Prompted by a front page story in the Journal a few weeks ago I have been reflecting on why we are so badly governed. The report concerned the way a new regulation requiring a more demanding driving test for anyone using a mini bus commercially had the quite unintentional side effect of preventing teachers providing extra curricula activities in school. I found the issue embarrassing because I knew nothing about it all until the headmistress of Ringwood School gave me an ear bashing about its devastating effect. The source of my embarrassment is this: how is it that when we are paying MPs ever greater amounts in salary, expenses, and staff costs, we are becoming increasingly ineffective at making sensible laws where the consequences have been properly thought through?
I put this down to three principal causes. First, the Rolls Royce engine that we have for creating legislation is not being properly maintained. When a bill comes before the Commons it used to get a most thorough going over. A a whole day was given over to a debate on the general principle of the bill, before it went into a committee which took several weeks to go through the provisions in detail, line by line and even word by word. During this examination, assisted by all sorts of interest groups, any hitherto unforeseen consequences could be identified and thrashed out. Once it emerged from the committee, the bill would get another full day or two of debate and amendment in the Commons in which the key issues raised in the committee could be revisited by other members. Finally, the bill would have to re-start the whole process again in the House of Lords. Any amendments passed in the Lords would then have to come back to be debated in the Commons. This exhaustive process delivered laws that had been rigorously scrutinised, examined and debated. It is, however, very time consuming and over the last half century governments with increasingly large legislative programmes have tried to short circuit the process by cutting the amount of time given to each bill. The Opposition, on the other hand, has always used time as a weapon to obstruct the Government by taking as much time as possible on each bill. The focus of this battle about the use of time has been in the committee stage which traditionally took several weeks. Frustrated governments would impose a time table (commonly known as a guillotine) on the committee’s proceedings when they thought that the Opposition were unnecessarily prolonging the process. By convention, however, such a step would not be taken until the committee had already sat for hundreds of hours. The imposition of the guillotine was rare and always controversial. Under this present Government, however, every bill is now routinely subjected to a guillotine and the time table is announced before the bill has been debated at all. Bills are expected to emerge from the committee in only a few days. The result is that vast tracts of bills now emerge from the committee undebated and unexamined at all. Mercifully, the House of Lords -where the Government’s writ does not yet run to the same extent, they still do their job properly. But when Lords’ amendments return to the Commons for debate, often having largely rewritten the bill, we are subject to the ridiculous spectacle of a Government guillotine giving literally a few seconds to discuss each Lords’ amendment. It is little wonder that our law is now so ineffective and often perverse.
The second problem is that so much of our law bypasses parliament almost entirely. So many modern bills come before parliament and do not make the law in detail themselves, but rather, give Ministers power to make detailed regulations subsequently. These regulations are of two types: they either automatically become law unless enough MPs object and in so doing secure a debate; or those that only become law once a debate has taken place. In any event, such debates are limited to one and a half hours and the regulations cannot be amended in any way, they simply have to be rejected or accepted as they stand. Most worryingly of all, there are some 4000 or so of these instruments every year, many of them amounting pages and pages of small print in language designed to defeat the non expert. Most MPs will never have been aware of them never mind having read them. So it is hardly surprising when we turn out not to have foreseen the consequences.
The third reason that our parliament has become so ineffective at making law is that it has given so much of its power to do so away to the European Union. More than half our laws are now imposed on us from Brussels. The parliamentary scrutiny to which European Union laws are subjected is nothing short of a disgrace. The House of Commons European Scrutiny Committee sits in secret. I believe it does so because if it were in public, it would be seen by all to be a farce, with massive piles of documents being dealt with in minutes. Again. It is little wonder that even MPs have little idea about the law that we are elected to make.
To conclude, the problem is that in many respects the elected legislature has given up legislating. We have become a bureaucracy rather than a democracy. We will only get round to doing something about this when bad laws infuriate people to such an extent that they demand reform, and that can't be long. |
