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The real cost of MPs’ security to constituency representation

By Neil Matthews and Sean Haughey.

The abuse of MPs, both online and offline, is becoming a more prevalent feature of British political life. In the most egregious cases, abuse has escalated into violent and even fatal attacks on MPs. In response, MPs are adopting new security measures at the constituency level to protect themselves from harm. These measures range from the subtle (e.g. no longer advertising the details of surgeries) to the not-so-subtle (such as the wearing of stab vests). We know how these developments are impacting MPs personally, not least in terms of their mental health. We also know about the associated financial ramifications, with the costs of MPs’ security skyrocketing in recent years. But what about the implications for representation and democracy? Are MPs able to perform their representative role just as well amid stricter security protocols? Or are costs incurred to representative democracy when constituency service is securitised?

The security-accessibility trade-off

All security systems come with costs attached. When MPs tighten constituency service security the most obvious cost incurred pertains to accessibility. This security-accessibility trade-off manifests in one of two ways: either through a reduction in opportunities for constituents to meet with their MP, or through the adoption of security protocols which complicate access pathways. In terms of reduced opportunities for constituent-MP engagement, take for instance those MPs who have stopped holding surgeries in public venues (e.g. shopping malls) because of security concerns. Consider also the MP who, after repeated incidents of verbal abuse, admits that he no longer socialises in his own constituency. These examples of retreat from the public square are problematic, because it is through even the most innocuous and impromptu interactions – in the local pub or supermarket for instance – that MPs develop their constituency antennae, learning about the issues which matter to their constituents:

‘We try to be, as constituency MPs, recognisable, available, accessible to all. A successful constituency MP is the person who people feel they can go to in the pub or, as frustrating as that sometimes is, come up to you when you’re doing your shopping.‘

Access to MPs can be complicated by security in a number of ways. Some MPs, for example, have replaced “drop-in” surgeries with appointment-only meetings, a formality which likely results in some constituents being turned away. We also know that, on the advice of police, some MPs have discontinued in-person surgery appointments, instead offering online meetings only. Whilst this might expedite access to MPs for the digitally confident citizen, it will disincentivise engagement for those without the requisite skills. What is more, the value and quality of online meetings – relative to in-person meetings – is open to question. The social scientific evidence underlines the therapeutic value of in-person meetings between MPs and constituents. These in-person meetings are key to the development of “co-presence”, and help build a “human bridge” through which constituents feel listened to. These benefits could be much harder to attain when the interaction occurs through a screen. Similarly, with face-to-face meetings, that personal touch and sense of intimacy is likely compromised by the presence of security guards.

The symbolic costs

Public spaces articulate political and cultural messages. What messages, then, are conveyed to the public when MPs adopt airport-style (or even prison-style) security at their constituency offices? Think bulletproof glass, CCTV, reinforced doors, panic buttons and so on. Whilst these measures may reassure MPs and their staff, the effect on constituents could be quite the opposite, perhaps marking the space as somehow unsafe, where visitors need to be on their guard. Research into other sites that have been securitised suggests as much, whereby defensive urban architecture (designed to mitigate terrorist attacks) has had a chilling effect on public democratic culture, eliciting a range of subjective emotional responses from pedestrians: fearfulness, suspicion, paranoia, and exclusion. Some of the security measures at constituency offices could be eliciting a similar response from constituents. Take, for instance, the MP who tells his constituents they should “be prepared to be searched” when they arrive at his surgery:

‘We are following security guidance, as a result Security Operatives and/or the Police will be screening constituents attending face to face surgery appointments. Please bring along photo ID, leave bags and coats at home where possible, as they will not be permitted in the meeting toom and will need to remain outside the meeting space and be prepared to be searched.‘

(Guidance provided on Julian Smith MP’s website for constituents)

For the architect, Stephen Flusty, places and spaces bearing the features of security – searches of person or property, say – warrant being labelled as “jittery”. They are marked, in other words, by a tense and nervous atmosphere. We might ask then: how many of the constituency offices in the UK are showing signs of the jitters?

Security and trust: a Catch-22?

Security measures at the constituency level could, then, be counter-productive, in that MPs may be undermining the very representative connections they seek to protect. Up until now, the linkage between MPs and constituents at the local level has been held up as a positive exception to what has otherwise been a story of increasing political disengagement across western democracies. But what if new security measures at the local level are making engagement more difficult, placing distance (figuratively and literally) between MPs and constituents?

Amid a general crisis of representation, in which people in the UK typically feel unrepresented by Westminster, there is a risk that the mitigating power of constituency service will be diminished if MPs become (or are perceived to be) harder to reach – or are less present – at the local level. Moreover, if perceptions of disconnect between politicians and the public is a driver of political distrust, and that distrust in turn fuels abuse of politicians, the security steps MPs are taking to mitigate this threat could in fact be exacerbating it.

Importantly, the securitising trend affecting British political life appears set to deepen. The Speaker of the Commons, Lindsay Hoyle – a long-time advocate for greater protections for MPs – has called for a transformation in parliament’s “security culture”. To a similar end, the outgoing Conservative government signed-off on a £31m package to bolster the constituency-level security of MPs; while the recently published Walney review recommends even greater bolstering. Understanding how such enhanced security shapes  the character and delivery of representative democracy in the UK – and the myriad costs it brings to bear on both politicians and the public – warrants greater attention.

This blog post was first posted by LSE blogs. It draws on research by the authors published in Parliamentary Affairs. All views expressed are the authors’ own.

About the authors

Neil Matthews is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol.

Sean Haughey is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the Institute of Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool.

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Petitions and Petitioning in Europe and North America

By Henry Miller.

Over the last decade, parliaments across the world have adopted e-petition systems to promote citizen engagement with legislatures. While made possible by the internet and twenty-first century technology, the contemporary e-petition can also be understood as the latest version of an ancient political practice: the petition. As this blog will illustrate, petitions and petitioning have long been a popular way for people to engage with parliamentary institutions, both before and after the advent of modern democracy.

This blog summarises key findings from a major new edited book, Petitions and Petitioning in Europe and North America: From the Late Medieval Period to the Present published by Oxford University Press for the British Academy. Originating from an AHRC Network, the book brings together historians, political scientists, legal scholars, and sociologists to examine petitions and petitioning, that is the practices related to the drafting, signing, presentation and reception of petitions.

As the book shows, petitions have been ubiquitous across a many different geographical, chronological, and political contexts, including modern democracies and authoritarian regimes. The book is organised into three sections that: 1) define petitions with greater conceptual clarity than before; 2) examine changes and continuities in petitioning over long periods of time; and 3) offer case studies of why and when petitions have mattered in particular political contexts, ranging from late medieval England to the early Soviet Union. This blog will summarise findings in three areas that will be of particular interest to scholars of parliamentary studies.

First, a key theme of the book is the relationship between petitions and the evolution of parliamentary institutions. In his chapter, Gwilym Dodd shows that petitions were an important method for collectively asserting parliamentary authority against royal power in late medieval England. During the ‘age of revolutions’ (1789-1871) in Europe and North America, mass, collective petitioning on public issues, often based on newly codified rights to petition, was increasingly directed to legislatures. The value of petitions to parliaments was double-edged in an age of limited suffrage. Parliaments, including the UK House of Commons, used petitions to claim a degree of popular consent in the absence of democratic elections. Yet at the same time, petitioners invoking ideas of popular sovereignty frequently challenged parliamentary authority by claiming to represent a broader people than the limited electorate.

In the twentieth century, as Richard Huzzey and Henry Miller show, there was a shift away from petitioning legislatures to a broader range of authorities, including international bodies like the United Nations. Petitioning remained a ubiquitous form of political participation, but because petitions to non-parliamentary authorities (such as Number 10 Downing Street) were rarely recorded, its continued popularity remained largely invisible to scholars. This historical perspective allows us to see that one important implication of the growth of legislative e-petitions systems, documented by Cristina Leston-Bandeira in her chapter, is that it restores parliaments as the principal authorities for receiving petitions from citizens.

Second, petitions have been an important mechanism for representation across the centuries. As a series of studies have shown, petitions have enabled the ‘voice of the voteless’ to be heard in legislatures from groups lacking formal political rights, including Native Americans, women before universal suffrage, and colonised peoples in the British empire.  In their study of the US Congress over two centuries, Maggie Blackhawk and Daniel Carpenter persuasively argue that petitioning has been an important form of representation that exists independently of electoral and party politics. Examining Dutch petitions over three centuries, Maartje Janse et al, demonstrate that petitioning has been a significant practice for making representative claims to authority by individual citizens and groups. In his survey of petitions in colonial Jamaica during the era of slavery, the late Aaron Graham shows that petitioning was one of the few tools available to groups including Free People of Colour and Jewish subjects to  claim rights from a legislature dominated by slave-owners. Marta Gravela and Ismini Pells show that petitions were an important mechanism for claiming citizenship and welfare, respectively, from the state.

Third, the book reveals the essential duality of petitions and petitioning as both formal and informal political practices that is vital for understanding their ubiquity, longevity, and flexibility. While often studied in formal, institutional, official settings, notably parliaments, petitions have always taken informal, unofficial forms as well and have been directly to a range of authorities. As chapters by Mark Knights, Joris Oddens, and others show, there has been an enormous variety of petitions and related subscriptional (or name-signing) practices, including supplications, covenants, declarations, and gravamina to name but a few. In the nineteenth-century UK, petitions to the House of Commons were the most popular genre of petitioning, but these existed alongside addresses to the monarch, memorials to government, and requisitions and other petitions directed to every type of local authority.

Petitions have never been isolated from other forms of political participation. Indeed, in particular contexts they have underpinned and made possible other forms of collective action. While petitions today are often regarded by sociologists as a conventional form of collective action compared to more direct forms of protest, a historical perspective shows that petitioning has often been linked with revolts, rebellions, and revolutions. Petitioning has often been a fluid political practice that could mutate into other forms, including mass demonstrations or strikes, while the correlation between petitions and the formation of political organisation such as political parties or single-issue associations is well-established. Modern forms of participation and engagement have evolved from petitioning. The institutionalised forms of referendums and initiatives in Switzerland, Andreas Würgler shows, developed from a long tradition of petitioning. The practice of letter-writing to MPs and political leaders, which expanded dramatically in the twentieth-century, was an outgrowth of petitioning as Huzzey and Miller suggest.

The shape-shifting quality of petitions is one of the many reasons why they have been a widespread practice since the late medieval period, and a key means for interacting with parliamentary and representative institutions, even if now, they largely take digital form.  

About the authors

Dr. Henry Miller is Vice Chancellor’s Fellow in the Department of Humanities, Northumbria University.

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Reimagining the UK Parliament

By David Judge and Cristina Leston-Bandeira.

Few institutions – whether economic, social, or political – have escaped calls in recent years for reimagining. In its literal sense reimagining is ‘the action or an act of imagining something again’(OED); or, stated more pithily, it means to ‘think seriously about starting over’. A reimagining of parliament, therefore, needs to explore and trouble (in the sense of challenging and disrupting) current imaginings of what parliament is and does. This is what we set out to do in our new book Reimagining Parliament.

Stages of Reimagining

A ‘stages approach’ was adopted to reimagining. The first stage was to identify what was to be reimagined. Obviously, in our case the specific focus is the UK parliament. It is not about the genus of ‘parliament’, or of the general concept of ‘parliament’. Instead, it is about the Westminster parliament firmly located within a ‘Westminster system’ of government. This is the present (what currently exists). This provides the starting point for reimagining (what does not yet exist).

The second stage of reimagining was to identify who is doing the reimagining. The selection criteria for ‘reimagineers’ was that they should collectively combine the practical, professional experience of those who have worked in Westminster and the academic, research experience of those who have analysed parliament from a range of disciplines; and that they should be willing to step outside their professional and academic comfort zones to be provoked into thinking afresh about how they might reimagine parliament. Our ‘reimagineers’ were: Didier Caluwaerts, Emma Crewe, Paul Evans, David Judge, Cristina Leston-Bandeira, Lucinda Maer, Alexandra Meakin, Dann Vermassen, Hannah White, and Ben Yong.

A third stage was the ‘how’ of reimagining. A ‘headshift’, in the sense of ‘a break with conventional thinking’, was required. To break with the orthodoxies of institutional perspectives, contributors were asked to identify foundational principles with which to drive the modelling ab initio of various dimensions of parliamentary activity; to explain why the identified principles are deemed to be foundational, and why they matter. Two broad categories of principles emerged from this identification process. In the first category are principles broadly reflective of basic political tenets currently underpinning notions of liberal democracy in the UK: these include openness; engagement/connectedness; accessibility; inclusion; equality; fairness; responsiveness; and accountability. Principles in the second category are associated more with institutional and organisational norms and practices: these include wellness; ethical propriety; sustainability; organisational flexibility; and effective institutional governance.

The outcomes of reimagining

Notions of space, connectivity and interaction help in defining the positioning and distinctiveness of parliament at the centre of UK politics. ‘Space’ focuses attention upon location, architectural space and purpose, and the symbols, performances and rituals of parliament. ‘Connectivity’ is concerned with the dynamics of representation, the identities of those to be brought together in parliament, and how citizens are included and engaged in parliamentary processes. ‘Interaction’ is multi-directional, both outward looking to inter-institutional connections and highly politicised processes of effecting government responsibility and accountability; and inward looking to intra-institutional modes of administration and regulation, demarcated by parliamentary procedures and processes of self-governance.

Within these encompassing frames – of parliamentary space, connectivity, and interaction – the impact of how first category foundational principles may impact reimagining can be seen below.

Openness, engagement/connectedness, and accessibility

Space: These principles are used to guide rethinking: first, in the architectural sense of designing more open-plan spaces within which parliamentarians and staff could meet and work; and of an opening-up of the dark recesses of the parliamentary estate to allow in more natural light and ventilation. Second, in the sense of parliament being open to the public and infusing the principle of public access into the architectural design and necessary security structures and working regimes at Westminster. A fundamental question behind such reimagining is: what would the building look like if the public’s access to democracy was the primary purpose for the design?

Connectivity: The principles of openness and accessibility also underpin a reimagining of the engagement networks, mechanisms and processes of parliament to inform its information, education, communication, consultation and participation activities. In part this prioritisation of openness reflects growing citizen expectations of more openness within parliamentary democracies across the world. Whilst the principles of openness and accessibility provide keystones for engagement activities, their interconnectedness with other principles – of relatability, relevance, continuity, and sustainability – is also vital to reimagining public engagement.

Interaction: When applied to parliamentary scrutiny the principles of openness; engagement/connectedness; and accessibility provide for: greater openness and accessibility in the sense of the ability to obtain information from government and citizens and the capacity to receive (and publish) information in a more open way – through reimagining the technologies, the language, and the choreography of scrutiny. A reimagining of connectedness would include greater deliberative innovation into the scrutiny process; alongside a rethinking of partnership working both within Westminster and between legislatures in the UK; as well as enhanced networking with other monitoring and regulatory bodies. In turn, the principle of engagement can be used to rethink the relationship between parliamentarians and scrutiny processes.

When applied to parliamentary procedure, a reimagining based on the above principles, would aim to encourage participation, deliberation, and make procedure more accessible to parliamentarians and citizens. To this end, it should be transparent both in the sense of being ‘open’ about the rules governing parliamentary behaviour and how they are applied, as well as being presented in language which is natural, plain and transparent. Enhanced openness, in conjunction with other identified ‘second category’ principles, envisages procedure to be more ‘relatable’ inasmuch as it must be recognisably human; ‘relevant’ insofar as it must focus attention on what is important; and provide ‘continuity’ to the extent that procedure must be predictable without being unchanging.

Inclusion, equality, fairness, and responsiveness

These principles provide tensile threads running through most aspects of reimagining parliament.

Space: the principles of inclusion and equality are of central importance in re-envisioning parliamentary architectural space and transforming parliamentary rhythms, rituals and symbols. Such reimagining would have at its heart securing greater equality and inclusion in relation to currently under-represented or un-represented groups in parliament. These principles would be inhered by symbolic recognition of the achievements of minority groups; provide challenges to prevailing ‘hierarchies of value’; and made manifest in redesigns of parliamentary space, parliamentary communication and messaging strategies, and the adoption of neutral (non-exclusionary) parliamentary language.

Connectivity: A rethinking of parliamentary engagement imbued with the principle of inclusion aims to produce a parliament that is more welcoming, more relatable, and more relevant both to current generations and to future generations of parliamentarians and citizens. The principle of inclusion also signifies a necessary representation of diverse bodies, abilities, voices, opinions, backgrounds, races, ethnicities, genders, and identities in parliamentary activities. Securing greater equality and inclusiveness in the representative process requires affirmative action, including compensatory measures, to challenge the structural and attitudinal barriers which perpetuate representational inequalities. The inclusion of more, and more diverse, voices in the deliberation of public policies through such institutional actions and measures, alongside the situating of parliament as a key nodal point in intricate networks of electoral and non-electoral representation, are essential elements of reimagining parliamentary representation. The principle of fairness also intersects with the discussion of representational equality, not least in the maxim that formal political equality is secured through free and fair elections. In turn, securing fairness opens up considerations of a more proportional electoral system and greater alignment of the activities of representatives to the preferences of the represented through the institutionalisation of an encompassing system of responsiveness.

Interaction: Inclusion – and the promotion of diversity – serves as a guiding principle for reimagining the patterns of social interactions, working routines, and ‘people policies’ at Westminster. A reimagined parliament would conceptualise itself as an exemplar of best workplace practice and culture, rather than an exception to the rules shaping other workplaces. Moreover, a reimagined parliament would uphold the principle of fairness, and the closely aligned principle of non-discrimination, to guarantee the general right of workers be treated fairly and not to be discriminated against. When reimagining parliamentary governance, a parliamentary administration which is both responsive and responsible is to be a touchstone of good governance. These principles, when operationalised, would provide greater transparency of governance arrangements; and ensure that those making key administrative decisions are clearly identifiable and known to be responsible and accountable for those decisions.

When it comes to reimagining parliamentary scrutiny, what makes it unique, and distinct from other forms of scrutiny of executive actions, is that it engages the notion of democratic accountability. The media, regulatory bodies, charities and academics may all play valuable scrutiny roles, but they lack this central democratic function. For parliamentary scrutiny to be effective, it needs to engage parliamentarians. Being engaging, efficient, connected, informed, and accessible can all be seen as part of good scrutiny, but good scrutiny should feed back into good government. Equally, if procedure is essential to conferring legitimacy upon the processes and outputs of parliament then the way decisions are reached must be seen to be fair (and, so far as possible, be enduring because they are fair).

Further serious thinking

Whilst the specific focus of Reimagining Parliament is ‘thinking seriously about starting over’ – in conceptualising parliamentary space, connectivity and interaction in Westminster – it also serves to prompt questions about the necessity of further serious thinking about reimagining the broader institutions and processes of parliamentary democracy and parliamentary government in the UK. Calls for broader reimagining are particularly salient at a time when: parliament is widely and roundly criticised (see, for example, Ian Dunt, Hannah White, and Alison Young); significant proportions of the UK population have little trust in Parliament; and many citizens believe that politicians at Westminster do not understand their lives.

About the authors

David Judge is Emeritus Professor of Politics in the Department of Government and Public Policy at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.

Cristina Leston-Bandeira is Professor of Politics in the School of Politics and International Studies at the University of Leeds.

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Evidence on Stage? Comparing committee hearings in the UK House of Commons and German Bundestag

By Marc Geddes.

Parliamentary and legislative committees perform a range of roles, such as the scrutiny of legislation or accountability of government. Increasingly, committees are holding public hearings, which can be really important for MPs to gather relevant knowledge and evidence to support their work and fulfil committee tasks. In recent research, I spent time in the UK House of Commons and German Bundestag and interviewed MPs and staff to get a better understanding of whether committee hearings are important information-gathering tools. Given that these are often official and formal routes for parliaments to listen to stakeholders, these are prestigious and important and can be seen as ‘evidence on stage’.

In the House of Commons, the parliament has two committee systems. For scrutinising legislation, temporary bill committees are made up of 30 or so members, appointed by parliamentary parties, to go through proposed laws via public meetings with an optional evidence-gathering stage. For scrutinising policy and holding government to account, permanent select committees exist to shadow government departments. Made up of small groups of MPs – usually around 11 members – and elected by the party colleagues, they are often independent-minded spaces. Select committees conduct policy scrutiny through inquiries that include open calls for written evidence and public hearings with a variety of witnesses (e.g. scientists, business or trade union leaders, interest groups, etc.). Committee members deliberate in private to identify key conclusions and recommendations, to which government must respond (but is not forced to accept). Analysis has shown that around 40 percent of recommendations are accepted.

In the German parliament, permanent committees mirror government departments (plus some cross-cutting ones, such as a Petitions Committee). Committees are tasked with both examining legislation and with scrutinising policy. Committee size varies depending on the topic, but they are in general much larger than UK committees. For example, the Committee on Work and Social Affairs has 49 members. Members are appointed by parliamentary parties and take on the role of rapporteur, i.e. they are allocated specific portfolios within the committee’s wider remit. For example, in the Committee on Work and Social Affairs, one MP from each party will have responsibility for migration issues, another for pensions, etc. In general, Bundestag committee meetings are private but, especially since the 1980s, they have increasingly made use of public hearings. These can be used to invite experts to give evidence as part of scrutiny of legislative or policy proposals.

At first glance, both parliaments seem reasonably similar. But this masks considerable differences. In the UK, committees are supported by a secretariat of procedural and policy specialists, who write briefing papers for all members, suggest witnesses and analyse written evidence. Witnesses are usually identified on the basis of suggestions from members and especially the committee’s chair, in consultation with the advice from parliamentary officials (including the secretariat but also the House of Commons Library and the Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology). Bundestag committees, meanwhile, are also served by a secretariat, but their role is to offer procedural advice only. Witnesses are instead nominated by parliamentary parties, often via group leaders and rapporteurs, who’s own staff will undertake research and identify experts. The number of witnesses depends on the size of the parliamentary party. Witness lists are published, inclusive of the party that nominated them, so it is fully transparent who invited whom.

The two approaches by the House of Commons and the Bundestag push evidence-gathering in different directions. In the former case, hearings are usually organised in a non-partisan way, especially for select committees. In the latter, given the inbuilt party political considerations, the process sharpens political divisions. These differences are reinforced through other practices. Briefing packs in the House of Commons are produced by the parliamentary administration and shared with all members; these often serve as agendas and give suggestions for issues to probe. Witnesses are often given oral briefing by the inquiry manager so that the witness can adequately prepare. In the Bundestag, briefings are handled by the rapporteur within each parliamentary party, often in close collaboration with the party leadership teams. Witnesses are usually briefed by the relevant party, too, in terms of the kinds of points and questions the party wants to get across.

These dynamics mean that committee hearings in both parliaments operate differently. Questioning in the House of Commons can be very political, but it is rarely directly partisan. Indeed, many hearings – especially with experts – tend to be thematic and open-ended, which may be directed a the panel in general or at specific witnesses, and without time limits (though the chair may play an active role in directing questioning). Committee hearings in this context can allow for robust questioning of political and policy positions, and allow MPs to gather information and expert opinion on a range of issues. In the Bundestag, meanwhile, questioning dynamics are very different. MPs usually focus their questions only on witnesses that they have invited, and usually have a set amount of time to both pose a question and receive an answer (in committees I’ve observed, this was often three to five minutes). Consequently, hearings do not develop thematically or where responses can build on one another; there is no dialogue. The end result is that hearings are often used by MPs to confirm existing knowledge, legitimise pre-existing political positions, or criticise the government.

Given the often assumed centrality of committees, and the growing prevalence of hearings, understanding how these function and work on a daily basis is critically important. What does this mean for committee hearings as evidence on stage? In both settings, it is clear that expertise is used, but used differently. Borrowing from the work of Christina Boswell, it seems that committee hearings in the UK case are used more ‘instrumentally’, i.e., for their problem-solving functions, while in the German case to ‘substantiate’ and ‘legitimise’ policy positions.

What I have found so far is notably different to what we might expect. Given the UK’s wider adversarial political culture, replicated in many dynamics in the House of Commons (not least prime minister’s questions), and Germany’s consensus-seeking political system characterised by coalition governments and bargaining, we would have perhaps expected committee work to echo such cultural differences. And yet, they operate in opposing ways. We can explain this at least in part due to their parliamentary structures, whereby the German Bundestag is organised with reference to its parliamentary party groups and the UK House of Commons gives primacy to the individually elected representative.

However, there are deeper underlying issues at play. First, with respect to the parliamentary administration, for example, MPs in the UK are a lot more positive about the service provided by officials who are seen as trusted and impartial. In my interviews, German MPs were a lot more sceptical of the idea of neutrality, with many questioning whether anybody can ever be neutral. Second, MPs view their roles in the institutions differently. In the House of Commons, MPs are either part of the frontbench or backbench; and if the latter, they see themselves as independent-minded and with the freedom to focus on anything they want. In the Bundestag, MPs are allocated policy portfolios on behalf of their parliamentary parties, and so see themselves as becoming specialists and advocate for their party in respective debates and committees. This suggests a more general point of difference between the two parliaments, which have developed within different parliamentary traditions and therefore have developed different structures and organisational methods to achieve those results.

About the author

Dr Marc Geddes is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, and Visiting Fellow, Institute for Parliamentary Research (IParl). His past area of research expertise focuses on parliamentary committees in the UK House of Commons. Since 2024, he has begun a new research project to compare how parliaments across Europe gather, analyse and make use of different types of knowledge to fulfil their democratic functions.

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Changes in UK executive-legislative relations: A Congressionalising House of Commons, 1997-2015

By Kento Ohara.

Literature on the changing nature of the UK constitution in recent years abounds. Although there is a widespread perception that the UK constitution has been undergoing some significant change recently, there is little consensus to date on how to conceptualise this change. In addressing this challenge and placing the UK’s recent constitutional developments in a comparative context, my project focuses on executive-legislative relations in the UK as the underlying dimension in the country’s recent constitutional evolution. This focus flows from the fact that the sovereignty of crown-in-parliament has been widely identified as the core of the UK constitution. To repeat the well-rehearsed phrase of the late English constitutional thinker Walter Bagehot, it is the ‘close union, the nearly complete fusion of the executive and legislative powers’ that is the ‘efficient secret’ of the (English) constitution (2009, p. 11). Notable recent developments within the UK’s sovereign parliament (especially the House of Commons) and its relationship with the executive branch include: major shake-ups in the Commons’ select committee system (Fisher 2015; Russell 2011), increasing number of rebellions within parliamentary parties (Cowley & Stuart 2012; 2014) and new legislation on the prime minister’s dissolution power (Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011; Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act 2022). The role perception of MPs and their career patterns, amid the rise of ‘career politicians’ in UK politics, have also been said to be going through some transformation, influencing attitudinal changes on part of these politicians to a certain extent (Fisher 2015; Heuwieser 2018).

How then can we conceptualise these changes in UK executive-legislative relations, and how can we measure such changes empirically? My project seeks to address these questions by turning to the classic works of Polsby (1975, ch. 4) and Wilson (1885) on Anglo-American comparison of legislatures. Drawing on these influential studies on comparative legislatures, my project proposes the concept of ‘Congressionalisation’ of the UK House of Commons. It is argued that both institutionally and behaviourally, UK executive-legislative relations are incrementally becoming more similar to those observed between the US executive and congress.

Traditionally, the UK’s executive-dominated parliamentary system has been contrasted with the US presidential system, where Congress dominates the legislative process. Whereas in the UK the parliamentary majority, controlled by the executive, is vested with extensive agenda control and legislative power in its fusion-of-power model of government, under the US’s division-of-power constitution, the executive and legislative branches retain a much more significant degree of power to constrain each other in the legislative process (not to mention the heftier role of the judicial branch) (Bagehot 2009; Lijphart 1992; Wilson 1885).[i] This arrangement has created what the US political scientist Richard E Neustadt called a system where ‘separated institutions shar[e] power’ (1960, p. 39). This Anglo-American difference has long been noted by American and British constitutional thinkers, perhaps most notably by the future American president Woodrow Wilson, who decried the American system as a ‘congressional government’ (1885).

It was Polsby who picked up on these earlier observations on the different levels of policy-making influence legislatures have in Western democracies, and conceptualised the Westminster parliament as the ideal-type of an ‘arena’ legislature, in contrast to the ‘transformative’ Congress in the US (1975, pp. 278ff). In short, an arena legislature exercises very limited policy-making powers, whereas a transformative legislature enjoys a vital role in shaping policies. Following Wilson’s and other earlier observations, Polsby attributed this difference in policy-making influence of the UK and US legislatures primarily to the strength of their committees. Whilst the UK featured ad hoc standing committees to scrutinise bills, congressional committees yielded significant and effective policy influence. Indeed, some ‘mega-seat’ committees, such as the House Rules Committee, have acted as gateways for bills thereby exercising considerable agenda control, a power that is usually reserved for government ministers in the UK.

Polsby also proposed some preliminary hypotheses as to why some legislatures enjoyed larger policy-making influence than others. According to Polsby, it was the ‘character of parliamentary parties’ (emphasis added) that was related to the extent to which a legislature was ‘arena’ or ‘transformative’: the more coalitional, decentralised and flexible the parties, the more transformative the legislature.[ii] Among these characteristics, the first dimension (the extent to which parties are coalitional) related to the electoral parties, and the third dimension (flexibility) to the legislative parties, whilst the second dimension (the extent to which parties are decentralised) concerned both electoral and legislative parties. Hence, with respect to the internal working of legislatures, Polsby’s argument on the difference between the UK parliament and the US congress can be summarised into the following three key aspects:

  1. Committee strength: the US congress features stronger committees in terms of policy influence than the UK parliament.
  2. Agenda control: the US congress features a more decentralised, coalitional agenda control over its business than the UK parliament.
  3. Legislative parties: the US congress features parties that are more decentralised in terms of the distribution of legislative posts and more flexible (less party-disciplined) in terms of intra-legislative voting than the UK parliament.

My project argues that the UK parliament is indeed incrementally growing similar to this classic understanding of the US congress on these three dimensions, and seeks to corroborate the Congressionalisation argument by empirically measuring recent changes in these three aspects.

Existing studies do point to some recent developments in Westminster with regard to these three aspects. For example, studies have shown that with reforms to both public bill committees (legislative committees, formerly known as standing committees) and select committees (executive oversight committees), parliament is in a better position to scrutinise the government effectively (Levy 2009; Benton & Russell 2013). Especially in the case of select committees, these institutional innovations seem to have strengthened Parliament’s policy-making influence (Russell & Benton 2011; Lynch & Whitaker 2019). Although the UK government still retains unrivalled agenda control (a pledge made by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition to establish a House Business Committee in the House of Commons went unfulfilled), there now exists the Backbench Business Committee, which determines the topics to be debated during backbench business, giving parliamentarians more control over their own time (Matthews 2015). Distribution of legislative posts, such as select committee chairs and membership, has also become more decentralised, taking patronage away from the party whips (Fisher 2015; Russell 2011).

It is also important to note the behavioural changes on part of both MPs and the executive as well. Party cohesion in the House of Commons has waned in recent years with rebellions and government defeats becoming increasingly more common (Cowley & Stuart 2012; 2014). The preventive, as opposed to reactive, influence of Parliament has also manifested in the government’s approach to the legislative process, with the government’s Guide to making legislation explicitly advising ministers to anticipate potential dissent in Parliament (Cabinet Office 2022, pp. 159-160; see also Russell & Cowley 2016; Russell et al 2016). This is more akin to what we are used to see in the US context, where the executive branch is required to anticipate and bargain with congressional actors to achieve policy goals (e.g. Mayhew 1974, p. 107).

My project seeks to further this comparison of the British and American legislatures, especially on the flexibility dimension of legislative parties. I am devising new measures on divisions, i.e. intra-legislative voting, and on parliamentary speeches, that will allow me to trace behavioural changes of parliamentarians over time, especially in relation to Anthony King’s ‘modes’ of executive-legislative relations (1976). This will make a novel contribution to the literature on UK parliamentary reform and cross-national comparison of legislatures, as well as documenting the logic of Westminster’s evolution over recent years.

[i] Takayasu’s recent contribution highlights the changing roles of the judiciary and the House of Lords in the UK constitution as well, which he denotes as ‘Madisonianisation’(2018, in Japanese). My project focuses on the UK’s narrower executive-legislative relations.

[ii] Later studies have also confirmed that in parliamentary systems, having a coalition government is correlated with stronger parliamentary power to scrutinise the executive (Martin & Vanberg 2011; André et al 2016).

About the author

Kento Ohara is an MPhil student reading Politics (Comparative Government) at the University of Oxford. He is primarily interested in legislatures in parliamentary democracies, mainly in the UK, Germany and Japan, and how their internal procedures change over time.

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Necessary Women: pioneering women working in Parliament

By Mari Takayanagi.

Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, many people lived and worked in the Palace of Westminster. Some worked for the House of Commons or House of Lords, some were family members of office holders, and others were servants in households. This included many women. Indeed, at times female residents outnumbered male residents by nearly two to one: the 1911 census, for example, lists 67 women and 36 men living in the Palace of Westminster in addition to the suffragette Emily Wilding Davison who hid there in a cupboard overnight. There were also of course many staff who did not live in, an enormous variety of roles from Clerks to cleaners.

The presence of so many staff may be surprising, as Parliament is always equated in the general public mind with MPs and Members of the House of Lords debating in their chambers. Although some staff might play visible roles, such as the Doorkeepers in their uniforms and the Clerks sitting at the table, they appear almost as part of the furniture – blending in with the Gothic architecture, ritual and ceremony, rather than as individuals. Even more overlooked are the staff in less visible roles, including many women. 

But staff not only work in Parliament, they are also subject to the same kinds of employment and social issues as workers outside Parliament. Recent research by Rebecca McKee has examined ‘unsung heroes’, staff who work for MPs. The staff who work for the House of Lords and House of Commons are similarly unsung. My new book Necessary Women, co-authored with Elizabeth Hallam Smith, uses new archival research to provide the first ever history of women working in the Palace of Westminster. This approach helps reframe Parliament from a solely political workspace to a place of work more generally, highlighting women from all classes working in jobs reflecting gender roles in wider society.

I was delighted to share some of this research at the PSA Parliaments Annual Conference 2023. In this blogpost I’m going to focus on three pioneering women for whom the Second World War brought new opportunities in Parliament: Kay Midwinter, Monica Felton, and Jean Winder.

Kay Midwinter

In May 1940, shock rang around the House of Commons as a woman walked in and stood calmly on the floor of the House, looking around at her new workplace. This was Kay Midwinter, the first female Clerk in the House of Commons. Appointed to free up a man for war service, the ‘Girl Clerk’ as she was termed in the press –she was aged 32 – worked for the House of Commons National Expenditure Committee during the Second World War.  Previous experience of working with committees in the League of Nations in Geneva helped her to get the job. Highly praised by her managers and by Irene Ward and Joan Davidson, the female MPs on the committee, Midwinter worked particularly closely with Ward and Davidson on two reports, on the women’s armed services and women factory workers.

Midwinter later reflected on her time in the Commons as follows:

During the war I was standing behind the Speaker’s Chair about 5 or 6 yards from Churchill while he made all his famous war speeches. He used to glare at me as much as to say “What’s this woman doing?” but he never challenged me…. when it came to laying the Report on the table of the House – you know, my male colleagues said “Oh you’d better not do that, you know, it has never been done by a woman before!” So I said “Well, for that reason I’m going to do it!” So there we are. But really one was up against male prejudice throughout. Absolutely. There was never any question of promotion.

[Oral history recording, United Nations Career Records Project, Bodleian Library]

Not only promotion but pay, for Midwinter was paid less than half the rate of her fellow male Clerks doing the same job as her. Ward and Davidson expressed their opinion that she was ‘inadequately paid’ and she did receive a pay rise, although only to the ‘women’s equivalent’ of the male grade. She moved to the Foreign Office in 1943. After the war she went to work for the United Nations, first in New York and then back in Geneva, where she died in 1996.

Monica Felton

Like Kay Midwinter, Dr Monica Felton worked for the National Expenditure Committee in the House of Commons during the war as a fairly small part of a wider public career – but there the similarities end. Felton was as an elected Labour member of the London County Council, most unusual; Parliamentary staff would not usually have such a public party-political affiliation. She was appointed to the Commons as an economic advisor on the recommendation of Lewis Silkin, a Labour MP on the committee who had also previously been an LCC member.  He and Felton had a strong shared interest in town planning; her significance as a woman town planner has been studied by Mark Clapson.  Felton had a doctorate from the LSE and was previously a lecturer for the Worker’s Educational Association, where she was remembered by students as a Marxist. She worked in the Commons for 18 months before resigning with permission.

After the war, Silkin appointed Felton to be chairman of first Peterlee and then Stevenage New Town Development Corporations between 1949 and 1951. However, she was fired from Stevenage after going on an unauthorised trip to North Korea for the left-wing Women’s International Democratic Federation in 1951. It was a very controversial visit; on her return, she accused American, South Korean and even British troops of involvement in massacres of the Korean population and other atrocities, on Radio Moscow and in the Daily Worker, and was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize. The episode made her infamous and ruined her career in the UK. She made a new life for herself in India, where she died in 1970.

Jean Winder

Jean Winder was the first woman Hansard reporter. She fought a long battle for equal pay, and like Midwinter, was also assisted by Irene Ward MP. In August 1951, Ward stood up in the House of Commons chamber and said:

The House of Commons is run on the basis of equal pay… but there is one woman on the HANSARD staff in the Gallery, Mrs. Winder, who has not got equal pay… I have got Mrs. Winder’s permission to draw the attention of the House to what I consider is an intolerable constitutional position…

[House of Commons Debates, 2 August 1951, col 1710]

Jean Winder was appointed to House of Commons Official Report, known as Hansard, in January 1944 when the Editor was desperate for staff and unable to find a suitable man.  Like Midwinter, Winder was an immediate success in the Commons, highly rated, and performing exactly the same job as her male colleagues who were paid more than she was. Despite support all the way up to the Speaker, the Treasury refused equal pay. It took years of advocacy by Irene Ward before Winder finally achieved equal pay in late 1953. Ward supported Winder in private and in public over many years. This undoubtedly influenced Ward’s politics and relationships with political colleagues as she lobbied inside and outside Parliament.

In conclusion, the stories of Midwinter, Felton and Winder illustrate various themes of Necessary Women including opportunities brought by war, important relationships between staff and MPs, and struggles for equal pay. Sadly, these innovative Second World War appointments had no direct successors in the House of Commons. The next female Hansard reporter was not appointed until 1968, and further female Clerks did not follow until 1969. The indirect and direct contribution of these pioneering women to Parliamentary life and work deserves to be better known.

About the author

Dr Mari Takayanagi FRHistS is Senior Archivist at the UK Parliamentary Archives and a historian of women and Parliament. Her first book, ‘Necessary Women: the Untold Story of Parliament’s Working Women’, co-authored with Elizabeth Hallam Smith, was published in June 2023 by History Press.

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Making the Law Count: The UK Post-Legislative Gap

By Tom Caygill.

Over recent years, engagement in post-legislative scrutiny in Westminster has declined. A mixture of events (e.g. Brexit) and crises (e.g. Coronavirus) has pushed post-legislative review (by government departments) and, as a result wider, post-legislative scrutiny (undertaken by parliamentary committees) down the government and parliamentary agenda. In this blog post, I examine the nature of this decline, the wider reasons for it and suggest how we can move forward from here. As the UK Parliament is often placed on a pedestal as an example of how to approach post-legislative scrutiny, it is vital that it continues to lead by example.

In 2008, the UK Government agreed to introduce a systematic process of post-legislative review by government departments. Legislation would receive a departmental review within three to five years of that Act entering the statute books. Once such a review was completed, a memorandum containing its findings would be sent to the relevant departmental select committee in the House of Commons, for additional scrutiny. 

My 2021 report for the Westminster foundation for Democracy examined the extent and effect of post-legislative review and scrutiny between 2008-2019. Although it was rarely used to begin with, there was an increase in the number of published memoranda by government departments particularly between 2010 and 2015. This also coincided with an activist House of Commons Liaison Committee which was keen to ensure that select committee were undertaking a breadth of different forms of scrutiny (including post-legislative scrutiny).

The story since 2015 however has been a continued decline in the number of post-legislative reviews being undertaken by government departments which means fewer are being sent to House of Commons Select Committees. Although select committees do not need a government post-legislative review in order to initiate post-legislative scrutiny they are considered to be useful triggers to get select committees to consider undertaking post-legislative scrutiny.

Figure 1: Post-Legislative Reviews 2008-2023


Figure 1 shows the extent of the decline which has taken place since a peak in 2012. There are a number of factors which could be at play here. Two big factors slowing the pace of post-legislative review are Brexit and the Coronavirus pandemic which monopolised the intellectual capacity of government departments, for understandable reasons. This pushed post-legislative reviews off departmental agendas, but they have not returned to the agenda of government departments. Another factor potentially at play here is that between 2010 and 2015, the bulk of post-legislative reviews would fall upon the legislation of a previous government (from a different party). There is therefore likely to be a change in enthusiasm from reviewing your predecessors’ legislation rather than reviewing your own. In British politics, governments do not like to admit mistakes as they view it as a sign of weakness.

A further factor here, which coincides with the decline of post-legislative review, is that the House of Commons Liaison Committee since 2015 has taken a less proactive role in shaping the agenda of the committee system. This also means there is no one overseeing the agreement between the Cabinet Office and Committee Office made in 2008. For more information on the gap in scrutiny see my 2020 article on the UK post-legislative scrutiny gap.

There is also a lack of coordination in Whitehall. Lord Norton of Louth has submitted a number of parliamentary questions over recent months in order to identify why post-legislative review has seemingly ground to a halt (no post-legislative reviews have been published on www.gov.uk in 2023). From her answer on the 7th August (figure 2), the Minister makes clear that no further post-legislative scrutiny work is expected within government before the end of 2023.


Figure 2: Parliamentary Question from Lord Norton on post-legislative review currently taking place.


It does look like we will end 2023 without any post-legislative reviews having taken place. As noted above there is no oversight of this agreement which will only contribute to the lack of urgency from government to undertake these reviews.

The lack of co-ordination in Whitehall is also visible in her response (figure 3) to a follow up question from Lord Norton on the 27th September 2023.

Figure 3: Parliamentary Question from Lord Norton on which Acts the government considers eligible for post-legislative review.

The fact that the Cabinet Office does not hold information centrally does give away that there is at best limited coordination and oversight of what is happening in government departments in relation to post-legislative review. At the moment the future of post-legislative reviews does not look promising. Although I will note again that this does not prevent post-legislative scrutiny being undertaken. Indeed, special inquiry committees in the House of Lords will initiate an inquiry without a post-legislative review and then ask for one. Further to this, over the course of the last couple of sessions, there have been between 3-4 inquiries across both Houses. So while post-legislative scrutiny has not stopped, the number of inquiries has reduced.

So what might happen next? This of course could be corrected if there were to be a change in government following the 2024 General Election with a future Labour Government being more than happy to review Conservative legislation. However, we would face the same issue of enthusiasm draining as the term of office goes on. So doing nothing is likely to lead to a repeat of the past 15 years with a peak shortly after an election and then a steady decline.

A more proactive response is needed. There is a need for someone to start overseeing the process of post-legislative review and that should be from the parliamentary perspective as government departments will find reasons not to do them without parliamentary pressure. The Scottish Parliament’s Convenors Group (made up of committee convenors) has made post-legislative scrutiny a strategic priority for the sixth session of the Parliament, and this is having results with eight inquiries having been undertaken since the start of 2022 (and more in the pipeline), with two and a half years to go of this session. It looks set to break records in the parliament. A strategic focus can clearly make a difference and this could be something which returns to the House of Commons Liaison Committee or the House of Lords Liaison Committee (which decides which Acts will receive post-legislative scrutiny via special inquiry committees in the Lords). There have also been arguments for a dedicated joint post-legislative scrutiny committee to over see the process across both Houses but to also monitor the agreement between the Cabinet Office and the Committee Office. A simpler approach would be to create a dedicated space for post-legislative scrutiny on the UK Parliament website, in a similar way to which draft bills (for pre-legislative scrutiny) are featured on the ‘Bills & Legislation’ section of the website. This is also an approach undertaken by the Scottish Parliament. There is also an argument that after 15 years, this agreement is in need of review (indeed many in Westminster argue that these reviews should take place 10 years after passage rather than 3-5 years). This is something that either a dedicated committee or one of the Liaison Committees could do. It is clear from the perspective of the House of Commons (in particular) that there is more work to do to institutionalise post-legislative scrutiny in Westminster. As we approach the end of the 2019 Parliament, this is an important time to reflect on the progress made since 2008 while recognising the need to enhance post-legislative scrutiny further.  

About the author

Tom Caygill is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at Nottingham Trent University

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Parliamentary scrutiny: what is it, and why does it matter?

Parliamentary scrutiny is at the heart of UK politics. In this post, Meg Russell and Lisa James examine the four key methods of parliamentary scrutiny, and offer proposals on how to strengthen it, calling for better behaviour by government and strong engagement from backbenchers.

Background

Parliament lies at the heart of UK politics. The legislature is a core institution in any democracy, but is particularly important in the UK, due to our tradition of ‘parliamentary sovereignty’. The government is dependent on the confidence of the House of Commons, which can potentially remove it from office. Parliamentary consent is required for primary legislation, and parliament is a particularly central and important body in holding ministers to account day-to-day.

This makes scrutiny – the detailed examination of policy proposals, actions and plans – one of the essential roles of parliament. Other functions include representation, and serving as a space for national debate – which in turn feed into parliament’s scrutiny function.

This briefing summarises why parliamentary scrutiny matters, what different kinds of parliamentary scrutiny exist at Westminster, some recent concerns about the decline of scrutiny, and ways in which it can be protected and strengthened.

Why does parliamentary scrutiny matter?

The government is responsible for much day-to-day decision-making, in terms of national policy formulation and implementation. But the government itself is not directly elected, and depends for its survival on the continued confidence of the House of Commons. This makes parliament one of the central checks and balances in the constitution – arguably the most central one of all. To provide government accountability, one of the core functions of parliament is scrutiny.

Parliament is a very public arena, with debates televised and transcribed on the public record. Hence parliamentary scrutiny means that ministers must justify their policies in front of an audience, which provides transparency and accountability, and helps to ensure that policies are seen as legitimate.

Crucially, parliament contains many and varied political voices. MPs are elected from diverse constituencies all over the UK, and represent different political parties. The House of Lords includes members from a wide range of backgrounds, many of whom are independent of political party, and some of whom are respected experts in their field. Parliamentary debates, and other mechanisms such as committee calls for evidence, also enable specialist groups and individual citizens to hear about policy and feed in their expertise, evidence and concerns. All of this ensures that different perspectives are heard in parliament when considering government policy.

The mere existence of parliamentary scrutiny, given its public nature and diverse contributors, can have an important effect. Even where nothing visibly changes as a result (e.g. if a government bill remains unamended) studies show that ‘anticipated reactions’ are important. Policy is more carefully thought through because ministers and officials know that it will be scrutinised by parliament. Hence scrutiny improves the quality of decision-making; and if it is lacking, policy may be poorer as a result.

What are the key forms of parliamentary scrutiny?

Scrutiny takes place both in the Commons and in the Lords, and both on the floor of the chamber and in various kinds of committees. At Westminster, even processes not focused directly on government policy require a ministerial response. Scrutiny and accountability thereby come through numerous mechanisms. These same forums also to some extent subject opposition parties to scrutiny, in the sense that they too must set out their own views on the public record.

The key forms and venues for scrutiny are set out below. In a number of these areas there have been recent concerns expressed about weakness or decline in scrutiny, which deserve attention.

1. Scrutiny of legislation

Most obviously, parliament conducts scrutiny of government legislation, and also of private members’ bills, with slightly different mechanisms operating in the Commons and the Lords.

Despite occasional backbench rebellions resulting in visible government climbdowns, scrutiny in the Commons is often seen as weak. But this can be overstated, given that ministers think carefully about the acceptability of bills to MPs before they are introduced. Changes in the Lords also often respond to concerns raised (including behind the scenes) in the Commons.

Nonetheless, adequate bill scrutiny depends on government cooperation. Ministers must ensure that bills are in good shape before introduction, and (given government’s extensive control of the Commons agenda) allow sufficient time for debate. They also need to be willing to listen and respond to reasonable points made by parliamentarians. There have been recent concerns about bills being rushed, and about late government amendments.

There are various known weaknesses in the legislative scrutiny process. Commons public bill committees are temporary and nonspecialist, unlike in many other legislatures, and the process of evidence-taking could be improved. Meanwhile, there is no formal evidence-taking stage for bills introduced in the Lords, or that have their committee stage in the Commons on the floor. This limits opportunities for expert input.

Perhaps the biggest concern in recent years has been about the growing use of delegated (or ‘secondary’) legislation, and increasing powers delegated to ministers in bills. This legislation receives very limited parliamentary scrutiny, raising clear accountability gaps if it implements major policy. Particular controversies emerged in this area during the Covid-19 pandemic, but overuse of delegated legislation has long been criticised, including by parliamentary committees, and expert groups such as the Hansard Society.

2. Parliamentary questions and government statements

Written and oral questions in both chambers put ministers on the spot about policy. Aside from scheduled questions, more ad hoc urgent questions allow sustained questioning on a topic, and their use has grown in recent years. Voluntary government statements take a similar form – and when not offered on key topics may trigger an urgent question.

Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) are the highest profile forum and have long been subject to criticism for their ‘bearpit’ and adversarial nature. They attract attention, but are unrepresentative of most forms of questioning, which can be more constructive but are lower profile. There are regular calls to reform PMQs but even they may have important ‘anticipated reactions’ functions.

The Cabinet Manual states that ‘the most important announcements of government policy should, in the first instance, be made to Parliament’, but there have been many recent complaints about ministers flouting this rule. This again occurred particularly frequently during the pandemic, but has continued – often to the displeasure of the Commons Speaker. Making major announcements outside parliament denies the opportunity for the kind of sustained questioning and democratic accountability that occurs when making announcements to MPs. Follow-up statements or urgent questions sometimes follow, but may be lower profile.

3. Opposition, backbench and adjournment debates

Parliament holds various kinds of debates in non-government time, including Commons backbench business debates, opposition day debates and adjournment debates. Irrespective of the topic, ministers must always appear and explain the government’s position, creating additional accountability. Often such debates are directly focused on government policy, and/or on topics that ministers would prefer to avoid.

Backbench business debates and opposition day debates may result in a vote on a substantive motion. In recent years there have been criticisms of the government’s relatively new practice of instructing MPs to abstain on opposition motions. Although decisions in these votes are not enforceable, the House of Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, has suggested that this shows a ‘lack of respect for the House’.

These two forms of debate are guaranteed a minimum number of days per session in standing orders. But recent years have seen a number of long sessions (2010–12, 2017–19, 2019–21), which gives excessive control to the government over their scheduling.

4. Select committees

The select committees are seen as jewels in Westminster’s crown. They are unusual in international terms for conducting extensive and careful non-legislative scrutiny, for their nonpartisan ethos, and for generally producing unanimous reports. Committees in the Commons mostly shadow government departments, while those in the Lords are more crosscutting.

Committees gather expert and other evidence (including some recently using citizens’ assemblies to elicit considered public views). Ministers are often called to give evidence to the committees, as well as the government being required to respond to their reports. There have been occasional concerns about ministers cancelling committee appearances, but this is the exception.

Research shows that, while the select committees have little ‘hard power’ to force changes, they can be influential through putting topics onto the political agenda, feeding valuable evidence into wider debates, and having an ‘anticipated reactions’ effect – through forcing ministers to consider policy carefully, because they know they may have to publicly explain it to committees later.

In the Commons, select committee structures are routinely changed when government departments are reorganised. This can cause concerns – for example most recently when the abolition of the International Trade Committee left little opportunity for scrutiny by MPs of important international agreements (though such scrutiny remains in the Lords).

How can parliamentary scrutiny be strengthened?

There have been some welcome changes to mechanisms for parliamentary scrutiny in relatively recent years, such as the election of House of Commons select committee members and chairs (since 2010), and introduction of evidence-taking by Commons public bill committees (in 2006).

But this briefing has mentioned various weaknesses in parliamentary scrutiny processes, including recent concerns about decline – for example through primary legislation being rushed or subject to late government amendments, and an overreliance on delegated legislation. Recent polling shows that the public wants new laws to be subject to full parliamentary scrutiny. Improved government behaviour could make a good deal of difference in this area, but the Hansard Society has also proposed procedural changes.

Proposals exist for strengthening Commons public bill committees – e.g. by injecting greater permanence and specialism – and for publishing more government bills in draft. The Commons Procedure Committee has proposed improvements to the private members’ bill process.

Government control of the House of Commons agenda creates weaknesses, including over the timetabling of bills, ministers’ ability to withhold backbench and opposition days, and parliament’s inability to recall itself from recess. The Constitution Unit has proposed changes in this area.

Fundamentally, improved scrutiny depends on better behaviour by government, but also on strong engagement by backbenchers and other non-government parliamentarians. Even seemingly ‘toothless’ scrutiny mechanisms can have important effects, by subjecting government policy to public exposure and debate. Both government and non-government parliamentarians therefore have important responsibilities to maintain the system of parliamentary scrutiny – in order to uphold good quality government decision-making, and the legitimacy of politics in the eyes of the public.

This blog is part of the UCL Constitution Unit’s briefing series designed to inform policy-makers and the public about key constitutional issues and democratic debates. Our briefings draw on international evidence and examine both long-term trends and current developments in the UK. This is part of our project on constitutional principles and the health of democracy.

It was originally published on the Constitution Unit’s blog and is re-published here with thanks.

About the authors

Meg Russell FBA is Professor of British and Comparative Politics at UCL and Director of the Constitution Unit.

Lisa James is a Research Fellow at the Constitution Unit.

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Is confrontational questioning bad for parliaments and democratic politics?

Parliamentary procedures such as Prime Minister’s Questions in the UK or Question Time in Australia are often criticised for their contentious style of debate. Ruxandra Serban compares questioning procedures in the UK, Australia, Canada and Ireland, and discusses whether a confrontational style has negative consequences for parliaments and for democratic politics.

Parliamentary questions are a well-known feature of politics, and procedures such as Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) in the UK, Question Period in Canada, and Question Time in Australia are at the centre of public perceptions of parliament. These procedures receive more attention than their European equivalents, which are considered less ‘interesting’ than the theatrical antics of PMQs. But they are also criticised for being too combative, with the implication that the confrontational dialogue seen during PMQs or Question Time is detrimental to parliament and for politics more broadly. Recently, the new Leader of the House in Canada also promised to change the adversarial character of Question Period. But how confrontational are these procedures, and why? Does confrontational questioning have negative implications for parliament and for democratic politics? And, importantly, what can be done about it?

How confrontational are different questioning procedures?

PMQs in the UK is notoriously conflictual, with numerous studies documenting face-threatening strategies, incivility, and personal attacks in questions and answers. But how does confrontational language at PMQs compare with similar procedures in other parliaments? To investigate this, I looked at four similar parliaments, during four comparable premierships: Enda Kenny in Ireland (2011-16), David Cameron in the UK (2010-15), Julia Gillard in Australia (2010-13), and Stephen Harper in Canada (2006-8). Taken in pairs, the four premierships are of a similar duration, with both Cameron and Kenny having a term of about five years, and Gillard and Harper of about two. All four led similar types of government: coalition governments in the UK and Ireland, and minority governments in Australia and Canada.

I sampled a set of 30 questioning sessions for each case-study, amounting to 3,212 parliamentary questions. Each question was labelled based on whether or not it included a conflictual remark, understood as explicit instances of an MP criticising the government, a political party, policy, or the Prime Minister.

During the periods analysed, the Canadian Question Period was the most confrontational, with 75% of questions including a conflictual remark. The Australian Question Time came second, with 44%, and the UK’s PMQs third, with 40%. Oral Questions to the Taoiseach was much less conflictual, with only 13% of questions including a critical comment. Although some of these patterns may be related to the context of each premiership, my new research shows similar findings apply to the Trudeau premiership, during which around 80% of questions to the Prime Minister included a conflictual remark. Ongoing conversations about excessively contentious questioning in Canada, Australia and the UK suggest that things have definitely not improved over time.

Why do MPs use conflictual remarks in their questions?

To understand why MPs pursue confrontational questioning, we need to look at the incentive structure of oral parliamentary questions. Questioning time is scarce, and oral questions to the Prime Minister in the parliamentary plenary (a meeting open to all MPs, usually in the Commons chamber) is the most visible political event of the week. In the media spotlight, political parties have an opportunity to embarrass their opponents, and also to put their side at an advantage in the competition for issue ownership and votes at the next election. Recent studies have documented how parties amplify their attacks in questions in the run up to an election. There is, hence, a clear incentive for both government and opposition parties to control how MPs ask questions, and to ensure a cohesive questioning strategy.

Who gets to ask questions at Question Period in Canada and Question Time in Australia is, to an important extent, controlled by political parties. In both cases, parties have ‘tactics’ or strategy committees that plan questioning approaches and topics for each week. In Canada, although on paper questioning is spontaneous, party whips hand over a list of questioners to the Speaker before each Question Period. Similarly, in Australia, parties decide which of their MPs will ask questions at Question Time. MPs in leadership positions, such as the Leader of the Opposition and main party leaders, have precedence over backbenchers, and the latter must also follow the main questioning lines set by their party. Backbenchers on the government side are often reduced to asking ‘helpful’ questions, and rarely get to ask other questions, for example on matters relevant to their constituencies. In the UK, parties also strategise their questions for PMQs. The Leader of the Opposition undertakes weekly preparation with their team, which establishes the main attack lines for each PMQs session. Backbenchers also largely follow these lines, and occasionally receive questions planted by whips. However, the fact that government backbenchers do not always just ask helpful questions to the Prime Minister, but also pursue other topics, and are occasionally even critical of the government, suggests that PMQs is not as tightly controlled by parties as its Canadian and Australian equivalents.

This highly charged political atmosphere and winner-takes-all incentive structure leads to an adversarial questioning culture: whether in leadership or in backbench roles, MPs are socialised by their parties into a confrontational style of questioning, and whilst some might see this as a small, distinct part of their job, for others, especially for women and new MPs, it is intimidating and off-putting, and not a style of communication that would be admissible in other workplaces. The fact that confrontational questioning is an established part of the culture of some parliaments is also evidenced by the involvement of Speakers. In all four parliaments, Speakers mainly intervene to limit shouting and noise in the chamber, but rarely to limit confrontational questioning, unless unparliamentary language has been used.

Are confrontational questions bad for parliament and for democratic politics?

If questioning is perpetually dominated by conflictual language, what are the implications? In terms of what the public thinks, evidence is mixed. In the UK, surveys and focus groups reported that the aggressive nature of PMQs puts members of the public off politics. Similar evidence exists in Canada. But a study of oral questions in 22 countries found that questioning mechanisms that allow open, spontaneous and adversarial exchanges increase engagement with and attention to politics. Using an experimental design, another study found that watching PMQs does not decrease trust in parliament, and makes citizens feel better equipped to understand politics.

Whilst adversarial questioning may be seen as entertaining, and captures the attention of the public, it also normalises a type of negative, aggressive debating style, and paints a particular picture of what democratic politics looks like, and of what parliaments do. The snappy soundbites and shouting that define PMQs and Question Period contribute to a wider environment of negative language and interactions in politics. A growing body of literature spanning different countries has shown that the language and style of political debate have consequences for democratic politics, and can, for example, cultivate an increasingly polarised political environment. Parliaments are a space for the expression of disagreement among political actors. But the routine deployment of vicious insults is arguably not necessary to express disagreement with decisions of the government or Prime Minister, or with technical aspects of policy.

In terms of negative effects on parliament, the key question is whether the incentive structure that encourages conflictual questioning prevents MPs from using questions to scrutinise the government in a meaningful way. If oral parliamentary questions are dominated by political attacks, and MPs must play their parties’ game, there is less room for the kind of detailed scrutiny of the executive which parliaments must be able to perform. Confrontational questions also encourage confrontational answers, leading to a less than ideal deliberative interaction. Concerns about the role of procedures like PMQs in perpetuating negativity in politics should hence be taken seriously, as should the implications of adversarialism for scrutiny.

What can be done?

The incentive structure that leads to an adversarial questioning culture in some parliaments is difficult to dismantle, as it is also related to other components of the political framework, such as the electoral system. Unless parties agree to a ‘truce’ on confrontational questioning, it is difficult to see how meaningful change could happen. But questioning takes place within rules of procedure, and some procedural options can ensure that parliamentarians have both opportunities for spontaneous interaction and a ‘safety valve’ for the expression of conflict, as well as forums for a more focused dialogue with the Prime Minister or ministers, centred around requests for information and explanation.

Evidence from recent research suggests that spontaneous plenary questioning is the least conducive to focused scrutiny – MPs use the opportunity to ask questions on a wide range of topics, and to score political points. This is exacerbated in contexts that are highly party-controlled, like the Australian Question Time or the Canadian Question Period. On the other hand, closed questioning, with questions submitted in writing in advance followed by supplementary questions, creates a forum for more detailed scrutiny. The Irish Dáil provides an illustrative case for how these two types of questioning work together. Oral Questions to the Taoiseach is structured around closed questions, submitted in writing and in advance. Leaders’ Questions allows spontaneous questioning. The two procedures ensure that parliamentarians get both a chance for detailed scrutiny and long-term policy questions, and one for more spontaneous political interactions and topical questions. A similar effect can be achieved if the plenary procedure is complemented by a committee procedure. In the UK, the Commons Liaison Committee – which consists of the chairs of select committees –  complements PMQs with detailed scrutiny of the Prime Minister on a small set of topics, and ministers are questioned separately on a rota at Departmental Question Time.

For procedures to be truly complementary, they must have different features. If one includes closed questions, the other should include open questions; if one is in plenary, the other could be in committee. The Canadian House of Commons recently introduced a Prime Minister’s Question Time on Wednesdays, similar to the UK’s PMQs. The rest of the week, Question Period includes a set of ministers, as well as, occasionally, the Prime Minister. This is a change from the traditional model of Question Period, which included both the Prime Minister and ministers attending questioning every day. By only separating the questioning opportunity for the Prime Minister and not introducing any other procedural changes, the new PMQs turned out to be just as adversarial as the old Question Period model. MPs operate under the same set of rules, and have no incentive to change the style of questioning.

Another procedural element that singles out the Canadian Question Period as a puzzling case of excessive conflictual language is time limits. MPs are allowed 35 seconds to ask a question, and answers must comply with the same time limit. The Australian Question Time is similar, with a time limit of 30 seconds for questions. These are both outliers in the population of questioning procedures that include prime ministers, most of which allow a moderate time limit for questions of up to two minutes. In an environment that already encourages conflictual language, short time limits for questions and answers further incentivise a snappy remark that can make it into a social media clip, as opposed to meaningful scrutiny. Increasing the time limit for questions slightly may facilitate an interaction that allows more elaboration, and which is not exclusively focused on delivering the attack line.

Conclusion

Procedural solutions can ensure that parliament performs its functions well, and that the government is held to account, but they do not remove the broader problem. Adversarial questioning validates and contributes to a political culture of aggressive confrontation and constant negative campaigning. Instead of accepting this as a permanent feature, it is worth continuing to ask whether it is a type of politics that is desirable.

This blog draws on a recent article published in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations, entitled ‘Conflictual behaviour in legislatures: Exploring and explaining adversarial remarks in oral questions to prime ministers’.

About the author

Ruxandra Serban is an Associate Lecturer in Democratic and Authoritarian Politics at UCL.

This post was originally published on the Constitution Unit blog and is re-published here with thanks.

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Our Survey Says (Part 2): A Few Interesting Nuggets about Committee Prestige

By Stephen Holden Bates, Caroline Bhattacharya and Stephen McKay

Just like in Family Fortunes[i] but by chance rather than by design, 100 people responded to our survey[ii] about the prestige of different select committees (SCs) in the UK House of Commons (HoC).[iii]

From a score of one to five (with five being the most important), respondents were asked to rate the prestige of UK HoC SCs, permanent oversight committees of three main types: (i) Departmental, which scrutinise corresponding government departments; Domestic/Administrative, which are concerned with various aspects of the internal workings of Parliament; and Other Scrutiny, which focus on issues that cut across government departments.

The average committee received a prestige score of 3.03 with Departmental SCs receiving an average of 3.21, Domestic/Administrative 2.96, and Other Scrutiny 2.74. The highest ranked committee was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Treasury SC (4.48) with the lowest being the punctuationally-anachronistic Consolidation &c. Bills Joint Committee (1.94), which considers Bills that “bring together a number of existing Acts of Parliament on the same subject into one Act without amending the law”.

Figure 1 ranks SCs from most to least prestigious according to the results of the survey. There are perhaps some results which deserve greater attention than others. For example, we may wonder whether the Standards and Privileges SCs would be ranked so highly if the survey hadn’t taken place in the aftermath, or at the same time, as their high-profile inquiries into the behaviour and probity of various MPs, such as Chris Pincher, Matt Hancock, Margaret Ferrier and the former Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. We may also be a little surprised at the lowly rankings of the Northern Ireland, Scottish and Welsh Affairs SCs, perhaps not in relation to other Departmental SCs but maybe in relation to some of the Other Scrutiny and Domestic/Administrative SCs. Finally, those of us who are concerned about the climate crisis (which, let’s face it, should be all of us) may be perturbed by the fact that the three environment-related committees all appear in the bottom half of the table.

Table 1 shows the difference between a committee’s overall ranking and the ranking by different types of respondents. Results with a green font colour indicate a committee which is at the top of the list of those ranked higher by that type of respondent than the overall rankings; those with a red font colour indicate a committee which is the top of the list of those ranked lower. As can be seen, when it comes to departmental and other scrutiny SCs, MPs and their staff who answered the survey think that the International Trade, International Development, Scottish Affairs and, especially, the Levelling Up, Housing & Communities SCs are more prestigious than the average respondent, whereas Work & Pensions, Women & Equalities and the Human Rights Joint Committee are less prestigious. In addition, the Exiting/Future Relationship with the EU Committee is considered more prestigious by parliamentary staff and less prestigious by academics. Some interesting results can also be observed with Domestic/Administrative SCs. Both academic and parliamentary staff respondents believe the Procedure and Petitions SCs are more prestigious than MPs and their staff do, whereas the situation is reversed when it comes to Backbench Business.

Figure 1: Ranking of Select Committees by Prestige
Overall RankingCommitteeDifference between overall ranking & ranking by
AcademicsMPs & their StaffParl. Staff
1Treasury0-10
2Foreign Affairs-210
3Public Accounts1-20
4Home Affairs110
5Defence-110
6Liaison10-1
7Health & Social Care0-11
8Privileges010
9Standards-4-40
10Public Administration & Constitutional Affairs-10-1
11Education2-4-4
12Business & Trade01-1
13Exiting/Future Relationship with the European Union -613
14Human Rights Joint Committee4-112
15Justice0-2-1
16National Security Strategy Joint Committee07-2
17Work & Pensions0-60
18Procedure4-84
19Culture, Media & Sport130
20Backbench Business-22-3
21Energy Security & Net Zero10-1
22Transport12-4
23International Trade-442
24Levelling Up, Housing & Communities010-1
25Environment, Food & Rural Affairs-331
26Petitions3-56
27Science, Innovation & Technology20-1
28International Development24-3
29Women & Equalities0-80
30Environmental Audit0-63
31Administration-731
32Finance-23-1
33Selection21-4
34European Scrutiny24-1
35Northern Ireland Affairs2-33
36Statutory Instruments Joint Committee-422
37Statutory Instruments-441
38Arms Export Controls3-20
39Scottish Affairs450
40Regulatory Reform-400
41Welsh Affairs2-10
42European Statutory Instruments5-10
43Consolidation &c. Bills Joint Committee120
Table 1: Difference between overall ranking and rankings by different types of respondents

Table 2 compares the rankings and scores of female and male respondents. A positive number indicates that female respondents scored/ranked that committee higher than male respondents and a negative number that they scored/ranked that committee lower. As can be seen from the lists, all committees which scrutinise policy areas stereotypically seen as feminine are ranked/scored higher by female respondents than male correspondents – Women & Equalities most notably – and only two committees which scrutinise policy areas stereotypically seen as masculine (Business & Trade and Environment, Food & Rural Affairs). Although, of course, no firm conclusions can be drawn from our survey results, they do contribute in a small way to important debates about who gets to define which committees are prestigious. For example, Franchesca Nestor is currently undertaking interesting work about whether influential measures of committee prestige used to rank US congressional committees fail to take into account the fact that different groups of legislators may have systematic differences in their views of which committees are prestigious and that, consequently, prestige is understood in relation to what the majority group (i.e. white, middleclass, male representatives) do and think. It would be intriguing to delve into this issue more deeply this side of the pond…

CommitteeDifference between Female & Male RankingDifference between Female & Male Scores
Women & Equalities80.87
Energy Security & Net Zero60.61
Northern Ireland Affairs60.6
Human Rights Joint Committee40.58
Levelling Up, Housing & Communities40.56
International Trade40.53
Regulatory Reform40.5
Culture, Media & Sport40.45
Welsh Affairs30.51
Scottish Affairs30.44
Finance20.47
Business & Trade20.42
Privileges20.38
Health & Social Care20.36
Education20.36
Arms Export Controls20.32
Petitions10.48
Environment, Food & Rural Affairs10.43
Public Accounts10.12
International Development00.53
Science, Innovation & Technology00.5
Selection00.32
European Statutory Instruments00.31
Work & Pensions00.27
Consolidation &c. Bills Joint Committee00.24
Standards00.2
Home Affairs00.09
Treasury0-0.04
Environmental Audit-10.48
Exiting/Future Relationship with the EU -10.17
Foreign Affairs-1-0.06
Liaison-1-0.07
European Scrutiny-20.26
National Security Strategy Joint Committee-20.19
Defence-3-0.15
Statutory Instruments Joint Committee-40.17
Transport-50.18
Public Admin. & Constitutional Affairs-5-0.08
Justice-60.07
Statutory Instruments-60.05
Procedure-70.07
Administration-8-0.01
Backbench Business-90.14
Table 2: Comparison between the scores and rankings of female and male survey respondents

[i] Or Family Feuds in the US, or Familien-Duell in Germany.

[ii] The survey was run as part of Stephen Holden Bates’ 2021-22 Parliamentary Academic Fellowship, which was funded by the UKRI/ESRC Impact Acceleration Account, and is part of on-going work looking at the impact of membership patterns on the work and outputs of select committees.

[iii] 100 people answered our online survey between 22nd May and 18th July 2023. The survey was aimed at experts, although we allowed anyone to answer, and was distributed via Twitter, the newsletter of the UK Political Studies Association’s Parliaments Specialist Group and through email contacts. Of the 100 respondents, 30 were parliamentary staff in the House of Commons, 15 were academics, 13 were MPs, 12 worked for MPs, and 10 were parliamentary staff beyond the HoC, with the other 20 compromising members of the public, journalists, people who work for think tanks, and ‘other’. Overall, 30 respondents were female, 63 were male and seven preferred not to say; no respondent said their gender was not the same as the sex they were assigned at birth. Seven respondents said they belonged to a group which was considered an ethnic minority in the country in which they worked, 86 said they did not belong to such a group and seven preferred not to say. Four respondents were removed for the analysis presented in this blog, as there were problems with their answers and/or they did not complete the survey properly.