Tag Archives: New Zealand

Scrutinising delegated legislation: what can Westminster learn from other parliaments?

Posted on by

Recent years have seen increasing expressions of concern about whether the UK Parliament has adequate procedures for scrutinising delegated legislation. In a recent article in Political Quarterly, Tom Fleming and Tasneem Ghazi explore the lessons which might be learned from how other parliaments approach that challenge. This blog summarises those lessons.

There is wide concern about the increasing use of delegated legislation in the UK. Delegated legislation is normally made by ministers, rather than parliament. Historically, it has been used to fill in the details of broader policy frameworks set out in primary legislation. But recent years have seen a growing trend of ministers using delegated legislation to implement major policy decisions. This was highlighted as an issue during the Brexit process and Covid-19 pandemic. It has continued under the Sunak government, as shown by the recent bills on industrial action and retained EU law both containing significant delegated powers.

This trend has led to renewed attention being paid to the UK parliament’s system for scrutinising delegated legislation (which mostly takes the form of ‘statutory instruments’). By its nature, this legislation receives less extensive scrutiny than primary legislation. But especially when these statutory instruments (SIs) contain significant policy content, it is important that MPs and peers have sufficient opportunities and means to scrutinise them. That scrutiny may confer greater legitimacy and further government accountability to parliament. It may also highlight technical and policy flaws and ensure that a range of voices are heard in the policy-making process.

Continue reading →

Must a caretaker government be a zombie government?

Posted on by

During the recently concluded Conservative leadership contest, the government appeared to be in a holding pattern, taking little or no action of substance until the election of Boris Johnson’s successor. But did the government, which had a substantial parliamentary majority and an electoral mandate, need to act as if it was merely a ‘caretaker’? Robert Hazell explains that the rules around a ‘lame duck’ PM remain fuzzy, and argues that steps must be taken to clarify the position as soon as possible.

Something very strange happened at Westminster over the summer: a government which enjoyed a comfortable working majority of 71 seats was declared to be a caretaker which could not take any major decisions. It was variously accused of being a ‘zombie government’ ‘asleep at the wheel’, and incapable of taking urgent decisions required by the energy crisis. In its defence the government might have responded that as a caretaker it was precluded from taking such decisions. But the Whitehall rules on this are far from clear. So, what are the Whitehall rules about caretaker governments, and the principles underlying them? And given the confusion this summer, do the rules need clarifying or updating?

‘Caretaker government’ is not a term to be found in any UK government guidance. The Cabinet Manual talks instead about ‘restrictions on government activity’. A leadership election in the governing party is not one of the circumstances when the Cabinet Manual says government activity must be restricted. It envisages just three such circumstances when governments are restricted:

…governments are expected by convention to observe discretion in initiating any new action of a continuing or long-term character in the period immediately preceding an election, immediately afterwards if the result is unclear, and following the loss of a vote of confidence.

Paragraph 2.27.
Continue reading →

As the House of Commons begins to look at a new employment model for MPs’ staff, we should look to other legislatures to see what we can learn from them

Posted on by

A Speaker’s Conference has been established to determine if changes need to be made to the employment arrangements for MPs’ staff. How the UK’s other legislatures manage and recruit their staff can help inform that process. As part of a long-term project on MPs’ staff, Rebecca McKee analyses how three of the UK’s legislatures recruit, employ and pay members’ staff.   

While their precise roles vary, legislators almost everywhere require support staff in order to do their job effectively. In the UK, these staff and their employment arrangements have become the focus both of public attention and internal scrutiny, through a series of reviews in Westminster and the devolved parliaments of Scotland and Wales. Later this year, in the House of Commons, the Speaker’s Conference on the employment of Members’ staff will consider other options for staffing arrangements as those currently in place in are only one of a range of possibilities.

This post outlines the current staffing arrangements in three of the UK’s parliaments – the House of Commons, Scottish Parliament and Senedd Cymru – and the key similarities and differences in their employment arrangements. The post covers the key areas of governance, division of roles and salaries and recruitment in each area. It also briefly highlights other possible options from legislatures elsewhere.

Devolved parliaments

Referendums in 1997 paved the way for the creation of the Scottish Parliament and the National Assembly for Wales, the latter being renamed the Senedd Cyrmu in 2020 following the Senedd and Elections (Wales) Act 2020. 

Both of these bodies adopted staffing arrangements similar to those of Westminster, whereby each member employs their own staff within a statutory regulatory framework covering some, but not all, terms and conditions. Each has a designated body responsible for determining the structure and rules on staffing and administering payrolls. The material they produce is a combination of guidance to members – as office holders who employ their staff, there is a balance to be struck between setting rules for best practice and encroaching on the autonomy of the member as the employer – and mandatory policies, such as the rules to be followed when members claim money for staff salaries.

Continue reading →

The evolution of MPs’ staffing arrangements: how did we get here?

Posted on by

The current system of recruiting and employing MPs’ staff is not one you would design if you were starting from scratch, but before considering an overhaul, it is useful to ask how we got here. In this blogpost Rebecca McKee, who is currently running a project on MPs’ staff, examines the evolution of MPs’ staffing arrangements, providing some context to the current arrangements so we can understand how best to reform them.

Speaker Lindsay Hoyle has called for a Speaker’s Conference to consider a major overhaul of workplace practices in the House of Commons. Under our current system, it is MPs – not the Commons – who recruit and employ their staff, within a framework of regulations set out by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA). While the devolved legislatures and many other countries have similar arrangements, New Zealand stands out as an example where MPs engage staff employed by the parliamentary authorities. This triangular employment relationship is not without its own problems.

The Parliament’s People Awards in March highlighted some of the brilliant, difficult work these staff do. But for most people outside of the parliamentary bubble these staff, their roles, and their employment arrangements are largely unknown. 

MPs can claim a package of expenses through IPSA to support their work. This includes their own salary as well as expenses to cover the costs of running an office, a place to live in their constituency or London, travelling between parliament and their constituency, and employing staff. Currently, MPs can claim up to £237,430 for staffing. This sum is calculated by IPSA on the basis that it would cover up to four full-time equivalent (FTE) staff with a mix of roles and responsibilities. However MPs, as the legal employer of their staff, can choose to employ any number of people within this budget. The allowance, and the number of staff it is designed to cover, has increased over the years. Figure 1 shows a timeline of the evolution of MPs’ funding alongside other social and political changes.

Figure 1
Continue reading →

Parliaments and the pandemic

Posted on by

Earlier this year, the Study of Parliament Group published a collection of 25 essays on how parliaments across the UK and further afield have responded to the pandemic. They consider not only aspects of the response in the two Houses at Westminster, but also in Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Crown Dependencies, New Zealand and other international comparisons, including case studies of the Maldives and Bahrain. Paul Evans summarises some of the themes here.

Executive assertion and parliamentary compliance

As the full scale of the threat posed by COVID-19 began to be recognised, governments wanted to take powers and parliaments were for the most part initially willing to cede them, with little protest when the normal procedures were abrogated. In most cases the legislatures, initially at least, willingly handed over very extensive powers to their governments to make emergency legislation and this was generally done with unusual expedition and, as a result, scant scrutiny.

The problem was perhaps most acute in the area of delegated legislation, resulting in government more or less by decree, as Tom Hickman sets out in his contribution to the volume. At the best of times, the scrutiny of this at Westminster – particularly in the Commons – is open to, and regularly receives, criticism. When actions were first taken to control the pandemic, it was widely suspected that the UK government was deliberately reducing the level of potential parliamentary scrutiny. This suspicion applied to a lesser extent to other executives, which introduced a large number of instruments which took effect in advance of being approved by the legislature.

However, as all the examples, domestic and international, demonstrate, there is an eternal conflict in the procedures underpinning democratic systems between a diversity of voices and a unity of purpose, between efficiency and accountability, between deliberation and decisiveness, and between consent and control. The pandemic, like any national emergency tends to, dramatically highlighted these tensions. In one essay in the volume, Paul Seaward notes that the extent of the use of emergency powers seen in the UK parliament in 2020 is unprecedented in peacetime .

Continue reading →