It is not just in the Commons that Private Members’ Bills attract interest. In the Lords, there is no ballot at the beginning of the session (or rather, taking up Lord Tyler’s earlier point, no random selection). Instead, peers introduce Bills at the start of the session – there is value in getting in early – and time is usually found to discuss those that have been introduced in good time. The importance of Private Members’ Bills is not so much that peers introduce them with a view to getting them enacted – occasionally some do pass, but more often than not there is not time in the Commons to consider them – but rather to ensure that the issue is debated. Even if the Bill is not passed, it ensures the matter is debated, the Government provides a response, and it may help generate pressure on Government to take action of its own. Debate on PMBs takes up a small amount of time, but it can be highly productive in raising issues that affect people outside the House. Indeed, members of the public are sometimes more engaged with issues raised in PMBs than they are with the normal run of Government legislation.
Yesterday, four Private Members’ Bills had their first reading in the Lords and, I think, bear out the point I am making. The five are:
Social Care Portability Bill (introduced by Baroness Campbell of Surbiton)
House of Lords Reform Bill (introduced by Baroness Hayman; this is a successor to the Steel Bill)
Assisted Dying Bill (introduced by Lord Falconer of Thoroton)
European Union (Withdrawal) Bill (introduced by Lord Pearson of Rannoch)
We should be in for some interesting debates. The Bills cover subjects which, whatever one’s stance on the merits, deserve to be aired.
I have resigned from the onerous duties of answering all the little problems of peers on this messagebboard/blog.
If I become involved with Westminster again I shall do so without the hindrance of Pressure/lobby groups, all of which distract from the main business of parliament!
Best Wishes, from all end every pseudonym I have used, including my own name!
I’m really sad to read this, GHH. I felt your comments were/are extremely important and shone a special light on whatever it was being debated. Therefore, I hope your disenchantment isn’t permanent and that we will read your views again before too long.
Best wishes, ME
I like to believe that our comment-side pillar-of-participation, Gareth Howell, has decided to be “moving on”,
rather than stalwartly continuing, albeit dutifully, marching alongside in “support” of as it were Old-Clothes seeking to be repeatedly repaired by New-Materials,
which Gareth has been doing well by adding knowledge, experience and advice
(most of which, alas! as with most others of us regularly submitting as best we know, appears to go un-acknowledged, and is intuitively suspected of being allowed and possibly even ‘helped’ to slip down through the ‘cracks-in-the-table’, and then as quickly to get lost away-forever through the bigger cracks in the floor-boards)
maude is right;
(except that I don’t sense so much “disenchantment” as a resolutely-deliberated “sea-change”
charitably notified by a still ‘noble participant’).
Dear Lord Norton. Not sure if you read and respond to comments, but I wonder if you could name a Lords PMB that perhaps helped lead to a Government Bill, either directly or as part of a wider lobbying effort. Just curious, that’s all 🙂 Thank you.
Stuart: That’s a very good question. There is an obvious methodological problem in establishing a causal relationship. However, to take a good historical example there is the Earl of Arran’s Private Member’s Bill in 1965 to give effect to the Wolfenden Report on homosexuality. This was the start of the process leading to the decrminalisation of homosexuality. To fast forward, Lord Joffe’s Bill on assisted dying is probably a good example of a measure that helped get an issue on to the political agenda.
Where, through what effective channel, is the individual citizen/subject’s “private-need” to be legislated ?
Or even the collectivised private-need of (say) “two or three gathered together (in God’s Name)” ?
“Private laws” ???
One just on the cards and in the news, having been the ‘winning’ one drawn-out-of-a-hat (containing up to, or could it be more than, 600 possible “private-laws” )
(tabled by “privately-individual-MPs”)
in The House of Commons is for a “Referendum In or Out of Europe
This is an individually-private-(tory)-member’s Bill !!!.
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Another Lords-of-the-Blog peer further claims that Parliament ‘prides itself on its accuracy of wording’.
Isn’t “Private Member’s Bills” is about as democratically accurate and truthful wording for a “lobbyable minority-group-need” as is
“Select Committees” for “Participatorily-Democratic Scrutiny Committees” ?
Unfortunately, it is clear that the facility of PMBs is being utilised by HMG to circumvent lack of parliamentary time for Bills that should be appropriately placed in the main business. An excellent example of this was seen recently with the Marine Navigation (No2) Bill where as a PMB it did not receive proper informed debate in either House. the result of which was the enactment of a clause (2) which seriously undermines the safety of navigation in UK ports.
donc1955: The use of so-called handout bills (that is, Government Bills available for Private Members who wish to introduce them under the PMB procedure) is a fairly common feature.