I came first in the new parliamentary session’s ballot for private member’s bills. Accordingly, I have received a very large correspondence urging me to promote a bill on behalf of any number of worthy causes. I will take my time to consider the best way to proceed: I have until the 16th June to submit the title of the bill to the Commons clerks. These are the principles that constrain my choice.
First, the bill will have to be of limited scope. The principal enemy of a private member’s bill is the limited parliamentary time available to it. Clearly, the wider the scope of the bill, the more time will be demanded to scrutinise it properly and the danger will be, not that it is voted down, but that it is simply ‘talked out’.
Second, It must enjoy the Government’s support, or at the very least, its neutrality. Otherwise, the Government will use its majority to vote in down, talk it out, or neuter it by amending it the committee and report stages of its progress.
Third, It must involve almost no cost to taxpayers, otherwise it is unlikely to have the Government’s support.
Fourth, it must be almost completely uncontroversial. If it were not so, then it would attract opposition. There has always existed a small number of devotees who turn out to oppose any private member’s bill that offends against the constraints that I have listed. They do not have to trouble themselves to vote against the bill, they merely need to speak at length until the bill runs out of time.
There is a remedy against this danger available to the bill’s sponsor, which is to move a closure motion and divide the house. The problem is that if you do so you have to be pretty sure that the House is quorate. If the result of the division reveals that there are fewer than 40 members present (including Mr Speaker) then the business falls, and the bill with it. Getting 40 members to turn out on a Friday is a non-trivial undertaking. Members of Parliament use Fridays to pursue all sorts of important concerns and meetings in their constituencies. It would take substantial enthusiasm to persuade them to return to Westminster to be ready to support a closure motion and protect a private member’s bill from being talked out.
The alternative is to have a bill that is so utterly controversial that everyone has an opinion, one way or the other, which they will feel they need to register in response to a very large correspondence that the issue has raised amongst their constituents. This was the case in the last parliamentary session with the Assisted Dying Bill. It was protected in the Commons by the possibility of closure by reason of the fact that almost all of us felt the need to be there.
The procedures in the House of Lords are quite different however, and that’s where the Assisted Dying Bill ran out of time.
Complex, expensive and controversial bills need to have the benefit of the Government whip and be debated in Government parliamentary time.
Does that mean, of necessity, my bill will have to be ‘motherhood and apple pie’ ?
Well, there are worthy things that need to be legislated for, and which might be categorised as such.
But then, exceptionally, a controversial bill will slip through and surprise us all. The Act that switched organ donation from opt-n to opt-out was one such.
We’ll see.
Sir Desmond Swayne TD
