Tag Archives: parliamentary reform

Delivering House of Commons reform after the general election 

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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. 
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The personal side of parliamentary reform

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The view that Westminster is not functioning as it should, and that reform would be beneficial, has become increasingly widespread in recent years. Greg Power argues that it is not sufficient to focus on technical details and process: reform efforts must instead understand what politicians believe to be important and offer them ways of dealing with those issues better.

There have been a number of good books in the last couple of years about what is wrong with Westminster and what needs to change. They all set out a compelling case and numerous ideas for reform. But most tend to focus more on the ‘why’ and the ‘what’, than on the ‘how’. There remains very little on which reformers can draw as to how we might engineer these sorts of sensible changes and how parliaments actually get overhauled.

This question of how to reform complex parliamentary institutions is at the heart of my new book, Inside the Political Mind, which draws partly on my own personal experience of working on such change: initially at Westminster as a Special Adviser to successive Leaders of the Commons, Robin Cook and Peter Hain, and since 2005 with parliaments and MPs in more than 60 countries around the world.

Every one of those institutions is different, and they each have their own peculiar problems. But there are common themes to the challenge of reform everywhere. And one of them is that parliamentary reform is hard. Really hard.

There are three standout reasons for this – all to do with the very way in which parliaments are composed and constructed.

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The Backbench Business Committee: an unfinished revolution?

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2020 marked the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the House of Commons’ Backbench Business Committee – an event that marked the first major reversal of a century-long trend of the government taking increasing control of the agenda of the House. But the anniversary went largely unnoticed. Paul Evans, a former Clerk of the committee, asks whether this is because it has been outmanoeuvred by the usual channels, has lost its cutting edge, or because relative obscurity is what backbenchers really want.

The birth of the Backbench Business Committee

The background to how the Committee on Reform of the House of Commons (commonly known, after its chair Dr Tony Wright, as the ‘Wright Committee’) was established can be found, for those interested, in the introduction to its first report. Amongst the matters the House instructed it to consider, when it was set up on 20 July 2009, was the ‘scheduling of business by the House’. It recommended the creation of a new category of ‘backbench business’, to be managed by a new committee of backbenchers, a new ‘House Business Committee’ to bring transparency to the way in which the House’s wider agenda was determined, and a system by which the House as a whole would be given the final say on its agenda. Many of these ideas had been foreshadowed in a Constitution Unit report published in 2007.

After an inconclusive debate on the proposals of the Wright Committee on 22 February 2010, on 4 March, amongst other reforms arising from the committee’s recommendations (most significantly on the election of chairs and members of select committees) the House agreed that a proposal for the establishment of the Backbench Business Committee should be brought to it by the government (emphasis very deliberately added) before the start of the next parliament, and that a House Business Committee should be established during the course of that new parliament. In fact, as everyone knew at the time, the timetable for doing so was well-nigh impossible. The parliament was dissolved on 12 April, just 20 sitting days after the 4 March debate. That could have been the last we heard of the recommendations on new ways to schedule the House’s business.

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The hybrid House of Commons: the problems of government control

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For much of last year, the government resisted MPs’ calls for full reinstatement of virtual participation in House of Commons proceedings. In this post, Daniel Gover and Lisa James review the development of the ‘hybrid Commons’. They argue that full virtual participation, including remote voting, must now be reinstated, and that recent events reveal broader problems of government control over the Commons agenda.

Last spring, the House of Commons adapted quickly and successfully to the challenges presented by COVID-19. The so-called ‘hybrid Commons’ – combining in-person proceedings with simultaneous virtual participation – was one of the first responses of its type globally, and widely praised. But within weeks, the government unilaterally abandoned the virtual element, provoking anger amongst backbench MPs and violating the core parliamentary principle of the equality of all members. It was only on 30 December – well over six months later – that virtual participation in key debates was reinstated, while even now ministers refuse to restore remote electronic voting.

At the start of a new year, the UK’s public health crisis is at least as serious as it was at the beginning of the pandemic, and this will continue to restrict physical participation at Westminster. It is therefore essential that MPs be enabled to participate virtually in as wide a range of Commons proceedings as possible – including in remote divisions. The fact that ministers have been able to block this until now also reveals deeper problems with the House of Commons’ governance, and where power lies, which should urgently be addressed.

The development and collapse of hybrid arrangements

In March and April, consensus between the parties produced rapid adoption of new systems to enable parliament to perform its essential functions. The Commons first authorised its select committees to meet virtually, followed by hybrid arrangements for the Commons chamber itself – initially for ‘scrutiny’ proceedings (questions and statements), followed by ’substantive’ business (motions and bills). Soon after, intensive work began on an electronic voting system, with the first ever online Commons division held in mid-May.

Yet these arrangements began to unravel shortly before the late-May Whitsun recess, barely a week after the first online vote. Despite significant anger from backbench and opposition MPs, ministers refused to facilitate a decision to extend the time-limited orders that had enabled virtual participation in the chamber, and as a result the rules simply lapsed.

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