, we should not necessarily abolish it because, as with the Trade Act, we may think it quite right for there to be an executive responsibility, but we then have to make it accountable. So my second conclusion is that, here we are, putting a statute in place to govern the exercise of a prerogative—particularly the exercise of it by the Prime Minister, of course, rather than the monarch—and we should hold the Prime Minister accountable to Parliament, because that is where the authority comes from. We have to defend the sovereignty of Parliament.

Therefore, what does that accountability look like? It ought to be a simple majority of the House of Commons. We can dispense with some of the more unhelpful arguments about the Fixed-term Parliaments Act and the supermajority. We will not go back to gridlock as a consequence of that because there is no supermajority. A simple majority gets us to precisely the position that we want—namely, where a Prime Minister who has a majority in the House of Commons will get his or her way, and that should be the case. However, we also have to say that if a Prime Minister has not got a simple majority in the House of Commons, they should not necessarily get their own way. Therefore, my third conclusion is that we should put such a simple majority into the Bill.

I encourage noble Lords not to think about the last coalition, which I think history will treat more kindly than it has so far, but to think forward to the next one. Let us imagine a day when there is a coalition where the Prime Minister comes from a party that has significantly less than a majority in the House of Commons but has created a coalition. Should that Prime Minister be able to go to the palace and ask for a Dissolution without any scrutiny whatever? Would this not be an abuse? Is it not essential that any such coalition in the future—we have to anticipate that there may be such a thing—would have to re-enter exactly this territory? Would we not future-proof the Bill if we put a simple majority in the House of Commons into it? Would we not create the constitutional environment in which a coalition could be formed if needed? Coalitions ought to be about exactly that kind of situation; otherwise, I do not think that we have properly done our job in anticipating the circumstances that this legislation may pertain to and preparing it for that possibility.

Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill

Lord Lansley Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 25th January 2022 Lords Chamber

I support the approach from the noble Lord, Lord True, that the main objective should be making this Bill as clear and watertight as possible. That is one of the principles that should underpin all the considerations we have about amendments. The Constitution Committee, which I chaired until very recently, said that constitutional legislation should be able to pass the test of time. Clearly, the Fixed-term Parliaments Act was never going to do that, and I think many of us saw that from the outset. Certainly, when we are looking at this legislation, be it on certain other clauses—Clause 3, for example—or indeed the points that have already been made by the noble Lord, Lord Norton, I think that the purpose of our deliberations from now on should be to make sure that there are no loopholes whatever in this legislation so that it can pass the test of time.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to contribute to this debate. I signed Amendment 3 together with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, and other noble Lords.

I do not come to this as a constitutional expert—far from it—but I think I bring to it two objectives. One is to think about it from the practical, political point of view. In this House we have encountered, and will continue to encounter, the prerogative power being increasingly clarified by statute. I start with that point, which I think the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, referred to. When we see the prerogative being clarified by statute, my view is that we should try to make it a watertight statute. We should try to make it absolutely clear. In this particular respect, we are looking at something that is clear only in so far as it reasserts that there is the status quo ante. However, the status quo ante itself is not necessarily clear. We have a set of principles which—as we have discovered, and I have discovered, by listening to the debates and reading them in the other place—are themselves debatable about how they would be applied and in what circumstances they would be applied. Even in the first debate this afternoon, we heard the assertion that it would be inconceivable for the monarch to refuse a request for a Dissolution but equally, there may be circumstances in which such a request may be refused, otherwise what is the point of calling it a request?

It is not certain. My view is that when we encounter prerogative whether we were debating the Trade Bill and looking at the prerogative to make treaties—I have a Private Member’s Bill which would clarify in statute the circumstances in which the Government could enter into a prolonged and substantial armed conflict or declare war—or here, I think we should be prepared to be more specific about the circumstances in which this prerogative is to be used.

I come back to the practical and political. First, there is a manifesto commitment. The Conservative manifesto said:

“We will get rid of the Fixed Term Parliaments Act”.


Amendment 3 also enables that to happen. That is not the issue.

Secondly, the Joint Committee put forward the proposition that constitutional change should secure

“as wide a degree of cross-party agreement as possible”.

My personal view is that Amendment 3 would enable that to happen. It is supported by parties in this House. Although it will not commend itself to my noble friends on these Benches, it would be supported by the Scottish nationalists, who are not represented here; they said so in the other place. However, I was rather disappointed that when the Government responded to the Joint Committee, they did not address that point; they did not say that they were looking to secure as wide a degree of cross-party support as possible.

What we have to do, which the Joint Committee asked for, is expose the Bill to the fullest possible scrutiny. Looking at the debate in the other place, I do not think that this issue, which seems central, received that, so I am pleased that we are giving it an opportunity to be thought about very carefully.

I recall that the Fixed-term Parliaments Act and its implementation fell down on the two-thirds majority. We should remember that there were three occasions in 2019 on which a Motion was presented in the other place and secured a simple majority but not a two-thirds majority. That immediately begs the question: was that the extent of the problem? Certainly, a simple majority enables us to start to think about how crises should be resolved and by whom, but it is that fundamental point about “by whom” that I come back to. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, put it extremely well, but I shall put it in my own terms.

If a Prime Minister were requesting a Dissolution of Parliament and calling an election in circumstances where that would not be supported by a majority in the House of Commons, on what authority would he or she be doing that? If people cannot tell me what that authority is, we should put into the statute now that a Prime Minister should act with such authority. In all normal circumstances, based on our past experience, a Prime Minister will command a majority in the House of Commons and be able to secure a simple majority for such a Motion, and they would be able to have a Dissolution of Parliament at a time of his or her choosing.

However, I do not think that we can turn the clock back to past conventions and assume that they will be readily or easily applied to future circumstances. For example, coalitions have happened and may do so again, and they may be quite complicated. If we were in circumstances where a Prime Minister did not have a majority based on his or her own party and we were in the relatively early stages of a Parliament, by what authority would they circumvent the fact that an alternative Government was available?

[Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury (Con)]

Perhaps I may ask my noble friend about a situation where there was a hung Parliament, where the Prime Minister had no majority—we have had that experience very recently—where a pandemic was taking place and where the Opposition did not co-operate in passing laws. Surely then it would be right for the Prime Minister to seek the consent of the country.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

There are many circumstances in which crises can emerge. There are arguments that cut both ways. In the midst of a pandemic, does one want an election? In the midst of a war, does one want an election? We could go back to 1940 and say, “Surely, if the Prime Minister then, Neville Chamberlain, had sought a Dissolution, why would he not have been granted it? Would it have not been right for the electorate to say what the outcome should be?” My response to my noble friend would be to ask whether in those circumstances it would not be the responsibility of the House of Commons, and whether it did not have the authority to resolve that crisis. If the answer we come to is, “Oh, but, but, but…”, there are all sorts of circumstances and hypothetical scenarios that we can conjure up which would lead us to the assumption that the Prime Minister can go to Her Majesty or the monarch and request a Dissolution, but the House of Commons would not support it. I come back to the same question: by what authority does the Prime Minister make such a request? I support the amendment and have put my name to it because it brings us back, time and again, to precisely that point.

Professor Robert Hazell put it more elegantly when he gave evidence to the Joint Committee:

“The best way of protecting the monarchy is not to revive the prerogative power but to leave decisions about Dissolution where they belong—in Parliament, in the House of Commons.”


This amendment does that in the simplest and most effective way possible by making it certain that if a Prime Minister requested a Dissolution in future, he or she did so on the basis that a majority of the House of Commons had agreed. If not, by what authority would he or she do it?

[Lord Beith (LD)]

This is an issue which divided the Joint Committee. The view expressed by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, was the view of a minority of the committee of which I was a member, whereas the majority did not want to go into this territory. We had a great deal of discussion about it, but the report records, unusually, that there was a clear difference of view.

I support the idea that there should be a House of Commons vote. Even though I previously supported ensuring that the prerogative power remained a personal prerogative, partly in case this amendment was not carried but also because the two are not inconsistent with each other, it would be even more inconceivable that the monarch should refuse a Dissolution if it had the clear authority of the House of Commons behind it.

A further benefit of having a House of Commons vote on Dissolution is that it makes it quite clear the ouster clause that we will debate later would be unnecessary. The courts would not interfere with a decision taken by Parliament. We can return to that topic later, but we might as well put it on the table now, because it is a powerful argument for having a House of Commons vote. I therefore support what has been said by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, and the noble Lord, Lord Lansley.

There are circumstances in which a Prime Minister might be told that it would be embarrassing for the monarch to have to be asked because a Dissolution might be refused. That would include a re-run of an election that had just taken place. Let us imagine a situation where one party is known to have substantial resources and seeks a re-run of the election, because it is just about the largest party but does not have a majority. There are a variety of such circumstances. In their response to the committee, the Government quite sensibly said that it was impossible to speculate—I am not quoting exactly—about the many different possible situations that could arise, and it is not very fruitful to do so. We merely recognise that there are possibilities.

While so much is said about the failings of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act—I know that it has faults, but the two-thirds majority issue was probably the only significant fault in the legislation—we have to recognise that most democracies in any way comparable to ours have a fixed term for Parliament and that the Joint Committee said:

“The Fixed-term Parliaments Act very clearly fulfilled its immediate political purpose. Not only did the Parliament last the full term, so did the Coalition Government that was formed at the beginning of it.”


I simply say to the other parties that they should be careful what they wish for. The time may come when they seek to form a Government with others and both sides need some guarantee that the Government will not be torpedoed early in its existence.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I am coming on to that, as I just said to the House I would. You can look at those circumstances in different ways, I would submit. Perhaps I will deal with that and then go on to the other point.

The Government had effectively lost the confidence of the Commons on the central purpose of its being, which was to deliver the referendum result on a key European policy. As the noble Lord opposite says, they tried to call an election three times, and three times the Commons refused to grant one. Why did the other place refuse to grant one? I cannot remember which noble Lord it was who said in the debate that it was because the leader of the Opposition sat on his hands and decided to prevent an election taking place. The noble Lord said he would not have done, but he did—three times.

The votes for dissolution were 298 on 4 September, 293 on 9 September, and 299 on 28 October. On every occasion they fell short of a majority. The Labour Party cast its vote to secure what it manifestly wished to do, which was to prevent the Prime Minister going to the country. Three times Mr Corbyn was presented—like Caesar on the Lupercal—with the crown of the election that he could have had the following day, on 4 September, 9 September and 28 October, and he declined.

The noble Lord suggests that of course if they had known there would be an election, the Opposition would never have sought to vote against it. By sitting on their hands, the Opposition defied the people and did not have an election.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My noble friend must address the point. The point is that if the requirement were not what the Fixed-term Parliaments Act required but a simple majority on a Motion in the House of Commons, the Prime Minister back in October 2019 would have secured a simple majority and got his election.

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, there is a conditional in that: a “would”. I believe that people must be presumed to intend the consequences of their own actions, and the consequence of Mr Corbyn’s actions was to thwart a general election three times. The figures I have given to the House are there in the book.

I want to move on because the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, in the gravamen of the argument—although I think the matters I have covered are a flaw in it—used the argument, which I think was taken up by my noble friend Lady Noakes, that the votes of millions of people should not be overturned by Dissolution. A number of noble Lords have addressed this. By implication, the noble and learned Lord argues, per contra, that the chance to vote for millions of people should be denied by a vote of the House of Commons. It seems to me an extraordinary concept that a House of Commons that does not wish to go should, in his words, prevent or overturn the votes of millions. I respectfully disagree. I think the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, who chaired your Lordships’ Constitution Committee with distinction, put some political practicality into the equation, as did the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood. This is very serious. I simply do not accept the argument that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, put forward.

A simple majority vote, for the reasons I have given, would not necessarily prevent deadlock in certain conditions—my noble friend Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury spoke to this—such as when the Government of the day held only a small majority, no majority at all or depended on a small party with a particular regional or country-specific interest. The procedure that is proposed would, in my submission, fail the test of clarity and the absence of loopholes, as the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, put to us. The Joint Committee itself noted on the matter of a vote in the Commons before Parliament was dissolved, that, “The majority”—there were conflicting views, as the noble Lord, Lord Beith, put to us—

“considers it a change which would only have a practical effect in a gridlocked Parliament, which could mean denying an election to a Government which was unable to function effectively, and which might therefore be counter to the public interest.”

I agree with the submission of the majority that this would be

“counter to the public interest.”

In short, far from making things simple, the very thing that the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, said he wished to achieve, it could still lead to stasis.

The most detrimental aspect of a vote in the other place, and potentially allowing that to be used to frustrate an election, is that general elections are sometimes called when the existing Parliament has proven to be unviable. The statutory requirement for a vote in the other place would only compound that problem, and in such a case, as we have discussed or I have submitted, with part of his own party potentially voting against a Prime Minister—circumstances that the noble Lord, Lord Butler, suggested could happen—even a simple majority would be too high.

Past Governments, and potentially future Governments, have often worked within turbulent political and economic contexts, trying to deliver ambitious and significant agendas and sometimes with small majorities. It is in these circumstances, above all, that the flexibility of the system which the two major parties in this country pledged to revive and which we are seeking to revive through this Bill matters most. In these scenarios, a Prime Minister should be able to be decisive and request a Dissolution to try to resolve a parliamentary stalemate or test their mandate to govern.

My noble friend Lord Lansley asked by what authority a Prime Minister might act. I think my noble friend and learned friend Lord Mackay of Clashfern answered that. The Prime Minister, acting as the Sovereign’s principal adviser, is able to request a Dissolution by virtue of an ability to command the confidence of the other place. In the case of a minority Government or a confused House of Commons, the agreement to a Dissolution might be difficult to secure—as it proved three times in 2019. I submit that not many new MPs—some noble Lords have been slightly disrespectful of what might be the motives of people in another place—would rush to face the electorate in a matter of months if given the chance to have a say.

It is by no means certain, as noble Lords have suggested, that past minority Governments would have secured opposition support for an election had this system operated. I agree with the powerful interventions of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, and my noble friend Lady Noakes on this point. Some noble Lords seem to forget the experience of 2017-19. A vote in the House of Commons might have meant other minority Governments and similar ones having to limp on like that one, unable to deliver their priorities. The revival of the prerogative power to dissolve Parliament is, in our submission, the most effective way for a Government to be permitted to put important questions to the people, resolve stasis and secure the mandate to govern effectively. It is a system of constitutional practice that has worked; I urge noble Lords not to seek to add complexity where previously, before 2011, there was none.

I must address briefly the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire. It would go further in the development of a statutory process by making express provision that, when Parliament stands prorogued, a Dissolution cannot be sought. The amendment seeks to set a condition that a Parliament must be “recalled”—or rather summoned—for the purpose of the passage of a Dissolution approval Motion.

Prior to the Dissolution of Parliament, a short Prorogation may be necessary to allow the swift conclusion of business; of course, it should be as short as possible. This has happened on several occasions, most recently in 1992, 1997, 2005 and 2010. In 2010, Parliament was prorogued from Thursday 8 April until Monday 12 April, whereupon Dissolution was proclaimed. Among other things, this enabled the general election to take place on a Thursday, as has been usual practice. Although the concepts of Prorogation and Dissolution may be superficially similar in that they are both prerogative acts, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, said, they are distinct. Prorogation is the formal ending of a Session; Dissolution provides an opportunity for the electorate to give their verdict.

I have heard the arguments in favour of a Commons vote on this matter in the circumstance of a Prorogation also but, respectfully, the Government believe that this is undesirable and risks repeating some of the worst aspects of the 2011 Act. In our submission, providing for the requirement that a prorogued Parliament must be summoned serves only to build in additional delay and undermine the ability of the Prime Minister to act decisively. The risk that the noble Lord alluded to in seeking to strengthen the role of the Commons raises that fundamental question: who should be the ultimate judge on the Government’s decision to call an election? As many noble Lords have said, the answer is clear: the electorate. As the Joint Committee said, they are

“the ultimate authority in a democratic system”.

Like my noble friend Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury, I simply do not understand the idea of a rogue or outrageous Dissolution because it is the fundamental act of humility by the Executive to place their future in the hands of the electorate, who should be the final arbiter of whether a Prime Minister has called an election legitimately. I acquit the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, of this but I have found it strange to hear noble Lords say that they want to repeal the FTPA but return to some of the worst aspects of it. I think that there is a further complication in what the noble Lord suggested.

I am sure that the House wishes to move on. We will have further opportunities in the debate on the next group to discuss sovereignty and controls on Parliament, but I ought to say in preamble that noble Lords have suggested that a Commons vote increases parliamentary accountability and acts as a check on the Executive. It is not our view that the prerogative system diminishes parliamentary sovereignty and the Executive’s accountability to Parliament. Rather, by reviving the prerogative powers, we are restoring the link between confidence and Dissolution. If a Prime Minister loses the confidence of the elected House, they can either resign, seek a Dissolution or seek to recover the confidence of the House. The other place has the nuclear option of a Motion of no confidence and a plethora of means of holding the Executive to account. It does not require further prescriptive statutory measures to do so effectively.

Notwithstanding the gentle chiding of the noble Lord, Lord Newby—I am grateful to him for taking the time, or wasting it as he seemed to argue, to read the letter that I sent to noble Lords—I ask your Lordships to consider carefully the potential, unknown, long-term consequences of this amendment, which flow out of some of the problems that we have discussed in this debate. A vote in the Commons would disrupt the equilibrium in finely balanced, historical constitutional arrangements and could have an impact on the role of the sovereign. In reviving the prerogative power to dissolve Parliament, the Government have clearly acknowledged that this power is exercised by the sovereign on the request of the Prime Minister, as we discussed in the first group.

Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill

Lord Lansley Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 9th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I have signed once more on Report this amendment, along with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, and I entirely agree with what he just said to the House. That is partly in the light of the debate in Committee, which compellingly reinforced the need to send this issue back to the other place to be reconsidered, and for it to make the final decision, as the noble and learned Lord says.

I say to colleagues, not least on this side of the House, that the Conservative Party’s manifesto in 2019, which we are implementing, said:

“We will get rid of the Fixed Term Parliaments Act.”


This legislation, including Amendment 1, will do that. So the Conservative manifesto commitment will be met. The question, of course, is what we put in its place.

My noble friend on the Front Bench will have his chance to say so, but he has said that the purpose of the Bill is to restore the prerogative power, or the status quo ante. I have to say that it still feels like generals fighting the last war—they are fixed on the events of the autumn of 2019, and, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, has amply illustrated, we are not in the situation of the end of 2019 and we may never be again. If one looks at the events of the autumn of 2019, one sees that three times the Prime Minister sought a general election and failed to secure a two-thirds majority but in each case secured a simple majority. The proposition, which seems to be at the heart of the Government’s approach, is that this Bill prevents gridlock, but in my view a simple majority of the House of Commons would, in almost all circumstances, also prevent such gridlock.

More to the point, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, said, is the question that the other place has to answer: should this once again be an executive decision of the Prime Minister of the day, regardless of the view of the House of Commons? I will not go on at length, but I repeat my view that the Prime Minister exercises the responsibility to request a Dissolution by virtue of the fact that he or she commands a majority in the House of Commons. If a Prime Minister loses the confidence of the House of Commons, by what right do they go to the palace and seek a Dissolution? In the circumstances in which a Prime Minister loses the confidence of his or her own party, and of the House of Commons by extension, there may be, and often has been in the past, an opportunity for a new Administration to be formed who enjoy the command of a majority in the House of Commons. Under those circumstances, it seems to me that it would not be right to seek a Dissolution.

The noble and learned Lord referred to what Mr Rees-Mogg said. I am a former Leader of the House of Commons and I believe that the job of the Leader of the House of Commons is to explain the Government’s thinking to the House and explain the House’s thinking to the Government. On this occasion, the latter did not happen. The House was not in a mind to have a Dissolution and an election and I do not think that the Leader of the House was reflecting any view in the House of Commons to that effect. It was, therefore, a threat—an unconstitutional threat, since the Fixed-term Parliaments Act currently applies and such a threat could not be given effect unless and until this legislation passes into law.

My point is that we should give an opportunity not to restore the prerogative in the form in which it existed in the past but to qualify it by reference to what is the reality of our constitution—that sovereignty rests in the sovereign in Parliament, that that must be reflected by a majority in the House of Commons and that therefore a request for an election should be backed by a simple majority in the House of Commons. Anything other than those circumstances would be an illegitimate request and contrary to the view of Parliament.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, I mentioned in Committee and I mention again to the House now that I have always been a strong critic of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act and I was pleased when the Government decided to do away with it. But I find myself in a strange position now of being pleased that they have introduced the Bill but disappointed with it, because it is a messy and—for the reasons that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, said—counterintuitive solution, in that it is moving power back to the monarch. It is a messy solution to a problem that was particular, in most respects, to the 2017-19 Parliament and which, as the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, said, we are now trying to repair or prevent from happening again.

My message is simply that the shenanigans of the 2017-19 Parliament were a result, more than anything else, of the 2011 Fixed-term Parliaments Act, which this Bill will repeal. We need not worry about that kind of problem again because it is incredibly unlikely—impossible, I would say—that we will see those sets of circumstances recurring. Of course, the main reason why the Government could not get a majority for a general election—a facility that I strongly believe should be available to a Government—was the requirement for a two-thirds majority. On each occasion when Boris Johnson went to Parliament and asked for a majority, it gave him one, but not a two-thirds majority.

The solution being offered by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, is beautiful in its simplicity. It solves all the problems with one mighty bound. The main problems of this Bill—or rather, the problems that it does not resolve—are the possible interference by the judiciary, the possible politicisation of the role of the monarch and the argument that we can all have about what the Dissolution principles should be, which a lot of the debate in the Joint Committee was about. With one mighty bound we are free, if we say that you need a majority in the House of Commons. It prevents—for ever—any possibility of the monarch again being involved in this most political of decisions and of saying to a democratically elected Prime Minister, “No, sorry, I’m the monarch; you think you should go to the people, but I’m telling you that you can’t.” It is inconceivable that that could happen and, if it did, it would be a constitutional crisis of a magnitude that we have not so far seen. You get rid of all that area of debate and problem. You also get rid of this ugly ouster clause, to which we will come in a moment. The courts are kept out of it because no court is going to challenge a majority verdict of the House of Commons. With a simple majority in the House of Commons, it is job done. The courts and the monarch are out of it.

Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill

Lord Lansley Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments
Tuesday 22nd March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judge (CB)]

My Lords, after a short debate in the other place, the amendment proposed by this House was disagreed, and here we are today. There is still an issue: we believe the Dissolution of Parliament should not be based on the revival of the prerogative, but the other place takes a different view. The other place is the elected Chamber. As I made clear during the debate, this issue was to be decided not by Parliament as a whole but by the other place because that is the elected Chamber. It has spoken. I stand by the undertaking I gave during the debate, and therefore this must be carried.

In doing so—I think I am allowed to say this—I very much hope that, in the long march of the future, it will turn out that the decision of the House of Commons is vindicated. I really do hope that. I would like to think that I will be right, but I still do not have confidence that we can be sure that no future Prime Minister will misuse or abuse this power. We will therefore have to wait for the future to decide who, in truth, was right on the issue.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I hope we are all agreed that we should not insist on the amendment that we passed on the previous occasion. However, we were right to ask the other place to think again. Indeed, even though it was a relatively short debate, and programmed as such, it was an opportunity for a number of Members to think again—if not necessarily to change their minds, at least to reflect on the nature of the decision that was being made. For example, Jackie Doyle-Price said:

“In building legislation that will last, we need to ensure that we have sufficient, adequate checks so that any Prime Minister will not abuse their position.”


Kevin Brennan asked a very interesting question, which we raised here:

“What would happen where the Prime Minister of a minority Government wished to call a general election, but there was the possibility of an alternative Government being formed? Would that Prime Minister be able to dissolve Parliament by prerogative in those circumstances, or would another person be given an opportunity to form a Government and a majority in the House of Commons?”—[Official Report, Commons, 14/3/22; cols. 647 and 643.]


Of course, the answer is that such a person may be given such an opportunity but that would be by the exercise of the discretion of the sovereign, which would draw the sovereign back into decision-making—something we were all agreed that we wanted to avoid.

The point is that our amendment was intended to raise these issues but not in any sense to undermine the manifesto commitments of the two main parties to repeal the Fixed-term Parliaments Act. However, the manifestos did not say how the Act was to be replaced.

The Government have settled to their satisfaction that the constraint of Parliament upon the prerogative power is to be removed, but they have not settled the question of whether the sovereign might continue to be drawn into Dissolution decisions. It is unfortunately likely that, if there were to be another coalition—I speak as a former Minister in a coalition Government—this issue will resurface; it is bound to do so. Like the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, I hope that we will be proved wrong and the Government proved right.

In such important constitutional legislation—the Government are fortunate in having my noble friend on the Front Bench to steward it in this place—we should be looking for consensus and certainty. I am not sure that this Bill has achieved that. None the less, I hope that the Bill will succeed in its objectives.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, we should not let this moment pass without reminding ourselves of precisely what a bizarre set of circumstances we find ourselves in. I remind the House that the Lords amendment that we sent to the Commons says:

“The powers referred to in subsection (1)”


—that is, the power to dissolve Parliament—

“shall not be exercised unless the House of Commons passes a motion in the form set out in subsection (1B).”

In other words, very simply, this unelected House is saying to the elected House that, while it is none of our business, we think the House of Commons should have something to say about whether the House of Commons should be dissolved and the electorate consulted. I hope that, at some point in the future, the Commons reason for disagreeing with this House will be printed word for word in Erskine May, as follows:

“The Commons disagree to Lords Amendment 1 for the following Reason—Because the Commons do not consider it appropriate that the dissolution of Parliament should be subject to a vote in the Commons.”


Imagine if we substituted “the Dissolution of Parliament” for, say, something that we are going to debate in another Bill tomorrow—“the electoral system”. This is our constitution. It is not any old Bill but the rules of the game. Could we have an amendment in future saying that the Commons disagrees with the Lords in an amendment on the electoral system, on the basis that the Commons does not consider it appropriate that the electoral system should be subject to a vote in the House of Commons? That could apply to any other aspect of our constitution.

I feel pretty confident in saying that there has never been anything quite like this. As we have said time and time again, the whole development of our parliamentary democracy has been a slow transference of power from the monarch/Executive to the elected House of Commons; yet this particular Commons, elected just two years ago, is saying that whether or not there is an election is not anything to do with it. Ultimately, this entrenches the possibility of the monarch becoming profoundly and deeply involved in politics and in an acutely political decision: whether there should be a general election—there is no bigger decision than that. The House of Commons feels that it should not have any say in that whatever, and it should ultimately be a decision for the monarch.

I encourage those who revise Erskine May to make sure that this stunning reason on Dissolution appears somewhere in the text of that great tome. I am sure that it has never happened before. I think it is absolutely bizarre of the Commons to say that it does not want anything to do with this.