MPs work a lot harder than we think

Labour have tried to suggest that Parliament is under-occupied and wasting precious time: it's not true, and implies that MPs should always be on stand-by to interfere

There was an item on The Mirror a couple of days ago broadcasting an opposition attack in the run-up to the King’s Speech, arguing that the House of Commons had been finishing its business early on several occasions; this demonstrated, so Labour proposed, a government which had run out of energy and ideas. The paper aired the phrase “zombie parliament”, which is redolent of the dying days of the 2017-19 Parliament, and thrown at the opposition by Boris Johnson as he itched to go to the polls. Whether Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party would actually welcome an election now is hard to say; they know all the signs are pointing in their favour, they know they should be confident, but there is still a doubt gnawing away at them.

The idea that there is not much business in Parliament, and that MPs are loafing around without anything to occupy them, prompted a number of questions in my head (to some of which I already knew the answer). The first, of course, was: is it true? One should start by saying that it is a bizarre time to raise the accusation. Parliament is not currently sitting at all, but that’s because it was prorogued on 26 October to end the 2022-23 session and prepare for State Opening on 7 November and the King’s Speech, which will set out the government’s legislative programme for what is likely to be the last session of this parliament.

The opposition argued that in the session just concluded, which began in May 2022, the Commons had risen more than 10 minutes earlier than planned on 100 on 213 sitting days. In total, 134 hours of legislative time had been “wasted”, despite a surge in the allocation of time for backbench business. The earliest finish had come on 6 June, when the House has risen at 2.20 pm on a day when it might ordinarily have been expected to sit until around 7.30 pm. Such an early collapse of business is rare but not unheard of, and sometimes there is a suspicion it might happen while sometimes it is a real bolt from the blue.

On that day in particular, Tuesday 6 June 2023, it always had the potential to finish early, as the main item of business was all stages of the British Nationality (Regularisation of Past Practice) Bill, a technical measure which just inscribed clearly in statute what had formerly been assumed about the nationality rights of people born in the UK to a parent considered settled on the basis of exercising a free movement right, and those who registered or naturalised as British citizens on the basis of that policy. There were not many contributions to the debate, and so everything finished quickly, but it was wise of the governments’s business managers to allow some leeway.

There are two questions which spring from the Labour Party’s criticism. The first is whether our Parliament is, in some sense, taking it easily, while the second is whether there are more things it could and should be doing.

The first is relatively easy to answer, and I have been banging this drum for nearly 20 years. The public may affect horror or disapproval at the occasional early finish, or at what is persistently and incorrectly seen as the summer “break”, but it is a matter of fact that Parliament sits for considerably longer than many comparable legislatures. According to the House of Commons Library, the very rough length of a Parliamentary session is about 150 sitting days, and a session is roughly a year of parliamentary time.

The US House of Representatives sits a a similar number of days a year, but its days are rather shorter, averaging about five hours in recent congresses. The House of Commons day is typically around eight hours. Japan’s House of Representatives sits for a similar number of days as the Commons, around 150 a year, while in Canada, the House of Commons in Ottawa only manages about 125 sitting days a year. Germany’s Bundestag, where legislators must legally attend on full plenary days, sits for only about 100 such days each year. In India, the last Lok Sabha, over its full five-year term, only sat for 331 days. So our Parliament is very much at the active end of the spectrum by the crude metric of sitting days.

There is also the obvious factor that Members of Parliament have many more calls on their time than just attendance in the chamber. This is something which critics find it convenient to forget for the sake of an photograph of a sparsely attended debate or an early finish, but just think about it for a second. Of course there may be legislative and select committees sitting, in which some of the House’s most intensive scrutiny work is done; MPs are always in demand to meet their constituents, individually or en masse, and can still be lobbed in person by anyone who wishes to see them; there are all kinds of official and semi-official bodies like all-party parliamentary groups which meet and require attendance; in a working week the Palace bustles meetings, functions, lobbies, receptions and other kinds of gathering which will attract legislators with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

Behind everything there is, well, work. MPs have office staff but the allowances are not extravagant, and in any event it is simply a time-intensive occupation, requiring a lot of reading (even if a lot of it maybe be skimming), the supervision of others’ work, negotiations over diary management, signing letters, approving questions for submission to ministers… the list is not quite endless but it sometimes seems that way. Then factor in the interaction with other Members, from all parties, House officials, party workers and others without whom an MP cannot pursue their daily existence, and it is clear that the day quickly fills up.

Two other significant factors: something like 200 MPs, nearly a third of the House, serve as ministers, shadow spokespeople or in other party roles. For ministers and their shadows, that is the main part of their political life. Everything else is crammed into the interstices, leaving them often double- or triple-booked. The final issue is constituency work. Most MPs will spend at least some of each weekend holding surgeries, attending functions, going to meetings, being briefed and lobbied on local issues. This does not stop during the longer recesses, which are still too often described as “holidays”. I am not suggesting that MPs never have a break, but the fact that Parliament is not sitting simply does not equate to them being “on holiday” or at their leisure.

In general terms, then, the idea that Parliament is on a go-slow is easy to refute. It is unrepresentative to judge on the last few weeks or even months; bear in mind the when Parliament was prorogued on 26 October, it was the end of a mammoth session which began on 10 May 2022, when the King, then Prince of Wales, and the Duke of Cambridge, acting as counsellors of state, opened Parliament on behalf of the late Queen Elizabeth II.

(It was a trimmed-down occasion in terms of ceremony; constitutionally, it was noteworthy in being the first time that counsellors of state had acted for the sovereign in opening Parliament. The Queen had been absent twice before, in 1959 and 1963, both times due to pregnancy. On both occasions, Parliament was opened by a royal commission, the same body that conducts the prorogation ceremony, a group of three or more privy counsellors appointed by Letters Patent. The Gracious Speech was delivered on each occasion by the lord chancellor as presiding commissioner, Viscount Kilmuir in 1959 and Lord Dilhorne in 1963. A commission had also opened Parliament in November 1951, when George VI was too ill to do so in person; he died three months later.)

So last month was the end of an unusually long session, which had seen a great deal of political turbulence including the death of the sovereign and two changes of prime minister. Some bills had endured difficult passages; the Online Safety Act 2023, for example, which had been carried over from the 2021-22 session, was introduced during the uneven stewardship of Nadine Dorries as culture secretary, and encountered sufficiently stiff opposition both in Parliament and outside that the government, Michelle Donelan having replaced Dorries as secretary if state, sent some clauses back to committee before Report stage. In addition, the last two sitting weeks of the session, beginning 16 and 23 October, the so-called “wash-up”, came after the three-week conference recess, so the rhythm of business had been disrupted and legislation was at varying stages of completion as everything was co-ordinated towards prorogation.

This leads to a broader question, though. Even if one accepted the opposition’s thesis that Parliament was under-occupied, which I don’t, what is it that MPs should be doing with this “spare” time? When pressing the charge, the new shadow leader of the House of Commons, Lucy Powell, set out the argument in full:

The country is crying out for change, yet all we’re getting is Tory failure heaped on more failure. With families struggling with the cost of living and Tory mortgage mayhem the Conservatives have given up on governing, making MPs clock off early half the time. Whilst the Government flails around, Labour MPs are desperate to use this time the Tories are wasting.

There is a lot I disagree with here. The first is the idea that if the House of Commons is not sitting, then the Conservatives has “given up on governing”. Emphatically no: Parliament does not “govern”, that is what the government is for, and the reason our system makes the government dependent for its existence on the legislature is to make sure that elected representatives have direct accountability but not control. Never mind that governing through a body of 650 individual legislators would be impossible, it is not how the system was ever supposed to work.

The proposition behind Powell’s words, with Labour MPs “desperate to use this time:, is that policy is made at least substantially through legislation. Of course there is one sense in which this is true: legislation gives the government its power, gives it most of the tools it uses to administer the UK. (Most but not all: some functions carried out by the government are exercised under the royal prerogative, like declaring war and signing treaties, though increasingly these are being brought under some kind of legislative oversight.) But there is a concomitant belief, which I think is hugely damaging, that public policy requires an almost-constant drumbeat of legislation. From first principles, this is surely flawed: legislation is supposed to set out broad princples of which is and is not licit, with those principles interpreted by the various arms of government like the police and the criminal justice system, and also create frameworks for the state to administer services like healthcare, education and welfare.

It would, surely, be prima facie bizarre if Parliament was always having to be setting down new rules, setting things beyond the law and creating new institutions or awarding new powers. It would assume at least one of two things: that unforeseen circumstances, dangers and challenges were emerging on an almost-daily basis; and/or that existing legislation was proving inadequate or out-of-date almost as soon as the ink was dry on Royal Assent. And I simply don’t think either of those propositions stands up to scrutiny.

I wrote in June that we should re-examine our assumption that Parliament must always be doing things. Of course we cannot look to mediaeval or early modern parliaments as a direct model for the modern world, but I think it is very important to remember, and least reflect on the idea, that it was not always the assumption that Parliament would sit effectively all the time. Before the Civil Wars, monarchs tended to summon Parliament when they needed money of a sum which could only be realised through taxation. Of course the scope of government had grown unrecognisably since then, but is it a logical assumption that there will always be a full day’s business for two Houses of Parliament? In the Commons, the treadmill of departmental questions is ceaseless, of course, and we wouldn’t want to lose those sessions of scrutiny which operate on a rota under which each department face questions every five weeks or so.

It is the case that any opportunity for generalised debate on current affairs will usually be used to most of its extent. After all, MPs know the value of being seen to contribute in Parliament and have their views placed on the record, even if those contributions can verge on the banal and humdrum. We shouldn’t deprecate too much this fact of life: I think too often we overlook the consideration that MPs are in a way participating in a non-stop job interview for the position they already hold. That must be exhausting, but it also requires a somewhat transactional relationship when it comes to parliamentary activities. It is absolutely right that Parliament accommodates this, but accommodation and indulgence are different approaches. If every possible hour was given over the debate on any subject, speakers would mostly be found, and the hours mostly filled. Whether that is valuable or not is another matter.

Fundamentally, Powell’s remarks suggest (to me) that she think we should maximise the sitting hours—without, God forbid, making them anything but “family-friendly”—and then decide how to fill them. Surely it is more sensible to consider what Parliament wants and needs to do, and then arrange sitting hours so that those priorities are accommodated as efficiently as possible?

It is perfectly possible that I am placing too much weight on a throwaway partisan remark by a shadow cabinet minister. It does, though, suggest to me a basic ideological difference between Left and Right, or, perhaps, between the current iteration of social democracy represented by the Labour Party, on the one hand, and the sort of conservatism in which I believe on the other. The idea that parliamentary time is being “wasted” suggests that the state—Parliament and government—is the first response to anything that happens in public life. Something bad happens? We should ban it. Something good happens? We should tax it. If there is not a legislative response, then certainly a view must be expressed; indeed, everyone should have a platform to express those views. It is a notion which finds its ultimate absurd expression in a prime minister, perhaps light-heartedly, commenting on the trial and conviction of a character in a soap opera.

(For younger readers, this genuinely happened. In 1998, Coronation Street ran a storyline which saw series veteran Deirdre Rashid (Anne Kirkbride) convicted and jailed for mortgage and credit card fraud committed by her conman lover Jon Lindsay (Owen Aaronovitch). There was such public interest in the wrongful conviction of the “Weatherfield One” that the prime minister, Sir Tony Blair, undertook to instruct the Home Office to examine the case. I hope he was joking, but the fact that he even considered making any comment was telling.)

I take a different view. Legislation is one way of executing public policy. The government should always reflect on whether events, good or bad, happen against an appropriate landscape of regulation and scrutiny. But it will be a rare news event which will demand a new or revised law, or some kind of state action. A kneejerk reaction to bad things happening is often “There should be a law against this!” Often there is, albeit sometimes it requires novel interpretation or small amendment, but there is also often pressure to make new legislation to show that the government is doing something. That is not how Parliament should work.

My message, then, is just to stop and think. We are as cynical a society as we have ever been, but those whom we elect on our behalf, while many have faults of all kinds, are almost all hard working. Being a Member of Parliament is a crushing burden of work for which you get little thanks and modest financial reward, and in return for which you sacrifice time and relationships. I’m not asking you to pity MPs: they are all volunteers, they know what they’re signing up for and there are still huge numbers of applicants for each vacancy. As Red Clydeside legend Jimmy Maxton is supposed to have said, if you can’t ride two horses at once, you shouldn’t be in the bloody circus. All I would say is, let’s be realistic about how MPs really live, how Parliament works, and avoid the lazy and inaccurate characterisation that they are lounging around the fleshpots of Westminster.