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849 Fixed-term Parliaments Bill 1 DECEMBER 2010 Fixed-term Parliaments Bill 850
problems in this small aspect of the legislation. He is
absolutely right to say that large parts of the Bill exist
only for the preservation of a single Administration. I
do not know the appropriate Latin equivalent of ad
hominem legislation, but this is “ad administrationem”
legislation, which is why some provisions will not stand
the test of time. The best that we can do is try to ensure
that the elements of real peril are tidied up.
The hon. Gentleman was right in several regards, but
not in one. He talked about the IPSA Bill having been
miraculously improved in the other place, but none of
us really thinks that we ended up with a perfect situation
or that nirvana arrived by virtue of that Bill. However,
on the Bill before us—I suspect this would also apply to
the other constitutional Bill that we recently scrutinised—he
is right that if there were a free vote, none of the
legislation would go through at all.
Mr Jenkin: If the Parliamentary Voting Systems and
Constituencies Bill had been separate Bills, I do not
think that either would have gone through.
On the IPSA Bill, at one stage there was a proposal to
allow IPSA to adjudicate on and punish Members for
breaching the rules. That would have driven a coach
and horses through our traditional immunities under
the Bill of Rights, but it was removed in the other place.
Chris Bryant: Indeed. As the hon. Gentleman said
earlier, a privileges Act will be needed at some point,
and I hope that the Government turn to such legislation.
I realise that there are problems with any written or
“codified”—to use the Minister’s term—constitution,
because one risks making it justiciable and must then
decide what will be the justice that oversees it. Will it be
a supreme court or a constitutional court, such as many
other countries have? That is a debate for another day,
however.
2.15 pm
The issue of the Speaker’s certificate can be addressed
only in relation to how it is operated in motions of no
confidence, so I do not intend to stray far, Mrs Primarolo,
from the specific issues involved. Nevertheless, in the
previous debate the Minister said that all the amendments
dealt with wildly hypothetical situations. Those were
not his precise words, but broadly speaking that is what
he meant, and he was right in a sense. When one starts
writing bits of the constitution into statute, however,
one has to provide for the hypothetical situation that
suddenly arises when, for example, voters have cast
their votes not so conveniently as to provide for a single
majority party in government, or when a party—as has
happened regularly over the past 200 years—has collapsed
into two parties and is not able to sustain itself in
power.
It is important that we consider the unlikely outcomes
that might transpire, because if they were to transpire
they would provide us with an enormous constitutional
headache, and we would have literally no means of
sorting them out, because we would have no other court
to appeal to in order to sort out the constitutional row.
For instance, if the monarch decided to sack the Prime
Minister—this point was raised earlier—other than
revolution I know of no other means that we would
have to enforce what we all understand to be the proper
constitutional settlement.
I presume that the Government have drawn up the
provision on the Speaker’s certificate as they have done
in an attempt to mirror provisions in the Parliament
Act 1911, as amended of course in 1949. In an attempt
to ensure that in accordance with the Bill of Rights the
courts did not interfere in parliamentary proceedings,
that legislation tried to provide a cast-iron process
whereby the Speaker could certificate that certain Bills
were money Bills and did not, therefore, have to go
through the same process in the House of Lords as
other Bills. It also provided that if a money Bill were
amended or not passed by their Lordships within a
certain period—I think it is a month—it would be
automatically be sent to Her Majesty for Royal Assent.
I also presume that the Government have used that
legislation to draw up the legislation before us, because
section 1(3) of the 1911 Act states that
“the Speaker shall consult, if practicable, two members to be
appointed from the Chairmen’s Panel at the beginning of each
Session by the Committee of Selection.”
That process still occurs, and Mr Speaker doubtless
went through it before he recently certified several Bills
as money Bills.
There is a difficulty, however, with transposing that
provision directly into provisions for a situation in
which the Government have lost a motion of no confidence,
or into measures that provide the Speaker with a series
of fairly significant powers. The Speaker will get to
decide when to issue that certificate. As the hon. Member
for Harwich and North Essex has already said, that
means that the Speaker will decide whether nodding
people through when Members are on the parliamentary
estate and a Whip, by agreement between the Whips
from both sides, nods them through at the end of a vote
by saying, “And two more,” is allowed.
The Speaker will decide also, for instance, whether
14 days have passed since the no confidence motion has
been carried. That is important, because past debates
on a motion of no confidence might have started at
3.30 in the afternoon, but they certainly did not finish
by midnight; sometimes, they took up the whole of the
next day’s business. In parliamentary terms, Members
were still on the first day, so the question whether
14 days had transpired would be a moot point.
Further, the Speaker will decide what is a motion of
no confidence. I therefore presume that, similarly, he
will decide what is a motion of confidence. The hon.
Gentleman is absolutely right that many of those issues
could be dealt with in Standing Orders. That would be
very helpful to the House on the question of what
counts as a motion of no confidence or of confidence,
in particular, because this is a matter not of partisan
advantage or ideological divide, but of trying to ensure
that there are practical measures to obviate a constitutional
disaster should the moment arise.
It would be helpful if the Minister were able to tell us
whether he is minded to suggest to the Deputy Leader
of the House that there should be motions to change
the Standing Orders of this House to make some of the
conventions that currently exist part of Standing Orders.
For instance, there is the question whether we should
have in Standing Orders the provision that when the
Opposition demand a motion of no confidence it should
usually be provided, say, within 24 or 48 hours, or
provision concerning how the Speaker goes about the
certification process.