This week I have had an opportunity not only to be engaged in business in the Lords but also to look more broadly at our constitutional arrangements. On Tuesday, I spoke at a sixth-form conference at Wellington College (above) on ‘Britain’s changing constitution’ and this morning I spoke to undergraduates at Wroxton College (below), the overseas campus of Fairleigh Dickinson University – the college is based in Oxfordshire, in a Jacobean mansion (the ancestral home of Lord North, prime minister under George III) – on the role of the House of Commons. My academic research subjects are comparative legislatures, parliament, the constitution, and the Conservative Party; within this, my primary research specialism has always been voting behaviour in the House of Commons. Being in the House of Lords now means that I am ideally placed to observe behaviour in what we refer to as ‘the other place’.
One of the questions I was asked about the House of Commons concerned the pressures on MPs in combining a growing volume of constituency work with the demands of parliamentary work at Westminster. The demands on MPs, and indeed peers, has grown remarkably in recent decades and has created significant pressures on resources. What much of the debate about MPs’ pay and allowance ignores is that the largest part of the the allowances is devoted to staff salaries. Staff salaries are not particularly generous, but for obvious reasons now there is a natural reluctance on the part of MPs to press for an increase in their allowances. In the Lords, we have a very small research and secretarial allowance, which is not sufficient to hire a full-time member of staff or even to buy in a part-time member for any significant period of time.
Are you advocating a dollop of money for the Lords or are you questioning the needs for so much to be spent on MPs staff? I’ll assume you meant the first.
You’ll need to make a case since the jobs are getting done as it is. I am also assuming you got (and accepted) the gig due to your abilities in the first place.
Blame the apparent greed of some MPs for me playing the devil’s advocate on this! I don’t think the public are up for paying the second home mortgage for the likes of the Ball’s and are a bit cheesed off finding out their erstwhile rights to claim expenses for £200 blenders.
Tiz
Actually, neither. I can see the case for ensuring that MPs staff are better paid, though I see the case for the staff being employed through the House rather than directly by the MPs. There may be a case for some redistribution, increasing MPs’ salaries, removing things like the additional housing allowances and providing for staff to be paid on a reasonable salary scale determined by HR staff. I wasn’t advocating increasing peers’ allowances. As you touch upon, we tend to do our own research. I have never claimed the full allowances, but I can see the case for reviewing the allowance system, perhaps moving to a standard and taxable daily payment for days attended.
Do we need all these extra laws !? Are many of them originating in the EU and needing to be passed by us as secondary legislation ?? Could we not limit the amount of laws being passed ?? This, I am sure, results from the need of Govt. Ministers to respond to the newspapers and other media to shouts of ‘something must be done’ in a knee-jerk response to problems.
It has done us little good over Iraq, and maybe the answer is that less is more when it comes to legislation. Most of the new laws, on asinine things like banning mobile phones in cars, is never enforced anyway, so the whole exercise becomes a ‘reassuringly expensive’ way of telling voters that ‘action is being taken’.
Surely the answer is for the Lords to be more than an ‘amending’ institution. If they don’t like something, they should send it back ‘unmarked’ with some red biro over it saying ‘start from scratch’.
There is certainly a case for reducing the volume of legislation as well as improving the quality of the legislation that is enacted. I think the House of Lords does a really good job of legislative scrutity, but I am all for seeking to strengthen it even more in fulfilling that role.
There are various ways to improve the quality of legislation as well as reduce its volume. When I chaired the Constitution Committee in the Lords (2001-4), we produced a large report on ‘The Legislative Process’ (2004). It included recommendations for strenthening Parliament not just in the legislative process but also in undertaking pre-legislative and, most significantly, post-legislative scrutiny. We recommended that each Bill should be accompanied by a list of the criteria by which one could judge whether it had fulfilled its purpose. These would provide the basis for post-legislative scrutiny but may also have the effect of encouraging greater rigour in preparing legislation. Such rigour may improve the quality of what is brought forward as well as making ministers recognise that some measures are not that clear in their intent and should not be proceeded with.
The more one can move away from the present attitude taken by both ministers and Parliament – namely, that Royal Assent constitutes the end of the process – the better. We also need to wean ministers from the view that they need to get ‘their’ big Bill through in order to prove themselves. Perhaps we should give credit to ministers who don’t bring any Bills forward. There is also too much of a tendency to take a ‘something must be done’ approach and believe that the way to solve a problem, almost any problem, is to legislate.
Another way to limit legislation is to make ‘sunset clauses’ (which limit the lifespan of a measure) the norm. The Lords has done some reasonable work in pressing for such clauses to Bills, but I agree that there is much more that we can do. I have been pressing especially on the issue of post-legislative scrutiny. I will post more on this shortly.
As a matter of interest, how often does the Government repeal existing legislation? By this I do not include repealing old legislation which is being tidied up elsewhere or to make way for new Acts.
Is it a regular occurrence that the Government decides to allow us to do things that were previously prohibited, or ends the requirement for us to do certain things?
On the MP allowances issue, when I was a Parliamentary Researcher back in the late 1990s I was ‘paid’ the princely allowance of £50 a week!
The Law Commission and the Scottish Law Commission have a responsibility to identify obsolete and unnecessary laws. As a result, a great number of laws have been repealed.
The Statute Law (Repeals) Bill, presently going through Parliament (it had its Second Reading in the Lords on Tuesday) repeals more than 250 Acts of Parliament. Over the past forty years, 18 reports have been produced – the current Bill is a result of the most recent – and the previous 17 have resulted in over 2,000 Acts being repealed as well as the partial repeal of thousands of others.
Talking of repealing Acts, does the Gibbons Report (on the Statututory Dispute Resolution Procedures, Employment Act 2002) have a timetable? I’d like to have a chat with one of those who thought that the 3-step procedure was a great idea for employers with small businesses. Yes, I did get hit by a tribunal, thanks for asking. I was not informed and was not on the internet at the time. Ignorance is no defence unless you’re an MP, it seems.
This leads me to wondering what is the benchmark for scrutiny of such laws. Clearly, Michael Gibbons believes the situation to be seriously flawed, as do many legal commentators, and the gvt itself has accepted the report. Meanwhile, decent employers continue to be turned over because no-one can understand the procedure, except for the professionals. In other words, the scrutiny fell short when considering the effects on traders without the resources of the big boys.
A further point is that of representation. It is clear to most people that justice can be skewed according to the funds available to litigants etc. Why is there an assumption that an employer can afford a lawyer but the employee is likely to have ‘free’ (no win, no fee) legal access?
Worse, is the sacrifice to get at the truth in preference to “This court is not concerned with the guilt or innocence of the appellants…What really matters is the integrity of the process” (Carl Bridgewater case).
Are these points, and similar, taken into consideration at your point of entry or is the willful misinterpretation of the judges to blame for bad law?