All parties – an all too often members of the public – complain that new legislation is badly drafted and inadequately examined. To try to improve the way in which the Government’s proposals are given a reality check, Parliament has invented “pre-legislative scrutiny”. When the Prime Minister first came to power last year he announced a special bill to “build trust in our democracy”. Since such legislation would define our approach to all the rest, it was particularly important we gave it proper scrutiny of this kind.

The joint committee of Peers and MPs looking at the “Draft Constitutional Renewal Bill”, which pretends to interpret Brown’s lofty ambitions, has been taking evidence about its contents for the last seven weeks.

The committee’s sessions are in public, so I am not sworn to secrecy about the way in which our range of expert witnesses have responded. There seems to be a divide between those who think that everything is already pretty well as good as it can be and those who want more radical reform. A range of former Attorney Generals – who seemed to have clubbed together into a sort of Attorney General Trade Union (Retired Branch) – obviously judge their past role to have been near perfect, and any loss of public confidence to be the public’s fault.

On the other side of the debate, people have major misgivings about the whole way in which (as we see it) successive governments have been able to take less and less notice of what Parliament (and the public) think, and that the Bill which the Government have come up with will do little to address that fundamental difficulty.

Yesterday, in our final evidence session, we questioned Jack Straw (Lord Chancellor, Secretary of State for Justice and lead Minister for this Bill). We put to him the two alternative overall responses to his proposals that other witnesses have given us: on the one hand, that the draft Bill is a ragbag of relatively minor and diverse changes that do not amount to a coherent reform, and should be more radical; and on the other, that tinkering of this sort risks undermining some essential elements in our constitution, without achieving much else.

Either way, our witnesses are almost unanimous in considering that the Bill, in its present draft, will do nothing much to “invigorate our democracy” – the primary purpose of the whole exercise, according to the Prime Minister. What was supposed to be a radical set of proposals has been made so anodyne that there seems little hope it will encourage more public participation in our political life. What chance is there that those who have lost faith in politics altogether, and long since abandoned the democratic system in favour abstention and cynicism, can be converted?

You can take a look at the draft Bill here. You may conclude that lordsoftheblog does more to involve citizens in our Parliamentary democracy!