Today the Constitution Unit publishes a wide-ranging new report. The Constitutional Landscape: Options for Reform briefly summarises 31 areas of constitutional policy, describing the current state of affairs and the options for reform. In this post Lisa James, one of the report’s authors, explores its contents.
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A new parliament in an old palace: where next for the Restoration and Renewal programme?
Following the general election, an unusually large number of MPs entered parliament for the first time, but the building that they will be working in is in serious need of repair. Alex Meakin outlines how the previous parliament approached the problem of restoring and rebuilding a parliamentary estate that is in increasing need of serious work to make it a safe and effective venue for the UK’s legislators. She concludes that the sheer cost of the project will act as a deterrent to strong action, but that further delay will likely only increase that cost, and could result in the loss of the Palace of Westminster as a working building altogether.
Several months into the post-election parliament, the 335 MPs who were sworn in for the very first time are starting to find their way round their new workplace, navigating a building covering the same area as 16 football pitches, across 65 different levels. Along with their returning colleagues, the 2024 cohort will soon be asked to decide on the future of the Palace of Westminster: a decision which has the potential to shape the culture of the legislature for their successors.
As the newly-elected MPs are discovering, behind the magnificent mock-Gothic exterior of the palace lies a building in disrepair. Windows that cannot be closed, mice running along the long corridors, and leaking pipes and toilets are all evidence of the major refurbishment the palace requires. Far greater evidence is hidden behind the walls and within the basement of the building, where the essential mechanical and electrical services — which provide the necessary power, ventilation, communications, and heating to the building — are now decades past their expected lifespan. Their condition leaves the building at risk of a catastrophic event, such as a fire or flood, which could risk lives as well as the future of the palace.
Continue readingParliamentary reform in the 2024 party manifestos
The main party manifestos have now been published, allowing exploration and comparison of their constitutional proposals. In this second post in a series on the manifestos, Meg Russell looks at the parties’ commitments on parliamentary reform. What are they promising, and what are the prospects for these proposed changes?
Yesterday on this blog, Lisa James reviewed the constitutional proposals presented by the political parties in their 2024 general election manifestos. Unsurprisingly, parliamentary reform is a key area that appears in several of them. Most parties include aspirations to reform the House of Lords, and some make other commitments on the House of Commons, or the overall power of parliament. This second post in the Constitution Unit’s manifesto series reviews these proposals, reflecting on their origins, merits, and prospects for implementation. It starts with the power of parliament as a whole, before moving to the Commons, and then the Lords.
The power of parliament
It is primarily the Liberal Democrats that give space to parliament’s overall place in the constitution – an area subject to significant recent controversy. The Brexit referendum of 2016 led to fierce clashes in parliament, and unusually high-profile arguments about both parliamentary procedure and the limits of the government’s prerogative power. Brexit also raised new questions about parliament’s powers over policy matters that returned to the UK following its exit from the European Union.
Continue readingDelivering House of Commons reform after the general election
How can House of Commons reform be delivered in the next parliament? A new Constitution Unit report explores past approaches to developing and delivering changes to the Commons’ procedures, and the implications for current advocates of reform. Tom Fleming and Hannah Kelly summarise the report’s findings and conclusions.
Background
House of Commons reform is likely to be on the political agenda in the next parliament. Recent years have seen a growing number of books and reports highlighting problems with how the Commons works, and arguing that at least part of the solution lies in reforming its internal procedures. These reform proposals come against a backdrop of deep public dissatisfaction with parliament that suggests a need for MPs to explore ways of enhancing their collective reputation. The election of a new parliament on 4 July may therefore open a window of opportunity for Commons reform.
Given this context, there has been surprisingly little recent discussion of how such reforms might actually be delivered. This matters, because a number of different institutional vehicles can be used for developing and drafting proposals for procedural change. Moreover, past experience suggests that how the reform process is organised matters for the outcomes of that process. Politicians with an agenda for Commons reform should therefore be giving serious thought to the mechanisms for delivering that agenda.
Goals of the report
Our new report therefore provides an evidence-based assessment of four different previous approaches to developing and delivering proposals for Commons reform:
- Government initiative. Reform can come directly from government proposals, drawn up under the authority of ministers. Those ministers might respond to suggestions from elsewhere, and informally consult relevant MPs or select committees. But under this approach, the initiative for developing and bringing forward reform proposals lies wholly with the government.
- Permanent backbench select committee. Proposals can instead be developed by a permanent select committee of backbench MPs with an ongoing remit to investigate procedural questions. The primary past and current case of this approach, and the one we study in our report, is the House of Commons Procedure Committee, which has existed in more or less its current form since 1997.
- Temporary backbench select committee. The Commons can also appoint a backbench select committee with a temporary remit to report on a particular area or areas of procedure. We study the most recent such committee: the 2009–10 Select Committee on Reform of the House of Commons, better known as the ‘Wright Committee’ after its chair, the Labour MP Tony Wright.
- Government-chaired select committee. The final approach is something of a hybrid: appointing a select committee to review Commons procedures, but having it be chaired by a government minister. The key template for this is the Modernisation Committee which existed from 1997 to 2010 under the last Labour government. This committee combined backbench MPs with frontbench spokespeople from the three largest parties, and was chaired by the Leader of the House. Having a cabinet minister chair the committee was unusual, and sometimes controversial, given that Commons select committees usually only include backbench MPs.
How much control should there be over how MPs do their job?
In the second of a two-part series, former senior House of Commons official David Natzler discusses whether MPs should be subject to a minimum attendance requirement, and their role as constituency caseworkers. He concludes that an objective measure of individual MPs’ constituency activity and work, and some agreed minimum standards, would be useful, but that the right of MPs to determine for themselves how to do their job should be preserved.
In the first blog in this series, I set out the background to the recent resignation of Nadine Dorries and suggested that it raised some general issues of importance. In that post, I discussed the process of appointing MPs to the House of Lords, and on the process of resignation, suggesting that sitting members of the Commons should not be eligible for peerages, and that the process of resignation should be brought in line with prevailing norms, involving a simple letter of resignation to the Speaker or Clerk of the Commons. In this post I look at the issue of MPs’ attendance and at the performance of their constituency role.
Attendance
There was criticism of Nadine Dorries for not having spoken in the Commons chamber for around a year, since 7 July 2022 when she answered questions in the Commons as Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. She was also criticised for not tabling a written question since 20 December 2017 (although between July 2019 and September 2022, she was a minister, and therefore not able to table questions) and for not having voted since 26 April 2023.
MPs are not formally obliged to attend the House of Commons. Those such as Sinn Féin MPs who decline to take the oath or affirmation of allegiance after their election may indeed never do so during their time as MPs. As Erskine May puts it: ‘On ordinary occasions, the attendance of Members in Parliament is not enforced by either House’.
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