The Commons in the family way
The New Labour government changed the House's sitting hours to make them "family-friendly"—but what effect did the changes have?
As I wrote some time ago, reform of the House of Commons was among the many items of constitutional change in the mind of Tony Blair and his ministers when Labour ousted the Conservatives after 18 years in May 1997. It was not a big-ticket item—those were House of Lords reform and devolution to Scotland, Wales and London—and there can be virtually no votes swayed by changes proposed to the lower house, but Blair and his North London Père Joseph, Peter Mandelson, were determined that change and “modernisation” should run through the New Labour project like a golden thread. In many ways, indeed, New Labour was as much a process as a target or end-point. It was a brilliant concoction.
Shortly after taking office, the government established the Select Committee on the Modernisation of the House of Commons (the Modernisation Committee, or “ModCom”) and tasked it with making all sorts of changes to the procedures and arrangements of the House. “Modernisation” is a weasel-word, of course: as many have remarked, it is a spin on the idea of a change of which the speaker approves. ModCom was chaired by the Leader of the House, initially Ann Taylor, and the front benches of the two major opposition parties were also represented. This was to ensure that the party hierarchies came to agreement during the deliberative process and changes proposed by the committee would be nodded through by the House as a whole.
ModCom lasted for the whole 13 years of the Blair/Brown government (it was not reappointed after the formation of the Coalition in 2010). It was responsible for a broad range of reforms: some were genuinely aimed at improving parliamentary scrutiny, such as the greater use of ad hoc committees to look at draft bills or the creation of the parallel debating chamber, Westminster Hall, to allow issues to be aired without the House having to reach any decisions; some were undoubtedly enacted to make the life of the executive more predictable and less stressful, such as the introduction of the systematic timetabling of scrutiny of bills to replace the occasional use of the guillotine and the ability to carry over bills from one parliamentary session to another if specifically nominated.
One of the most obvious and in many ways symbolic changes was the wholesale reform of the House of Commons’s sitting hours. Until the fall of the Conservative government in 1997, the Commons typically sat from 2.30 pm to 10.00 pm from Monday to Thursday and additionally on Wednesday mornings. This obviously involved late nights for Members and staff, and reflected the operational tempo of the Victorian House, in which MPs would often attend to their professions or other responsibilities on weekday mornings before turning to their secondary (until 1911 unpaid) roles as legislators. It was a convenient pattern to the sort of men who filled the Commons in those days, though the arrival of a substantial Labour contingent, with many working-class MPs, after 1922 chipped away at this rationale.
There were several arguments for changing the sitting hours by 1997. It required regular unsociable working patterns for those staff who needed to support the House whenever it sat, and it placed significant strictures and pressures on the personal lives of MPs. The new Parliamentary Labour Party of 1997 contained 101 female MPs, a record number and proportion, for at least some (thought not all) of whom the media’s moniker of “Blair Babes” was demeaning and dismissive. This fresh cohort, some of them young enough to have significant childcare commitments, suggested to the government that the sitting hours could be changed under the banner of making them “family-friendly”, trying to imitate as much as possible, and certainly more than had ever been done before, a normal nine-to-five occupation. Achieving this would allow MPs of both sexes to attend to childcare and other responsibilities and allow them more free time in the evenings, hopefully reducing the strain on their relationship.
(This last supposed outcome was not universally regarded as positive. At one point a newspaper interviewed MPs’ spouses about their partners’ working patterns and whether some reform would be beneficial. Edith Rifkind, wife of Malcolm, was quite adamant that she did not support the idea. “My husband already spends the week away from him family. The last thing I want is for him to have his evenings free!”)
All of these factors came together to swaddle reform of the sitting hours in virtuous and progressive cloth. It created a perfect New Labour counterpoint between the hidebound, gentleman’s-club institution of the “old” Commons and a fresh, feminised, responsive chamber created by the new administration.
It was a longer process to achieve this change than perhaps the government had expected. They initially indicated support for moving Thursday’s business forward by three hours, thereby allowing the House to rise for the week at 7.00 pm and for even the most far-flung Members to return to the bosoms of their electorates and have a full working Friday for constituency affairs. In January 1999, these modestly revised hours were introduced on a temporary basis until the end of the session. That autumn, ModCom recommended they be retained for a further session (1999-2000), at the end of which they were again confirmed for the rest of the Parliament.
After the 2001 general election, Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, was reluctantly taken from his department and appointed Leader of the House. It was not a role he had sought, and few could regard it as other than a demotion. Cook resented it for the rest of his life. However, with a degree of practicality, he applied his substantial experience and skill in the Commons to his new post and pressed ahead with reform. In 2002, after proposal and counter-proposal, the House agreed to change its sitting hours on Wednesdays and Thursdays, starting much earlier in the day, at 11.30 am, and having the moment of interruption (the time at which the main business must end and any remaining questions be put) at 7.00 pm. These changes were made in January 2003 and imposed at least until the end of the parliament.
I joined the House in the early days of the following parliament (on 3 October 2005, with two other Commons clerks: in a dazzling move which we would come to recognise from our seniors, each of us had been instructed to arrive at a slightly different time). So the pattern of the legislative week (though we all initially worked on select committees) was a strange hybrid of the old and the new. On Mondays and Tuesdays, the House would not sit until 2.30 pm, running to the moment of interruption at 10.00 pm. Wednesdays, however, were more “real world” days of 11.30 am to 7.00 pm, while Thursday ran an hour ahead of that, from 10.30 am to 6.00 pm.
I should point out for those not familiar with the House’s patterns of work that the Commons by default does not sit on a Friday. However, the Standing Orders stipulate that on 13 Fridays each session, private Members’ business shall have precedence over government business, and these are the days on which bills introduced by backbenchers will scramble as far as they can through the legislative process. Typically three or four each session will score a home run. But on these Fridays the Commons only sits from 9.30 am to 2.00 pm; there are no questions and it is rare for there to be ministerial statements. Not all Members will attend, many having returned to their constituencies on Thursday. It does not really feel like a full day’s business.
If this hybrid week looks peculiar, there was some advantages. In all fairness, the House cannot sit on Monday mornings, or MPs from more distant seats would have to travel the previous day, slashing into already-rare respite. Tuesday mornings were used by a lot of select committees as it is easier for MPs not to have to choose between their committee duties and whatever is happening in the chamber (also, if a committee is sitting at the same time as the House, a division in the House requires the committee to suspend for 10 minutes or so, in order for MPs to vote and come back; this is, believe me, a bore if you have anxious witnesses trying to make their way through complicated oral evidence).
Of course, the retention of late sittings on Mondays and Tuesdays did mean that MPs generally had to remain on the Parliamentary Estate all day and evening, so would regularly rack up 12 or more hours. Equally, the House requires a certain number of staff to support it, and sitting beyond a normal office end-time meant that some of us had to work evening shifts on a rota: clerks would be needed to staff the three procedural offices (the Table Office, the Public Bill Office and the Journal Office), to carry out divisions in the House and to provide the senior clerks who would sit at the Table of the House. Other departments, of course, also had to remain, from researchers in the Library to catering staff in bars and restaurants.
In 2012, further changes were made. The late night on Tuesday was stopped and that day adopted the same hours as Wednesday, beginning at 11.30 am, while Thursday moved an hour earlier again, beginning at 9.30 am with the moment of interruption at 5.00 pm. This left only Monday as a day on when the House would regularly sit outside what we think of as “office hours”, and made the business of the chamber essentially something which those hours could include. Ten years on, those hours persist.
This was almost everything which the New Labour reformers had hoped to achieve. The knotty issue of Monday mornings is probably insoluble: the House will have to start some time after lunch, and, unless it was willing to sacrifice some sitting hours overall, that will require staying into Monday evening. But one late night a week is not too much of a burden. In theory, then, the House had been transformed into a workplace which would be much more manageable for parents or carers, and the decrease in late finishes would allow MPs to have a personal life during the week, away from their place of work.
The most extreme cases of past years have certainly been almost entirely curbed. In the year following the 2017 general election, despite parliamentary trench warfare over Brexit, the Commons only sat beyond midnight on three occasions. In the 1980s, one in four sitting days had run beyond midnight. That is a seismic shift in culture. Yet only last year, the Institute for Government produced a paper which suggested that many MPs still did not really regard the House’s sitting hours as “family-friendly”. Fifteen years of reform, and major changes, and a lot of Members still felt it was difficult to reconcile their parliamentary duties with personal and familial commitments.
I think there is an underlying conceptual problem here. Many reformers have viewed “modernisation” and the creation of a more “normal” workplace at Westminster as a linear processes: broadly, the more changes you make in the direction you choose, the better things will get. In fact, though—and I say this not merely with slightly misty-eyed traditionalism—in this case, as in many others, reform is a matter of compromise and trade-offs.
The more we try to delineate parliamentary duties within “office hours”, the more two things happen: firstly, the more we have politicians who only, after election, participate in the legislative and scrutiny process. They become, to coin a phrase, “professional politicians”. Many might, at least prima facie, think that is a good thing. But let me offer some caution.
If MPs work effectively a standard working week on their parliamentary duties, they bring to the House whatever skills and experience they had accumulated, but it has a line drawn under it there: their experience will start to date, and their skills will not develop, and may begin to atrophy. Maybe we are comfortable with that. But let me highlight one small but important perverse incentive.
Traditionally, two government MPs with eminent legal qualifications are chosen to be Attorney-General and Solicitor-General, the chief legal advisers to the administration and the sovereign’s representatives to the judicial world. (In theory, for example, the Attorney could choose to lead in court on major criminal proceedings in which the prosecution represents the monarch, R v…) In practice this rarely happens, and the balance of the law officers’ court appearances are restricted to the Supreme Court. But the difficulty is that making MPs work full-time at Westminster means that any lawyers elected to the House will virtually have to discontinue their practices. They will grow rusty, and those who have not already been given silk are unlike to become King’s Counsel on merit after their elections, as they will not be practising.
For the last 20 years at least, governments have struggled to fill the law officers’ posts from the Commons, and several different methods have been tried, from giving silk to barristers simply so that they can hold the post; through granting honorary status to fulfil rights of appearance in higher courts (Harriet Harman, Solicitor-General 2001-05, was not a barrister at all, never exercised her right of appearance and never appeared in court for the government at all); to appointing more legally eminent members of the House of Lords like Lord Goldsmith (Attorney-General 2001-07) and Lady Scotland of Asthal (2007-10). All of these methods can solve the immediate shortage, but each has its drawbacks.
Of course the sitting hours of the House should not be determined by the need to appoint two members of the government. But the position of the law officers is indicative. There are frequent if rather inchoate ambitions that ministers should be in some way specialists in their field, as non-parliamentarians appointed to senior positions are in, for example, the United States, but how would potential ministers acquire and retain this expertise?
The truth is—and it is a hard truth—that desiring a legislature which operates “family-friendly” hours can only ever be one of several competing priorities. It takes us into much wider debates about who our politicians should be: ordinary men and women with undistinguished lives, or high-flying careerists with hugely desirable skills? How much should they be paid? Should they be allowed to have paid interests outside Parliament, and, if so, what limits should be placed on those? These are not all questions which can be answered to move further towards a Platonic ideal of a democratically elected chamber. They are pressing around us eagerly, each butting us for our attention, and trying to drown out the noises of the others.
There will never be a truly family-focused House of Commons. But as reform-minded individuals, or even just the curious, we must step back so that we can see the whole of the picture rather than just the fine detail of one section. What is an MP, and what does he or she do? That’s a much bigger question, and answering it will require deep thought but also a readiness to face messy compromises and choices we might wish we didn’t have to make.