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.