Author: psaparliaments

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

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.

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Questions to the Prime Minister at Liaison Committee

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.

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

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.

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2016 in Parliament

Please note that this blog piece was originally published on the Crick Centre blog, and has been re-posted here with the author’s permission.

As 2016 comes to an end, we await the Supreme Court’s verdict on whether the Government can invoke Article 50 without the authority of Parliament. Having the UK’s highest court consider the constitutional role of Parliament has been one consequence of a referendum which hadn’t even been scheduled at the start of 2016, but dominated a turbulent year in the Palace of Westminster.

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What Makes Parliaments Effective? The case of the States of Jersey

By Mark Egan

What makes a parliament effective? What are the factors which make parliaments better at making laws or representing the people? These issues were discussed during the PSA Parliaments and Legislatures annual conference in October 2016. I spoke from the perspective of a parliamentary practitioner with experience of the UK and Jersey about the additional challenges faced by small parliamentary bodies in achieving the Holy Grail of effectiveness.

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Why do we blog, anyway?

By Marc Geddes

I have been Communications Officer for the PSA Specialist Group on Parliaments for almost two years, and I have loved it. It has allowed me to engage with a range of academics, researchers, students and practitioners to help disseminate their research whilst also promoting the study of parliaments and legislatures across the UK. The main way that I have sought to do this is through our website, and especially through our blogs, which cover topical issues or overviews of legislatures. But why does this even matter? Why should parliamentary and legislative scholars be blogging? There are at least three reasons, and each relates to the audience that we are trying to engage: the public, practitioners, and academics.

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One year of EVEL: Evaluating ‘English Votes for English Laws’ in the House of Commons

By Daniel Gover and Michael Kenny

It is now just over a year since the House of Commons adopted a new set of procedural rules known as ‘English Votes for English Laws’ (or EVEL). Put simply, EVEL provides MPs representing constituencies in England (or England and Wales) with the opportunity to veto certain legislative provisions that apply only in that part of the UK. (For a reminder of how the process works, see here.) Introduced with some fanfare by the Conservative government following the 2015 election – and criticised heavily by its political opponents – these procedures have quickly faded from public view. But, one year on, what lessons can be drawn from how EVEL has operated so far?

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Connecting Parliaments and Citizens online: The initiatives of the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies and the UK House of Commons

By Isabele Mitozo

Over the last two decades, the web has become a facilitator for information access. Institutions, especially representative ones, have used that means to communicate with citizens. Parliaments, more specifically, have tried to improve the use of digital platforms to go further and open up the process of law construction.

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Sunset Clauses in Anti-Terrorism Laws: What’s the Point?

On 31 October 2016, the House of Commons agreed, without debate, to approve the draft Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures Act 2011 (Continuation) Order 2016. If agreed by the Lords, the order will continue in force the Home Secretary’s powers under the Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures Act 2011, namely to impose, via a ‘TPIM’, a range of duties, obligations and restrictions on suspected terrorists. That power was due to expire on 13 December 2016, five years after its enactment, because of the incorporation in the legislation of a sunset clause – a legal provision that provides for the expiry of a law or part of a law at a later date. Unless the House of Lords defies parliamentary convention and does not approve the continuation order, it is unlikely that the TPIM powers will now expire. This does not necessarily mean that the sunset clause has failed; after all, it may be that the TPIM powers are an important and useful part of the UK’s counter-terrorism regime and warrant extension. The imposition of six new TPIMs by the Home Secretary in the past three months suggests that the government believes this to be the case.

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Irrelevant Questions Undermine the Value of PMQs

By Andrew Defty

The weekly Prime Minister’s Questions is undoubtedly an important mechanism for holding the government to account. The requirement that the Prime Minister must come to the chamber of the House of Commons on a weekly basis to answer questions about government policy and administration provides a valuable, and rare, opportunity for individual MPs to scrutinise government.

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