BLAIR’S BRITAIN, 1997–2007 Read online

  to make the Commons more efficient, changing the hours and making

  the passage of legislation more predictable. Others wanted to make the

  Commons more accessible to the public. Yet others wanted to make

  it stronger, ‘shifting the balance’ – a much used phrase – between the

  Commons and the executive.

  Partly because of the vagaries of the terminology, the record of

  Commons modernisation during the Blair government was decidedly

  mixed. The process was variously criticised for reducing the ability of the

  Commons to hold the government to account, for being too piecemeal,

  and for lacking coherence. Some of the Modernisation Committee’s early

  proposals – such as removing the requirement for MPs to wear a top hat

  when making a point of order during a division – had been useful and

  sensible. Others – such as the introduction of the Westminster Hall

  debating chamber – usefully enabled greater discussion.8 But few of the

  early proposals had the potential to enhance the scrutinising role of the

  Commons. Of the substantive reports published by the Modernisation

  Committee between 1997 and 2001, only two contained proposals to help

  enhance the power of the Commons in relation to the executive. The

  others were designed for cosmetic or tidying-up purposes, or for the convenience of members. As one Labour MP complained: ‘I was sent here to

  do a job, and it has been put to me that in many ways, the proposals will

  make my job easier. But I was not elected to have an easy job; I was elected

  to scrutinise legislation.’9 Writing at the end of the first Blair term, Philip

  Norton was to argue that the unfocused nature of the reforms advocated

  by the Modernisation Committee meant that ‘the “Blair effect” on parliament appeared to be to weaken rather than strengthen it’.10

  The direction and extent of modernisation largely depended on the

  agenda pursued by the Leader of the House.11 Their stance was especially

  17 Tony Wright, ‘Prospects for Parliamentary Reform’, Parliamentary Affairs, 57, 2004: 867–76.

  18 Even many of the initial Conservative opponents of the scheme came around to

  Westminster Hall – although not the one who memorably described it as ‘the Bongo

  Bongo parish council room above the policemen’s caff’ – once they saw it as constituting

  an improvement in the avenues open to backbenchers to debate policy.

  19 House of Commons Debates, 7 November 2000, c. 176.

  10 Philip Norton, ‘Parliament’, in A. Seldon (ed.), The Blair Effect (London: Little, Brown,

  2001), p. 49.

  11 Alexandra Kelso, ‘The House of Commons Modernisation Committee: Who Needs It?’,

  British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 9, 2007: 139–43.

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  important since they chaired the Modernisation Committee. The post of

  Leader of the House has a dual role, being both the government’s voice in

  the Commons but also the Commons’ voice in the cabinet. Some occupants of the post gave precedence to the former, others to the latter. Ann

  Taylor (1997–8) began with the good intentions signalled in her Charter

  88 speech, but soon failed to deliver on these early promises. Margaret

  Beckett (1998–2001) was even more executive-minded, and unwilling to

  do anything that might cause the Commons to become increasingly

  assertive. John Reid (2003) was only in post for a couple of months, whilst

  Peter Hain (2003–5) and Geoff Hoon (2005–6) both pursued reforms but

  not those that would have had the effect of rebalancing the Commons

  against the government.

  The high points of modernisation came, after 2001, under two exForeign Secretaries: Robin Cook who was Leader of the House between

  2001 and 2003, and Jack Straw who was appointed in 2006, and who

  stayed in post until the end of the Blair era. Both successfully managed to

  pilot through significant reforms of Commons procedure and practice.

  Cook’s reform package was the most ambitious, and he struggled to enact

  it in its entirety, facing opposition not least from the government whips’

  office.12 His attempt to reform the way that select committee members

  were chosen, for example, narrowly failed, after allegations that the whips

  had been working behind the scenes to undermine support for them.13

  The resistance of the whips, who were afraid of losing too much control

  of the legislative agenda, had begun in 1997 (Blair’s first Chief Whip Nick

  Brown was very resistant to some of Ann Taylor’s suggested reforms) and

  ran throughout most of the Blair decade. In itself, resistance from the

  whips is useful evidence that not all of the proposed changes were being

  advanced through a desire to strengthen the executive.

  Yet despite resistance, in 2002 Cook still managed to enact a more

  comprehensive set of reforms than would have seemed possible a year

  before – and far more than had been achieved in the preceding parliament. These included: more resources for select committees; payment for

  select committee chairs (to try to develop a parliamentary career path as

  an alternative to becoming a minister); more topical Parliamentary

  12 Modernisation of the House of Commons: A Reform Programme for Consultation, memorandum submitted by the Leader of the House of Commons, HC 440 (2001–2).

  13 See, for example, Alexandra Kelso, ‘ “Where Were the Massed Ranks of Parliamentary

  Reformers?” ’ – “Attitudinal” and “Contextual” Approaches to Parliamentary Reform’,

  Journal of Legislative Studies, 9, 2003: 57–76, or Cook’s own account of his battles, in Point

  of Departure (London: Simon and Schuster, 2003).

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  Questions; and changes to the parliamentary timetable.14 The reforms

  generated a letter to The Times from Michael Ryle, a former

  Parliamentary Clerk and one of the founders of the academic Study of

  Parliament Group, who argued that they brought ‘almost to completion

  the most systematic package of parliamentary reforms for 100 years’. His

  letter ended: ‘As a campaigner for parliamentary reform for more than 40

  years, I can now retire happy.’15

  With the benefit of hindsight, though, it is possible to be slightly more

  sceptical. Not all of the reforms bedded in – or achieved what had been

  expected. As a result of some MPs’ complaints about the revised

  timetable (especially those involving a late ending on Mondays, followed

  up by an early start for committees on Tuesday mornings), the hours

  were partially reformed again in January 2005, with the hours of business

  on Tuesday reverting to those that had existed prior to October 2002.16

  The early September sittings were also practically stillborn.17 The new

  carry-over facility – allowing a Bill to continue for more than one

  session – was restricted to a very small number of Bills. The innovation of

  pre-legislative scrutiny (another favourite of parliamentary reformers for

  years) also proved less than entirely satisfactory, remaining very much the

  exception rather than the rule.18 Yet Cook’s period as Leader of the House

  can still be characterised fairly as delivering significant changes to

  Commons procedure. />
  Jack Straw’s period as Leader was noticeable for the reforms to the

  standing committee process. This had long been identified as one of the

  weak points – if not the weak point – in the legislative process. Standing

  committees were seen as overly partisan, frequently ill-informed, and

  almost always adding very little to the scrutiny a Bill was receiving. Straw

  piloted through both a change in nomenclature (from the confusing

  ‘standing committee’ to the somewhat more straightforward ‘public Bill

  committee’) and, much more importantly, in procedure, by allowing

  committees to receive both oral and written evidence before they began

  the process of scrutinising a Bill. Straw’s reforms were still in their infancy

  14 See Philip Cowley and Mark Stuart, ‘Parliament’, in A. Seldon and D. Kavanagh (eds.),

  The Blair Effect 2001–5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

  15 The Times, 5 November 2002.

  16 That is, 2.30 p.m. to 10 p.m.

  17 The Commons met for two weeks in 2003 and 2004 but conducted relatively little important business, and an attempt in 2006 to try to reintroduce regular September sittings

  failed by 122 votes to 354, a wide margin of 232.

  18 Jennifer Smookler, ‘Making a Difference? The Effectiveness of Pre-Legislative Scrutiny’,

  Parliamentary Affairs, 59, 2006: 522–35.

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  when Blair left office, making it difficult to assess their full impact, but

  they had at least the potential to do more to improve the quality of the

  parliamentary scrutiny of Bills than any other Commons reform in the

  last twenty (or more) years.19 If the Blair effect in the first term was negative overall, the effects in the second and third terms therefore were more

  mixed – and contained some real advances.

  It was, however, unfortunate that the process of modernisation ceased to

  be a cross-party initiative in any meaningful way. Many of the reforms in

  the 2001 parliament and after were driven through the Commons using the

  bulk vote of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), albeit on free votes,

  supported by very few opposition party MPs. One of the most important in

  terms of its impact on the legislative process was the automatic timetabling

  (‘programming’) of legislation, which meant that each Bill went through a

  pre-arranged timetable of debates. Of all the reforms during the Blair era,

  it was the one most often cited as strengthening the executive. Ironically,

  the idea had come initially from those who wished to strengthen the

  Commons – programming was, for example, proposed by the Procedure

  Committee in 1985 and in two separate reports published in 1992 – when

  the complaint was that parliament’s scrutiny of legislation was far too

  unstructured. But although programming began as a voluntary agreement

  between the usual channels, it was soon being imposed on the Commons

  by the bulk vote of government MPs, provoking complaints that the government was using it to stifle debate. The vote to make programming of

  government Bills a permanent reform saw not a single Liberal Democrat or

  Conservative MP vote in its favour.20 This did little to weaken the suspicion

  that reforms were not aimed at improving the scrutiny of government.

  Labour’s modernisation reforms, therefore, were not the full-blown

  and enthusiastic reforms initially promised by Ann Taylor in 1996. They

  were half-hearted and patchy, and many did not facilitate better scrutiny

  of the executive. Indeed, some had the opposite effect. The Commons has

  certainly become more efficient in what it does, but it has not necessarily

  become much stronger or more effective as a result. Yet equally, it is not

  clear that taken overall the reforms have made the Commons weaker.

  Several of the modernisation reforms, especially some of those introduced

  since 2001, have served to enhance the role of the House of Commons.

  19 The key word here is ‘potential’; it will be possible for the reforms to be fatally undermined, should they lack support in the early years of a Brown government.

  20 Votes in 2006 to introduce a communications allowance and to alter the procedures for

  amendments to legislation were similarly also supported by the bulk of the PLP but a mere

  handful of opposition MPs.

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  Other reforms and the rise of the constituency role

  There were three other reforms in the Commons, none of which was part

  of the process of modernisation per se, but all of which will have longerlasting importance than some of the more esoteric procedural reforms.

  Labour’s first reform was announced on 9 May 1997, and involved a

  change to Prime Minister’s Questions, moving from two fifteen-minute

  slots on Tuesday and Thursday, to one half-hour slot on a Wednesday.21

  This was not explicitly outlined in the 1997 manifesto, although there had

  been a vague commitment to make PMQs ‘more effective’. In opposition,

  Blair had thought the amount of preparation required twice a week a

  ‘ridiculous use of a Prime Minister’s time’.22 The reform had the effect of

  narrowing the focus of the parliamentary week as well as occasionally

  making PMQs less topical; some MPs also felt it contributed to a lessening of televised coverage of the Commons. However, although this was

  not the rationale of the reform, the new half-hour sessions also allowed

  greater persistence in questioning, something skilled parliamentary performers, most notably William Hague between 1997 and 2001, were able

  to use to their advantage. As a result Tony Blair endured some difficult

  sessions in the ‘more effective’ PMQs.

  The second reform was Tony Blair’s decision to appear before the

  Liaison Committee – the committee consisting of the chairs of the other

  select committees – twice a year. The first meeting took place in July 2002,

  and his appearances lasted for two and a half hours at a time, during which

  he was quizzed by the MPs in depth. Each session covered a different theme

  or set of themes, with the Prime Minister knowing in advance the subjects

  to be covered but not the exact questions. These sessions did not attract the

  attention that they deserved, partly because Tony Blair proved rather good

  at answering or deflecting the MPs’ questions, and so the committee rarely

  landed any heavy blows. But the innovation remained considerable. It represented a significant advance in the scrutiny of the Prime Minister: it was

  the first time for sixty-five years that a Prime Minister had been before a

  select committee – and it will now be very difficult for any future Prime

  Minister to refuse to attend such meetings. It is also difficult to think of any

  other world leader who would appear, alone and unaided, before their

  senior parliamentarians for two and a half hours.

  21 In 2002 PMQs moved to noon on a Wednesday, instead of the traditional 3 p.m., in a bid

  to generate better media coverage.

  22 Derek Draper, Blair’s Hundred Days (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), p. 36.

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  The third significant reform occurred in late 2004, and was effectively

  forced onto the Commons as a result of other g
overnment legislation.

  Anticipating the coming into force of the Freedom of Information Act in

  January 2005, the House of Commons authorities published details of

  the expenditure claims made by each MP. A further reform in 2007 published more detailed breakdowns of the data, indicating how much MPs

  spent on various types of travel. The first batch of figures revealed that

  MPs claimed a total of just over £78 million in allowances and expenses

  between April 2003 and March 2004. By October 2006, the figure for

  2005–6 had risen to 86.8 million, an average of £131,000 per MP.

  Press coverage was not positive, with newspapers depicting MPs as a

  ‘bunch of thieving, fiddling, wasteful, good for nothing, feather-bedded

  spongers’, languishing in the Palace of ‘Wasteminster’. Most headlines

  talked of MPs getting an extra £100,000-plus on top of their salary. Press

  coverage was even more hostile in 2007 when there was an attempt to

  exempt parliament from the Freedom of Information Act. But anyone

  giving the figures even a cursory glance could see that most of the expenditure did not consist of ‘expenses’ in the way that the phrase was normally understood. The bulk of the money went on staff costs, office space,

  and stationery and travel expenses – along with allowances for second

  homes if the MP lived outside London. Rather than seeing them as an

  example of MPs corruptly trousering taxpayers’ money, the expenses are

  better seen as evidence of the continuing development of the constituency role of British MPs.

  This development predates the Blair era, but the amount of time and

  money spent by MPs engaging with the constituency grew during the Blair

  years. The large influx of (mostly Labour) MPs elected in both 1997 and

  2001 were especially constituency focused, not least as a result of Labour’s

  key seat strategy which emphasised local campaigning.23 A survey of the

  1997 intake found that 86% ranked ‘being a good constituency member’

  as the most important role of an MP, compared to just 13% who thought

  ‘checking the executive’ was the most important task. By 2005 this constituency focus had also spread to the large Conservative intake elected in

  that year’s election. One study into the 2005 intake discovered that they

  23 This tendency was enhanced during the early years of the Blair government by the practice