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Intro: [00:00:00] You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/pm.

Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy. And coming up in this week's edition.

Ruth Fox: Should you have to apply for an obscure medieval sounding office in order to leave the House of Commons?

Mark D'Arcy: Checking Sir Keir Starmer's legislative scorecard just weeks before the expected end of the parliamentary session.

Ruth Fox: And stand by your beds. MPs prepare to renew their permission for Britain to have an Army and Navy and a Royal Air Force.

Mark D'Arcy: But Ruth, let's start with another week of Westminster churn around the issue of by-elections and [00:01:00] defections. This week we saw the calling of the Manchester Gorton by-election, illustrating for a start the power of the Whips of the party for which the MP who's leaving sat to set the date of a by-election.

It's going to be late in February. They're not waiting till May. They're not allowing other parties to get in there and get on the ground campaigning. Labour have set the date for pretty much as early as they could possibly set it.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, much earlier than we thought. We thought they'd wait till the local elections last week, didn't we, when we were suddenly struck by the news that this was all gonna be taking place, shaping up, I think, to be a three-way fight between Labour, Reform and the Greens, as we said, but not with the candidates we expected.

Mark D'Arcy: Andy Burnham has been blocked. As we were discussing last week, the National Executive Committee has the power to stop sitting metro mayors and police and crime commissioners from running as parliamentary candidates before the end of their term, and they've used that power to say that Andy Burnham can't use this particular route to return to the House of Commons. So the King of the North is gonna have to stay in the North running greater Manchester for a while [00:02:00] yet and won't be an immediate threat to Sir Keir Starmer should the local elections in May be the debacle that the polls suggest they might be for Labour.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Zack Polanski also isn't standing, so he hasn't decided to take up the cudgels. Reform UK have however picked their candidate, and that is Matthew Goodwin, who is a controversial figure, particularly among some of my academic friends and colleagues. A political scientist.

Mark D'Arcy: Author of several books on the rise of UKIP and its various subsequent iterations.

So he studied the populist right in Britain and has now joined it.

Ruth Fox: Yep. I think it's fair to say that's been quite some time coming, for those of us who've been following his career. Should say Matthew's known to the Hansard Society as well because back in his very early days when he was just starting out at, I think he was at Nottingham University, he was the book review editor for our journal Parliamentary Affairs.

Mark D'Arcy: The Hansard Society's dabs are on him.

But there's another thought here too, which is, should Matthew Goodwin win the forthcoming by-election, and that is [00:03:00] far from being a done deal, the Reform Party will suddenly have a number of alternative leaders in its ranks because not only would they have Robert Jenrick who had been aspiring to the leadership of the Conservative Party not all that long ago, not only would they have Suella Braverman, a former Home Secretary and a genuine big political beast. Some people would rather criticise the BBC for calling her a big beast. She's a former Home Secretary. That qualifies for big beast I think in most political lexicons.

Ruth Fox: It's one of the top three officers of State, isn't it?

Yeah.

Mark D'Arcy: So you may or may not have a good opinion of Suella Bravermann, but I think if you get to be Home Secretary, it's a fairly legitimate description, but potentially you'd also have Matthew Goodwin as well. And so there'd be a number of people who would be aspiring to the crown of Nigel Farage. At such time as he might decide to step down from the leadership of the Reform Party. That may be quite some time away, but it changes the dynamic of a political party in Parliament and outside it when there are plausible alternative leaders knocking around.

That might just have an [00:04:00] interesting effect on the way the Reform Party operates in Parliament and beyond.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. But Mark, we've had, in response to this development and the resignation of Andrew Gwynne, the Labour MP that prompted to the by-election and all of these political manoeuverings. This week we've had a couple of questions from listeners, interestingly anonymously. Always makes me wonder who are. Are they MPs? Are they civil servants? Parliamentary staff? I doubt it's parliamentary staff because they probably know this stuff, but the questions are, why can't MPs just resign their seat? Why do they need to take the Chiltern Hundreds?

As one of the listeners put it, what on earth is the Chiltern Hundreds? So I think we need a little explainer, Mark.

Mark D'Arcy: The Chiltern Hundreds is an ancient Saxon, I think in origin, domain of the Crown and to be Steward and Bailiff of the Chiltern Hundreds means you are in charge of it. I'm trying to remember where the Chiltern Hundreds are, presumably in the Chilterns.

Ruth Fox: It's actually three Chiltern Hundreds, technically of Stoke, Desborough, and [00:05:00] Burnham, which are in the County of Buckinghamshire, which cover what we now know as the towns of Amersham, Beaconsfield, High Wycombe, Marlow, Eton, and Chesham.

Mark D'Arcy: There you go. And there's an alternative office you can apply for if you want to leave the Commons as an MP, which is the Steward and Bailiff for the Manor of Northstead, which you were telling me this is in your bailiwick of Yorkshire.

Ruth Fox: Oh, it's in Yorkshire, the parish of Scalby in the North Riding, and actually that's the one that Andrew Gwynne was appointed to last week. So that's the office for profits that he holds at least temporarily.

Mark D'Arcy: I'm not quite sure what the profit is. Do you get like a barrel of ale or something every year?

Ruth Fox: I don't think there is any. And no, nothing at all these days. But I think it's fair to say if the Chiltern Hundreds with Eton at its heart, the Manor of Northstead is a little bit low key in comparison.

So Victorian county history says that this was a property of the Manor, an old chamber, a low house, unfit for habitation. So Richard [00:06:00] Cholmeley, presumably the owner, his shepherd dwelt there until it fell down. So it's third or fourth class compared to the first class of the Chiltern Hundreds.

But anyway, that's what they have to apply for. But why?

Mark D'Arcy: The reason is steeped in the politics of the early 17th century when the King was trying to influence Parliament a lot more. Charles the First, and later on Charles the Second trying to control Parliament and MPs were being intimidated in the buildup to the Civil War, the brief republican period.

And what would happen would be that MPs would resign rather than be appointed to something by Parliament that would get them in trouble with the King. And that being in trouble with the King wasn't just a matter of royal disapproval. You could end up in the Tower. You could end up being beheaded. So it was quite a tight corner to find yourself in.

So they would resign, and Parliament decided it wanted to stop people resigning and taking the easy way out. And that this was one of the ways in which they attempted to bolster their position against the King [00:07:00] is stop people doing a runner.

Ruth Fox: There was also a period when being an MP wasn't really seen as a very desirable honour.

It was a sort of a reluctant obligation, and actually Parliament didn't sit for very long each year, so it wasn't a necessarily onerous in terms of the duties and the workload, but as you say, in terms of the threat, if you got caught up in the tension with the crown could be difficult. But March 1623 is the date that matters here. That's where it all dates from. The House of Commons passed a resolution that Members of Parliament would not be permitted to directly resign their seats. A man after he's duly chosen cannot relinquish his seat was the motion.

Mark D'Arcy: And fast forward on half a century or so and you get another resolution.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. December 1680. So the Commons then passes a resolution disqualifying an MP who receives an office or place of profit from the Crown. Now these are paid officers and basically if an MP was in receipt of payment from the crown. Then quite [00:08:00] understandably, the House of Commons thought they couldn't properly scrutinise the actions of the Crown, of the Government of the day.

So they decided that you couldn't hold this office for profit and remain an MP.

Mark D'Arcy: So the current mechanism we have for leaving the House of Commons, applying for an office of profit under the Crown is basically MPs realising that they could play these against one another. So you could in effect, say the ban on resignations could be circumvented by applying for one of these offices, and then you'd make yourself incompatible.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, and there were multiple offices for profit that could be utilised previously, but really then in 20th century it's settled on just two that have been retained. But it's also an added feature of all of this discussion, which is that, of course, in the past, ministers who were appointed to the government would have to resign their seats in order to fight a by-election.

And at one point if they changed offices, so if there was a transition in Whitehall from one Government department to [00:09:00] another, one post to another, they had to resign again.

Mark D'Arcy: That's a whole lot of by-elections.

Ruth Fox: A lot of by-elections. A whole lot of movements.

Mark D'Arcy: Didn't this happen to Winston Churchill? I think at some point in his early ministerial career, he became a minister and he had to fight a by-election. I think his seat at the time was in Oldham and he lost it. And forever afterwards when he was passing through Oldham on a train, he would close the blinds on the window so that he wouldn't have to look upon the constituency that had rejected him.

Yeah, this may be one of those apocryphal political tales, but it got a pleasingly poetic sound to it, at any rate.

Ruth Fox: And again, this one dates to 1707, the Act for the Security of Her Majesty's Person and Government disqualified ministers from being MPs when they first accepted office, or when they changed office, so they had to stand for reelection.

And of course the fear then was that the minister would owe their allegiance and loyalty to the Crown, not to the House of Commons. But if you remember a few months back when we talked to George Owers, the author and the historian, about his book Rage of Party and how the relationship between [00:10:00] the Monarch, the Crown and Parliament changed, of course then the context and value of these provisions changed because the fear of the relationship between Crown and Parliament was not what it was in the 1600s.

Mark D'Arcy: What we end up with is an inherited procedure that doesn't seem rational to the modern mind, if you like. I think as far back as William Gladstone, people were saying, we ought to tidy this up.

Why can't we just have a straight resignation procedure now, because the King isn't gonna come and chop your head off.

Ruth Fox: So this concept of applying for the office for profit, the Chiltern Hundreds, or the Manor of Northstead, it was also regarded at that time as an honour, not just a sort of an office for profit, but there was honour attached to it.

And in Gladstone's time, an MP ran off to America with thousands and thousands of pounds, and he had to be put through the Chiltern Hundreds in order to eject him from Parliament and Gladstone thought it was an outrage that he was receiving this honout because he didn't deserve it. He [00:11:00] wasn't worthy of it.

So at one point, Gladstone considered, should we just scrap all of this and actually just have a straightforward resignation. But they didn't move ahead with that. And here we are today. We still haven't. But they did get rid of the provisions for ministerial resignations 1926.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, so a lot fewer by elections after that, but I don't know.

Part of me says, why not just rationalise it, but part of me rather enjoys the kind of Gilbert and Sullivanesque atmosphere that this gives to Parliament, that you can only leave by this rather circuitous route created by accident in the 17th century.

Ruth Fox: This is you at your most romantic, isn't it, mark?

I'm terribly more practical. I think I find it all a bit too much, just like I do think there's an issue if you have to explain these things and the man in the street really just cannot understand even these basics in the background to it. I think you've either got to do more to educate people about why this is as it is and what the symbolism is, including some MPs and journalists, dare I say? Or [00:12:00] you can come up with something that's a tad more straightforward. I suppose I'm just terribly practical.

Mark D'Arcy: I suppose that's a fair enough point, but part of me just enjoys the, it's like why isn't Parliament based in a nice, convenient, modern industrial unit in a

Ruth Fox: It might well be if the Restoration and Renewal doesn't take place.

Mark D'Arcy: Quite, but I enjoy the building, I enjoy the gothic atmosphere, I enjoy all the history that congregates around it, and don't feel the urge to sweep it away.

Ruth Fox: No. But these provisions have been used quite different circumstances, haven't they? Because you were mentioning on the podcast a few weeks ago, Bruce Douglas Mann, who resigned his seat as a defector from Labour to the SDP.

One I'd completely not been aware of, 1985, 15 Ulster Unionists resigned their seats to oppose the Anglo-Irish agreement. All but one of them got reelected. Perhaps explain therefore how on earth 15 of them resign at the same time. You alternate between these, the Chiltern Hundreds and the Manor of Northstead. [00:13:00] So you put one into each one. Soon as another one comes along, you're ejected from it. It's a bit like a queuing system.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, so I think the Treasury appointment system must have gone into overload when that happened. And of course a little bit more recently, I think it was something like 2007, 2008, David Davis, the Conservative MP, resigned his seat to force a by-election to highlight some civil liberties issues. Rather to the irritation of David Cameron, who didn't reinstate him as Shadow Home Secretary when he won his by-election and came back into Parliament. So the whole load of uses for this to make political points, but sometimes the political point's slightly lost on the voters.

Ruth Fox: I think my favourite's probably John Stonehouse in 1974. The Labour MP who faked his own death, ran off to Australia to avoid his mounting debts. He applied for the Chiltern Hundreds when he was arrested in Melbourne apparently. But he never actually got round to signing the papers, and he didn't actually get round to signing them until he'd actually been found guilty and sentenced.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. I think this may have been a deliberate omission because when he came back to [00:14:00] Parliament after his attempted disappearance had fizzled out. He was still a pretty vital vote for the then very precarious Labour government. And so he was literally going from the dock in the Old Bailey back into Parliament every day to vote, to sustain the Labour government of the day, of Harold Wilson and then James Callaghan, and then that persisted until he was convicted and forced to leave Parliament altogether.

So he was a useful vote at a time when every single vote counted rather a lot.

Ruth Fox: Indeed. And of course, Gerry Adams. Because of course, being a member of Sinn Fein, didn't recognise the Crown. So the prospect of having to hold a Crown office, not just a Crown office, but an office of profit was really rather too much.

So he wrote a letter saying, I hereby resign as the MP for the constituency of West Belfast, at which point the chancellor, it was then George Osborne appointed him Crown Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds, and he objected. He said, I am an Irish Republican, I have had no [00:15:00] truck whatsoever with those antiquated and quite bizarre aspects of the British parliamentary system.

Unfortunately, he did have to have a bit of truck with them because it was the way to resign. But here's a another sort of complexity. 1975 House of Commons Disqualification Act says that no MP shall be required to accept any office or place by virtue of which he would be disqualified by this Act for membership of that House.

So he could argue that, I'm not accepting that, and I'll stay in so effectively. You have these motions dating from the 1680s and 1700s up to an act in 1975, which creates a legal impasse, which has to be resolved. And they basically do a fudge as ever in our system, we had a legal fudge, so Members are now appointed to the office instead of the previous text, which was that they accepted the office.

Mark D'Arcy: The small print as ever matters a great deal.

Ruth Fox: I have to say, Mark, I just think it's a bonkers system and in the [00:16:00] situation where you have, effectively, a legal fudge to get round this impasse, I think just shows that it's bonkers. We should change it.

Mark D'Arcy: And on that Pythonesque note though, Ruth, should we take a quick break?

Ruth Fox: Let's do that. But first, before we go, a gentle reminder for all our listeners before you pop off to make a cup of tea. If you're enjoying the pod, can you help us spread the word, forward it on to your family, to your friends, to your work colleagues. They can find Parliament Matters for free on all the usual podcast platforms. We're on Apple, we're on Spotify, we're on YouTube. And of course, if you're a super fan, and concerned about the state of democracy, and you think like us that Parliament does matter, then you can help by joining the society or making a donation at hansardsociety.org.uk, that's hansardsociety.org.uk.

And there's also a link in the show notes, and we'll be back in a minute to talk about the Government's legislative program.

Mark D'Arcy: And we'll be awarding marks out of 10 for artistic impression and technical merit.

Ruth Fox: I'll see you in a minute.[00:17:00]

Mark D'Arcy: And we are back, Ruth, and I think it's worth us taking stock of how the Government's doing in getting its legislative program through, because the parliamentary session is drawing not entirely peacefully to its close. Now, the expectation is that sometime after the May elections, a Royal Commission will descend on the House of Lords and signal the end of this parliamentary session. There'll be much doffing of caps and a few weeks later, a few days later, maybe even, a new legislative season will begin, but what's Keir Starmer managed to get through in that time?

Ruth Fox: I've been doing some calculations and I think the government has got 36 bills through to Royal Assent so far, plus a hybrid, the Holocaust Memorial for Victoria Tower Gardens adjacent to Parliament. So 37 bills in total, but interestingly, they've still got 20 bills and another hybrid bill still in progress.

Mark D'Arcy: But as I was saying, the clock is ticking. And there isn't really all that much [00:18:00] time, not all that many sitting days for Parliament between now and, I don't know, mid-May sometime.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. If you calculate the sitting days that we think will take place in February, March, April, and May, minus the sort of short February recess and the Easter recess, I reckon that they have got, if they sat through to the end of May, which they probably won't do, probably won't, reported for in the press, they'll finish earlier than that, but if they went right through to the end of May, I think they've got potentially 52 Monday to Thursday sitting days. Now, it's probably shorter than that. It might be nearer 45, something like that. But that's quite a, 20 bills, they've carried over three, so they don't have to finish those, plus the hybrid, so you're looking at 17 bills at the moment that they still want to get on the statute book, by the end of May. And there's some important ones. You've got the Finance Bill to implement the budget provisions has to go through.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, [00:19:00] that's an absolute must. They've simply got to get that through.

Ruth Fox: They've got to get that through. You've got the Armed Forces Bill is being carried over, which we're gonna talk about shortly. They've got Crime and Policing, English Devolution, Pension Schemes Bill, Victims and Courts. So it's still quite a lot of meaty legislation to get through and, as we've talked in recent episodes, there are a number of Bills where they've got clear problems.

The Hillsborough Law, Public Office (Accountability) Bill, where they had to essentially suspend proceedings pending a resolution with their backbenchers about how they're gonna handle amendments to deal with the security services and whether or not they're going to apply the provisions to the security services and how that's gonna work.

The Diego Garcia Bill has pulled from the Lords, the Hereditary Peers Bill still hasn't moved forward, they haven't finished ping-pong, so some big meaty beasts that have got to be resolved.

Mark D'Arcy: Yes, indeed. Now, just digressing ever so slightly onto the subject of the assisted dying legislation, this is why it's so difficult for the Government to find extra time for the consideration of [00:20:00] that beyond the amount that they've already found for extra time.

There's plenty of legislation that has to get through and it can't be the Government's only priority. So there's an issue there for the Government business managers.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And on the assisted dying bill, there's obviously been some developments this week where Lord Falconer has laid down the changes he thinks are needed to the bill as its sponsor the Lords, but he's also made clear that they're now running out of time.

It's not gonna get through unless the Peers speed up. And he's basically threatened the use of the Parliament Act. So listeners, we will have special podcast episode on this, the assisted dying bill, and how it would work or might work under the Parliament Act. So look out for that in your podcast feed.

Mark D'Arcy: But back to the government's main legislative program, there's an awful lot to do. Not all that much time in which to do it. Even if a couple of bills do somehow or other get postponed, and it's entirely possible that they don't come up with a solution in the remaining time to the Hillsborough Bill, for example, it's [00:21:00] entirely possible that apart from anything else else Trump eruptions might derail the Chagos Bill.

So two of those bills might, as it were, be taken off the table for the time being. Now what happens then is that the bill is lost, if it's not completed by prorogation, unless it's being carried over, perhaps we better explain a bit about what that actually is and how it works.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, iit's a motion that has to be passed to enable proceedings on a government bill, which hasn't completed its passage in the Commons before the end of the session, to resume in the next session of the same Parliament. So you can't carry it over past the general election unless it's a hybrid bill, but you can pass it from one session to another. Now, normally you're supposed to indicate that at Second Reading, so after a Second Reading debate, once the Second Reading is approved, you then get the money motion and the programme motion and so on, and then you can see sometimes the carry over motion. And we've had, I said, three of those so far. Cybersecurity and Resilience [00:22:00] Bill, the Railways Bill and the Armed Forces Bill. So they will carry on in this session, but then resume proceedings in the next.

Mark D'Arcy: So they'll leap like a gazelle over the prorogation of Parliament and just pick up the threads in the next Parliament.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. This is a provision that dates back to the Modernisation Committee, actually the first Modernisation Committee in the 1997-98 session. And the idea was to save time, ensure that work that had been done wasn't lost when you hit the hard barrier of the end of the session.

But also you've gotta be careful about Governments not abusing it. And the other element of course is from a government perspective, you don't wanna carry over too much into the next session because that then thwarts your next session agenda and your King's Speech might look a little bit thin if time is full of carry over bills. So a delicate balance.

Mark D'Arcy: It does though allow time to be used a little bit more efficiently. So it's still possible to introduce a bill a couple of months before the end [00:23:00] of a session. And not feel that you've gotta go at breakneck speed to get it through before the hard stop of prorogation.

Ruth Fox: Even a few days, I think, can go, can go as late as that. And of course, though they're supposed to indicate at second reading, actually they can pass a carry over motion on a bill in the Commons as late as up to third reading.

So it's entirely possible that some of these other bills that are a little bit stuck in the mire will get a carry over motion, the nearer we get to May.

One thing to note, a carry over bill has to complete its passage within 12 months of the date of First Reading. So that's another factor that you've got to consider on the timings, but the House does have the option to then agree another motion to extend the timetable in the next session so you can keep these things rolling forward a little bit.

Mark D'Arcy: So having explained that particular complexity, how does the first session of the Starmer government compare to other first parliamentary sessions of other governments? Are they doing better, worse, about the same?

Ruth Fox: I [00:24:00] haven't done an analysis of the number of bills passed, and of course, we are looking at different lengths of sessions.

I think what we have seen that's quite interesting is the number of draft bills that have been put in for pre legislative scrutiny. So in a sense bills that you'd expect to be preparing for the next or subsequent sessions. And certainly on this score, the Government is doing really quite poorly in comparison to previous Governments in the first session of a Parliament after the general election.

Mark D'Arcy: The idea of pre legislative scrutiny is you take a piece of draft legislation and put it in front of a committee, sometimes a committee of MPs, sometimes you might bring in a few peers and have a joint committee of the Commons and Lords to do it. But to scrutinise what's usually a quite difficult, heavyweight, technical piece of legislation and knock the rough edges off it before you feed it into the formal parliamentary system. So this would be before it even had its second reading in the Commons, you'd work on the bill and then badabim, you've got something that perhaps is going to have a few less rough edges and difficult bits in [00:25:00] it because the pre legislative scrutiny process will have hopefully iron them out.

Ruth Fox: That's what they hoped, of course, with the Online Safety Bill, which had pre legislative scrutiny and then they had some two attempts at it and it's still quite difficult. But yeah, the idea is that you can iron out some of the problems. This week we got the first bill in draft for pre-legislative scrutiny, and that's the Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill.

So that is quite a technical, difficult bill. And we know that

Mark D'Arcy: Classic example of the sort of thing we're talking about.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, exactly. And that I think will probably go to the Housing, Communities and Local Government select committee, that's chaired by Florence Eshalomi, unless they're planning to set up a standalone committee for it, and then presumably they present that to Parliament. If not in the next session, there might not be time before the next session, but the session after that. But as you say, how do they compare with other parliaments? 2010-2012, also a two year session, they had 11 bills in pre-legislative scrutiny. 2015-16 was a shorter session, they had five. [00:26:00] 2017 to 2019, again, two years, 11 bills. And then the last Parliament, 2019 to 2021, again two years, nine bills. Now this government's got one.

Mark D'Arcy: You do think that they've missed a trick here? I remember having a conversation with a Labour MP about how a Starmer Government might handle its parliamentary program and suggesting that what they really ought to do is have quite a number of draft bills that they could have under pre legislative scrutiny. Not least because even then it was clear that Labour seemed to be heading for a pretty big majority. And this would give some of that vast majority something very useful and constructive to do, which is look at pieces of legislation that could be started off in pre legislative scrutiny, could have all the details deliberated, all the rough edges hopefully smoothed off, and then be feted into Parliament in their second parliamentary session.

So it's a way of building momentum for an effective legislative program over the years without having everything suddenly being dropped in without much [00:27:00] prior scrutiny. It would also mean that, rather than the devil making work for idle hands, the pre legislative scrutiny committees would be making work for idle hands. And MPs would be performing a useful function. Senior members who hadn't got into Government, maybe were a bit disgruntled about that, would at least have a role in presiding over these committees and doing some of this useful work. So all sorts of advantages to doing it this way. Not least you get better prepared legislation.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. They didn't take your advice, did they?

Mark D'Arcy: That's course ever thus with me, I'm afraid.

Ruth Fox: They only ever promised four in the King's Speech, an Audit Reform Bill, Equality Bill, Conversion Practices Bill and Commonhold and Leasehold Reform. We haven't seen sight of the other three.

I don't know whether we will. So it smacks, doesn't it, of what we've learned about the government and how it prepared for coming into office in opposition. They didn't do the hard yards, the homework, they didn't do the preparation and the policy development, let alone the legislative [00:28:00] development in order to get themselves into this kind of position.

Mark D'Arcy: It certainly seems that way, and it seems a pity too, because your backbenchers can do useful things for you. There tends to be this rather grand view from the lofty heights of a governing party that the troops should just do as they're told, click their heels and obey orders. And actually sometimes they can have perspectives and information and experience that can be put to good use. And it seems a pity not to use it. It's a valuable resource.

Ruth Fox: It is. But before we have another break, Mark. I just thought it's worth reflecting that we've also had news this week of, I think I can only think of it as a sort of zombie bill, the HS2 Crewe to Manchester Bill, you remember that one?

Mark D'Arcy: Oh, yes, indeed.

Ruth Fox: It's a hybrid bill to build the HS2, high speed railway line. Introduced first in 2021-22 session. It got to the stage of hearing petitioners, which is what happens where select committee is set [00:29:00] up to hear the views of petitioners who are affected by the proposed legislation, the railway's gonna go through their farm or their back garden or their allotment or something.

They began work on that in 2023, but stopped in October of 2023 when HS2 was canceled. So the big question has always been what are they gonna do with this bill? It's just sat there doing nothing, no news about what was gonna happen to it. We now know they have passed a carry over motion, and interestingly, it seemed to me it's a carry over motion that looked like it could be carried over, not just to the next session, but potentially to the next Parliament. Now you can do that for hybrid bills only, these big sort of infrastructure bills.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. These are bills that include public and specific private interests. So where a particular tract of land is being crossed by a railway line, for example, that makes it a hybrid bill, because there's a public dimension to it. But there's also a private dimension to it, and they have a very complex parliamentary procedure to make them work, which goes right back to the Victorian era [00:30:00] when the first railways were being built.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. So it looks like, I don't know, it looks like they're gonna repurpose it as the Northern Powerhouse Rail Bill, presumably with quite a few amendments. Presumably they're gonna have to restart the petitioning select committee process, but when and what their sort of target date is, is a bit unclear.

Mark D'Arcy: I suppose if you are going to have to go through a design process to, for example, build a Manchester to Leeds high speed rail line, you've got to design that first and then start the parliamentary petitioning process once people are aware of where the route is going to be. So you can see why it might take a while to get there, but of course this main lines into, amongst other things, the politics of the forthcoming by-election in Gordon and Denton. Because it's a big infrastructure issue that the North has wanted for a long time.

Ruth Fox: I think if you live in the North, you might say sometimes that actually HS2 type, north to south, Crewe to Manchester is not necessarily the priority. That actually we think east to west might be a big priority [00:31:00] and isn't getting the investment.

Mark D'Arcy: One of the things to remember about this though is quite what a gruelling process it is because I have post traumatic memories of once accompanying MPs on the first HS2 bill committee as they went round a large chunk of rural Warwickshire, and this is Miss Marple country.

You kept expecting a sharp eyed old lady to dart out and solve a quick murder, but it was an incredibly gruelling day when they started off meeting people at about nine o'clock in the morning having taken a coach trip to get there and there'd be petitioners saying there, we can't have the line going through there, 'cause that's the site of special scientific interest, or there'd be terrible noise, all the plans include a waste dump immediately by our village, so we'll be blanketed in dust the whole time. All those kind of issues coming out again and again and they must have met about 20 or 30 different local groups in the course of this very long day.

But the point about it is that it does give local people at least a chance to say this to Parliament and make their points, and that's then followed [00:32:00] up by the kind of formal process in Committee later. But MPs actually go out to the site and see what it would mean and hear local residents' worries and grievances.

So it's going to be for a group of MPs and they'll have to come from outside the affected area incidentally, quite a long and difficult and gruelling Committee Stage. I remember one person who was on a hybrid bill committee describing it to me as a legislative gulag. They really were put to work there.

Ruth Fox: It is hard work. We'll have to wait and see what happens. In fact, we may have news next week because the carry over motion for the HS2 bill is gonna be debated on Monday.

Mark D'Arcy: Watch this space.

Ruth Fox: But, with that, should we take a break and come back and talk about another key piece of legislation, the Armed Forces Bill, which thankfully means that we will have an army, navy, and air force for the next year.

Mark D'Arcy: Good news for all those admirals, air marshals, and field marshals.

Ruth Fox: And not so good news for all those hostile actors. See you in a minute.

Mark D'Arcy: And we are back. And Ruth, one of the [00:33:00] bills we were talking about that's been debated this week and has been carried over into the next parliamentary session is the Armed Forces Bill, and this is in some ways a slightly different kind of parliamentary proceeding, which has its roots way back in the midst of time, in the Bill of Rights of 1688 1869, Article Five of the Bill of Rights says a standing army cannot be maintained without the permission of Parliament and the Armed Forces Bills are the mechanism by which that permission is granted. And every year, Parliament used to have to pass legislation to authorise the existence first of the Army and the Royal Navy, and more recently of course for the Air Force as well.

The process that we have these days dates back to the 1950s and its author is a rather interesting Commons figure, colonel George Wigg. Now Colonel George Wigg was a Labour MP I think elected in 1950, best known in [00:34:00] his place in history is around the whole Profumo scandal. He was the MP who mentioned the allegations against the then Secretary of War John Profumo way back in the early sixties, but 10 years before that, he got a bit cross about the cumbersome mechanism by which MPs had to authorize the continuation of the armed forces, and he filibustered the motion to continue them, I think, in 1952. And the result of that is the current process that we see today, which is that you have a five yearly Armed Forces Bill, which would tweak and update various aspects of military law and the framework in which the armed forces operate.

And every year you also had to have a Commons motion authorising the continued existence of the armed forces. He made it very clear that he thought it'd be most unwise for the House of Commons to relinquish its power over the continuation of the armed forces.

And what you get now is a five yearly Armed Forces bill. We've got one in process at the moment, which gets [00:35:00] to be scrutinised by a specially set up select committee, which can take evidence, visit Army bases, typically visits the Army Glass House in Colchester, for example, to see how the military discipline system is working, but can take evidence from all kinds of witnesses on all kinds of issues pertaining to the armed forces and make recommendations for changes to the legislation.

So it is quite an elaborate process and that process is underway. We haven't yet got the names who are going to be in that special select committee, but there are things going on.

Ruth Fox: So that select committee's in place of the normal public bill committee. And as you say, the select committee has got a wider range of things it can do, it can take evidence, it can issue reports, it can propose amendments to the legislation. So we'll have to see what happens to that.

But there's also a very practical element to this, Mark. You're talking there about constitutional element of why this is important, but as well as granting that parliamentary consent, it's also about ensuring that the basis of military law and discipline in the armed forces is provided [00:36:00] for each year. And I hadn't understood until I started looking into this bill that the armed forces don't have a normal contract of employment. They have a duty of allegiance to the king. And from the perspective of the Ministry of defence, it's essentially a duty to obey lawful orders. The Act sets out the sort of service justice system, so that they can maintain discipline and that chain of command, and without it, essentially you'd, be leaving officers without the ability to punish misconduct.

So if the Act didn't pass, it's gotta pass by the end of this year, if it doesn't pass, service personnel still have their duty to the King in place, but there'd be no power for the commanding officers to essentially enforce it. Things like court marshals and so on would be problematic. I was looking back, we had an exchange a few years ago around this with a now retired Clerk in the House of Commons.

And this Clerk said to me, without the Armed Forces Act, the military are just groups of heavily armed people who all dress [00:37:00] alike.

Mark D'Arcy: Sounds a bit American.

Ruth Fox: ICE no less.

Mark D'Arcy: My interest in this has always been as a survivor in the 1960s of RAF married quarters where I spent a certain amount of time as a small child.

I've always been quite interested in service terms and conditions because sometimes the places service personnel are billeted are pretty horrid. So I've always been interested in the practical side of that.

But as you say, there is this big constitutional thing, which of course came out of James II's oppressive use of military force against his own citizens. So when you had the Glorious Revolution and he was thrown out, and William and Mary came in as monarchs to replace him, you also got this parliamentary provision that essentially the House of Commons had the armed forces very firmly under their thumb. And the armed forces couldn't continue without their consent, which was very important constitutionally.

Ruth Fox: And of course, the annual renewal in this sort of intervening period between the renewals of the Act every five years, that annual renewal is done via, my favourite subject, [00:38:00] statutory instruments. In fact, I think it's probably an Order in Council. There's always a delegated legislation angle.

Mark D'Arcy: Every time

Ruth Fox: It's worth perhaps adding also Mark that these bills can range a bit more broadly. 'Cause it's a legislative vehicle that the Government's got to hand so it can put some other things into the Bill. And, you mentioned there, the state of army quarters for families, there's a proposal in this bill to create a defence housing service to improve the supply and quality of housing. There's changes to the reserve forces. So you can call up reserves now from people who are age 65 preparing for war. And there's also some changes around armed forces manpower and so on. So some quite important provisions, but also some changes to the role of the Armed Forces Commissioner, which is due to come into force in March.

Mark D'Arcy: Which brings us neatly to our guest on the pod today. We're delighted to be joined now by the Labour MP Jayne Kirkham, MP for Falmouth and Truro. And Jayne, [00:39:00] you've got a bit of an involvement in this Bill because you managed to get a policy that you've been advocating into the Bill, and it all started last year with a Ten Minute Rule Bill that you raised in the Commons. Now, tell us what that Bill would've done.

Jayne Kirkham: Yes, of course I understand I'm a new MP, but I do understand it's very rare to actually for Ten Minute Rule Bill to make it into law. So I feel very privileged that happened. So the Ten Minute Rule Bill was about the Armed Forces Commissioner Bill because the Government has now passed into law an Act that gives the armed forces a commissioner, so it's an independent person to go to issue complaints, raise terms and conditions points, and, basically completely independent of the forces. And in Falmouth where I represent, we have the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, the Bay Class ships, they are based now the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, support the Navy in a number of different ways so they can be supply ships, they sent the Ebola ship down to West Africa and supported that effort [00:40:00] as a kind of hospital ship. And they've been involved very recently in the shadow fleet operation. They were there and they also, Proteus is one of their vessels that was used to secure the deep sea cables as well. So they're a really important, really fundamental, part of our support for our armed forces, but they're not actually part of our armed forces. But they're not actually civil service either. They have a very unique position and they're very proud of that unique position. But unfortunately, that does mean sometimes that the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, the RFA, they fall through the net. So their terms and conditions aren't the same as the forces, but they aren't the same as the civil service. And sometimes that has meant over the years that they've suffered and their terms and conditions aren't necessarily as good.

Mark D'Arcy: So your Bill was essentially to allow Royal Fleet Auxiliary personnel to make complaints through the Armed Forces Commissioner.

Jayne Kirkham: I wanted them to have the same, to have an independent person to [00:41:00] go to as the forces had. So yeah, that was the scope of my bill, to give them the opportunity to have either their own commissioner or to come under the auspices of the Armed Forces Bill Commissioner, but still obviously to retain their very unique position as the RFA.

Ruth Fox: Now, Jayne, as you said, it's very difficult to get a Ten Minute Rule Bill into law. And last December, a few months after your Ten Minute Rule Bill speech in the chamber, you raised a question at defence questions and you said to the Defence Secretary, can we not make progress with this? Can we not implement it? And he said at the time he was very concerned about it and he said he'd welcome a meeting with you to discuss it. And lo and behold, a month later, the Bill for the armed forces emerges and clause 30 essentially enshrines what you wanted in your Ten Minute Rule Bill into that legislation.

So how did that work? Had you met with the MOD officials or Ministers after your Ten Minute Rule Bill or just after [00:42:00] your question? What was the process?

Jayne Kirkham: Yes, I can't remember the exact timing, but I did have a meeting with the Armed Forces Minister at the time, which was Luke Pollard and some of the MOD officials, and we talked through it and I explained the importance of it, and they took that on board and they said they would go away and look at the Armed Forces Bill, which of course comes up, I think it's every four or five years, and see if anything could be done there. So it was a discussion that we had and they took it away with them. And then, to be honest, the next I knew about it was when the Bill came out and there it was at clause 30 and in the schedules as well.

So yeah, I was very happily surprised and pleased.

Mark D'Arcy: And was this a big deal for your constituents? Were there torch lit parades in Falmouth and Truro?

Jayne Kirkham: No, I doubt that will be the case, but I do think the RFA, as I said, their terms of conditions are under discussion at the moment, they are being [00:43:00] negotiated. And I do think having that independent voice, having somebody to go to outside the RFA to raise, and some of the things in the schedule, so there are systemic issues as well as grievances and personal issues. So they will have an outlet to raise some of these things now and I think it will help them. I do think it will help them. So I very much doubt there'll be parades or anything that great. But I do hope in the future that they will be able to use it and it will improve the role that they have. And enable them to do their jobs better.

Ruth Fox: Of course, the Armed Forces Commissioner is due to come into force, I think at the start of March, Mark.

And thus far they opened last year the recruitment process for the Commissioner. But we've not heard anything yet publicly at least about who that is going to be. And I think the person who's appointed is supposed to be subject to a pre-appointment hearing by select committee, by the Defence Committee. We'll have to wait and see what happens. [00:44:00]

Mark D'Arcy: Now, talking of Committees incidentally, the Armed Forces bill goes through a special process, there's a special select committee set up every time an Armed Forces Bill goes through, which is every five years. Have you been asked to be on it because of your contribution to the bill?

Jayne Kirkham: I've had a discussion about it. I haven't been specifically, I'm on the Railways Bill at the moment, and that is carrying on for a number of weeks. So I'll have to look and see if there's a crossover there. But I have had discussions about it and obviously it's fascinating going on bill committees as a new MP. I've been on, I think three or four now, and I'm learning very fast. So the select committee for the Armed Forces Bill would obviously be a really good one to be involved in.

Mark D'Arcy: How much interest is there amongst MPs in this process? Because as I say, it's a five yearly parliamentary event this, every time there's a little bit of updating of some aspect of military law and the structure of the forces and whatever.

How much interest does it attract on the floor of the House of Commons?

Jayne Kirkham: I think this bill particularly quite a [00:45:00] lot because there are some provisions relating to veterans and housing and things that really do impact on people's constituents. And I think even in Cornwall, we have the second highest number of veterans of any local authority area.

So I think MPs are more impacted than many people realise. Because there are simply so many veterans in the country who will benefit from some of the provisions in this bill. So there has been quite a lot of interest in this bill in certain areas of the country specifically, but also more widely across the country because of the interest of veterans.

Mark D'Arcy: And is it interest that's party political or is it everybody agrees?

Jayne Kirkham: I think everybody agrees that forces housing needs improving and that the privatisation of the forces housing under the Major government maybe didn't work out as planned. And there's an awful lot of work that needs to be done. So that's certainly. And the Veterans Covenant as well, making that enforceable [00:46:00] in every local authority area, et cetera. That's something that's had patchy coverage. So I think there is a general understanding that the Veteran's Covenant needs to be uniformly and widely applied as well.

Mark D'Arcy: And is this pushing at an open door? Ministers receptive to this?

Jayne Kirkham: Yes, I think so. And, as I said, a lot of this is covered in the Armed Forces bill itself, so there was a recognising that those things particularly needed to be done.

Ruth Fox: And Jayne, as a new MP, you said you've now been on a few public bill committees. What are your thoughts? Do you find it confusing? Do you find it frustrating? Do you find you love it? Do you find it enjoyable? Is it something that you nod to the whips and say, yeah, okay, I'll sign up to that, but wish you were doing something else in your constituency. How is it?

Jayne Kirkham: It is tricky, isn't it? I've been on the Crown Estate Bill, which was really relevant to me because the Celtic Sea is right next to Cornwall and the Crown Estate Bill was to give the Crown Estate the power to bar, et cetera, so they could lease the seabed and the Celtic Sea, and we could have floating offshore wind. So [00:47:00] that's really important to me.

The Water Bill I was also on, again beaches in Cornwall suffer a lot with sewage. That was really important to me as well. And I'm on the Railway Bill at the moment, and that's quite an intensive one because it's four weeks and it's a Tuesday and a Thursday, so it is tricky funnily enough to get back to Cornwall on the railway on a Thursday if I go, but my last train to Falmouth direct is 6:03. So I'm very worried that I don't miss that tonight because obviously I want to spend time in the constituency. But I think the bill attracts, I mean the Railways Bill has obviously attracted MPs who have a particular interest in the railways.

So I would say I'm learning a lot of very interesting detail and fact about the railways on the Railways Bill that I maybe didn't know before. But, yes, it depends. Some of the parts of the Bill that you don't expect can spark long debate where others that you think might don't. So it is a fascinating process. Does take a while to get your head around how the clauses are [00:48:00] grouped and discussed, and you go through it line by line, but you also get the opportunity to interview witnesses if it's a larger bill at the start of the committee, and that's fascinating as well.

Mark D'Arcy: Jayne Kirkham, thanks very much indeed for joining Ruth and me on the pod today.

Jayne Kirkham: Thank you for having me.

Ruth Fox: I think Mark, that's all we've probably got time for this week. Another busy week. But listeners just bear in mind we've got a special on the assisted dying bill and how the Parliament Act might be applied, if indeed it is. So look out for that in your podcast feed over the weekend.

Mark D'Arcy: Your vital guide to what might happen next.

Ruth Fox: See you next week.

Mark D'Arcy: Bye.

Outro: Parliament Matters is produced by the Hansard Society and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. For more information, visit hansardsociety.org.uk/pm or find us on social media at Hansard Society. ← Back to Parliament Matters episode page