The Trivialisation of Parliament

Henry Hill writes:

Assisted suicide is an issue which – rightly – arouses strong feelings on both sides. But setting aside the substance of the issue for a minute, the circus surrounding Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill (henceforth the ‘Leadbeater Bill’) has been yet another bleak milestone in the trivialisation of Parliament.

The ur-problem is Keir Starmer’s decision to proceed via a private members’ bill (PMB) rather than a government-sponsored bill.

While this used to be the manner in which Parliament approached potentially-contentious social legislation (e.g., abortion and the decriminalisation of homosexuality), later governments have tabled legislation while still allowing a free vote (e.g., on civil partnerships and gay marriage).

The PMB route creates all sorts of problems. For starters, PMBs have no pre-legislative stages – during which detailed evidence can be collected, the mood of MPs tested and so on. The Institute for Government (IfG) thinks this is a potentially fatal mistake (although its suggested solution, citizens’ assemblies, is terrible).

If so, however, it’s an error that Leadbeater and her allies have, if anything, leant into. For example, despite the Bill being ‘reportedly prepared by an extremely experienced parliamentary drafter’, she chose not to publish it until a mere three weeks before it was due to be debated in Parliament.

As a result, when the Bill was finally published, critics were able immediately to produce a laundry list of deficiencies. At least some of these might have been factored in during the preparation stages of a government bill, but instead the Leadbeater Bill was cooked up in a bunker by its staunchest supporters and held secret there as long as possible.

This has already had one remarkable consequence. If you have been following the debate, you might have noticed Leadbeater and other supporters of the Bill attacking sceptical Cabinet ministers (most notably the Health Secretary, which you’d think might give them pause for thought) for allegedly breaching the Prime Minister’s mandate that Cabinet be neutral.

But here’s the thing: because a PMB has no pre-legislative stages, and Leadbeater published it so late, what Starmer actually did here was insist on his government’s neutrality on a piece of critical legislation before he or his ministers had seen it.

Neutrality on government bills makes sense because there is, or ought to have been, full discussion in Cabinet first; collective responsibility was the corollary of collective agreement in old-fashioned cabinet government. Applying it to private legislation is a one-sided abuse of that custom; applying it to such legislation sight unseen is just irresponsible, an active abdication of responsibility.

It also means that ministers such as Wes Streeting haven’t had an opportunity to collect any evidence about, say, the potential impact on the NHS – and it is telling that Leadbeater’s allies are trying to stop him doing so now.

You might think that all this would make it even more important that it receive thorough scrutiny in Parliament. Yet even on paper it will receive only the same procedure as a normal bill, despite its deeply deficient origins – and in reality, it seems likely to receive far less.

There is a clear theory-versus-practice split here, and it is perfectly captured by the disagreement between the above-linked IfG article and Nikki da Costa, the former Downing Street head of legislation. The theory is that once introduced, the Bill goes through exactly the same procedure as any other piece of legislation.

Yet da Costa presents a host of reasons that this is not the case. The vulnerability of PMBs to timetabling pressure, for example, undermines the scrutiny process in both houses: MPs can be put under pressure (‘moral blackmail’) because of the increased chances of the Bill failing outright, while the House of Lords is typically much more reluctant to do its usual heavy lifting for the same reason.

That means the only real opportunity for scrutiny is during the report stage, and it’s here that the most egregious shortcoming is apparent. For whose job is it to select the bill committee for a PMB? The sponsoring MP, in this case one Kim Leadbeater.

Leadbeater and her allies (who struggle to answer basic questions about its safeguards) have done their best to obscure these limited opportunities for proper scrutiny. Supporters of the Bill have been very vocal in urging MPs with reservations to vote for it regardless at second reading ‘if they support assisted dying in principle’, because all the details can be worked out later.

This is, for the reasons set out above, very unlikely to happen. But it’s also a completely ridiculous misunderstanding of Parliament’s function. Our legislature is not (or ought not to be) an undergraduate debating society; it is no place for abstract debates about the merits of assisted suicide per se.

Parliament is about creating and scrutinising legislation; when guides to parliamentary procedure state that the House ‘debates the general principles of the bill’, the ‘of the bill’ bit is of critical importance. There is a world of difference between ‘I support this plan in principle, but am wary about the details’ and ‘I support the abstract objectives this plan tries to accomplish, but think the plan is terrible’.

It would be absurd, even with a normal bill, for the Commons to waste an entire debate on a student-level discussion of the abstract issue it sought to address. That many commentators seem not only to believe otherwise, but to find it unobjectionable, suggests an alarmingly trivial conception of what Parliament is and how it works.

Yet if such attitudes have spread, MPs must shoulder the bulk of the blame. Notwithstanding both the long-established shortcomings of the PMB procedure and Leadbeater and her allies’ energetic attempts to abuse them, MPs have collectively chosen time and again to diminish their own function.

Most obviously, they were enthusiastic supporters of Robin Cook’s reforms to House of Commons procedure which slashed its sitting hours (and some still think that’s too much work).

One big consequence of this has been that the House of Lords, which still sits late, now has to do the vast bulk of the heavy lifting when it comes to making legislation fit for purpose. Elsewhere, the practical implementation has been farmed out to quangos and regulators. If outside observers wrongly think the Commons’ job is holding airy debates while others work out the details, it’s not hard to see how they got that impression.

The other, and much more visible, consequence has been the huge increase in the use of programme motions – the things used to fix the amount of time available to debate a bill.

While these did exist before Cook, there has been a profound shift in the past 20 years. Where determined MPs could once keep ministers up until the small hours to press them on the fine details of legislation, they now need to apply to the Speaker for the chance to speak at all, if enough of their colleagues want to take part.

If they get picked, their contribution could be slashed to just two minutes – fine for getting something into Hansard, boosting your scores on TheyWorkForYou, or generating a clip for social media, but totally inadequate for a meaningful contribution, let alone a back-and-forth debate.

The upcoming debate on the Leadbeater Bill has been allocated just five hours of parliamentary time. If every MP wished to speak, and were afforded the chance to do so (which you’d think would be a bare-minimum standard for a democratic legislature) they would get less than 30 seconds each. Again, you can understand why someone would look at that and conclude second reading was simply a chance to air debating-room takes.