Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Lord Grocott Excerpts

Tuesday 10th May 2011 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Grocott]

8: Clause 1, page 1, line 8, at end insert—
“( ) Each five-year parliament shall include a minimum of five parliamentary sessions.”

[Lord Grocott]

My Lords, this is a very simple amendment with a very simple objective which I hope the Government will be able to accept. As the House knows, I find the Bill entirely unattractive and wish that we were simply getting rid of it, but if we are to have a Bill where there are fixed five-year Parliaments, then it follows, as night follows day, that there ought to be a rule governing the number of Sessions within the fixed five years.

It is very odd trying to put our constitution into a straitjacket, but the Government seem intent on doing so. This amendment was considered in Committee but not very satisfactory answers were given. The reason I have been inspired to table it is that whereas we normally know that a parliamentary Session will last about a year—with the exception of the first year of a Parliament, which can frequently be 18 months, from, say, May in one year until November the following year—I am sorry to say that this Government have unilaterally decided that there would be a two-year Session to begin this Parliament.

If we were following the normal conventions of our democracy then we would not be debating the Report stage of a Bill now, we would be having a Queen’s Speech. It is a year since the general election and that is the normal length of a Session of Parliament. The Government have already told us that the next general election will be in May 2015, so it seems an incredibly simple proposition that there should be five Sessions of one year each. Normally it would be completely unnecessary for me or anyone else to move an amendment requiring that this should be the case, but the Government have broken the normal rules. I do not know where the decision to have a two-year Session came from. I ask the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, what consultation the Government had with the Opposition or anyone else when they decided that we should have a two-year Session of Parliament.

As we all know, the sessional discipline is part of the delicate balance between Government and Opposition. Oppositions get stronger, in a sense, as the Session progresses because the Government know that they are up against the deadline of a Queen’s Speech; and we have had, quite properly, to establish precise mechanisms to enable a Bill to be carried over from one Session to the next. I say “quite properly” because we have all recognised in the past—although apparently not now—that it would be quite wrong for a Government simply to be able to extend at their convenience the periods between Queen’s Speeches.

As I say, I do not like translating conventions into rules, but it is necessary in this case. Why are we not having a Queen’s Speech now? Why are the Government not bringing the first year of this Parliament to a conclusion in the normal way, after 12 months, making concessions on Bills—which is what Governments do towards the end of a Session—and then preparing for the next statement of the Government’s policies and legislative objectives, which of course is what we get with a new Queen’s Speech? If the Government are intent on having five years after five years after five years ad infinitum—although I am obviously delighted with the amendment that has been passed that will require any new Government to think again about this—what could conceivably be the objection to insisting in this legislation, which provides us with the opportunity, that there should be a minimum of five Sessions in a five-year Parliament?

I looked in vain, having reread the Committee stage when this was discussed, but no one spoke against it except the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace. Maybe it was wishful thinking on my part, but I got the feeling that he was not wildly enthusiastic about speaking against it. The only objections that he offered were that this could present problems should there be a Dissolution of Parliament under the terms of this legislation in less than five years. We all know that that is a possibility; again, it is a part of the Bill that not many of us like, but there are precise provisions for saying how Parliaments can be of a period of less than five years. If the Government have found the mechanism for dealing with a Parliament that lasts less than five years, surely it is not difficult to find a mechanism for dealing with the consequences for parliamentary Sessions. It is unfortunate that we have to go down this road but, if we have, it cannot be beyond the skill of parliamentary draftsmen to deal with that objection.

The only other case that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, offered in Committee comes in col. 526 of Hansard on 21 March. He explained why the Government decided that it would be not a one-year Session but a two-year Session; it was announced unilaterally to Parliament last September without consultation, as far as I know—although I would be delighted to be proved wrong in that respect. The explanation that was given was as follows:

“An announcement was made in September, which would normally have been between a third and half way through the Session”.

He is referring to the last Session, which should have concluded this May, as I have suggested.

“There was an option to truncate the Session about now”—

he was speaking in March—

“but it was thought that the best thing to do was to go to next year”.

The Minister is very precise with words; he is a lawyer and is careful what he says. It is not exactly truncating a Session to suggest that it should be for a year, however. It really is a fairly loose use of the word.

[The Advocate-General for Scotland (Lord Wallace of Tankerness)]

Does the noble Lord not recall that the normal practice has been for the first Session after a May election—indeed, I think that it happened with almost every Government elected when Mr Blair was Prime Minister—to last not a year but until the following autumn? So when I say truncated, I mean that there would not normally have been a Queen’s Speech this May; it would still have been in November. The first Session would probably have gone 18 months, so to have had a Queen’s Speech in March or April would have been to truncate the normal practice after a May general election.

[Lord Grocott]

The problem with that argument is that, yes, it is true that if the election is in May then normally you have the Queen’s Speech the following year, in November. But if there is an election in October—and one that I vividly remember is the one in October 1974, because it was when the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, went out and I came in—the Queen’s Speech is the following November. The convention is that the Queen’s Speech is in November and if the sequence of elections means that that does not happen, it is quite right that there is a long Session of 18 months. There is a bit of a case for that, I suppose; all Governments are wild with enthusiasm when they come in and have lots of exciting things to propose, such as Fixed-term Parliament Bills, and so on. So it goes for a longish Session. But this was a choice for the Government, once they had decided that there would be a five-year Parliament, between having a year Session or a two-year Session. If he thinks there is not much to choose between an 18-month Session, which as he rightly says obtains when there is a May election, and a two-year Session, let me say that it would have been heaven to me as Chief Whip to have had a two-year Session. There is no pressure on you and no trouble; you can spend as long as you like on Committee and Report stages, and so on. So I do not think that that argument held up very well.

I do not suggest evil intent on the part of the Minister or anyone else in the Government in this respect at all. I am simply saying that not much thought went into what was in fact a quite substantial shift of power between Government and Opposition. As I said, that is a pretty delicate matter in our parliamentary procedures in both Houses, because it shifted the balance of power substantially in favour of the Government. I thought that the Minister really gave the game away in this second sentence:

“There was an option to truncate the Session about now, but it was thought that the best thing to do was to go to next year”.—[Official Report, 21/3/11; col. 526.]

The question from where I am standing is: the best thing to do for whom? In whose interest was it unilaterally to determine that there should be a two-year Session?

I simply put two questions to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace. First, was there any consultation through the normal channels about the Government's decision unilaterally to decide, for the first time in the past 30 or 40 years—I am sure that the historians could go much further—on a two-year Session which is massively to the Government’s advantage? Secondly, I really would like to know, once it was determined to be the “best thing to do”, in whose interest the decision was thought to be made. I beg to move.

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

My Lords, we support this amendment. It goes to the heart of this Government’s claim that they wish to empower the legislature as against the Executive. The reason it matters, as my noble friend Lord Grocott said, is that where there is a restriction on the time to get legislation through, there is a huge incentive for any Government, whatever their hue, to reach agreement with the Opposition on as many issues as possible. If they do not reach agreement on those issues, the consequence is that their legislation is delayed.

Parliament is disempowered if a Government feel able, as this one did, to double the length of a Session. This Government did so on a whim, as there was no consultation. It appears from the speech of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, that they simply decided to go for two years without giving any justification. This House is entitled to hear the Government's opinion on the number of Sessions there should be in a Parliament and their commitment in relation to that. Do they understand the importance of empowering the Chamber in each House by having a limit on the time available to them for the passage of legislation?

If satisfactory answers are not given, this should be put to the vote. It is an important issue. The answers must include one to the question which my noble friend Lord Grocott put, because that is really the litmus test of how committed the Government are to the idea of there being a year-on-year Session. This is another opportunity for the Government to put their money where their mouth is. Are they true exponents of what they describe as the new politics, or are they simply motivated by a desire to make their life as easy as possible—that is, the worst sort of Executive?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, for affording the House a further opportunity to consider and scrutinise this point, which, as has been indicated, he first raised in Committee. At that point I indicated that the two-year Session that we are currently in was intended as a transitional situation so that we could get into a position where we had 12-month parliamentary Sessions that fitted in, should Parliament pass a fixed-term Parliament Act.

I draw your Lordships’ attention to the Written Ministerial Statement made by my right honourable friend the Leader of the other place, Sir George Young, on 23 March. He reiterated the Government’s decision to extend the current Session of Parliament to spring 2012,

“in order to ensure a smooth transition towards five, 12-month Sessions over a Parliament, which would be a beneficial consequence of Parliament agreeing the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill”.—[Official Report, Commons, 23/3/11; col. 57WS.]

I hope that the House and the noble Lord will be assured that it is our intention that there should normally be five Sessions in a five-year Parliament. While the expectation is that future Sessions will last for 12 months, it remains inappropriate to enshrine that in statute; indeed, I think that I understood the noble Lord himself to indicate that he would prefer that working practices and conventions were not enshrined in statute. It is our intention that in future Parliaments there should be five 12-month Sessions.

In the Bill we have sought to do only what is necessary to establish fixed-term Parliaments for the United Kingdom. I am not convinced that the case has been made for legislating for the number of Sessions. The Bill does not abolish the prerogative power to prorogue Parliament, which will continue to be used to set parliamentary Sessions, nor does the Bill affect the powers of each House to adjourn. It is worth noting that the Constitution Committee has endorsed our decision not to abolish the prerogative power to prorogue.

Future Sessions after this one will last for only 12 months. The noble Lord asked me about the points that I made in Committee. When I talked about truncating this Session, that was on the basis that, as he acknowledged, when elections have been held in May or June it has been customary for that first Session to continue through to the following October or November. To have had a Queen’s Speech around now would therefore have meant truncating what had been expected at the outset.

I have made it clear that the decision to go for two years and thereafter to have 12-monthly Sessions was taken not in May last year but at a later stage. I am not aware that there was any consultation—I accept that criticism—but this was intended to be a transitional measure. By that stage, the Government’s legislative programme had been announced and it would have been very difficult if we had moved immediately to a 12-month Session for the first Session, although that could have been done if it had been thought about at the outset. I hope that the House will accept that that is the purpose of this being a two-year Session. It is not intended that this should be repeated. My right honourable friend the Leader of the other place has indicated that it would now be our intention to move to five 12-month Sessions in a Parliament.

I take the point made by my noble friend Lord Norton about this always being in the interests of Parliament. My experience in your Lordships’ House in the run-up to the most recent general election is that, with the final Session starting in November and finishing in March in order to accommodate a May election, we have tended to have a short Session that I do not believe allows proper scrutiny of legislation. This led to a very unfortunate situation in the wash-up where large parts of Bills were ditched, some of which are now on the statute book but certainly did not have the kind of scrutiny that we would normally expect. Having five 12-month Sessions will allow for proper planning of legislation. While it would be unwise to say that there will never be any kind of wash-up at the end of the final Session, one hopes that there will be far less than has been the case hitherto. One of the advantages of a fixed-term Parliament is that it will be possible to plan a legislative programme in a way that will not lead to these log-jams at the end, when much legislation is virtually nodded through.

The decision having been taken to move to fixed-term Parliaments, and since we seem—for better or worse—to have moved into a situation where elections are held in May, the Bill provides for elections in May. Therefore, it makes sense that we should have annual May-to-May Sessions. I repeat: the current two-year Session is a transition. No doubt what we gain here is that there is only a finite amount of legislative time in the Parliament as a whole if it lasts for five years. It would not be appropriate to put that in the statute. I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving me an opportunity to reiterate the position and to flag up what my right honourable friend the Leader of the other place has said on this matter. With these reassurances, I hope the noble Lord will be prepared to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Grocott]

I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, for that response. He simply holds a fundamental view on the constitution. So do I, but it is a different one. He is comfortable with a legislative programme being neatly sliced and organised over a fixed-term Parliament, whereas I have been straightforward with the House in saying that I am not at all comfortable with that. I like the flexibility that normally obtains with our parliamentary system. I do not even have the problem that he has with the last Session of a four-year Parliament quite frequently being a five or six-month pre-election Session. All that the Bill will do is make sure that it is a 12-month pre-election Session instead of a six-month pre-election Session. It will also lead to a lot of uncertainty.

I was straightforward with the House in saying that I was, in some respects, very uncomfortable with my own amendment. For the reasons I have already set out, I do not like putting our constitution in any more of a straitjacket than it needs to be. I am very grateful for the contributions that have been made. As ever, I find myself agreeing with the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, on most things, particularly his reference to the 1945 to 1950 Labour Government having been the greatest Labour Government. I would go marginally further and say that it was the greatest peacetime Government in the history of this country; there is only a word’s difference between us.

I was taken with the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Norton. I agree with him that maybe a year is not necessarily the best period. Maybe it is worth discussing that. I strongly believe in the convention that we have. If a Government are unable to contain their legislative programme within an agreed period of time, there should be an agreement by either House to carry a Bill over from one Session to the next only after the most rigorous tests. However, I take the noble Lord’s point. I must admit that I was stopped in my tracks by my noble friend, who reminded me that it was against the philosophy of several of us to try to put the proceedings of this Parliament into too strong a legislative framework.

The point has been made, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, has acknowledged. It is written in blood in Hansard that there will be 12-month Sessions for the remainder of this Parliament until the happy day when it comes to a conclusion and a Labour Government can repeal the whole of this legislation. In light of what has been said, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 8 withdrawn.

Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Lord Grocott Excerpts

Tuesday 29th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Norton of Louth]

My Lords, I agree with my noble friend Lord Newton of Braintree. He is right about the international position; we are extremely unusual in the period of transition from Government to Government. I shall come back to that on a later amendment.

The problem with Amendment 37—I shall speak also to Amendment 34—is the premise that there should be a delay for a set period following the election. It may be for only five days rather than 14, but there is a delay, whereas the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, seeks to make provision for an election to follow in the immediate wake of the loss of a vote of no confidence. Given a choice between the two, I incline to the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Howarth.

However, the problem that I have with his amendment is that the loss of a vote of no confidence triggers an election as the only option. I believe that that should be, as now, one option rather than the only option. I shall come back to that issue in later amendments. Given the choice between the two I incline towards the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Howarth. However, we still need a provision for Prime Ministers to be able to tender their resignation rather than automatically request that Parliament be dissolved.

[Lord Grocott]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Newton, repeated an argument that has been used on many occasions, particularly by his noble friends on the Liberal Democrat Benches, that we are somehow in a new kind of politics now, having moved from the traditional two-party system to the less traditional three-party system, and that we therefore need to change huge swathes of our constitution, including changing the voting system and perhaps changing the mechanism for moving from one Government to another, in order to accommodate a fundamental change in our political system. I put it to him, and to them, that I do not take that view; I think that the fundaments of our politics are quite similar to what they were when I came into politics 50 years ago. I put it to them at least that, should any of the opinion polls be right—and we know that we should treat them cautiously—there is a fair bit of evidence that we are moving back towards more of a two-party system, which I for one would welcome. I would be interested to know whether all those who have been saying “New politics means new constitution” will now say that they want the constitution to revert to the way that it operated previously, should there be old politics after all—that is, fundamentally a choice between people who are broadly happy with the way things are and people who want to change them, which is basically what happens in democracies in the United States, here and in many countries of Europe—rather than a yes, a no and a don’t-know as we have at the moment. I make that point simply as an aside but it is worth considering.

This part of the Bill makes an extraordinary proposition. I think that we all more or less subscribe to the cliché “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, but the Government seem not only to be rejecting that idea but also to be saying that, if it is working perfectly, we had still better fix it. My argument is very simply that the no-confidence system as has operated in this country works not just very well but perfectly. We have a test case: 1979. I am very pleased to see the noble Lord, Lord McNally, on the Front Benches; he remembers 1979 as well as I do. That was a perfect example of the no-confidence system, which is not written into our constitution, with there being no clear procedural rules that Jim Callaghan had to follow, working perfectly. He lost the confidence of the House on a motion of no confidence so he went to the country. Will someone please tell me what was wrong with that? One problem that the Government got themselves into in their five days in May, among many others, was trying to write in law aspects of our constitution which are perfectly well understood and which do not need writing in law. It is a bit like trying to write down prescriptively in legislation the procedures that the monarchy needs to go through in the event of a hung Parliament. That would be extraordinarily difficult, and what the Government thought was an incredibly simple Bill is not a simple Bill at all. It has serious complications, and this is the most serious of them.

I simply put this to the Minister. In respect of the 14 days, what is the problem that he is trying to resolve? I shall put it even more simply than that and ask him what Jim Callaghan did wrong. He lost a motion of no confidence; we all know what that is. He immediately went to the country. Under this Bill, he should have entered a period of 14 days’ negotiation, without any consultation with the British public. Worse still—at least from my perspective; nobody could accuse me of self-interest because I have mentioned to the Committee before that his decision resulted in me becoming unemployed—

[Lord Clinton-Davis]

Jim Callaghan did not immediately go to the country. There was a gap of some six weeks.

[Lord Grocott]

He immediately called the general election. My noble friend is quite right to correct me, but it amounts to the same thing. My point is that there was no negotiation. He announced the general election immediately, and the public and the parties knew where they were.

Unless the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, can explain it to me, there is a double fault in the Government's position. Am I right in assuming, first, that the Government think that it was wrong for Jim Callaghan to go to the country when he did; and, secondly, according to other parts of the Bill, that the Government should have gone on for another six months until October 1974 without a majority to complete the five-year fixed-term period? That builds absurd rigidity into the system. I cannot see what they are trying to deal with. If the noble and learned Lord cannot answer those two specific questions about what Jim Callaghan did wrong, he ought to remove the provision.

I agree with my noble friend's amendment. To distil it, it simply says, “If a Government lose a motion of no confidence, there shall be a general election”. I would love it if someone would follow me to say, “It is a risky, false proposition that if a Government lose a motion of no confidence, they should go to the country”. Why fiddle about with it? What on earth are the Government doing? Why do they not save us all a lot of time and energy and just withdraw the provision?

[Lord Campbell of Alloway]

My Lords, very briefly, I have for a long time shared the concerns expressed by the noble Lord. Those concerns appear to me to be met by Amendment 50. Has he considered that?

[Lord Mackay of Clashfern]

My Lords, it is worth pointing out that the noble Lord’s Government introduced a fixed-term Parliament in Scotland with procedures if the incumbent Government lose a motion of no confidence. The Bill is dealing with a fixed-term Parliament on somewhat the same lines as the Labour Government did in the devolution legislation.

[Lord Grocott]

I am sorry, my Lords. I was sitting down thinking about having a cup of tea and suddenly realised that those were interventions on my speech.

The fundamental difference between this and the situation in the Scottish Parliament is that that document began from a blank sheet of paper—albeit a very well rehearsed blank sheet of paper. There is all the difference in the world between drawing up a new constitution and amending a constitution which has worked perfectly well. That is my answer to that question.

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

This is a fascinating debate. To pick up on what my noble friend Lord Clinton-Davis said, it has been mentioned before in this debate, but it is worth citing what Mr James Callaghan said in the evening after he lost the vote of no confidence. He said:

“Mr Speaker, now that the House of Commons has declared itself, we shall take our case to the country. Tomorrow I shall propose to Her Majesty that Parliament be dissolved as soon as essential business can be cleared up, and I shall then announce as soon as may be—and that will be as soon as possible—the date of Dissolution, the date of the election and the date of meeting of the new Parliament”.—[Official Report, Commons, 28/3/79; col. 589.]

Under the Bill, were it to be passed in this form, Mr James Callaghan would have said, “I shall now wait for 14 days while I offer the Ulster Unionists tunnels and money, and junior ministerial posts to Mr Bruce Grocott, in the hope that they might then support me”. Should Mr James Callaghan have been of that nature, he could under the Bill have used the 14 days to bribe and cajole to produce another Labour Government with confidence and supply support from the Ulster Unionists and come back 14 days later to say, “Ha, ha! I can return with a Labour Government and I will hold on until October 1979”. We should ask ourselves: would the public have had greater confidence in Mr Callaghan if he had behaved like that or did they have much greater confidence in him immediately accepting the consequence of what was happening and going to the country?

I ask that question because the right honourable Mr Nicholas Clegg says that we are going through all these contortions apparently to increase trust in our parliamentary system, despite the fact that Mr David Laws makes it clear that that is untrue. I give way to the noble Lord, Lord Rennard.

Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Lord Grocott Excerpts

Tuesday 29th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

My Lords, there would not necessarily be another 14-day period triggered by the first one. Subject to that, the noble and learned Lord’s analysis is absolutely correct. If someone else sought to form a Government and did not win a vote of no confidence, that would lead to an election if no other Government were then formed within 14 days.

I think there is agreement, surprising though it may seem. However, there are two other possible outcomes: that there is a Dissolution leading to an election, or another Government could be formed, the 1924 example being a case in point. As I said, the 14 days is a matter of judgment, but it does provide for a period for that second outcome of another Government being formed to actually happen. We have debated this issue already and we are due for another debate on an amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, on whether 14 days is right. However, the provision does allow for a period for that to happen and, if it does not happen, for us to proceed to an election.

[Lord Grocott]

Can the noble and learned Lord answer this question? It has been raised on a number of occasions but I have never heard a specific answer to it. Under the Bill, if the Liberal Democrats decide at some time in the next four years that they cannot support the present Government, the Government lose a motion of no confidence and, during the subsequent 14 days, the Liberal Democrats decide to support the Labour Party—which would not give many of us a great deal of joy—an entirely new Government could be formed without any reference to the British people whatsoever. Is that the position?

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

It is a very hypothetical situation. Any new Government, as the noble Lord suggests, would have to be subject to a positive vote of confidence. The noble Lord, Lord Grocott, says that they would get it. That does not necessarily follow because clearly the two parties do not command a majority in the House of Commons. It is hypothetical but, if the other Government were formed, possibly involving the Liberal Democrats and the Labour Party, and it commanded the confidence of the House of Commons, which is crucial, the fixed term would continue to its natural conclusion.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

I apologise. I had presumed that there had been a vote of no confidence in what would then have been a Conservative minority Government if the Liberal Democrats had left it. In that case a new Government would have had to be formed and there would have to have been a vote of confidence. I am sure that a new Government formed in that way would have to have a Queen’s Speech, which would trigger a potential confidence motion, and if they won that they would continue to govern. As my noble friend said, if an Administration have the support and the confidence of a majority in the other place, they can govern. I apologise if I misinterpreted the question put by the noble Lord, Lord Grocott. I presumed that there had been a motion of no confidence, and that may not have been part of the hypothesis that he put. However, the new Government would be susceptible to a vote of no confidence if they did not have a majority and could not command the confidence of the House. Therefore the procedures in this Bill would then be triggered; otherwise it is as the noble Baroness says.

[Lord Grocott]

If this game of musical parties were to occur—more specifically, if the Liberal Democrats were to decide which party they wanted to operate with—it would be very difficult for Mr Clegg to continue his argument that this was reconnecting Parliament with the public.

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

If that was the scenario—a purely hypothetical one—I think my party would have a challenging time making the argument as to why things had changed. However, I do not suppose for a moment that the noble Lord—who probably was in the Commons in 1977—complained too much about an arrangement falling short of a coalition with the then Liberal Party, which actually sustained a Labour Government in power. Obviously the Liberal Party had to answer to the electorate for what it did then, and that is the political reality. These things are all considered in a political context. There is the political reality again, taking the point made by the noble and learned Lord, that if a Prime Minister of the day sought to try and abuse or contrive a vote of no confidence, that would be judged in a political context. It may be thought in some circumstances that it was right to do so, in others that it was duplicitous; the ultimate determination of whether it was right or wrong is one for the electorate, and so it should be.

The period in my noble friend’s amendment is 28 days. He indicated that he took it from the arrangements that had been made for Scotland and Wales in the event of a resignation of a First Minister. There are sufficient differences in the position between the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales and the United Kingdom Parliament that would make 28 days an inappropriate period. That is why we have exercised our judgment and said in the Bill that 14 days is more appropriate.

The amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, would provide that an early general election could be triggered where the Prime Minister has resigned and 14 days have elapsed without the House of Commons passing a motion expressing confidence in a Government. Again, my point would be that in establishing fixed terms, we are seeking to deny the Executive their ability to decide if and when there should be an election. This amendment places one of the triggers for an early Dissolution within the hands of a Prime Minister. That is the problem which we would have with it. The noble Lord mentioned 1951 but it is generally accepted—indeed, I think Mr Jack Straw accepted this on Second Reading—that the circumstances there would almost certainly have triggered the two-thirds majority for Dissolution, because there was common ground that an election should take place. The problem with the noble Lord’s amendment, as I indicated, is that in an effort to try and take away the power from the Executive and put it into the hands of Parliament, it would return it to the Prime Minister.

However, subject to what I said in my opening remarks in response to the constructive point made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, and in wishing to look at the important contributions that have been made, I certainly intend to reflect on what has been said in this debate and in earlier debates on the same subject. I have no doubt whatsoever that these matters will be returned to on Report but I ask my noble friend to withdraw his amendment.

Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Lord Grocott Excerpts

Tuesday 29th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames]

My Lords, the amendment addresses two issues. I do not propose to deal with the question of possible weekend voting because we have discussed that already.

The first issue is that the Bill as drawn omits to provide for a timetable for an election to take place after a vote for a Dissolution or a vote of no confidence. The existing provision in the Bill is for an election to be held on the day appointed by Her Majesty, by proclamation, on the recommendation of the Prime Minister. The Bill therefore leaves it to the defeated Prime Minister to decide on the advice he gives to the Queen as to how long should elapse before a general election is held in the event of a vote of no confidence. To leave the date of the election as open as that would be unsatisfactory and open to abuse.

Secondly, the timescale suggested in the amendment—that an election should be held no earlier than four weeks after the Speaker’s certificate and no later than eight weeks after the certificate—is intended to strike a sensible balance. On the one hand, it is important to avoid an unholy rush to judgment, with a squeezed timetable for candidate selection, for nominations and for postal votes; on the other hand, it should not be possible to delay an election under either of the provisions for an early Dissolution for too long. It is also important not to permit an unduly long campaign to enable a Prime Minister to bolster an unpopular Government’s position. Keeping the period reasonably short is particularly important when there is a vote of no confidence because the Government who have just been rejected by the elected House would remain in power following that vote until replaced after the election.

However, the period allowed also has to be long enough to make it possible for a reasonably full campaign to take place, even where the Speaker’s certificate comes just before a holiday period. The timing of any early Dissolution may be unpredictable and inconvenient and that may happen. For this reason, while it might at first blush seem desirable to opt for a shorter period of six or seven weeks as the longest period permissible, we feel that eight weeks is about right.

It will be interesting to hear what other noble Lords think about the appropriate period, but it would not be sensible for the Bill to be enacted with no timetable at all. I beg to move.

[Lord Grocott]

My Lords, this is a characteristic of trying to solve a problem that has never existed. The only occasion on which this system has been tested—we keep going over the same ground and I do not need to repeat it—was when Jim Callaghan lost a vote of no confidence. I can remember absolutely no dispute, argument, difficulty or sense of abuse about the period between the defeat of the Government and the general election being held. However, now, as with fixed-term Parliaments and a number of other provisions in the Bill, we seem to need to write into statute law what has historically always operated perfectly satisfactorily.

In particular I am concerned that, unless we can improve the Bill, in addition to the two-week period when the Government are being formed, there is now to be up to eight weeks—10 weeks in all—between the defeat of the Government in a motion of no confidence and the general election. The longest election period in the time that I was fighting elections was six weeks, in 1997. I think that there was universal agreement that that was at least two weeks too long. The public get bored—I do not blame them—pretty rapidly. I shall not go over those arguments again because they are conclusive. I simply say that this is yet another example of an attempt to impose a straitjacketed legal constraint on something which has worked perfectly well and requires no change whatever. At its worst, it could lead to a general election campaign effectively lasting for 10 weeks, which is at least six weeks too long.

Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Lord Grocott Excerpts

Monday 21st March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack]

My Lords, I am tempted briefly to intervene, partly because of what the noble Lord, Lord Martin, said. I always remember that one of his predecessors—the late, great Jack Weatherill, who many of your Lordships will remember from his time in this House—once said to me, “If you have any doubt, do not go in and listen to the debate; just stay out and vote”. I must say that I have heard every word in this debate and uttered one or two myself, but the more I look at the Bill and listen to what noble Lords say, the more convinced I am that this is a wholly unnecessary piece of legislation.

If the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister wish to make a binding undertaking to go to the country in May 2015, there is nothing in our current legislation that would stop them. I can well understand why the two leaders of the new Government—a coalition which is a new experiment in many ways—wanted a period of five years. God bless them, they can have five years, and I genuinely wish them success; but I am not so naive as to suppose that if there is some extraordinary rift or argument during those five years, all those protestations will not fall to the side and there will be an election. The Bill provides for an escape clause, in Clause 2, which we shall debate next week. I have tabled a significant amendment to delete it and to replace it with something else. However, I must not rehearse those arguments now.

The more I listen to this debate, the more two things come to mind. The noble Lord, Lord Martin, talked about the fifth year. Everything he said was correct. I was there for the five-year Parliaments that existed between 1970 and last year. It is quite true that, in every case, the fifth year was the least glorious. However, it would be a little naive to suggest that there would not be a concentration on the forthcoming election in the fourth year. One has only to look across the Atlantic at the ridiculous two-year cycles for the House of Representatives and the four-year presidential cycle to see that potential presidential candidates are already being lined up by the Republicans although the general election is a long time ahead. Of course that would happen here as well. Therefore, we in this House have to accept—in my case reluctantly—that the House of Commons has sent us the Bill. We have the ultimate power to reject it completely. However, that would not be an advisable course for your Lordships' House to take, even though we would be entirely within our rights to take it. Instead, we should decide whether the five-year term enshrined in the Bill is the right way forward.

The Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister have put themselves into a difficult position, because if we insert “four” rather than “five” into the legislation, their resolution made last year to serve five years will be blown apart. Of course, the House of Commons would send back the Bill. Therefore, I suggest that perhaps the best way forward is to accept, with whatever degree of reluctance but with total understanding, the five-year wish of the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, but then to look to the future beyond that to consider what should be the normal life of a Parliament. On that question, the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, in an excellent speech, put his finger on a number of very important points. Beyond 2015, it would be prudent and sensible to listen to the advice not only of many theoretical experts and academics, but of others who have had practical experience of politics, and to say that if the Government insist on fixed-term Parliaments after 2015, the term should be four years.

[Lord Grocott]

My Lords, I am not sure that I would be happy with the proposal that the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, made, although I can see merit in it. However, I was very interested in what he said about the Bill laying bare the criticism that has been made of the Prime Minister for using as a defence of the five-year Parliament and of the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill the argument that somehow it will take away power from the Prime Minister. It will take away power from subsequent Prime Ministers. As David Laws's book and the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, spelt out clearly, it was the Prime Minister who decided, with the Deputy Prime Minister, that the next general election would be five years hence, and gave the precise date. He did it far longer in advance than previous Prime Ministers, but none the less he made the decision himself.

I will address a comment made by a number of noble Lords in various debates that deserves a response from people like me who do not like the Bill but feel that if we must have fixed terms, we would prefer four years to five. The criticism directed toward us is that the worries in the final year of a five-year Parliament are not significantly different from the difficulties that come at the conclusion of a four-year Parliament. The noble Lord, Lord Cormack, touched on that. The argument is that people will be electioneering for a full year, knowing when the election will come, that the Government will gear their legislative programme to the timing of the election, and that the situation will not be significantly different regardless of whether that election comes at the end of four years or five.

However, it is my experience, and that of many other noble Lords who have spoken, that a five-year Parliament historically has been less successful than a four-year Parliament, and that the fifth year is always a tired and weary year, when the authority of the Government is running down and may or may not get renewed. It is often a very bad-tempered year, with constant demands from the Opposition for the Government to resign and put their record to the electorate. I will not quote names, but many Ministers in the fifth year of a Parliament want to retire but know that it would be disloyal to the Government to quit when an election is coming at a proximate but indeterminate date. A Parliament gets tired and needs refreshing. It is almost a relief when the election comes and a new Parliament can, with renewed vigour, come into operation with a new Government, although not necessarily of a new party. All sorts of things contribute to that. Members of Parliament announce their retirement during the course of a Parliament, but there would be far more such announcements towards the end of a five-year Parliament than towards the end of a four-year one. I had better be careful how I say this but people who know that they are retiring do not give it quite the full welly as they would if they thought they might be sitting in the following term.

There is also a practical problem. This is probably rather an esoteric point but I think that many in the Chamber will recognise it. With fixed five-year terms, when you have to commit yourself to fighting the next general election, which is normally around half-way through a Parliament, you are committing yourself to remaining in Parliament for at least eight years—no one dares to call a by-election these days, or at least they do so only very rarely—and that is a very big commitment to make, certainly when you get to about your mid-50s.

Therefore, in terms of the last year, there is a significant difference between a five-year and a four-year Parliament. Of course, this country has the advantage of a wonderfully flexible constitution, so we are able empirically to compare what has happened in the past with four and five-year Parliaments. I hope that I have at least attempted to answer the criticism that it really does not make much difference whether it is a four or a five-year term.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, may think that I am rather a sad figure but over the weekend I reflected on what he said in his response last week. He said something that threw me—I had not thought of it. I was arguing, as I am now, for a four-year Parliament—not of a fixed term but normally four years—and I challenged him on why on earth a Liberal Democrat within a Government would say that the electorate should be consulted less frequently, because I suggest to the Committee that that is what would happen. I suggested that since the Second World War there would have been 13 rather than 18 elections and the noble and learned Lord said, “Ah, you can’t really assume that that is the case because, under the provisions of this Bill, who knows how many elections there would have been. Some might have been instigated by the two-thirds rule”. On reflection, that is not the strongest of arguments. I hope that in responding to this debate he will at least concede that there could not have been more general elections than there would have been had his Act been in operation, because there is a maximum amount of time that a Parliament can sit. Therefore, it must surely be true that there would have been fewer. I think it is incredibly unlikely that the two-thirds provision would have precipitated an election. The only occasion when there was an early election due to parliamentary activity was when the Jim Callaghan Government lost the vote of confidence, and that would have applied under this legislation. In fact, it might not have applied and poor Jim Callaghan would have had to enter a 14-day cooling-off period, or whatever you call it. That has always struck me as an odd suggestion.

I have a final question for the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace. The defence that his leader gave of the proposal for a five-year Parliament is contained in the Second Reading debate of the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill. When challenged as to the justification for five years, he said:

“Leaving aside the very short Parliaments, half of all Parliaments since the war have run for more than four years, so five years is … in keeping with our current arrangements”.—[Official Report, Commons, 13/9/10; col. 625.]

I do not know what he did at university, but it was not logic. That is the equivalent of a batsman saying, “My batting average would have been 100 if you eliminate the ducks”. Basically that is what he is doing in terms of averages. We need from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, a better justification for five years than has been offered to the Committee so far.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Butler of Brockwell]

A balance has to be struck and I would strike it at five years.

On the previous day in Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, urged a referendum on the question of the day of the week that polling should take place. In his speech today, he did not urge a referendum on going to a four-year term, which is a greater constitutional change than a change in the day of the week for voting.

[Lord Grocott]

My Lords, it is precisely the same issue. This is about whether the election should be every four years or five years—I am happy to accept that there may be failings in the wording of the amendment—but the principle is exactly the same: it is to enable the electorate to choose between whether the term of a Parliament should be five years or four years.

[Lord Butler of Brockwell]

I take it that, if the amendment is passed, the noble Lord would also want a referendum on the question of whether a fixed-term Parliament should be for four or five years.

[Lord Grocott]

Yes.

[Lord Butler of Brockwell]

Thank you. That makes my point. It has been argued that the merit of a four-year term is that it gives the electorate more ability to hold the Government to account because they can do so more frequently. People like us and experts on government argue about what is good for the people and what the people want. If this was put to a referendum, I doubt whether there would be popular support for four-year rather than five-year terms. Elections are not very popular in this country; people do not like having their television dominated by politics for five or six weeks at a time. One of the arguments in favour of a four-year term is that we are giving the public what we think they ought to want, but I doubt they want it themselves.

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Moved by

[Lord Grocott]

15: Clause 1, page 1, line 8, at end insert—
“( ) Each five-year parliament shall include a minimum of five parliamentary sessions.”

[Lord Grocott]

My Lords, I am very conscious of the fact that we probably have only about 10 minutes before we ought to break for dinner. These things fall as they do, but I hope that I may be presumptuous enough to suggest that this is an important amendment. It is a simple one and says straightforwardly that if we are to go down the road of fixed-term Parliaments over five years—I am opposed to that—there is a very strong case indeed for saying that there should be annual Sessions of Parliament, and that it should not be within the remit of government, having fixed the Parliament, then to be allowed absolute flexibility over the length of Sessions.

I perhaps would not have thought it necessary to put this amendment down and in effect legislate for the Session of a Parliament were it not for the very bad experience of the current practice whereby, to my amazement, last September the Government announced that the first Session of this Parliament would last for two years. So far as I know, this was done without any consultation, although the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, can correct me on that. That was an extraordinary unilateral decision to make. The only defences of it that I have heard are, “This is the first Session, so we have a lot to do”, or the rather feeble defence that it is only five months longer than the first Sessions of Parliament have often been in the past. Speaking as a former Chief Whip, I can say only that if you had said to me, “It is only five months”, five months longer for a Session of Parliament for any Government is absolute gold dust. It is a discipline on Governments who are putting in their legislative programme to do that within a 12-month period. I remind the House of the current situation before I explain why it is essential, when faced with this fixed-term Parliament, that we legislate to ensure that Sessions are at least annual.

At present, Governments normally decide around September each year—perhaps a little earlier—the date of the Queen’s Speech. I do not know the details of the negotiations between No. 10 and the palace, but I know, as the Committee knows, that we all understand that normally there will be a Queen’s Speech in November each year. Occasionally, it has drifted into December. That is excepting the Queen’s Speeches that come after general elections, which can come at any time—although they cannot come at any time if the Bill becomes an Act. We know that Governments work within a parameter, which is usually some time in November. There is the usual argy-bargy whereby if a Queen’s Speech comes too early, it is because the Government do not have enough legislation and are running out of steam; or if the Queen’s Speech comes too late it is because the Government have lost control of their legislative programme. However, the parameter means that there is a discipline that gives a big advantage to the Opposition—because parliamentary time is valuable, as we know only too well—and the Government really have to get their act together, manage their programme, and finish it within the 12-month period. To extend unilaterally the normal length of a Session is an abuse and is certainly to the massive advantage of the Government.

I do not know whether I should say this in anger or in envy, because anyone involved in managing a Government’s legislative programme every year has the nightmare period of October and early November when you are trying to fit a quart into a pint pot, you know that you have to do it and that you have to observe the conventional gaps between the stages of Bills—or at least you used to have to observe them; this Government do not have a good record on that aspect of our constitution. However, you know that there is a discipline within which you have to work. Moreover, both Houses—the Commons and the Lords—have recognised this process as important. Both Houses have procedures to enable Bills to be carried over. We have all been familiar with the debates that allow, in exceptional circumstances, individual Bills to follow a recognised constitutional procedure—if I may put it as grandly as that. Motions have to be passed and so on. There is a recognition that either House of Parliament can breach the annual sessional understanding only if the Government obey certain rules in relation to individual Bills and do not do that as regards their overall programme.

I do not know whether I should be angry or envious about the fact that the Government have unilaterally given us a two-year Session. I just wish that I had thought of it. When we were in government I wish that I could have thought, “Blimey, I don’t need to worry about getting these Bills through in 12 months; let’s just postpone the Queen’s Speech for another year or however long—whenever it is convenient to the Government to decide when the Queen’s Speech should take place”. Given that we have had all this hyperbole from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, and others—not very convincingly—about the Government or the Prime Minister giving away power regarding fixed-term Parliaments, I hope that he will acknowledge, if he believes that argument, that they should give away the power of unilaterally being able to decide when a new Session of Parliament should begin.

By having this two-year Session, the Government have breached an important convention of both Houses. It is reasonable for those of us who are concerned about this to say that we now need to enshrine the proposal in my amendment in legislation. I cannot think of any good argument against, if you know when general elections are going to be, why you should not also determine when the Sessions should be. I beg to move.

[Lord Cormack]

My Lords, briefly, I agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, said. I very much hope that my noble and learned friend will be positive in response. There is nothing that we can do about this extended Session. It will last until May next year. I regret that. Sessions should last as near as possible for a year, and if we are to move to fixed-term Parliaments, the obvious thing is to have the state opening for each Session in the May of each year. I hope that my noble and learned friend will give me some comfort when he responds.

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[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

This legislation is having ample legislative scrutiny and I suspect that in times to come we will move towards having much more pre-legislative scrutiny. That is why I argue for five-year fixed terms; there will be more opportunity for pre-legislative scrutiny as well as legislative scrutiny. I simply make the point that to truncate one Session into two or three months would not be sensible. Future Sessions will last for only 12 months. What is happening in this Session is a one-off adjustment so we can get into the pattern of spring to spring Sessions that would fit the election timetable of fixed-term Parliaments with elections in May. For these reasons, I invite the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Grocott]

My Lords, I do not know whether the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, is getting tired or whether I am. He has ample reason for getting tired because he has been heroic as the only Minister dealing with this vital constitutional Bill. However, I simply did not understand what he said. We had a general election in May last year and he said that in order to adjust to the situation where we know the date of the next general election, which will be five years from last May, the length of this Session of Parliament had to be adjusted to accommodate that. I do not understand that argument.

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving me an opportunity to explain it. It was clear from the comments made by the Deputy Leader of the other place in May of last year that the decision to extend the Session to spring 2012 was not made in the early days. The working assumption was that we would go forward as we normally do after an election in May and have the first Session running through to the following October or November. It is not giving away any state secrets to say that that was the assumption. We then considered whether it was better to move to a situation where, if we were going to have fixed-term Parliaments, the Sessions should run annually, May to May. An announcement was made in September, which would normally have been between a third and half way through the Session. There was an option to truncate the Session about now, but it was thought that the best thing to do was to go to next year. There is nothing sinister in that; we were totally open. However, this is a one-off change and from next year, Sessions will go from May to May. That is the right way to proceed. I hope the noble Lord will accept that there was nothing sinister in this, but that it was an adjustment made in-year, given that the original expectation was to go through until the autumn of this year.

[Lord Grocott]

I am not saying that it is sinister; I am just saying that it is illogical. If the Government decided in those five days in May that there were to be five-year fixed-term Parliaments, why was it not plain as a pikestaff that in normal circumstances that would mean five annual Sessions? No adjustment was required. A year would take you to the following May, then the May after that and so on. I do not need to go through it. With respect, it seems obvious to everyone in the House apart from the Minister that that is the logic of a five-year Parliament.

I am very grateful to noble Lords for their contributions, which have been 100 per cent on the side of those who agree with the amendment.

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

We did not, in those five days in May, think about moving from one year to one year to one year. That is the simple answer and I hope that the noble Lord will accept it at face value.

[Lord Grocott]

Of course I accept that and I shall not labour it further if the Minister assures me that the coalition was not going to tamper with that aspect of our constitution. However, I emphasise the sheer inconsistency of rejecting this amendment when the whole rationale—if there is one, although I doubt it as every day passes—of the Government’s comprehensive constitutional reform programme is to provide a degree of predictability and take away powers from the Executive. My amendment simply tests the Government’s sincerity and commitment to that by requiring them to correct their very inadequate and unsatisfactory decision unilaterally to make it much easier for the Government to legislate.

I fear that there is a tendency by the Minister—it is understandable when you are taking a complicated and important Bill such as this through the House on your own—to assume that, if any amendment is put down, particularly by the opposition Benches, the duty of the people in the Box is to find reasons for saying no to it. If the Minister were to put a cold towel over his head and think in as dispassionate a way as he is allowed—I do not mean “allowed” in any sense other than that this Government seem to be totally locked into their constitutional reform programmes, which do not seem to be thought out in a coherent way—he would come to the conclusion that, once the deal had been sealed between the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister, there would be no flexibility on that Bench to make any adjustments whatever.

Before I beg leave to withdraw the amendment, perhaps I may appeal to the Minister to tell those of a higher pay grade that this really is a sensible proposal, which, so far as we have tested the opinion of the Committee, has 100 per cent support from everyone but the Government, and that, if they are to be consistent in their principles, about which, as I said, I am not thrilled, they really ought to see the logic and sense of having fixed annual Sessions within five-year fixed Parliaments. With that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 15 withdrawn.

Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Lord Grocott Excerpts

Tuesday 15th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rennard]

I support Amendment 2 and the amendments in my name and the names of my noble friends Lord Marks and Lord Tyler.

Many noble Lords will know that I have long been an advocate of voting at weekends. They will also know how frustrated I feel that, among the many models piloted by the previous Labour Government to try to explore different ways of increasing turnout in local elections, only one pilot of weekend voting was ever undertaken—in one place, at one weekend—and that was of limited value. The idea of voting at weekends is not new; it has been floated and discussed in some form, but never properly debated in Parliament in such a way as to enable Parliament to decide the issue.

The Home Affairs Select Committee considered the issue in 1997; a Home Office working party looked at it in 1999; it was the subject of some limited debate when we permitted pilots as a result of the Representation of the People Act in 2000; the then Office of the Deputy Prime Minister further considered the matter in a consultation paper in 2002; the then new Electoral Commission published a report on election timetables in June 2003 and again in 2007; that year, weekend voting was again floated as part of the Government’s Governance of Britain Green Paper; and a separate consultation paper was then published specifically on this issue in 2008. That was supposed to feed into a citizens’ summit, which would recommend whether or not to go ahead with weekend voting later in 2008. That summit never happened. We have never had a proper debate in Parliament to determine the issue.

The principle of weekend voting is simple: more people are at home and free to vote for more of the day at a weekend than they are on a weekday. One possibility is to give people two days over the weekend on which to vote. This would avoid potential problems with religious observance and give people more than twice as much opportunity to participate. Many noble Lords have participated in elections and those who have campaigned will know the frustration of trying to contact voters among the working population of a constituency, in the few hours before the polls close at 10 pm, in order to remind them to vote. They will also have had extensive experience of trudging the streets during the day on polling day and vainly knocking on the doors of people who are out at work. We try to encourage them to vote but know that they cannot.

All those involved in elections know that people who are contacted on polling day and reminded by parties to vote are significantly more likely to vote than those who are not. It stands to reason that if people are contacted during the weekend when they are at home and reminded to vote, they are significantly more likely to participate. All good democrats should agree that increasing participation in elections is a good thing, especially as turnout has declined in many recent elections.

[Lord Grocott]

I know that the noble Lord favours different electoral systems and is passionate about increased participation in elections. Does he acknowledge that there is no evidence whatever in this country that changing an electoral system increases participation? In fact, we know that the various election systems that he supports lead to far more spoilt ballot papers, which, surely, is a further illustration of weakening participation in elections.

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[Lord Tyler]

I am very glad that the noble Lord, Lord Bach, preceded me because it gives me an opportunity to congratulate yet another sinner on repenting when I hear from him the admission that Ministers occasionally give us honeyed words and assure us that action will be taken when, in the 13 years in which he had a very responsible role in government, there was very little action even in discussing this issue, let alone consulting on it.

I shall make two or three quick points in support of the amendments that my noble friend Lord Marks and I have tabled. First, I recall very well indeed the night of 28 February 1974. In an enormous, scattered rural constituency with snow threatened, pouring rain much of the time and a lot of wind on Bodmin moor, we managed a turnout of 83 per cent, but that was in extremely difficult circumstances. This is true of many rural consistencies in which there are big distances to travel from the place of work to get to vote. There are very difficult circumstances in many villages when the only place where you can have a polling station is the village school, so it is closed for the day. That practical point has not yet come up in the debate. It may be true in urban areas too, but I do not have the same experience. There are practical problems about the insistence on Thursday as polling day that we should address.

The other point that I shall address very briefly was raised by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, and supported by my noble friend Lord Cormack. I am a practising member of the Church of England, by which I mean that I am never going to be perfect but am practising all the time. I recognise that there are people in all the churches who would find it difficult if Sunday were the only day. That is why our amendments specifically refer to the possibility of two days. Of course, it is also true that Saturday is a day for other faiths, as indeed is Friday.

I am chair of the Faith and Civil Society Unit at Goldsmiths College, so I take a particular interest in the way in which we are now a multifaith community. We should recognise that in the way in which we address this issue. That is why I am very strongly of the view, as my noble friend Lord Rennard said, that it would be preferable to have the choice of two days, but they should be shorter days. I also recall that on 28 February 1974 one presiding officer was so exhausted by the end of the day that he did not properly perforate the ballot papers. Since I ended up with a majority of nine after six recounts, I think that the long day is another factor that we should take into account, and a shorter working day but on both days seems to be something that we should look at very carefully.

I have some sympathy with the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, about the insistence on moving towards more and more absent voting, both proxy voting and postal voting. On balance, it is preferable to try to extend voting in person and to make that as easy as we can, not just for reasons of potential corruption and fraud but because it is part of one’s civil responsibility to come together as a community to vote. I hope that is true.

The noble Lord, Lord Howarth, referred to the briefing by the Electoral Commission, and I should say en passant that I am a member of the informal advisory group of politicians of all parties who give guidance to the commission every so often. Its summary is in effect that at this stage it would be premature to insist on moving towards weekend voting, which is really why my noble friends and I have put it not in a prescriptive way but in an advisory way that we should be moving in that direction. It is disappointing that although there have been pilots for so many other aspects of improving access to the voting process, there has been so little attention to or consultation on this issue. Incidentally, I endorse the point made by the commission about the number of advantages in advance voting. This is not an either/or. They are both quite useful ways in which we could get more people to go to the poll to cast their votes.

There is an interesting opportunity here. I hope that my noble friend the Minister will at least be able to indicate that he will not adopt the attitude of the previous Government, which was personalised, illustrated and characterised by the noble Lord, Lord Bach, in his honeyed words but with mighty little action. Before we get to the definitive moment to which my noble friend referred when we will know the shape of the new constituencies in October 2013, I hope that more work will have been done to consult all interested parties and to conduct pilot schemes to see whether a two-day weekend polling period with shorter hours each day would not suit our fellow citizens much better than plumping again for a Thursday, which is so inconvenient for so many and causes so much disruption.

[Lord Grocott]

My Lords, I echo what my noble friend Lord Howarth has said about how much better debates on major constitutional reform are when we get contributions from all parts of the House, which has characterised the debate on this amendment. I welcome the fact that we have had the opportunity to discuss this amendment even though I have real anxieties about it. Perhaps it is a sign of a simple mind, but one of the tests I put to constitutions is the extent to which they are straightforward, intelligible and as simple as possible, which is one of the many reasons why I am so strongly in favour of first past the post.

While I do not doubt for a minute the good intentions of people who think that we should have a couple of days to vote, there would be a problem. It would just extend the development, which has undoubtedly occurred in most of our lifetimes—I do not want to be rude in characterising it in this way—towards a kind of rolling election as opposed to an election day when the nation makes a decision. In part, a rolling election is very much as the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, has said. I know that under a Labour Government there was substantial development of postal voting. In effect, we have at least two election days, if not a longer period. There is the crucial day when the postal ballots go out and people react to that. Then there are the days between the postal ballots and the election day when more ballots come in, which makes it a kind of rolling election.

I feel a certain nervousness about extending the election over two days. At least it might mean that a lot of the drama will undoubtedly be removed from election day. Perhaps I am wishing for days that have passed to think that that drama can ever come back. The February 1974 election was certainly profoundly dramatic for me because it was one of the many elections that I managed to lose and there were several recounts into the middle of the night. We were pretty tired over that period, but that is part of the drama of an election night.

What would happen between the two polling days? Perhaps we would all sit in limbo. Again, I am trying to avoid crudely partisan points, but occasionally I cannot manage that. A rolling election period would be made worse by more complicated election systems. I genuinely respect the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, who has participated throughout. If the AV vote is passed, it will inevitably mean that counting will occur on the day after. It is inconceivable that an AV vote could be counted through the night of an election day.

[Lord Rennard]

One of the attractions of voting on a Saturday and a Sunday, between the hours of, say, 9 am and 6 pm, would be that the counts would begin at 6 pm on Sunday. Before the last general election, there was great controversy in the other place about when counts might take place and great concern that many of them would take place on the Friday rather than the Thursday. The Electoral Commission was greatly concerned about the accuracy of the counting by people who had been involved in the process from setting up the polling stations for 7 am to finishing at 10 pm and then counting the vote sometimes through to 4 am or 6 am on the next morning. It seems much more sensible for voting to take place during normal hours on a Saturday and Sunday and for votes to be counted on a Sunday evening. The noble Lord says that he personally did not like the February 1974 election results. I wonder whether he would prefer the system of 100 years earlier when a general election took place on different days in different constituencies all over the country.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Grocott]

That rather proves my point. I like the simplicity of polling day being polling day. We all know the beginning and the end, that the election programme will be on the BBC and that we will get an instant polling verdict on “News at Ten”. Are these bad things? I believe they increase the drama of an election and you need some drama in politics. It cannot be reduced to a dull procedural convenience. I do not doubt for a moment, as I have said, the motives of people who wanted more postal votes. There were many in my party who did and my Government facilitated it. It was done with good intentions but the outcome of what I can only describe as a rolling election has not been a good one. Likewise, I do not think the idea of having more than one polling day would be a good one. The noble Lord, Lord Rennard, says it makes people very tired so that they cannot cope and might make mistakes. However, our elections are amazingly free of challenges once the results have been declared. I have lost some elections and won one after a recount but people accept the results and rarely contest them.

My final concern is that, if elections are to result in more hung Parliaments—I doubt that they would under the first past the post system, as some claim, but they certainly would under a more proportional electoral system—the period between people first starting to think about an election and casting their postal vote will be prolonged and the country could reach a verdict weeks afterwards. So I recognise the motives behind these proposals but it is easy to have good intentions but bad outcomes. We have elections relatively rarely, and we will have them even more rarely if the Government have their way with this Bill. They ought to be dramatic days and I fear that these amendments would make them less dramatic and certainly less decisive.

[Lord Newton of Braintree]

My Lords, it is more or less fatal for me to come into the House because somebody always presses a button that leads me to get to my feet. In this case, it is all this nostalgia about February 1974, which is the date on which I was first elected. My memory of it is that it took a very long time because Braintree did not count during the night; it only counted the following day. After a nervous, sleepless night, I came in with a relatively small majority at about the same time as the Western Isles.

I have a lot of sympathy with the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. I would not support these amendments if they were pushed, but consideration of change should not be ruled out. I make three points in support of that. First, on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, most of the criticisms of abuse or problems connected with postal votes seem to relate at least as much to people who have had them for years as to new postal voters. Secondly, like many people here, I live in London during the week and at my home in Essex during the weekends, so I now have a permanent postal vote for everything except parliamentary elections, which I cannot vote in anyway, because I never know where I am going to be.

The third point picks up that made by the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, about the greater use of postal votes and non-postal votes—if I may oversimplify what he said. A key strategic problem is the decline during the past 20 or 30 years in the number of people who vote at all. During most of my time in the other place, the turnout was never less than 75 per cent. It was several times more than 80 per cent, and I had villages in my constituency where the vote went over 90 per cent. In the previous two elections, we have been down to percentages which we used to associate with American elections—between 60 and 70 per cent. Therefore, the key problem here is getting the vote up. We should be willing to consider anything which could be shown to contribute to that.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Grocott]

3: Clause 1, page 1, line 5, leave out “is to be 7 May 2015” and insert “will be determined by a referendum to choose between 6 May 2014 and 7 May 2015”

[Lord Grocott]

My Lords, I start by apologising to the Committee because my amendment includes the dreaded word “referendum”. I can understand why everyone else's heart sinks just as much as mine does at the very mention of that word. I tabled this amendment alongside my noble friend Lord Howarth, who has amendments along similar lines in this group—and they may well be better than mine—because I want to raise two or three issues. It is important that we correct an error that has been uttered on a number of occasions by no less a person than the Deputy Prime Minister. It is an error to say that this Bill removes the right of the Prime Minister to determine the date of the election. At Second Reading in the House of Commons on 13 September last year, the Deputy Prime Minister said:

“We have a Prime Minister who is the first in history to relinquish the right to set the date of the general election”.—[Official Report, Commons, 13/9/10; col. 622.]

What he should have said is, “This is the first Prime Minister to relinquish the right on behalf of future Prime Ministers to determine the date of the next general election”. Not only has this Prime Minister decided the date of the next general election, he has legislated to enshrine in law his choice of date. I hope from now on no one will use that as a justification for this Bill, which, as the House may know, is not a Bill that finds much favour with me. Can we at least correct that error? As I shall say later on, the Prime Minister is uniquely legislating to enshrine his favoured date in law, so people need to have a say about that, which is what we do in a referendum.

My second reason for tabling this amendment was to seek clarification from the Government on when and why they use referendums as a basis for constitutional change. The Committee is entitled to an answer to that question. The Deputy Prime Minister has said many times that these are hugely important constitutional changes. As far as I know so far, and we may still be counting, four major constitutional changes will be decided in this Parliament. We have already determined two, which are quite separate issues. The first was that there should be a referendum on AV and the second was that there should be fewer Members of Parliament. There is a referendum on one of those but not on the other. The one that we are debating now is to fix the terms of Parliaments, which is an important issue on which the present thinking from the Government is that there should be no referendum. The one coming down the line, which may take a bit of time in this House, is to abolish the House in its present form and replace it with senators.

I would simply like the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, who always treats these questions with great seriousness, to tell us why there is a referendum for one of those four major changes but not the other three. What factors have the Government brought to bear in determining which will be decided by referendums? Although I need some persuading of this, we have been told quite frequently by the Government that this is a coherent whole of constitutional change.

[Lord Cormack]

The answer is simple: the Government knew that they could not get AV through the House of Commons. Therefore, they have gone to a wider electorate.

[Lord Grocott]

I hope that the wider electorate reach a sensible conclusion. We shall know soon enough.

[The Earl of Onslow]

As the leader of the Labour Party has been discouraging the Deputy Prime Minister from taking any part in the AV campaign, it will be interesting to see the outcome.

[Lord Grocott]

I am interested but also worried because I care deeply about the outcome of the referendum and the damage that I believe can be done to our constitution. But we must not go back over that. It has been concluded and now it is for the people to decide.

I do not favour any of these changes, but if they are to go ahead the public need to be consulted. A referendum should be considered to determine whether there should be a four or five-year fixed term because of what I hope the Committee will agree is a powerful point: that the Bill reduces the power of the electorate. It reduces the number of occasions on which the electorate can be consulted.

If you reduce the power of the electorate, which the Bill undoubtedly does, then surely the electorate have the right to be consulted about that. It was right in 1975 for the then Labour Government to have a referendum on the Common Market, as it was then called, because it reduced the power of this Parliament. By the way, I voted no in that one. It is right that the choice should be given to the public. It is unarguable that the Bill reduces that power.

[Lord Maclennan of Rogart]

My Lords—

[Lord Grocott]

I thought that I might provoke someone.

[Lord Maclennan of Rogart]

Does the noble Lord believe in the opposite proposition—that to give power to the electorate you should not have a referendum? That might affect some of his earlier arguments about reform of this House.

[Lord Grocott]

I do not know which of the various constitutional proposals increases the power of the electorate. The noble Lord referred to reform of this House. One of the key reasons why I am opposed to this being an elected House is that it would seriously diminish the significance of a general election to the House of Commons. I hope that my argument is consistent; I will have to read it in Hansard tomorrow.

I hope that I can put this with some conviction but, according to my maths, since the 1945 election there have been 17 general elections in this country. If this Bill had been an Act, we would have had 13 general elections. I simply put this proposition: does that or does that not weaken the power of the electorate? There can be only one answer to that. The answer is yes.

I do not want to go to absurd lengths but we can all assume that, if there were no elections, that would seriously weaken the power of the electorate. I am not sure about the other end of that continuum—perhaps the Chartists with their annual elections. But there is no doubt that the convinced and settled view of the members of the Government who are voting on this Bill is that since the Second World War the British electorate have had too many general elections. Which ones should we not have had that we did have? Was it wrong in 1951 for a Labour Government who were tired to seek another mandate? Was it wrong of Mr Heath? Was it wrong of Harold Wilson, who had a majority of three in 1964, to call another election, or should he have soldiered on for another five years? Should Harold Wilson's Government in 1974 have gone on without a majority?

I would like to know the answer to a fairly simple question: why do the Government think that we have had too many general elections since the Second World War? Which ones were superfluous? There could be an interesting answer to that.

[Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton]

My Lords, between now and the next stage of this Bill I wonder if my noble friend could ponder whether, as has been proposed, the reason that AV is going to a referendum is because it could not be got through the House of Commons. Does that mean that we must have a referendum on Lords reform if it proves impossible to get it through your Lordships’ House?

[Lord Grocott]

What a persuasive argument—I am completely convinced by that.

If the Government are going to reduce the power of the voters over their Government, they must give us a very convincing argument as to why that is desirable. Of course, I very much hope that my amendment becomes entirely surplus to requirements, because I very much hope that the Committee will decide later that we should have four-year gaps between Parliaments. I do not agree with fixed terms, but if there is to be one I hope it is four years. For the first time in my life I am operating entirely in accordance with the Liberal Democrats’ manifesto and I hope they will be voting with us on four-year Parliaments. However, if the Government unilaterally reduce the power of the electorate to have general elections and to make their decisions about Governments, I hope that they will only take this power away on the authority of the electorate in a referendum.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, I am very happy to support the spirit of my noble friend Lord Grocott’s amendment. I have tabled two amendments—Amendments 57 and 58—which also require that a referendum should take place before we move to fixed-term Parliaments in this country.

I do not, in general, favour referendums, but there is a particular case for holding them when major constitutional change is being proposed. I think that is a view that the Constitution Committee reluctantly came to. The basis of that has to be that the constitution belongs to the people—it is not the property of those politicians who happen for the time being to have the privilege of serving in either the House of Commons or the House of Lords. Those who are Members of Parliament in either House, and certainly those who are in Government, should regard themselves as holding the constitution in trust on behalf of the people, by whose authority they have been given and entrusted with the opportunity to serve. They should treat that constitution with the very greatest respect and should move to change it with the very greatest caution. That applies even more particularly to a Government such as this present coalition Government, which does not have a mandate from the electorate for its policies.

It is, as my noble friend Lord Grocott suggested, curious that this Government—which makes great claim to be a liberalising Government who want to improve the quality of our democracy and increase the accountability of Government, and indeed Parliament, to the people—are proposing legislation that would mean that we would in practice have fewer general elections than we have had in the past. The average interval between general elections since the war has been three years and 10 months; if the Government have their way on this Bill, it will be not less than five years. That is one of the reasons why I, like my noble friend Lord Grocott, believe that—although I am no enthusiast for legislating to fix the term of Parliament—if we are to fix the term, then we had better fix it at four years. We do not want to see accountability diminished in a major measure of constitutional reform.

It is also curious that the Government believe that it is appropriate to hold a referendum on changing the electoral system and that it is appropriate to hold referendums when there may be some transfer of power—possibly no very great transfer of power—between London and Brussels, but they do not think that it is appropriate to hold a referendum on whether we should move to fixed-term Parliaments. My noble friend Lady Farrington raised the question of whether there might be a referendum on reform of the House of Lords, which would be a very major constitutional change by any standard. It seems extraordinary that the Government should propose to take that forward without incorporating provision for a referendum in the legislation.

I am not necessarily a devotee of consistency in constitutional matters, because I believe that there are many anomalies in our present constitutional arrangements, which have grown up for compelling historical reasons, that actually provide flexibility and enable the constitution to accommodate different traditions and to adapt itself as time goes by. If we are slavishly schematic in our approach to constitutional change, we shall be even more likely to get it wrong; but I wonder why the Government are quite so inconsistent in their approach to holding referendums on constitutional reform. Surely the Government should conduct themselves on a certain set of principles.

Turning to the particular amendments that I have tabled, I suggest to the House that they incorporate a better design for a referendum than the design of the one we are to have on 5 May on electoral change—there are differences between what I propose and what Parliament has enacted at the behest of the Government. The referendum that I have proposed would be advisory only and would leave scope for Parliament to meditate upon the message that voting in a referendum sends to Parliament. Amendment 57 would also provide that, if less than a threshold of 51 per cent of the electorate support the introduction of fixed-term Parliaments, then the question would be dismissed. That latter point should have applied also in Amendment 58—it was an omission on my part not to have included that in the drafting of that amendment. If we come back to this issue on Report, I can repair that then.

My amendments would provide for two questions. The first would be to ask the people whether they favour the introduction of fixed-term Parliaments, as provided for in the legislation. The second would ask them the other key question: if we are to have fixed-term Parliaments, do they think it right that the term should be fixed for four years or for five years? We all agree, I think, that this is quite the outstandingly important issue that remains to be resolved in this legislation apart from the overall issue of whether there should be fixed-term Parliaments, which has been approved in Second Reading. However, the question of four or five years remains wide open. I put it to the House that that may also be something that should be offered for the decision—or at least for the advice—of a wider electorate.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames]

My Lords, the noble Baroness is absolutely right to draw attention to the fact that the Constitution Committee thought that pre-legislative scrutiny would have been a good idea. Nevertheless, the committee heard evidence over a number of days and read a great deal of written evidence from some of the leading academics in the land and nowhere was it suggested that this was a referendum issue in my reading of the evidence of the report. That was the point that I was attempting to make.

The other point of importance that I would invite noble Lords to consider is that the principle of fixed-term Parliaments was subject to manifesto commitments of the Labour Party and my own party and in neither case was there a suggestion that it should be the subject of a referendum rather than legislation. The Conservatives embraced that commitment very shortly after the election, and the Members of Parliament elected as Conservatives to represent their constituents did not seek to interpose a referendum before this legislation should become law.

There is a danger, which I urge the House to bear in mind when it considers these amendments, that we move from a representative democracy, which the vast majority of us value a great deal, to government by plebiscite. If you lose sight of the principle that only fundamental changes require referendums, you move some way down that road.

[Lord Grocott]

Did the noble Lord not say in the first part of his remarks that he was very much in favour of referendums? I am not sure how that squares with what he has just said.

[Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames]

I qualified that by saying, “on important matters of constitutional reform”, and I then went on to explain what the Constitution Committee said when they used the term “fundamental”. I stand by that. What I am saying is that, if you extend the number of referendums that you have well outside the ambit of what is fundamental, you move away from representative democracy and towards government by plebiscite. It is a matter for Parliament properly to decide—both the principle and the question of four years or five.

I make one final point about Amendment 57, which the noble Lord, Lord Howarth of Newport, applauded —in spite of the fact that it is his own—and said that he liked its design. He said that the amendment was advisory only. That is entirely wrong since, as drafted, the amendment is a wrecking amendment, as it seeks to impose a mandatory 50 per cent threshold, which means not 50 per cent of those who vote but 50 per cent of the electorate, without which the Bill cannot become law. That is a very high threshold indeed. It means that a turnout of anything less than 50 per cent cannot give effect to the Bill, even if not a single no vote is cast.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

Tempting though the honeyed words of the noble Lord are—that seems to be the phrase of the night—he knows full well that it would be wrong of me to anticipate a hypothetical situation regarding that committee other than to confirm that it is proposed that there will be a Joint Committee to carry out pre-legislative scrutiny. It would be wrong for me to speculate on what that committee will propose, because that is some way down the track, or what the Government’s response would be.

My noble friend Lord Marks indicated that the previous Government brought forward legislation that fundamentally changed the relationship between the judiciary, the Executive and Parliament, and did so without a referendum. That might be thought to be a far more fundamental and far-reaching constitutional reform than the one we are considering. With the exception of the proposed referendum on the alternative vote, the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act, introduced in this House before the wash-up, had a plethora of constitutional measures, none of which, other than the AV referendum, sought to have a referendum attached to it. While I take on board the strictures of the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, on the Constitution Committee’s consideration and view on this Bill, the committee did not, as he confirmed, recommend that there should be a referendum. If one reads the Constitution Committee report from the previous Session, when I was a member, one detects a great reluctance to go down the route of referendums—or referenda, in deference to my noble friend Lord Cormack.

The items on the list read out by my noble friend Lord Marks, including the abolition of the monarchy and the secession of one of the nations from the United Kingdom, are of a different order from what is proposed in the Bill. This country is, after all, governed by a system of representative democracy in the other place. We in Parliament are basically entrusted with the power to make important decisions on behalf of the people of this country and, in the other place, by the people who are elected to make these decisions as representatives of the people. There must be an exceptional reason to ask people a direct question in a referendum, and I do not believe that the case has been made this evening for that exceptional high threshold to have been reached in respect of the Bill. I therefore urge the noble Lord to withdraw the amendment.

[Lord Grocott]

My Lords, I really am grateful for the contributions that have been made to this debate, not least because, as I said at the beginning, I felt that I needed to apologise to the Committee for mentioning the word “referendum”. It seems that there is still a fair degree of enthusiasm for talking about it now.

I will not use the term “honeyed words”, but the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, always puts together a strong argument. I must say, however, he was on pretty weak ground when he tried to suggest that it was not the Prime Minister who decided that the next general election will be on 7 May 2015. No less an authority than his own dear leader said:

“We have a Prime Minister who is the first in history to relinquish the right to set the date of the general election”.—[Official Report, Commons, 13/9/10; col. 622.]

Who did set the date of 7 May 2015? If it was not the Prime Minister, who was it? That decision was quite clearly made by this Prime Minister, and the only rights he is relinquishing are those of future Prime Ministers. I suggest taking the Denis Healey advice on that one—when in a hole, stop digging. The Prime Minister made his decision, with the Deputy Prime Minister, for the understandable political reason that they are in a fragile political situation following the general election and they had best try to bank five years in the job rather than risk their term being foreshortened. I really cannot put it any more strongly than that.

The noble and learned Lord suggested—and this may or may not be true; this is, by definition, something that cannot be demonstrated conclusively—that there might have been a few more general elections than I said since the Second World War if the provisions of this Bill had been in operation. He suggested that there might have been scenarios in which a general election would have been triggered according to the provisions that deal with that. I find that argument pretty unconvincing. I am trying to imagine a scenario in the House of Commons when two-thirds of the Members—that means the whole of the governing party and a substantial number of opposition party members—were cheerfully voting together to charge to the polls. It is very difficult to imagine.

The only time when an election would have been triggered under the provisions of this Bill was in 1979, when the Government lost a vote of confidence. I will not repeat too much of what was said on Second Reading, but that seems to have been the perfect operation of our constitutional arrangements. It was beyond improvement. Why on earth we need to start defining that kind of thing in legislation is beyond me. It was a magnificent occasion although, from my perspective, it was also a magnificent defeat. It was the constitution working as it should have done, and we only diminish the constitution by these provisions. But we will come to that later.

I am encouraged by a number of the contributions to this debate that were, on balance, more in favour of acknowledging that this is a fundamental change. Having fewer general elections weakens the electorate—surely we can agree on that. The noble Lord, Lord Brooke, as ever, put forward an interesting tangential view. I agree with him that perhaps the electorate would not give the answer to the question, “How many elections do you want?”, that we might assume they would. They might decide, “We can’t be bothered with another blooming election for quite a few years now”. That is quite possible. However, I certainly think that they should have, as my noble friend said, the right to decide whether, instead of having an election every three years and 10 months on average, there should be one every five years. That, surely, is a fundamental constitutional change. I do not want to misrepresent what the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, said, but I think that he as good as said that, as did a number of other speakers.

I realise that there is a weakness in my amendment, which is what my noble friend Lady Hayter said I might say. It was a pity that she did not go to New Zealand earlier because I would have loved to have heard her views of what the people there felt about changing their electoral system from first past the post and whether it had brought undiminished joy and happiness in the way that people who argue for proportional representation suggest.

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

It does bring the likelihood of coalition very much to the fore. Some people favour that and some do not, but undoubtedly in New Zealand the great advantage for those who support coalitions is that abandoning first past the post makes a coalition more likely.

[Lord Grocott]

I wish even more that we had had the benefit of a contribution from my noble friend and that she had been to New Zealand earlier. Perhaps we should take some advice on that front. However, her fundamental point was that, if you are going to increase the gap between general elections, you should certainly not do so without consulting the electorate.

I do not know whether the noble Earl, Lord Onslow, was supporting the proposal for a referendum but I very much agreed with him on what I think he referred to as the “constitutional madness” of the Government or a phrase of that sort. He said that they have got everything else right—which I obviously do not agree with—but they are getting constitutional reform wrong.

[The Earl of Onslow]

I said that it was doolally.

[Lord Grocott]

Doolally was the word. It is a splendid parliamentary term and I would not disagree with it.

There were many contributions to this debate but the only one with which I strongly disagreed was that of the noble Lord, Lord Marks, as he will not be surprised to hear. From his perspective, he did a good job in trying to persuade us that this is not a fundamental constitutional change, but the balance of the arguments we have heard suggested that it is. The only doubts that everyone has are in relation to there being another referendum, and I freely admit that I would not be absolutely thrilled at that prospect either. However, I hope that this short debate has established in the Government’s mind, even if it has not convinced them, that a lot of people believe that this is yet another major constitutional change. It diminishes the power of the British people by reducing the number of elections. It is surprising that the determination to proceed comes principally from the Deputy Prime Minister, who has made much of the need to reconnect Parliament with the people. How this proposal squares with that is something on which I look forward to hearing an explanation. However, in the mean time, with thanks to everyone who has taken part, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 3 withdrawn.

Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Lord Grocott Excerpts

Tuesday 15th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

I want to repeat a point I made on Second Reading, which does not seem to have been raised so far today. I do not bring any preconceived ideological support for fixed-term Parliaments. The Bill is a positive step to address the lack of public confidence in the political system. One of the points I made on Second Reading, which is the most powerful reason to support the Bill, is that it would ensure that the Government and the Opposition had to face the electorate on a predetermined date, whatever the political conditions are at that time. That is the most compelling thing about fixed-term Parliaments. As to the length of the term and whether it should be four or five years, I was struck by the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong of Ilminster. He made the point about Governments being distracted by preparing for elections and said that if there were to be a fixed-term Parliament, in his view as a former Cabinet Secretary, it should be five years.

[Lord Grocott]

We need to address the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, which as ever was entirely valid, about the extent to which we all tend to cover our party advantage with the cloak of great constitutional principle. That is obviously a criticism that we need to take seriously. The way in which to leaven that a little is to ask ourselves, whichever side of the argument we are on, whether we would take the same position of “principle” if we were on the other side of the House. I readily ask that question of myself, having spent a fair chunk of my parliamentary life in government—not as a Minister but in supporting the Government—and a fair chunk in opposition. If I find, as we all do from time to time, that I am in danger of adopting different positions in government and in opposition—which I must say I have seen to be spectacularly the case with one or two who are now in government—we ought to ask whether it was a great constitutional principle or party advantage. I try to test that myself and I have no doubt that I frequently fail, as I freely admit that I do not readily support a constitutional principle that I know would damage the Labour Party. That is where I am.

However, I ask the Government whether, if there were a Labour majority of one after the next general election, which they want to be in 2015, would they with the same passionate, principled enthusiasm say that it is essential that that Government remained in power for five years? That is the question the Government need to ask themselves. If they can say with certainty and conviction that the answer is yes, then obviously I will accept their argument and their integrity on that basis and will live with it, but I think they will find that a pretty tricky question to answer.

[The Advocate-General for Scotland (Lord Wallace of Tankerness)]

My Lords, again this amendment has stimulated an interesting debate, some of which goes into the general principles of fixed-terms Parliaments and some of which foreshadows the later debate we will have on the figure of four or five years. The amendment would omit the date of 7 May 2015 and provide instead that the next parliamentary general election should be held within a range of four to five years after the previous general election. In other words, we would be looking at an election held no earlier than 6 May 2014 and no later than 6 May 2015.

As my noble friend Lord Tyler very succinctly put it, that drives a coach and horses through the whole concept of a fixed-term Parliament because it would put back into the hands of the Prime Minister the option of choosing the date of the election which those of us who have supported the concept of fixed-term Parliaments want to move away from. I say to my noble friend Lord Cormack that it would quite easily be resolved because the Prime Minister could do so only if he had the agreement of the Deputy Prime Minister. It would be in the very circumstances where the Deputy Prime Minister and the Prime Minister fell out that the chances would be that the Prime Minister would want that option—the circumstances perhaps more graphically, from a literary perspective, expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Martin of Springburn. As my noble friend Lady Stowell said, the important point about fixed-term Parliaments is that the Government of the day have to face the electorate on a predetermined date regardless of the prevailing political circumstances.

Asquith was quoted. I have read this quote several times, and I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, did quote him because it gave us the benefit of the intervention by my noble friend Lord Brooke. We can have a quite legitimate debate about what Mr Asquith was saying on 21 February 1911. He said that reducing the Parliament from seven years, as it previously was, to five years would,

“probably amount in practice to an actual legislative working term of four years”.—[Official Report, Commons, 21/2/1911; col. 1749.]

He did not say that the term would be four years, but that legislative working term would be four years. That reflects the comments referred to by my noble friend Lady Stowell that were made by the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong of Ilminster, at Second Reading. I readily concede that he has misgivings about the idea of fixed-term Parliaments, but he said that if we have them, he prefers five years rather than four years because:

“Even with a term of five years, that shadow extends over the last year of the term and tends to reduce to no more than four years the period during which government policy-making and parliamentary debate can effectively be pursued without too much looking over the shoulder at electoral considerations”.—[Official Report, 1/3/11; col. 971.].

His concern is that if we have a four-year fixed term, it would kick in at the end of three years. Obviously, if we are going to have even more prelegislative scrutiny in the first year, that shrinks the time available to Governments to deliver their programme.

My noble friend Lord Norton, the noble Lord, Lord Martin, and others have indicated that our recent experience of Governments who have gone for a fifth year has not necessarily always been happy. In many ways, that almost makes the point. The only reason those Governments limped on during the fifth year was that it was not propitious or opportunistic for the Prime Minister of the day to call an election after four years because he thought he was going to lose. If you have a five-year fixed term, clearly Governments can plan for those five years. It may well be that they can do more prelegislative scrutiny in the first year. There will inevitably be an election looming at the end of the fifth year, but you are more likely to get proper planning for five years and a Government not having to go for the fifth year because they do not think it opportune to go at the end of four years.

Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Lord Grocott Excerpts

Tuesday 1st March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grocott]

My Lords, not for the first time in this Parliament do I find myself urging the Government to take care of our constitution, which I regard as a precious mixture of documents and conventions that need looking after. I think I know something about the basis on which this Bill was put together. It has very much the fingerprints of the Deputy Prime Minister on it. I know the base from which he operates, because he has told us frequently enough; it is to describe our parliamentary system as involving “broken politics” and to say that we have a “broken constitution”. I am paraphrasing what he has said, but the word “broken” frequently appears in his speeches.

I simply do not accept that our political system is broken; nor is our constitution. If you want to look at broken politics, where the word “broken” really applies, there are plenty of parts of the world where you can find it—not least in the Middle East. Politicians, and particularly Deputy Prime Ministers, need to be careful about the language that they use. We, on the contrary, in my view, have a constitution and democratic system of which we can be proud. I cannot be the only Member of this House who has travelled to various countries in the world, including those recently emerged from dictatorships, where they tell us that they admire our political system. They want to know more about it and about how we reconcile the differences between the two Houses, when they occur, as well as how our elections take place and how our electoral law operates. A whole range of things that we have developed over many years, often with great difficulty, are not viewed by countries overseas as being part of a broken political system—absolutely on the contrary. So I simply do not start from the same premise as the Deputy Prime Minister.

This is the only party political point that I shall make, but I think that the Prime Minister needs to be careful about dressing up in grand constitutional argument a political arrangement that guarantees that he will be Prime Minister for five years and about putting a Bill before Parliament to ensure that it lasts for five years. That comes not very convincingly from a Prime Minister who in arithmetic terms has a weaker parliamentary base of his own party than any Prime Minister since the Second World War. If he stays there for five years, he will be one of the longer-serving Prime Ministers, as I think the average for the 20th century was five years. It will not be a bad stint for someone without a parliamentary majority of his own party.

I have two sets of questions. The first is surely the most important, and I do not think that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, addressed it. What are the faults that this Bill tries to rectify? The strongest argument—and I can see it—is that it stops the Prime Minister from starting the race, and that it gives undue power to Prime Ministers over Parliament—and, if you like, over the country—to decide when a general election should be. Rather than look at the books on political theory, let us look at the facts. Of the 18 general elections held since the Second World War—and I shall assume that determining the date of the general election is a huge political advantage and that, if the Prime Minister wins the election, he or she has made a good judgment and that, if the Prime Minister loses, he or she has made a bad judgment—10 general elections were won and eight lost by the Prime Minister who called them. Of the 10 where the victories occurred, four of them were either by Mrs Thatcher or my great friend, who also seemed to keep winning elections. Mrs Thatcher is the best example; Tony Blair and Mrs Thatcher between them account for four of those 10 elections—and you get the feeling that whenever they called an election they would probably have won it. It therefore does not seem to me that as a matter of historical fact it is a colossal advantage to be able to determine the date of a general election.

The second fault it is alleged this Bill will put right is that flexibility in determining elections is wrong in principle. I cannot accept that. I could give any number of examples, as could other Members of this House. When an early general election was called in 1951 by Clem Attlee, would it have been better if he had been forced to have a fixed term that saw that Government continue for the full five years, or was it not entirely proper—although sad from my perspective as a lifelong member of the Labour party—that, because he felt his Government was tired and that some of the great characters had died or were unwell, it was right to ask for a further mandate from the public, which actually he won but was then beaten by the electoral system?

Would it have been right to have prevented Mr Heath from calling his election in the middle of the miners’ strike when he judged that that was the right time to call for an election to renew his mandate in a most difficult set of circumstances? I do not think that that was a failure of our constitutional system; it was a strength of it.

I am not at all convinced that flexibility in the way in which we hold general elections is a bad thing. The system whereby a general election is immediately held once a Prime Minister loses a vote of confidence is nothing other than a splendid part of our constitution. That is the most telling point of all and one mentioned in the splendid speech by the noble Lord, Lord Cormack. It is far from broken.

For reasons of nostalgia I read what Jim Callaghan said—and those of us who were there will never forget it—after he lost a vote of confidence by one. He said, in the simplest and shortest of speeches:

“Mr. Speaker, now that the House of Commons has declared itself, we shall take our case to the country. Tomorrow I shall propose to Her Majesty that Parliament be dissolved … and I shall then announce … the date of Dissolution, the date of the election and the date of the meeting of the new Parliament”.—[Official Report, Commons, 28/3/1979; col. 589.]

Those are splendid words. They almost bring tears to my eyes because shortly after that I was unemployed. I would go as far as to say there was majesty in the simplicity of those words. I dread to think what he would have had to say if this Bill had been an Act of Parliament at that time. He would have said, “The House of Commons has now spoken. I therefore invoke Section (2)(1) of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act”—or whatever Act it would have been. I suggest that the kind of detail involved in this Bill diminishes our constitution.

The Minister’s speeches are splendid and very persuasive most of the time, but it took him quite a long time to explain Clause 2 and the circumstances in which Dissolution on a vote of no confidence would take place. Why change it? What is wrong with the system? It has not only worked well, it has worked absolutely perfectly and majestically, so for heaven’s sake leave it alone. I do not think there are any serious problems to which this Bill provides a solution.

I want to make a couple of specific points about what is bad about this Bill. A couple have been mentioned before but it will do no harm to rehearse them briefly. Many of us here have either been in Parliament during four or five-year Parliaments or, in my case, have watched from outside when the electorate made their decision. There is no doubt that the fifth year of a Parliament, in our constitutional history and experience if not in theory, is nearly always a completely unsatisfactory year. It is one in which everything is winding down, and it is ludicrous to suggest that a Government in their fifth year of a five-year Parliament would be doing anything other than providing for the general election, the date of which they knew, both in their legislative programme and in the decisions that they made. Importantly, it extends the whole period of electioneering. I do not want to overstate the case, but again do we really want a system like the one the United States has in which the preparation for an election takes at least a year? That is what would happen if everyone knew in advance.

I have already demonstrated that this does not give a Prime Minister a huge advantage. Do we really want a 12-month period in which expenditure presumably had to be controlled and in which everyone knew that we were simply waiting for the date to come? I remember, as many others here do, that we have only once had a six or a seven-week election—I think that was the 1997 one. There was pretty universal agreement that that was too long for an election period. The public get bored rigid if it goes on for too long. The present period is pretty good: four or five weeks between the calling of an election and the public making their decision.

[Lord Empey]

I sit on an institution that has a four-year cycle, and I assure the noble Lord and the House that in the past months as we are now approaching our four-year deadline, the pre-election process creeps into that four-year cycle. However, in trying to find a balance and to know the right thing to do we also have the example of the European Parliament, which is on a five-year cycle. It is very hard to discern or divine what the right time is, because I assure the noble Lord that, even in the devolved regions, the four-year cycle produces a period when people are obviously preparing. I suspect that that is inevitable in any democracy. Let us hope we do not have a Bill that proposes a two-year cycle, like the House of Representatives in Washington.

[Lord Grocott]

I would certainly prefer a four-year cycle to a five-year cycle, but my strong view is that there is no need to change the present arrangements, which provide for a short sharp election in which the public are focused and where colossal sums of money will not need to be spent to extend it over 12 months, or however long the preparation period for the election would be.

My final point on what I dislike about the Bill is that it inevitably weakens Parliament. Part of the drama of Parliament and the Commons is knowing that almost any Division on any Bill—certainly, if the numbers in the Commons make it possible—could precipitate a drama that could result in a general election. Parliament needs to be dramatic and it is important that it is. It is not nine to five, for however many months per year, within fixed terms or within fixed Sessions of Parliament within those fixed terms. That makes for boring tedious politics, and we all know how difficult it is, even under the present system, to make it of interest on a wider basis.

To conclude, this Bill weakens Parliament. It weakens the House of Commons and makes it more predictable. It does not solve any problems that have been identified in any satisfactory way. I hope that my party, when it comes to draw up its manifesto for the next general election will, assuming that this Bill becomes an Act, at the very least say that we should revert to four-year Parliaments, but I would like it to abide by the oldest maxim in the book; if something is working, there is absolutely no need to fix it.

Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Lord Grocott Excerpts

Tuesday 1st March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bach]

I will of course be more than happy to answer the noble Lord’s question. I was waiting for it. We have not changed our position on the Front Bench since the last election—an election, I remind the House, that we lost. We support fixed-term Parliaments. Thus we are doubly disappointed by this disaster of a Bill, which has been rushed through with no proper consultation—no real consultation at all—and thus got so many vital, important things entirely wrong. First, on five years instead of four and, secondly, on the no-confidence safety valve, as it is called. That is drafted in a completely unsatisfactory way. It is unclear and, indeed, may turn out to protect the power of a Prime Minister so that there is no point at all in a fixed-term Parliament in any event. I hope that answers the noble Lord’s query.

[Lord Grocott]

I wonder whether my noble friend will give way for what I hope he will think is a helpful suggestion. Although he is quite right in describing the Labour Party’s current position in the aftermath of a general election commitment, any prudent party, when it has lost a general election, looks again at the policies that were in the document that it put to the electorate. I strongly suggest that that would be a good move and that it might result in our deciding that the commitment to a fixed-term Parliament was not the election winner that some might have thought it was.

[Lord Bach]

My noble friend is certainly right in one regard; it was not an election winner. On the other hand, I understand that the main opposition party is quite rightly considering all its policies, bearing in mind that it is in opposition and is likely to be in opposition for a little while longer.

I had not quite finished my fun, so perhaps I should not have given way to the noble Lord opposite so quickly. I hope that it will not be ungallant to suggest that this simultaneous change of mind might have something to do with the aftermath of the 2010 general election and the need to have a short-term arrangement that has the best chance of sticking for five years. If that is what was intended, fair enough. Political parties are absolutely entitled to come together on whatever terms they like, but why is there a need to cover up this short-term political necessity with a Bill that will change our constitution for ever? Let me be fair. At least those distinguished Members of Parliament took a little time to change their minds, unlike the right honourable gentleman the Prime Minister, who, as we have heard during the debate, suggested right in the middle of the election campaign that, far from fixed-term Parliaments, when a new Prime Minister took office there should be legislation insisting on a fresh general election within six months. I ask what has made him change his mind.

On this issue, the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, and, in my view, our Constitution Committee, got it right. The noble Lord talked about the biorhythms of our national politics. I think I understood what he meant, even if the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, did not. He said that five years does not capture it, and he seems to have got that precisely right. Our Constitution Committee dealt very thoroughly with this issue at paragraphs 62 and 63 of its report, from which I shall quote:

“Whilst acknowledging the case made by the Deputy Prime Minister for a five year term, nonetheless the majority of the Committee consider that a four year term should be adopted for any fixed-term Parliamentary arrangement at Westminster. In the view of the majority, the shift from a five year maximum to a five year norm would be inconsistent with the Government’s stated aim of making the legislature more accountable, inconsistent with existing constitutional practice and inconsistent with the practice of the devolved institutions and the clear majority of international legislatures”.

I say to that: game, set and match. The response so far to the Constitution Committee report is, by any test, very weak. To set out as part of that response a number of countries that have a five-year maximum is hardly the point.

My final point—and I am sorry that I have gone on for so long—is that many of the problems could have been solved if the Government had not rushed this legislation. It is such an obvious point and it has been made by many noble Lords, but it is worth repeating. At least, as I think the noble Lord, Lord Norton, said, with the AV Bill, whatever we may have thought of it, the importance of 5 May—at least to the Liberal Democrat part of the coalition—gave some excuse and reason for rushing that legislation. In this Bill, what is the hurry? What is the rush? What is the excuse for having no consultation, no pre-legislative scrutiny, no Green or White Papers?

I hope that the noble and learned Lord will spend a little time explaining why it is necessary for this Bill to go through Parliament without any outside consultation. We are told that when the next piece of constitutional legislation comes along—the Lords reform Bill—there will be pre-legislative scrutiny and the full works will be brought out, and quite right, too, but if for that, why not for this? I could mention the large number of noble Lords who have raised this point in one way or another during the debate.

In Chapter 5 of its report, our Constitution Committee absolutely slaughtered, if I may use the expression, the Government’s arguments for this legislation. Of course, it did so in parliamentary language and absolutely appropriately. If noble Lords think I am being high minded about this, I am not. I was the Minister who received our Constitution Committee’s report on the CRaG Bill, and only that Bill got a worse press than this one from our very much respected Constitution Committee, so I sympathise with the noble and learned Lord. I know what it is like after such a Second Reading when the whole world—apart, of course, from the Liberal Democrats—has been against you. I know what it is like, but the Constitution Committee has been absolutely clear and I do not want to allow the agony to continue by quoting from the report. The Minister and others on the Front Bench know exactly what it says.

I am sure that the noble and learned Lord will agree that our Select Committee criticised the Bill in a powerful and fundamental way. It did not believe, first of all, that the case for fixed-term Parliaments had been made. It did not believe that the case for five years rather than four had been made, and it severely criticised the Government for not taking time to consult and think more about the Bill. It is a pretty comprehensive attack, and the response, which I know the House was grateful to receive before Second Reading, is laughable. The letter from the Minister was well meant, but it was making the very best of a pretty bad job.

I end by asking the Minister what the Government’s serious answers are to the criticisms made by the Select Committee and many noble Lords around the House today. Why the urgency for the Bill? Surely what should happen now is that the Government should take the Bill away, consult on it and come back with a proper and suitable Bill for our consideration. Surely our constitution is vital enough not to be the plaything of temporary politicians who are just a little too eager to get power and much, much too eager to keep it.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Lord Grocott Excerpts

Tuesday 8th February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grocott]

My Lords, I can make my remarks in two minutes. I have had the enormous privilege of serving not only this House but two different parliamentary constituencies. In one the electorate was 100,000, in the other it was just under 60,000 when I retired. I simply report the situation to the House as accurately and genuinely as I can. Anyone who thinks there is no difference whatever in the level of service that you can give as a Member of Parliament when you are representing 100,000 people compared with 60,000 ought to try providing that service. I have tried to provide it. I say that with feeling because part of the overall justification that has been given for the various constitutional changes with which we will have to deal is that they will reconnect Parliament with the people. I seem to recall Nick Clegg using that phrase. I do not know how on earth you can reconnect Parliament with the people when you have bigger parliamentary constituencies. The noble Lord, Lord Renton, is right to say that staff can help with some of this work, but I would find it deeply depressing if we ended up with a House of Commons that was rather like the House of Representatives in the United States, where you do not see the representative but rather a member of his or her staff. The personal connection that we have in this country is so different from the position in many other countries. That is why I am always so wary of these comparisons.

I think that I have spoken for two minutes but I shall speak for one more. One of the things that make some of us so resistant to the raft of changes being proposed is the great opposition that exists to them. I know that as a matter of reportage. This is a friendless Bill. If there is any uncertainty about that on the government Front Benches, they should try offering a free vote on these issues in the Commons. I have never known so many Conservative MPs—I have not heard a Liberal say this yet, but perhaps one will—telling us to keep up the debate. It is dawning on them that the number of MPs will be reduced, that fights will break out between constituencies and neighbours, and that that is guaranteed to happen every five years. I was going to say that the light is dawning, but I think that it has dawned. Perhaps it is worth the Government checking that out. I may be wrong about the view of Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs—people over the other side of the Chamber have more experience in that regard than I have—but why do the Government not do a little check behind the scenes first and then demonstrate publicly that this huge constitutional change represents the will of the House of Commons and the House of Lords, and they can prove it because they have given a free vote to the Members?

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark]

My Lords, I wish to make it clear to the House that I shall not move my Amendment 18G in this group in favour of the amendments tabled by my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer of Thoroton and my noble friend Lord Foulkes of Cumnock.