Louise Thompson

Debunking the Myths of Bill Committees in the British House of Commons

Bill committees play a crucial role in the scrutiny of government legislation, yet they have traditionally been overlooked by academics and journalists in favour of the more newsworthy aspects of parliamentary scrutiny on the floor of the House of Commons chamber or by investigative select committees. This lack of interest has perpetuated a series of myths about bill committee work. This article discusses the common depictions of bill committees before demonstrating why these are incorrect. It argues that these incorrect assumptions can damage our perception of the policy influencing power of Parliament and that bill committees deserve a kinder billing in the literature.

Parliament and the Constitution: The Coalition in Conflict

The provisions of the Coalition’s agenda covering constitutional issues were embodied in section 24 of The Coalition: Our Programme for Government, entitled ‘Political Reform’ (HM Government, 2010: 26–7). The 27 bullet points included fixed-term five-year parliaments, a referendum on the introduction of the Alternative Vote (AV), reform of the House of Lords, legislation to provide for recall of MPs, and implementation of the Wright Committee recommendations for reform of the House of Commons.

Understanding third parties at Westminster: The SNP in the 2015 parliament:

Opposition politics in the British House of Commons is dominated by the ‘Official’ Opposition. However, other parties also carry out opposition roles in the chamber. This is particularly true of the third largest party, which is afforded some parliamentary privileges yet is overlooked in studies of Parliament. This article fills this gap, using a case study of the Scottish National Party (SNP) to analyse the challenges facing the third party in the Commons. It additionally contributes to the literature on regional nationalist parties, exploring the micro level variables affecting their agenda-setting capacities within a state level parliament. Drawing primarily on elite interviews with SNP members of parliaments (MPs) and staff, it finds that third party rights are not as significant as they may appear. Party size alone is not sufficient to guarantee impact in the Commons. Strategies to overcome the inherent procedural constraints of the chamber are also required. In the SNP case, this included incremental organisational change, a highly collegiate intra-party culture, and mentoring from existing MPs during the 2015 Parliament.

32. Conclusion: The Future of Parliamentary Politics

Political scientists have a mixed record in predicting the political future; and so, as political scientists, we won’t engage in expansive ‘futurology’ and ‘guestimates’ about the future of Parliament in this chapter. Instead, in exploring the future of parliamentary politics, we will invoke the words often attributed to Albert Einstein: ‘The future is an unknown, but a somewhat predictable unknown. To look to the future we must first look back upon the past’. If we can identify what parliament was and is, and what it did and still does – which has been the central connecting thread interwoven in the preceding chapters – then we can provide a basis for exploring what we might expect parliament to be and do in the future. Individually, the 31 chapters of this book have explored what parliament does and why it does what it does. Collectively, these chapters provide an overarching assessment of the contemporary significance of the UK parliament in the UK’s political system by revealing what it ‘is’ as an institution. Whilst it is not our intention to reprise the analyses of earlier chapters; it is our intention, however, to identify key puzzles implicit within these analyses which raise fundamental questions about what parliament is and why it exists. In turn, this will help us to identify the ‘predictable unknowns’ as starting points for the exploration of the future.

Integrating the view of the public into the formal legislative process: public reading stage in the UK House of Commons

ABSTRACT Recent years have seen increasing calls to integrate the publics voice into the parliamentary process. This article examines the impact of public reading stage (PRS) on the UK Parliaments scrutiny of a bill. A new stage of the legislative process piloted by the House of Commons in February 2013, PRS invited the public to comment on a bill undergoing parliamentary scrutiny (the Children and Families Bill). The PRS was designed to encourage members of the public to participate in the scrutiny of legislation through a specially designed forum on parliaments website. Over 1000 comments were submitted. Drawing on a content analysis of the comments given by the public to the bill, complemented by interviews with members of parliament, key officials and PRS participants, it was found that although the public reading stage had an impressive response, it failed to make much of a tangible impact on the parliamentary scrutiny of the bill. This was largely due to the choice of bill being used for the pilot and its lack of appropriate integration into the formal legislative process.

Parliamentarism and Democratic Theory: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

Legislators are widely thought to be incompetent and untrustworthy, drawn from the same upper-class, privileged stock. These professional politicians are power-seeking and money-hungry. When they a...

The Oxford Handbook of Legislative Studies

divide between the traditional notion of democracy, accountability and parliamentary sovereignty on the one hand, and the reality and practice of government in Britain on the other hand. Judge accepts that there is this divide but sees it as arising from the tension between representation and democracy, a reality of our present political condition. Ways of relieving these tensions can throw up many surprises, such as the remarkable way in which referendums, once deemed against the principle of parliamentary democracy, have come to be accepted as part of the British constitution. For Judge, parliamentary democracy remains the frame within which politics is conducted in Britain, and its incongruities continue to shape political outcomes and developments. He provides a lucid and arresting diagnosis of our present discontents.

The Other Side of Committee Work

The previous chapter analysed the most visible output of committee work: the formal amendments being tabled and moved, successfully or unsuccessfully in every bill committee. It painted a picture of the activity taking place in committees that was not, on the whole, a positive one. An in-built government majority, coupled with strong party discipline, means that MPs are unable to constrain the government to any great degree through the formal mechanisms available to them in committee. But this does not show the true extent of committee scrutiny. Formal amendments are not the only means by which committee stage can bring changes to the content of a government bill. It is equally, if not more, important to consider what Blondel et al. describe as the milder influence of committees in the House of Commons (1970, p. 79). This type of committee influence cannot be identified simply by considering the success or failure of amendments or by analysing the text of a bill when it leaves committee. They require a deeper examination of committee proceedings, an analysis of the content of Members’ contributions to committee debate and to ministerial responses, as well as to proceedings at the report stage of the bill. Only by combining the visible outputs of committee performance with these less visible outputs can we build an accurate picture of the levels of constraint or viscosity being exerted by, and through, bill committees.

Engaging with Experts

The introduction of evidence taking as the standard procedure for all programmed bills in committee was a huge change to the system of legislative scrutiny. It also signalled something of an attitudinal change towards bill committees. As we have seen, the history of committee reform has been closely intertwined with the need to increase the efficiency of the House of Commons and to ensure that the government’s legislative programme is passed without delay. Yet the introduction of evidence taking suggested that committee stage was seen to be of value. It aimed to better equip Members of Parliament with the policy knowledge needed to scrutinise government legislation effectively as well as efficiently. As such, it had the potential to ‘alter radically the way that the House of Commons approaches its legislative role’ (Kelso 2009, p. 131) and brought the possibility of ‘[doing] more to improve the quality of the parliamentary scrutiny of bills than any other Commons reform in the last twenty (or more) years’ (Cowley 2007, p. 22).

Evaluating Bill Committees

The functions of all parliaments change with time, adapting to meet the needs of the modern world (Beer 1966, p.30). But however much the functions of the British Parliament are modified, the need for the effective scrutiny of legislation remains at its core. This book has charted the development of the committee stage of bills. From their birth during the Gladstone premiership, we have seen them fall in size but increase in number. They have moved from being semi-permanent to completely ad hoc bodies and have been afforded new powers which have increased their capacity to scrutinise legislation effectively and efficiently. As the bill committee system has developed and increased in complexity, so has the parliamentary timetable. It has become increasingly crowded and greater demands are placed on MPs than ever before. If we add to this the growing size and density of the Statute Book we can see that the use of a committee stage away from the main House of Commons chamber is even more necessary today than it was in the late nineteenth century.