I’ve just got back from the launch in the Commons of ‘Rethink Politics’ an initiative funded by the Electoral Commission, supported by Rethink, the Mental Health charity, aimed at encouraging partcipation in politics by people who have been affected by mental illness. One of the successes of the project has been to get 5000 service users onto the…
Back to work this week on my Select Committee, Merits of Statutory Instruments. Our job is to scrutinise weekly the delegated legislation made under the authority of an Act (that is, the detailed stuff that makes the Act work) and see if any of the statutory instruments fail to achieve their objectives, or should be…
Thanks to ‘anonymous’ who contributed the following in a comment on the boingboing website at the end of last week: “Tangentially, you all might be interested in the ‘House of Lords’ blog – http://lordsoftheblog.net/. It is filled with thought-provoking commentary and insight about the bumpy but successful running of a parliamentary democracy. Raise your concerns…
This week’s quiz relates to peers who sit on the cross-benches, that is, peers with no party whip. They presently number almost two-hundred, have a convenor (Baroness d’Souza) and constitute the only grouping in the House with its own website. Their number has increased in recent years with the nominations made by the independent appointments commission,…
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008 was largely the work of the House of Lords. It built on and extended the provisions about IVF and embryo research in the 1990 law, which had established in Britain the first comprehensive regulatory authority in this field, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. The HFEA arouses great interest all over the…
I usually invite a guest speaker to our weekly crossbench meetings and yesterday it was Sir John Major. He now spends a lot of his working life addressing audiences all over the world on topics ranging from leaner government, through trade competition , to world population. So his was a practised speech but no less…
A committee of MPs has just reported on ways to “make the Commons matter more, increase its vitality and rebalance its relationship with the executive, and to give the public a greater voice in parliamentary proceedings”. It was set up by the House of Commons in the wake of the expenses revelations and was chaired…
Now that the 2008-09 session has finished, some data on the session have been published. The average daily attendance was 400. There were 89 divisions during the session; the Government was defeated in 25 of them. The House sat later than 10.00 p.m. (its target rising time) on 37 out of the 134 sitting days. …
I promised to alert readers when the Government eventually got round to consulting on the future of the edited version of the electoral register. As you may recall, I got a response from a minister earlier this year saying it was intended to commence the consultation before the summer recess. The commitment then changed to holding it…
