Parliament, government and secondary legislation: Lords select committees respond to the Strathclyde Review

Posted on March 25, 2016 by The Constitution Unit

Two House of Lords select committees have this week published reports that are highly critical of the recommendations of the Strathclyde review into the Lords’ powers in relation to secondary legislation, published in December. Mark Elliott summarises the committees’ findings and welcomes calls for a consensual, reflective approach to be taken.

I wrote in December about the Strathclyde Review, which took place at great speed in the autumn against the backdrop of the House of Lords’ refusal to allow the enactment of secondary legislation on tax credits. The Review – set up by the government – recommended stripping the Lords of its power to veto statutory instruments by investing the Commons with statutory authority to override the Lords in the event of opposition to secondary legislation. Two House of Lords select committees – the Constitution Committee and the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee – have now published reports that are highly critical of the Strathclyde proposals.

The report of the Constitution Committee

In its report, the Constitution Committee rejects the notion that the tax credits affair amounted to a ‘constitutional crisis’ and says that a ‘single Government defeat … does not seem a sound foundation upon which to base significant and lasting reform’ in this area. Indeed, the committee argues that the Strathclyde Review ended up – as a result of the terms of reference set for it by the Government – asking the ‘wrong questions’ and framing the issues inappropriately. In particular, the committee takes the view that while the Strathclyde Review approaches the matter in terms of the relationship between the two houses of parliament, the underlying, and far more profound, issue concerns the relationship between parliament and the executive:

Delegated legislation is the product of a delegation of power from Parliament to the Government. Parliamentary scrutiny of secondary legislation is the mechanism by which Parliament assures itself that the Government is exercising that delegated authority in an appropriate way, and in a manner which accords with Parliament’s intentions. Yet Parliamentary scrutiny of delegated legislation is less intensive and arguably less effective than its scrutiny of primary legislation. Statutory instruments cannot be amended, so there is little scope or incentive for compromise. Far less time is spent debating delegated legislation than is spent debating primary legislation. And … it is established practice that the House of Lords does not vote down delegated legislation except in exceptional circumstances. The result is that the Government can pass legislative proposals with greater ease and with less scrutiny if it can do so as delegated, rather than primary, legislation. It is in this context that proposals to weaken the powers of the House of Lords should be considered.

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The Strathclyde report: a threat or an opportunity for the Lords?

Posted on December 18, 2015 by The Constitution Unit

Lord Strathclyde’s report into the House of Lords and secondary legislation, commissioned following the row over tax credits, was published yesterday. Meg Russell discusses his proposals and argues that they may present an opportunity for a deal to be struck between the Lords and government – restraint in the use of Lords’ powers in return for restraint in appointments.

The report from Lord Strathclyde into the powers of the House of Lords was published on Thursday. This was precipitated by October’s row between the government and the Lords over tax credits, where the second chamber voted against a piece of ‘secondary legislation’ (which is frequently used to implement the detail of policy, under powers delegated in primary legislation – i.e. bills). Strathclyde was asked to investigate whether the Lords’ powers over such legislation should be reformed. His report, prepared with the support of a civil service secretariat and input from three former senior officials with specialist knowledge of the legislative process, presents three options for limiting the chamber’s powers. These received a very sceptical response from the opposition, and the legislation proposed by Strathclyde to implement his preferred option could prove very difficult to agree. So how reasonable are these proposals, and how much of a threat do they pose to the Lords? Could the government’s desire to make progress on the powers of the chamber instead be turned into an opportunity, to resolve wider issues of Lords reform?

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The Lords, politics and finance

Posted on October 29, 2015 by The Constitution Unit

In the aftermath of Monday’s Lords defeats on tax credit cuts there has been much talk of a ‘constitutional crisis’. In this post Meg Russell argues that whilst Monday’s vote was certainly unusual, the most significant change is the wider political context: that it is a Conservative government on the receiving end of repeated defeats in the Lords. Much like Labour ministers under Blair and Brown, Conservative ministers will need to learn how to handle a relatively assertive House of Lords in which they lack a partisan majority.

A Conservative government seems to be at war with the House of Lords. The Daily Telegraph claims that the Lords is ‘undermining democracy’. What on earth is going on? Has the Lords suddenly lost hold of its senses and begun acting entirely without precedent? To listen to some government supporters, in particular, one would assume so. Ministers have suffered a string of defeats since May 2015 – a total of 19 up to and including this Monday. The most controversial, of course, was the chamber’s decision to delay approval of the tax credits regulations, which has caused some to proclaim a ‘constitutional crisis’– and has subsequently sparked the government to announce a review into the chamber’s policy powers.

There are aspects of Monday’s tax credits vote which were undoubtedly unusual. As explored in an earlier post on the Constitution Unit blog last week, defeats in the Lords on ‘delegated legislation’ (the proposed vehicle for the tax credit changes) are relatively rare. There have been only four previous occasions when such measures were blocked outright by the Lords. None of these (on sanctions against Rhodesia in 1968, the London mayoral elections in 2000, the Manchester ‘supercasino’ in 2007 and access to legal aid in 2012) had such major financial implications as Monday’s vote. This fuelled claims that the Lords was breaking centuries-old convention by not respecting the Commons’ financial primacy. Yet the parent act, the Tax Credits Act 2002, had explicitly given the House of Lords a veto over such orders – even though it is quite possible for explicitly financial legislation (as detailed in this excellent Hansard Society blog) to create orders that require the approval only of the Commons. The well-respected Lords Statutory Instruments Scrutiny Committee had drawn the measure to the attention of the House on the basis of inadequate information about its impacts (a circumstance which the 2006 Joint Committee on Conventions explicitly suggested could merit use of the veto power (para 229)). In fact, the most clearly innovative thing about Monday’s vote was that the Lords did not reject the government’s proposals outright via a ‘fatal’ motion, but only imposed a delay – in the case of Baroness Meacher’s motion until further information became available.

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