Reports of Committees
| Date | 01 January 1979 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1979.tb01512.x |
| Author | Gavin Drewry |
| Published date | 01 January 1979 |
REPORTS
OF
COMMITTEES
REFORMING
HOUSE
OF
COMMONS
PROCEDURES:
ANOTHER
EPISODE
IN
1971 the House
of
Commons Select Committee on Procedure
produced
a
voluminous report on
The Process
of
Legislation,’
which
provided
a
wealth
of
evidence about the parliamentary stages of the
legislative process and generated some useful reforms. Since then,
successive sessional procedure committees (and the House
of
Commons Services Committee) have chipped away at some of the
obstacles to parliamentary efficiency. But all the time there has
been
a
lingering sensation that these exercises, useful though they
may be in stimulating incremental change and minor cosmetic
surgery, must one day be overtaken by a much more drastic
reappraisal of where parliamentary government stands, where it
should be going, and what can be done to help it get there.
The main justification for such a view is that the constitutional
context within which Parliament operates has changed drastically,
and
is
still changing, while Parliament itself has altered hardly at
all: one only has to consider the implications
of
Britain’s member-
ship of the European Communities and of direct elections to the
European Parliament, the fact that devolution to Scotland and
Wales
is
just around the next corner (and English regional govern-
ment may be around the next corner but one), the fact that proposals
for
a
United Kingdom Bill of Rights can no longer be regarded as an
eccentric fantasy, that we have had to live with minority govern-
ment, that there has been
a
proliferation of
“
quasi-governmental
”
agencies operating out of range of traditional methods of parlia-
mentary accountability, and that the survival of the House of Lords
(at least in its present form) has once again become
a
matter for
political debate. There has in
the
past few years been increasing con-
cern about the emergence
of
a
“corporate” state which by-passes
or even negates traditional modes of representation, and about the
implications of an apparent tendency towards more extensive
government intervention, reflected in increasingly large and
ambitious programmes of legislation.
It
has long been evident that
procedural adjustment merely nibbles at the edge of the problem
of adapting a nineteenth-century model of parliamentary govern-
ment to cumulative changes in the constitution, the component
aspects of which have in turn developed in an unintegrated and
unplanned way.
No
one (least of all the present writer) supposes that there
is
some magical formula which could achieve rational parliamentary
reform to accommodate all the foregoing factors: but at least some
benefit might be gained from considering the role of the House
of
1
H.C.
538, 1970-71.
See
this
writer’s
comments
(1972)
35
M.L.R.
289.
80
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