Month: January 2017

Blog

What makes for effective parliamentary public engagement? Reflections from the Welsh National Assembly

Post author By psaparliaments
Post date January 25, 2017

By Kevin Davies and Cristina Leston-Bandeira

Over the last decade, public engagement has become a key role for parliaments. This is shown in the reinforcement of a wide range of types of activity, from expanding the scope of visits to parliament, developing educational resources about the institution, to introducing out-facing programmes actively seeking to engage communities with the work of parliament. Whilst this has represented a clear shift in the way parliaments engage with the public, most of this activity has tended to develop in parallel to actual parliamentary business – as an aside activity.

Tags committee scrutiny, National Assembly for Wales, public engagement, public participation, Wales, Welsh politics

Blog

Questions to the Prime Minister at Liaison Committee

Post author By psaparliaments
Post date January 18, 2017

On the last afternoon of the final parliamentary session before the Christmas recess, Theresa May could put it off no longer and appeared before the Liaison Committee. Here Ben Worthy, viewing the session from outside, considers how she performed. Mark Bennister, utilising his new parliamentary academic fellowship looks at the Committee performance having watched the session from the Committee room.

Tags Andrew Tyrie, British politics, Hilary Benn, House of Commons, Liaison Committee, parliamentary scrutiny, UK Parliament, Yvette Cooper

Blog

Why has ‘stage two’ of House of Lords Reform not been completed after 17 years?

Post author By psaparliaments
Post date January 11, 2017

By Peter Dorey

House of Lords reform remains unfinished business, and looks likely to remain so for a long time yet. The preamble to the 1911 Parliament Act portentously proclaimed that Lords reform was ‘an urgent question which brooks no delay’, yet more than a century later, there have been only sporadic and inchoate reforms. Moreover, these have often been motivated by calculations of partisan advantage, even when depicted as being derived from important political principles. After the 1911 Act, the remainder of the twentieth century witnessed only three further laws pertaining to House of Lords reform: the 1949 Parliament Act, which reduced the Second Chamber’s power of delay (veto) of legislation from two years to one; the 1958 Life Peerages Act, which established a new category of appointed peer to sit alongside the hereditary peers; the 1999 House of Lords Reform Act, which removed most of the hereditary peers, but allowed 92 to remain pending further reform.

Tags British politics, Conservative Party, democracy, hereditary peers, House of Lords, Labour Party, Lords reform, parliamentary reform, second chamber, UK politics, upper chamber