The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill has attracted considerable controversy, not just because of the subject matter of the bill, but because concern is growing that should the bill pass second reading, that there will be insufficient scrutiny. Dan Gover argues that parliament needs to take measures to ensure that this important subject gets the debate and scrutiny it deserves.

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The House of Commons has voted to establish a new Modernisation Committee. Tom Fleming and Hannah Kelly explore the opportunities and challenges facing this new committee, drawing on their recent Constitution Unit report on past approaches to delivering House of Commons reform.

Last week MPs voted to establish a new select committee, the Modernisation Committee, ‘to consider reforms to House of Commons procedures, standards, and working practices’. This proposal was brought forward by the Leader of the House, Lucy Powell, and was promised in the Labour manifesto.

The name implies similarity with the previous Modernisation Committee, which was appointed under the last Labour government between 1997 and 2010, and which we analysed in our recent Constitution Unit report, Delivering House of Commons Reform: What Works?. This blogpost therefore draws on that research to evaluate the opportunities and potential pitfalls facing the new committee.

A new Modernisation Committee

The committee will have 14 members – nine Labour MPs, three Conservatives, and two Liberal Democrats – to be nominated via a future motion from the Leader of the House. It will include the Leader of the House herself (who expects to chair the committee) and the Conservatives’ Shadow Leader, Chris Philp. Though Powell wasn’t explicit in last week’s debate about how other members of the committee would be selected, Philp indicated that they would be chosen by their parties’ whips.

The committee’s composition will therefore be unusual in two ways. First, House of Commons select committees usually only include backbench MPs. Second, since 2010 the members of most select committees have been chosen by their fellow MPs via intra-party elections, not by party whips.

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The main party manifestos have now been published, allowing exploration and comparison of their constitutional proposals. In this second post in a series on the manifestos, Meg Russell looks at the parties’ commitments on parliamentary reform. What are they promising, and what are the prospects for these proposed changes? 

Yesterday on this blog, Lisa James reviewed the constitutional proposals presented by the political parties in their 2024 general election manifestos. Unsurprisingly, parliamentary reform is a key area that appears in several of them. Most parties include aspirations to reform the House of Lords, and some make other commitments on the House of Commons, or the overall power of parliament. This second post in the Constitution Unit’s manifesto series reviews these proposals, reflecting on their origins, merits, and prospects for implementation. It starts with the power of parliament as a whole, before moving to the Commons, and then the Lords. 

The power of parliament 

It is primarily the Liberal Democrats that give space to parliament’s overall place in the constitution – an area subject to significant recent controversy. The Brexit referendum of 2016 led to fierce clashes in parliament, and unusually high-profile arguments about both parliamentary procedure and the limits of the government’s prerogative power. Brexit also raised new questions about parliament’s powers over policy matters that returned to the UK following its exit from the European Union. 

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How can House of Commons reform be delivered in the next parliament? A new Constitution Unit report explores past approaches to developing and delivering changes to the Commons’ procedures, and the implications for current advocates of reform. Tom Fleming and Hannah Kelly summarise the report’s findings and conclusions. 

Background 

House of Commons reform is likely to be on the political agenda in the next parliament. Recent years have seen a growing number of books and reports highlighting problems with how the Commons works, and arguing that at least part of the solution lies in reforming its internal procedures. These reform proposals come against a backdrop of deep public dissatisfaction with parliament that suggests a need for MPs to explore ways of enhancing their collective reputation. The election of a new parliament on 4 July may therefore open a window of opportunity for Commons reform. 

Given this context, there has been surprisingly little recent discussion of how such reforms might actually be delivered. This matters, because a number of different institutional vehicles can be used for developing and drafting proposals for procedural change. Moreover, past experience suggests that how the reform process is organised matters for the outcomes of that process. Politicians with an agenda for Commons reform should therefore be giving serious thought to the mechanisms for delivering that agenda. 

Goals of the report 

Our new report therefore provides an evidence-based assessment of four different previous approaches to developing and delivering proposals for Commons reform: 

• Government initiative. Reform can come directly from government proposals, drawn up under the authority of ministers. Those ministers might respond to suggestions from elsewhere, and informally consult relevant MPs or select committees. But under this approach, the initiative for developing and bringing forward reform proposals lies wholly with the government. 
• Permanent backbench select committee. Proposals can instead be developed by a permanent select committee of backbench MPs with an ongoing remit to investigate procedural questions. The primary past and current case of this approach, and the one we study in our report, is the House of Commons Procedure Committee, which has existed in more or less its current form since 1997. 
• Temporary backbench select committee. The Commons can also appoint a backbench select committee with a temporary remit to report on a particular area or areas of procedure. We study the most recent such committee: the 2009–10 Select Committee on Reform of the House of Commons, better known as the ‘Wright Committee’ after its chair, the Labour MP Tony Wright. 
• Government-chaired select committee. The final approach is something of a hybrid: appointing a select committee to review Commons procedures, but having it be chaired by a government minister. The key template for this is the Modernisation Committee which existed from 1997 to 2010 under the last Labour government. This committee combined backbench MPs with frontbench spokespeople from the three largest parties, and was chaired by the Leader of the House. Having a cabinet minister chair the committee was unusual, and sometimes controversial, given that Commons select committees usually only include backbench MPs. 

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Last week’s opposition day debate in the House of Commons about Gaza and Israel was overshadowed by a bitter procedural row over the Speaker’s selection of amendments. But the rules governing opposition days – and their role in allowing these arguments – are not straightforward. Tom Fleming discusses the procedural background and implications.

The background

Last week saw a House of Commons debate about a ceasefire in Gaza and Israel overshadowed by a bad-tempered row about the Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, selecting an amendment from the Labour Party.

This debate came on an ‘opposition day’. There are 20 such days in each parliamentary session, when MPs can debate motions put forward by opposition parties rather than by the government. Of these, 17 are allocated to the largest opposition party in the Commons (currently Labour), and three to the next-largest, which is currently the Scottish National Party (SNP). Last Wednesday’s debate was on an SNP motion calling for ‘an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and Israel’.

Usually when the House debates motions, MPs can propose amendments to them in advance, and the Speaker selects which of those amendments will be debated. MPs then vote on the selected amendments before voting on the final motion (incorporating any successful amendments).

If this usual practice were followed on opposition days, it could mean opposition parties’ proposals regularly not getting voted on. This is because any government amendment is highly likely to pass, after which MPs would only be able to vote on the amended motion, not the original proposal. In acknowledgement of this, government amendments on opposition days are voted on after the main motion. In contrast, any non-government amendment selected would be voted on before the main motion. But it is a long-established convention that when a government amendment has been selected, no further amendments are chosen.

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