What makes for an effective parliamentarian?

Contributing to a panel at the recent Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (CPA) 68th Westminster Seminar, on effective parliaments, I identified what I see as the five essential elements for parliamentarians to be effective in carrying out their jobs.

1) Powers. The principal, and core defining, power of a legislature is to give assent to measures of public policy and demands for money. Legislatures are not so much law-making as law-assenting institutions.  The capacity to say no to the executive is what gives them leverage in fulfilling other functions.

2) Resources. Members need resources, both individually and collectively.  They require administrative and research support, independent of their parties and the executive. That usually entails support for their own offices and research support, not least in terms of a parliamentary library and research service.

3) Skills. There is no point in having powers and resources if members lack the skills to utilise them.  This encompasses a grasp of how to utilise procedures as well as to debate, to question and to know how to research sources and understand the importance of information provided.

4) Political will. Members may enjoy powers, resources and skills, but they are of little value if there is not the political will to deploy them.  Members have to be prepared to question and, if necessary, challenge their own party and government to achieve desired outcomes.

5) An understanding of what is expected of them, collectively and individually. To do their job effectively, parliamentarians need to have a clear understanding of what the job is.  Some appear to be extremely busy doing things, but without actually achieving anything.  Without a clear job description, there is the danger of doing a range of activities, but without focusing on what is core to being a parliamentarian.

What, then, is the job of the parliamentarian?

Legislatures are defined by their assent-giving capacity, not by an ability to create coherent measures of public policy

Rather, their tasks comprise principally:

1) Sustaining the government. This is especially important in parliamentary system, where the executive is derived from elections to the legislature and the government rests on the confidence of the parliament, or elected chamber.

2) Scrutinising. Most measures of public policy originate with the executive.  A core task of the legislature is to subject legislative proposals, demands for money, and the administration of government to sustained – and public – examination.

3) Influencing outcomes. Legislatures can say no to government.  That coercive capacity may be rarely employed, but it underpins a persuasive capacity.  Members may deploy their various powers, skills and resources to affect outcomes, to ensure ‘good’ law is enacted, that money is spent prudently and appropriately, and government conducted effectively, efficiently and honestly.

4) Ensuring the views of citizens are heard. Enoch Powell once observed that that the task of Parliament is to ensure that the people, through their representatives, speak to the government and the government speaks to the people. Parliamentarians can ensure that the voices of the people are heard.  Parliaments have a valuable safety valve function.

The challenge to parliamentarians, not least those in the majority party, is to recognise that being an effective parliamentarian does not necessarily conflict with being a loyal party member.  MPs tend to privilege the interests of party over the role of the institution of which they are members.  The two are not mutually exclusive.

By popular demand…. a caption competition

At a time of bad weather, dark nights and a general election campaign, there may be a case

for  a bit of light relief, so time for another caption competition.  This picture (suggested for the competition by Ken Batty, who is giving the oration) is from the degree ceremony at Regent’s University in July, when I was installed as a Honorary Senior Fellow.

As usual, the winner will be the reader who offers what in my view is the wittiest caption and most appropriate in the context of the picture.  The prize will be one of my recent publications.

Notes on dissolution

I see people keep tweeting queries about the dissolution of Parliament, so here are a few notes in response to various of the queries that have appeared.

Unlike prorogation, there is no formal ceremony for dissolution.

Parliament was dissolved at one minute past midnight.  Dissolution continues until the new Parliament meets.  The Commons will meet for the election of the Speaker and the swearing-in of Members.  This is expected the week commencing 16 December.  We await an announcement about the Queen’s Speech, which could take place just before Christmas or at the start of the New Year.

During dissolution, all committee room bookings in the Palace are cancelled.   MPs cannot use the facilities because there are no MPs.  Once Parliament is dissolved, those who have served as MPs cease to be such and cannot use the suffix MP.  (They continue to be paid, though, until polling day.)  Peers retain access to their offices – peers remain peers – but cannot use them for campaigning or party political purposes.

The period between dissolution and polling day is stipulated in section 3(1) of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act.  When the Act was passed, it was set at 17 working days, but was subsequently amended, under the Electoral Registration and Administration Act 2013, to 25 working days.  Parliament is automatically dissolved at the beginning of the 25th working day before polling day.

A working day under the Act means any day other than a Saturday or Sunday, a Christmas Eve, Christmas Day or Good Friday, a day which is a bank holiday under the Banking and Financial Dealings Act 1971 in any part of the United Kingdom, and a day appointed for public thanksgiving or mourning.

I may do notes about candidates and general elections in due course.

 

Notes on the general election

A few notes on the election due now on 12 December…

Under section 1(2) of the Early Parliamentary General Election Bill (due to receive Royal Assent today), the poll ‘is to be treated as a polling day appointed under section 2(7) of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011’. This engages section 1(4) of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, which means that, with an early election taking place after May, the next election takes place four years from the following May. The next election is thus scheduled for May 2024.

The House of Commons will meet on Monday to elect a new Speaker. Whoever is elected will then have to stand in the election as ‘the Speaker seeking re-election’. They will then stand for re-election as Speaker, assuming they are returned at the general election, at the start of the new Parliament. The rationale for electing a Speaker now is that current MPs know the candidates. At the start of a new Parliament, new MPs are essentially unfamiliar with the candidates. Back in 1972, the Procedure Committee did recommend that Speakers retire mid-Parliament. That has not been the uniform practice.

The House of Commons is expected to assemble the week after the election for the purpose of electing a Speaker and for the purpose of swearing-in, with the Queen’s Speech taking place in January. The election of the Speaker on that occasion should be fairly short and formal. It would be a problem if the House opted to elect someone else in January than the person chosen as Speaker next Monday! There would thus be an MP returned as the Speaker seeking re-election who would no longer be Speaker.

Since the start of the 20th Century, there have only been three general elections held in December, all three in the first quarter of the century – 1910 (the second general election of that year), 1918 and 1922. (The 1918 election followed that of 1910.) There were four held in December in the 19th Century.

Writings on Parliament….

This has been a good year for me in terms of articles published in Parliamentary Affairs.  I see my 2016 article, ‘The Fixed-term Parliaments Act and Votes of Confidence’, perhaps not surprisingly in view of current events, is again listed as one of the most read articles.  My article earlier this year on ‘Power Behind the Scenes: The Importance of Informal Space in Legislatures’ is one of the Editor’s Choices.  And the latest issue, which has just been published, carries two articles by me.  One is the introduction, ‘Departmental Select Committees: The Reform of the Century?’ to the articles forming a special issue to mark the 40th anniversary of the creation of the departmental select committees.  The other is my 2019 Bingham Lecture in Constitutional Studies at the University of Oxford, ‘Is the House of Commons Too Powerful?, about which I have previously done a blog post and which I like to think has the merit of timeliness.

Complementing these is my article in the latest issue of The Journal of Legislative Studies on ‘Post-legislative scrutiny in the UK Parliament: adding value’.  Again, this is something on which I have done a blog post.

I list these for the sake of completeness – it has not been a bad year in terms of output –  and also because if, in the forthcoming election campaign, you want to have a bit of a breather and read some scholarly pieces….

The priority now is completing Governing Britain.  Once the election is out of the way and the outcome known, I will get the finished manuscript off to the publishers.  That, at least, is the plan.

The role of the Speaker

On Tuesday, I was one of several witnesses to give evidence to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee in the House of Commons in its inquiry into the role of the Speaker. You can watch the session here; my panel starts at 11.43.

There is a tendency to look at Speakers in terms of their role in the chamber.  However, as I said my evidence, the Speaker has three roles, relating to three distinct domains: the chamber, the parliamentary estate covering the House of Commons, and the world beyond Westminster. Each requires different skills.

The first requires the Speaker to act as a ringmaster – as I mentioned, not so much in the sense of a circus, but a wrestling ring (the Speaker doesn’t book the acts, but he has to referee and recognise also that there is an audience for the performance).  The challenge has become greater recently because of a minority government and conflict over Brexit.  That challenge is all too apparent.

The second requires strategic skills.  The Speaker chairs the House of Commons Commission, which has a statutory responsibility to set strategic responsibilities and objectives for the services provided by the House departments, employs the staff of the House (other than the Clerk, Clerk Assistant and Serjeant at Arms), lays the budget for House services before the House, and determines the structures and functions of the departments of the House.  The challenges here are greater than before because of the Restoration and Renewal Programme (preparing for the great decant in a few years), security, and the Cox report on bullying and harassment.

The third requires major communication skills.  The challenge is acute now because of the collapse of trust in the House of Commons.  Previously, as I have argued, people did not trust MPs.  Now they do not trust the House of Commons.  The situation is exacerbated by the fact that the House comprises the sum of its parts.  There are different leadership roles in the House, especially the Leader of the House and the Speaker.  There are problems in providing a clear institutional response to criticisms levelled against the House.

The task facing MPs is to elect a Speaker who has the skills to tackle these challenges.  It may be that no one individual has all the requisite skills.  One possibility raised in the session was possibly hiving off responsibility for chairing the House of Commission to another member.  It may be that the House may also need a separate figure to act as spokesperson, or face, of the House, leaving the Speaker to focus on what happens in the chamber.  And as I have argued before, the House needs the collective will to act in the face of public opprobrium.  It cannot be left solely to one person.

The Queen’s Speech: debating the constitution

After each Queen’s Speech, there is usually five days of debate.  Even with five days, each day has to cover a range of subjects.  In today’s debate, they were home affairs, justice, local government, devolved affairs and constitutional affairs.  I took the opportunity, not surprisingly, to speak on the constitution.  There was an advisory time limit of six minutes.  I edited my notes to ensure I stayed within the limit.  Given that it was a short speech, I reproduce it below.  It enabled me to draw together a number of points I have made recently.

Lord Norton of Louth (Con)

My Lords, the gracious Speech is welcome in identifying a range of measures of domestic importance and not focusing exclusively on Brexit. However, Brexit is the fundamental issue facing the nation. A combination of unique developments has resulted in the debate surrounding Brexit putting our constitutional fabric under intense pressure.

The debate on Brexit is toxic and it is binary. We are used to the politics of justification, with each side able to engage with the other. What we now have is the politics of assertion, with each side shouting at the other and not being interested in the response. The language is stark and often takes the form of accusation and abuse. The nature of the debate is exacerbated by, and contributes to, the tensions that now exist and which pose a serious threat to the Westminster model of government. Those engaging in the debate are so consumed by the moral superiority of their policy goal that they treat our constitutional arrangements as secondary to achieving that goal.

At the heart of the Westminster system is the concept of accountability. There is one body responsible for public policy—the party in government. Collective responsibility ensures that it is a united entity, accountable between elections to Parliament and at elections to electors. Parliament scrutinises and challenges the Government but does not seek to substitute policy of its own. MPs have always privileged party above the interests of the House of Commons. Party, however, has facilitated accountability. We are in an exceptional situation where no one body is accountable. Electors cannot hold themselves to account for the outcome of a referendum. Electors cannot hold to account a transient majority comprising an ad hoc amalgam of parties and independents in the House of Commons.

The position we are in derives from the collision of two concepts of democracy. We had an exercise in direct democracy in the form of a referendum, and an exercise in representative democracy the following year, producing results not clearly compatible one with the other. The House of Commons has sought to wrest control of public policy from the Government. That, as I have argued before, is not “taking back control”: you cannot take back something you did not have in the first place. Because a transient majority cannot be held to account, it is an exercise in power without responsibility.

It is a unique situation and it is important that we do not seek to generalise from an N of one. We need to stand back and make sense of what is happening, not rush to judgment with calls for reform of the constitution. We hear calls for a written, or codified, constitution. It is not clear how, had we had one, the present situation would be any different. It is not so much an answer as a displacement activity.

The gracious Speech has the merit of not rushing to judgment and advancing any constitutional reform. I welcome that. I also caution the Government against listening to those who, in their failure to grasp the principles of our system of government, advocate change to bodies that produce decisions with which they disagree, be they the courts or this House. Perhaps my noble friend Lady Williams will confirm that the Government have no plans for changes to our constitutional framework and that Ministers will comply not only with statutory obligations but with the expectations and moral obligations imposed by conventions of the constitution.

Our system of government is sound, but recent events have undermined popular support, especially for the House of Commons. The most recent Hansard Society Audit of Political Engagement showed that only 25% of those surveyed had confidence in the Members of the House of Commons in handling Brexit; 73% had not very much or no confidence. Furthermore, 42% of those questioned agreed with the statement:

“Many of the country’s problems could be dealt with more effectively if the government didn’t have to worry so much about votes in Parliament”.

That is a remarkable finding, impossible to imagine in earlier years.

The challenge for parliamentarians, especially Members of the other place, is to recognise that the solution lies not with constitutional reform but with their own behaviour. They are part of the problem. They need to become part of the solution. That requires a degree of balance and self-awareness that has been sadly lacking.