• Philip Cowley, Rebel Rebel, The Swingometer, 24 June 2026

• House of Commons, Presentation Bills, Votes and Proceedings, 22 June 2026

• House of Commons Library, Main Estimates: Government spending plans for 2026-27, 12 May 2026

• House of Commons Library, Main Estimates data: Government spending plans for 2026-27, 1 June 2026

• Andy Burnham and Steve Rotheram, Head North: A Rallying Cry for a More Equal Britain, March 2025

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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 episode:

Ruth Fox: Parliament between two Prime Ministers, the difficult overlap between the outgoing Keir Starmer and the apparently incoming Andy Burnham.

Mark D’Arcy: And how would a Prime Minister Burnham manage his fractious band of MPs? In the past, he’s written about a kinder, gentler kind of whipping. How might that work?

Ruth Fox: And the secret life of the presentation bill: the bills before Parliament that may never be debated and may never even be drafted.

Mark D’Arcy: Before we [00:01:00] start though, Ruth, a little house notice, we’ve taken note of the government warnings against travelling in the extreme heat wave currently hitting the UK, so we’re recording this remotely. I do hope it doesn’t affect your listening pleasure with this podcast. It’s a rather odd thing in Parliament at the moment. Are we in the last days of the old regime or the first days of a new regime? Sir Keir Starmer is still answering questions as Prime Minister at the Despatch Box at PMQs, and we had a rather nasty PMQs this week to prove it. What I was a bit surprised by, I suppose, was quite how it worked.

Ruth Fox: Yes, well I didn’t catch it, Mark, apart from the bits on the headlines on the news, clearly I saw that Kemi Badenoch’s had a, shall we say, a strident outing at the Despatch Box this week.

Mark D’Arcy: Is there any other kind?

Ruth Fox: Yes. And Ed Davey had been rather more emollient. The Speaker apparently got himself quite worked up and intervened about the language, clearly concerned that some of Kemi Badenoch’s approach was perhaps not [00:02:00] ideal and could be reflected outside in the public that if MPs spoke like that, can’t really expect the public to behave differently towards politicians. But I didn’t catch it. You watched all of it. What did you think?

Mark D’Arcy: It was a fairly nasty session. I was wondering how it would play out because Kemi Badenoch’s style is very combative and I wasn’t sure this was the moment for a combative style. Yes, I’m a, if not quite Westminster insider any more, I think I have the Westminster insider mindset. So I watched these things with that perspective in mind. But I thought back to when Tony Blair had his final question time, the immortal opening this morning, I’ll have meetings with ministerial colleagues and others in future I shall have no such meetings ever again. You know, it is a very good joke to use as your parliamentary sign off. And David Cameron, at the end of Tony Blair’s final question time, actually led Tory MPs in giving him a standing ovation, which was pretty un-parliamentary in normal terms, but was seen as a generous gesture to an [00:03:00] opponent that they in some ways admired. Well, there was none of that this time. I mean, this was a fairly straight-on attack on Sir Keir Starmer and more and more on his Cabinet around him for not supporting him and for flocking to the banner of the heir apparent, Andy Burnham. There were a lot of very sarcastic attacks on the conduct of the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, who didn’t come out for Sir Keir Starmer’s final appearance at the Downing Street podium to announce his resignation. She was just there next door, said Kemi Badenoch, and yet she didn’t come out to show her support for her boss and instead was posing for selfies with Andy Burnham. Then she had a dismissive line about Andy Burnham being a couple of eyebrows and a black T-shirt, which I think, well it’s a nice line. And apparently there was some kind of altercation behind the Speaker’s chair where words were exchanged between her and the Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, who seems to be another of her regular targets.

Ruth Fox: Yes, I suppose the differences, and going to your point about is this the end of the old regime that started the new, this is [00:04:00] not Keir Starmer’s last PMQs, is it? That’s a couple of weeks away. The House has still got a few weeks to sit. We’re in that sort of twilight zone as far as Prime Minister concerned. And you know, he’s got to stand up at the Despatch Box and take the brickbats. The bits I did see it on the news. He was fairly combative in defence of his Chancellor, fairly combative in defence of the Education Secretary, which given that perhaps behind the scenes they’ve not been as supportive in these remaining days as perhaps he might have liked, I thought was somewhat generous. So he was perhaps more generous of spirit than some of the others in the House. The eyebrows and the black t-shirt, I want to come back to that one because interestingly, Andy Burnham had quite a witty, short but witty riposte on social media to that last night where he’s taken one of these sort of selfie videos of social media looking down at his t-shirt, flicking his eyelashes. And I have to say they are sparkly eyelashes. Anybody who’s met Andy Burnham knows about his sparkly eyes and [00:05:00] eyelashes, at least the women do. And he’s got this t-shirt on and he looks down at it and he says, I think it’s navy blue, not black, of course as Kemi Badenoch’s had suggested. He’s quicker on his feet than Keir Starmer. He can deploy humour. I think he’s less wooden. He’s a much more of a people person than you get the impression Keir Starmer is. Interesting, is that kind of approach, (a), is he going to be able to continue it in Downing Street with all the workload pressures that come with that job? And (b), how is that going to play out at the Despatch Box in the future?

Mark D’Arcy: I think there will be a kind of circling each other warily phase, where they try particular tactics and responses on one another at the Despatch Box at PMQs because these exchanges can matter. Occasionally, they can go viral. I’m sure that the ordinary day-to-day Westminster badinage doesn’t really make much impression on the general public. But the first few times, the debut as Prime Minister at the Despatch Box of Prime Minister [00:06:00] Burnham is going to be an occasion and it will attract a bit of interest. And if something happens there, you could imagine it going viral. So the stakes will be reasonably high for him and the Leader of the Opposition trying to establish dominance essentially. I’m sure there will be huge backroom teams cooking up the spontaneous quips.

Ruth Fox: Yes, I think we perhaps should explain particularly to our international listeners, that might sound like that we’re getting ahead of ourselves in assuming that Andy Burnham is going to be Prime Minister, but hey, the rest of Westminster is in that position, so why not? So the position at the moment is that the Prime Minister has announced his impending resignation. He continues as Prime Minister, but there is now a race for the Labour leadership, but in practical terms, we’re not expecting a contest.

Mark D’Arcy: So there’s a race with one runner at the moment.

Ruth Fox: Yes. So nominations close on the 16th of July, which interestingly is the last sitting day for the House of Commons before the [00:07:00] summer recess. On the assumption that there won’t be a contest, wes Streeting has announced that he’s not running, Darren Jones has announced that he’s not running, and I think the only other person where there’s a slim possibility he might, though nobody in Westminster seems to think he’s got the numbers, is Al Carns, the former defence minister who resigned a couple of weeks ago. So the assumption is that it will be Andy Burnham becoming Labour leader and then becoming Prime Minister. So the expectation is that he will become Prime Minister probably on the 17th of July. There’s apparently a Labour special conference for the announcement. We don’t quite know what the choreography and timing exactly will be, but it’ll be in and around that day. So the expectation is then that he will take over. So that’s where, listeners, our assumptions are at the moment and hence why we’re jumping ahead a little bit to the first PMQs. For him then, he’s got this period over the summer where Parliament will not be sitting. And actually I think that’s ideal in terms of [00:08:00] new ministers coming in, being able to read in to get briefed, prepare, and he’ll face the first PMQs when Parliament returns in September, that first week of September.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes, they’ll certainly have plenty of preparatory time for their parliamentary duties and presumably there’ll be quite a rejig throughout government, a rather different looking Cabinet, different figures in key jobs, and they’ll all have a chance to read themselves in. Bear in mind, of course, that you can come into a Cabinet job and be hit with an instant crisis. Remember Gordon Brown’s first night as Prime Minister, there were terrorist attacks all over the place, and so he was straight into crisis mode with his newly appointed Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, dealing with a situation that they couldn’t possibly have anticipated even hours before it broke. So there are moments where you just get hit with something the moment you come through the door of office. The other side of it is that Andy Burnham, although he’s an experienced parliamentarian, hasn’t been a member of the House of Commons for the best part of a decade, and it is not a done deal that people who used to be good at [00:09:00] Parliament come back and are then good at Parliament again. A classic example in this is Roy Jenkins, who as a Labour Cabinet minister was a real ripper in the House of Commons, a very, very effective performer. When he came back into Parliament after the Hillhead by-election in 1982, I think it was, as the expected leader of the SDP and the Alliance with the Liberals, he actually had a much, much tougher time with it, partly because he was very determinedly heckled by the likes of Dennis Skinner and Dennis Canavan, and he never really quite regained the parliamentary dominance that he’d had before. So while you would expect Andy Burnham to possibly click back into being a reasonably effective and experienced parliamentary performer, it’s not absolutely certain that will happen. Maybe his psyche has changed a bit over his time as Mayor of Manchester, and he might not find it quite so easy.

Ruth Fox: Yes, as you say, he’s got ministerial experience at the Despatch Box. He was, interestingly, Chief Secretary to the Treasury. So he’s been in [00:10:00] that department, so he understands that spending process, the Budget process, which I think is quite important. He’s been Culture Secretary and then also Health Secretary, so in charge of the NHS. He didn’t spend long in these jobs, as is the way at Westminster, three years in and had three jobs at a Cabinet level. So he has got more experience than people like Starmer or Blair had going into Number 10. But as you say, it’s quite old experience. It’s a bit outdated. Things have changed and the way Westminster operates has changed. And the interesting thing is, so few of the MPs he actually knows.

Mark D’Arcy: That’s going to be quite a big factor here, because the turnover in the House of Commons since he left has been absolutely enormous. There was a big turnover in 2017. There was an even bigger turnover in 2019 and a huge turnover in 2024. So there won’t be all that many old familiar faces greeting him. He’ll obviously know some of the people from his Greater Manchester patch as mayor, but beyond that, there’ll be a lot of rather unfamiliar [00:11:00] faces and maybe he’ll be spending a certain amount of time reading personnel dossiers, not least on people who might soon be included in his government.

Ruth Fox: Yes. The one area where he hasn’t got experience or at least much experience is foreign affairs, defence intelligence, national security portfolio. So that brings us on, Mark, to fantasy cabinets, you know, if you’re Andy Burnham and you’re sitting this weekend thinking who’s going to get what posts. I mean there’s an awful lot of questions come into play. What are the critical issues you’ve got to address? How do you show that you are different to the Starmer government, both personalities and policy? What are your priorities? How do you balance the left-right factions in the Labour Party? How do you get geographical balance? How do you get gender balance? All these sorts of questions. But thinking about who you might have in, it seems to me you can’t really continue with Rachel Reeves as Chancellor of the Exchequer and say that you are running a different government. I [00:12:00] think that is the one post that fundamentally has to change. And then the big question is who gets that? And a lot of what follows then pivots around the answer to that question.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes, absolutely. And there are people more or less openly lobbying for the job, not least Ed Miliband, currently the Energy Secretary, but of course a denizen in Gordon Brown’s Treasury team for many years before he entered Parliament. If you’re Chancellor you are the second figure in the government and you’d have an ability, as Gordon Brown did, to push your own policy agenda across lots and lots of different departments. So Ed Miliband would certainly fancy that, but of course there are plenty of other people who fancy that job as well. You talked a moment ago about fantasy cabinets. It’s not just the Prime Minister who develops his fantasy Cabinet here. There are lots of people who have their own fantasies about which Cabinet seat they would like to occupy. Inevitably, most of them are going to be disappointed. So there’s that to factor in as well. But there are other people who might be considered for the Treasury. Pat McFadden, currently the Work and Pensions Secretary, has been mentioned. John Healey, who departed so [00:13:00] spectacularly from the Defence brief a few weeks ago, has been mentioned. It might be someone else completely different, and that’s going to be the first and most difficult and most consequential choice, as you said, of Andy Burnham’s reign.

Ruth Fox: Yes, whoever gets it, several questions have to be answered, don’t they? Is he going to increase the defence budget? And if so, how? Because otherwise, John Healey’s concern that the government was not, in essence, doing enough to defend the nation. I’ll put it as simply and as gently as I can. That will stand over the Burnham government as it stands over the Starmer government as a problem if that’s not addressed. So does he have an answer to that question? There’s also looking ahead, what does he do about welfare reform? Obviously Pat McFadden and Stephen Timms and the Department for Work and Pensions are doing a review of welfare spending and looking at ways to reform that and reduce the bill. So, question, what happens to that? What’s the direction of [00:14:00] travel? But he’s also got to think about the current government’s plans for the public finances. In order to meet the fiscal rules, spending will reduce quite significantly in the last couple of years of this parliament. If you transition through to the next general election, there’s sort of a splurge of spending at the beginning of the parliament and then it declines. Are those spending plans that he’s going to want to be tied into? And interestingly, this coming week, Parliament’s going to be asked to approve the Main Estimates. So the main departmental spending plans across government. And, it’s a trillion pounds worth of public expenditure.

Mark D’Arcy: It’s big money.

Ruth Fox: It’s very big money. There will be some debates on selected aspects of the Estimates. There’s, going to be a debate on Northern Ireland, there’s a debate on criminal justice spending and so on. But I suspect they won’t get, again, the attention that they deserve and need because there’s so much else happening in Westminster and there’s an awful lot of attention elsewhere. [00:15:00] But how long do they really stand as credible? Are we going to see, fairly quickly, further Estimates later in the year to revise sort of spending plans?

Mark D’Arcy: A clutch of Burnham Estimates, if you like, that, that are presented to Parliament in September that completely overtake what Parliament will be discussing in the coming weeks and perhaps reflect completely different priorities with some departments going up and some departments going down in the amount of money they get?

Ruth Fox: Yes, it might not be the autumn because of course they’re going to have to have the Budget. So that’s the other question. Whoever gets the chancellorship has got to very quickly provide a clear policy steer and provide some quick answers because they’ve got to put the Budget together for the autumn. And the Office for Budget Responsibility, for example, I think requires, I can’t remember whether it’s 10 or 12 weeks’ notice of the Budget date. So that’ll be one of the first decisions that will have to be made putting the pin in the calendar the proposed date. But I could see the Estimates will perhaps be revised in the spring as normal, but you might need some bigger changes [00:16:00] in those that might otherwise have been the case.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes, indeed. And how easy is it to turn the ship, the supertanker of state, when you’ve only got a few months to pull together an entirely different programme? And you know, I can imagine that maybe some of the new ministers will have to cancel all summer holiday plans and just put nose to grindstone and start getting things ready for a new Budget. Because presumably Rachel Reeves’ next Budget is already in preparation. A lot of the preliminary work will already be underway. So a new incoming Chancellor would have to give different instructions, get the civil servants looking at things differently, coming up with different numbers. Turning that ship of state is not just a matter of turning the wheel, it takes a very long time for it to respond to the helm.

Ruth Fox: Yes. The other issue of course, Mark, that we’ve talked about a lot on the podcast is parliamentary management, which has been a big problem for Keir Starmer. Perhaps we should take a break now and come back and talk about Andy Burnham’s thoughts on whipping based on his previous experience in Parliament, [00:17:00] quite interesting thoughts, and what the implications might be for how he manages his parliamentary ranks in the years ahead. But before we go, if you’re enjoying the podcast and would like to support what we do, why not become a member of the Hansard Society? We know many of our listeners care deeply about the health of our parliamentary democracy but don’t necessarily feel that joining a political party at the moment is the right way to express those values. Now, as an independent, non-partisan charity, the Society offers another way to show your support for Parliament, democracy and informed public debate. Your membership will help us continue producing this podcast and supporting our independent work for a more effective Parliament and to promote better understanding of our democracy. To join, go to our website, hansardsociety.org.uk. There’s a membership button in the menu bar at the top left hand side. So that’s hansardsociety.org.uk. And if you’ve enjoyed the episode, please also take a moment to rate and review the podcast on your favourite podcast [00:18:00] app. It only takes a few seconds, but it really helps other people discover the show. So thanks for listening, and we’ll be back in a minute.

Mark D’Arcy: See you in a minute.

We are back. And Ruth, by spooky coincidence, Andy Burnham has recently published, well, a couple of years ago anyway, an almost personal manifesto written alongside fellow Metro Mayor of Liverpool, Steve Rotheram. And in that book, he has some thoughts about parliamentary whipping and how it ought to work. And it’s rather different from the way that by tradition it works, which suggests that Prime Minister Burnham, if he does indeed get into Downing Street, might take a very different approach to the running of the Parliamentary Labour Party. Maybe a few MPs will not be getting strung on by the whips in the way that sometimes they are now.

Ruth Fox: And by spooky coincidence, Mark, I’ve been refreshing my memory of this book by having a read of it over the weekend. So it’s called Head North, A Rallying Cry for a More Equal Britain. And why he chose to leave Westminster to [00:19:00] head for Manchester is a big part of the book and his thoughts on how Parliament works and why he was so disgruntled with it comes through very strongly. And he has in the book this manifesto, what he calls the Head North plan. It is basically a 10 point plan, which has at its heart a written constitution, what he calls a basic law, which is something that he’s drawn from Germany, about having equal living standards across the regions of the country. Reform of the voting system. And then number four on his list is removal of the Whip. And that I think is where it gets really interesting from our perspective in terms of Parliament. And both he and Steve Rotheram clearly agreed on this, their experience of the whipping system is that it has the effect of transferring power out of this flawed Parliament and into a small number of hands, largely unelected in the heart of the Whitehall machine. Basically, he argues that when he [00:20:00] thinks back to the votes that he regrets and the difficult issues that the Blair and Brown governments had, where a number of MPs rebelled, he looks back and thinks actually, if the government of the day had listened more to the Parliamentary Labour Party, rather than doubling down on its position from the outset, it would have been better off. And the problem he argues is that policies and decisions and legislation and so on are set in stone in government and then arrive in Parliament. And it’s like nobody in the machine wants to listen to what the MPs have got to say and that this is contrary to what the purpose of the Commons is, and that he thinks that they ought to be more open to dialogue, ought to be more open to the idea that MPs have got experience, skills, insight from their work and their constituencies.

Mark D’Arcy: That’s extremely interesting and you can see lots of good [00:21:00] points in there, but at the same time you wonder if Prime Minister Burnham is going to basically have a series of one-on-one calls with 400 Labour MPs over the summer in order to form his policy position, 400 different overriding priorities. So how does that work when you come into office and have to, almost from day one, get the show on the road?

Ruth Fox: Yes. He says in another part of the book: sadly in its current form, the elected house does not have the required power to stand up to the executive. Well, he is now going to be the executive. So as you say, how is he going to feel about MPs? And particularly when you’ve got such a large parliamentary party, there’s even more areas and places for MPs to have differences of view. Very, very difficult to get 400 MPs from very different parts of the country all agreeing on a prospectus. So how suddenly, when he’s thrust into the executive position in Whitehall, is he going to view that? But he has pinned his colours to the mast on this quite [00:22:00] powerfully in this book. He writes about it extensively. So if he comes in and nothing changes, it is going to look very odd and it is going to look again like either, when he wrote the book, he hadn’t thought sufficiently about these issues and hadn’t really thought them through, which is an argument that lots of people make about him, this sort of idea that he as a political figure, he changes his mind and with the wind, depending upon the last person he spoke to and where the sort of the political power lies. So that would be a criticism, or actually he’s a hypocrite if he doesn’t do it.

Mark D’Arcy: Well, I wonder if it’s a bit of the classic thing that oppositions always want more power for Parliament and more punctilious respect for the rights of Parliament. And governments always tread straight over them, and the people who complained about things in opposition are often exactly the same people who are then treading all over Parliament as soon as they get through the pearly gates into ministerial office. So you may get a version of this with Andy Burnham, but at the same [00:23:00] time you may also get a kinder, gentler form of parliamentary whipping. And one of the key questions for his new government is who is he going to make Chief Whip? Johnny Reynolds, the current Chief Whip, has never particularly wanted the job and may want it even less if he has to do it in a way specified in the book of Burnham. Anneliese Midgley, one of his close political allies in the Commons, is someone who’s name has been touted. There’s talk of the second coming of Sir Alan Campbell, who’s currently Leader of the House but was quite unwilling also we’re told to have left his previous post as Chief Whip. It might be someone else entirely, but it’s going to be an absolutely key choice because when you are running a somewhat fractious party of 400 MPs who’ve already, for Keir Starmer, blocked key policy initiatives from his government, then you have to get that right and you have to get it right from the start. Because if you have a scenario where Burnham launches some policy, there’s uproar in the PLP, a large number of Labour MPs threaten to rebel, he’s stymied from the get-go if that happens. [00:24:00]

Ruth Fox: Yes. He talks about the whipping system, in his view, disempowering MPs and diminishing their status. He talks about it disconnecting them from their constituents and making, as he describes it, good people seem like frauds. So there’s a strand of his thinking, which is that we talk about many MPs end their careers feeling really disappointed and disheartened with their experience at Westminster. So there’s there’s possibly a strand there in terms of how he might view the role of the Whip treating politicians and giving them a role in a different way so that they get more, if you like, career satisfaction at the end, they may not make ministerial office, but they feel that they’ve made a difference and they haven’t been made frauds of. And he basically says that the critique against what he proposes is that it would cause chaos and the country would be ungovernable without it. Essentially what you’re saying. He says, my view is the complete opposite. It would result in the immediate empowerment of MPs in the House of Commons and bring better [00:25:00] decisions to the benefit of all of us. Nineteen times out of twenty, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, most MPs would vote with their party anyway, he argues. And on those isolated occasions when the government has gone too far, the public needs more independent MPs to be the ultimate guardians of the national interest. So it may well be that whipping formally survives, but that there’s just a kinder, gentler approach to it. And in the context of a government with such a large majority, so many MPs, frankly they can afford to. We’ll have to see how it plays out when he faces his first mini-rebellion in the Parliamentary Labour Party.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes, I suppose that there are all sorts of little groups who might be unhappy. There are people who might have wanted a different leader from Andy Burnham and didn’t get it. There are people who might have wanted ministerial office and didn’t get it. There are people who might be unhappy about the treatment of Keir Starmer and therefore not particularly minded to truckle to the new regime. There are all [00:26:00] sorts of little factions, and of course there’ll be policy-based disagreements as well coming down the line because almost anything an incoming government does, is going to have to upset somebody. And in the meantime, you’ve got possibly a new set of Whips in there trying to look kinder and gentler and do things differently. So it’ll be a turbulent moment to come in and try and put this new approach.

Ruth Fox: Yes, and I think we talk a lot about this in terms of voting, but the other side of it is the role of the Whips in terms of their pastoral care approach, if you like. And of course, we should remember that Andy Burnham learnt an enormous amount at the feet of Tessa Jowell, who’s one of the more empathetic, kinder figures at Westminster that commanded respect across all sides of the House.

Mark D’Arcy: He was a junior minister in her Culture department, I think, wasn’t he?

Ruth Fox: Yes. And I do wonder whether that greater focus on the pastoral approach might come into play. But also whipping isn’t just about managing the votes, it’s also about managing things like participation in committees and appointment [00:27:00] of members to legislative committees, to public bill committees, to delegated legislation committees. And one of the critiques we’ve talked about a lot on the podcast is the way that these committees work. And because they’re whipped, essentially, if you’ve got experience, expertise, insight, or a critique of the government’s policy, you don’t get on those committees. The whips don’t appoint you. So I do wonder if one of the approaches might be to be willing to risk having a few more of those voices, like for example, appointing somebody like Karl Turner who’s patently opposed to the government’s jury reform proposals, to the public bill committee for that bill. Now there isn’t a limit on the number on public bill committees. You could have slightly bigger committees than they do now if you wanted to accommodate one or two extra voices. And that would be a way of at least allowing issues to be aired and then not pulling the whip from people. And possibly that might be a way [00:28:00] of managing things and being seen to do things differently.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes, at least allowing people to blow off a bit of steam or test their arguments with a minister in one of those committees. Another classic example from a few years back now, during the Coalition, newly elected Tory doctor, Dr Sarah Wollaston, wanted to be on the bill committee for David Cameron’s Health and Social Care Bill, and she went to the Whips and she said, I’ve got a few ideas for how this bill could be improved. Dear sweet, innocent that she was, she quickly found that she was nowhere near that committee and ended up putting down lots of what were very inconvenient amendments for the government at report stage, partly because of that. And I think that was one of the experiences that made her a bit of a rebel as time went on within the Conservatives during the Coalition years, because she felt that she’d been handled roughly when she’d been trying to help.

Ruth Fox: Yes. And, Mark, you remember last week we had Professor Philip Cowley on the podcast, and I don’t think we mentioned this live on air, I think we were talking about it afterwards with him, but [00:29:00] he’d got some new research out about the scale of parliamentary rebellion in the last session, so the first two years of this parliament, and in fact he published it earlier this week, talking about rebellions, of learned behaviour, and the fact that if we’re going to have ministerial churn again, then there’s possibilities that unhappy former ministers might be more willing to rebel in future. He says that the last session saw the highest rate of rebellion for any first session under a newly elected single party government since 1945. So the only other one is the 2010-2012 session. But of course that was not a single party government, it was the Coalition between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, and you had unhappy MPs on both sides of that coalition who rebelled, which inflated the numbers. But were you talking about a single party government, the last session was the most rebellious first session ever in modern times.

Mark D’Arcy: I think that reflects the way that Parliament in general has become a lot more rebellious, [00:30:00] both in the Commons and in the Lords in recent years. Part of that, a big inflexion point, was the Brexit years, when all sorts of shenanigans went on across party lines and party discipline was more than severely strained. I think that’s partly the hangover of that, but it is also public expectations, social media driven expectations that MP should be more independent figures taking stands on issues where they have beliefs that don’t necessarily run exactly along their party’s government’s lines. Again, you’ve got a situation where there is some reason for talking about a different approach to whipping and the kind of iron discipline that you saw in the sixties and seventies or indeed in the early Blair years doesn’t seem appropriate at a time when people have much more of an imperative to push independent views.

Ruth Fox: Yes, an interesting thing I saw in Phil’s research was that in the 10 years of the Blair government, they didn’t remove the whip from a single MP once because of their voting record. MPs might have lost the whip for other things, but not [00:31:00] because of the way they voted. So again, it was a different approach to parliamentary management. And bear in mind, Burnham’s book is basically saying he didn’t like that approach either. He found that political environment uncomfortable for a number of reasons as well, but they didn’t actually remove the whip in those days. So I suspect that might also be the approach taken going forward. The other thing that stands out in his book about Parliament is what happened in 2011. Burnham made his name really standing up for the Hillsborough inquiry, demanding that the records, the papers, be revealed, that there’d be an inquiry. And back in 2010, 2011, the new e-petition system was starting up. The Hillsborough e-petition was one of the first ones that got over the 100,000 mark to be able to have a debate in the House of Commons. I think it got about 140,000 signatures. And the Backbench Business Committee [00:32:00] recommended that there should be therefore a debate. And in October 2011, it was almost stymied by one MP, Sir Christopher Chope, a name we’ve talked about on the podcast before, basically standing up and objecting to a business motion timetabling business the following week, which would have had the effect of knocking out the Hillsborough debate in order to debate MPs’ pensions. This is back in the days after the expenses crisis when the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority was being set up and MPs’ pay and pensions were all being managed differently. And there was this big debate on MPs’ pensions, and the Hillsborough debate was going to follow it. And Sir Christopher stood up and objected, and this would’ve meant that the Hillsborough debate would’ve run out of time. Andy Burnham writes in the book, and Steve Rotheram of course who was himself a Liverpool MP, write in the book about this being a sort of fundamental moment for them about their attitude to Westminster, that one MP could stand up and [00:33:00] try and stop this debate taking place when they knew that some of the Hillsborough families and campaigners, for example, had already booked travel and accommodation to come down to Westminster for this debate that they had not been able to get discussed in the House of Commons properly for decades. And this really stands out and affects his attitude to Parliament and its procedures. And again, I wonder whether therefore, because of that, he may take a different approach to thinking about some of the procedural rules. He talks about the fact that these things, Westminster procedures, constitutional stuff, in his view is first order issues. Although they may be not debated and discussed in the pubs in Manchester that he frequents, he says they’re first order issues because they underpin how you make change.

Mark D’Arcy: This all goes to how people see government, and rather frequently in Parliament you get moments where something happens which is rather an affront to people who want to see something treated [00:34:00] seriously and discussed. I think the people who watched the debates around private members’ bills on subjects dear to their hearts and see there’s a rather jolly talking-out process going on, it all being treated as an extended joke, get rather offended. Once upon a time, of course, when people didn’t routinely see Parliament on television, this all went on below the radar. But when it’s obvious to people and they can watch it unfolding in real time, they’re far more likely to think there’s something wrong with the system that treats something they’re so concerned about that way. I think that’s the point that Andy Burnham is picking up. Now, saying that is easy. Figuring out what to do about it, is much more difficult, because if you’re starting to get into the business of infringing the kind of procedural rights of individual MPs, what you’re doing is not empowering them. What you’re doing is taking away one of the few weapons they’ve got. One of the few things an MP can do is cause a bit of disruption, to dig their heels in and signal that there’s a real problem. You take that away from them, what’s left?

Ruth Fox: And [00:35:00] interestingly, the Leader of the House at the time, and then Speaker Bercow, both made the point that Sir Christopher Chope had not done anything wrong. He was entirely within his rights, within the rules, to do what he’d done, but they had mechanisms to put it right, which was for the Leader of the House to table the motion subsequently and have a very short debate on it and get the motion approved. So there are ways around those objections, and the Hillsborough debate went ahead and was pivotal in getting the inquiry and a resolution of the issues.

Mark D’Arcy: But one possible answer to this is our old friend, the Parliamentary Business Committee, if things aren’t just done by sort of anonymous motions handed down on tablets of stone from parliamentary business managers, and if things have been squared in a proper democratic discussion by a proper Parliamentary Business Committee, you wouldn’t have half of these problems. It’s when things are done in a very behind-the-scenes Usual Channels sort of way with very opaque discussion underpinning them, that’s I think sometimes what drives the discontent with the way Parliament’s run.

Ruth Fox: Yes, well [00:36:00] we will see. But having discussed Sir Christopher Chope as a one-man objection machine in the House of Commons, and also having mentioned private members’ bills, he comes up again this week because, there’s been an awful lot of presentation bills, another form of private member’s bill, presented this week, and dozens of them by Sir Christopher Chope. And we’ve had a listener’s question about that this week. So should we take a short break, because it’s very hot, and come back and try and answer the listener’s question, in the next segment?

Mark D’Arcy: Let’s take a break.

We are back. And Ruth, we’ve had a question from a listener, Steve Melnikoff, on this issue of presentation bills. What do he want to know?

Ruth Fox: Yes. So Steve asks, on 22 June, Sir Christopher Chope presented, if I’ve counted correctly, 39 private members’ bills to the Commons. Given that few, if any, of these will ever be debated, what is he up to?

Mark D’Arcy: The wacky world of presentation bills. Presentation bills are private members’ bills, technically speaking, but what [00:37:00] they don’t have is what the ballot bills have, which is an allocation of time, a possible slot for debate. We’ve talked in the past, in the context of the assisted dying bill, about how if you’re first in the ballot, you get the first slot on the first allocated Friday to have your bill debated. These are bills without slots, they don’t have any kind of guaranteed debating time at all. So I suppose the first question is, what is the point? Well, one of the points of them is that if you can place them on the Order Paper strategically enough and cunningly enough, you might find that you do actually get a little bit of debating time for them. And it might be as little as, I don’t know, 20 minutes of a fag end of some private members’ bill Friday when the first two or three bills on the Order Paper have been dispatched and there’s still a little bit of time left. And it enables the proposer of the bill to make a speech on the issue of their choice and possibly even get a few sentences in reply from a minister somewhere. And of course potentially there’s always the possibility that if no one objects to your bill, it could proceed [00:38:00] through its second reading without objection and go into committee. That happens very rarely, but just occasionally it’s used as a sort of pipeline to try and get things debated. If you remember, there was a bill to outlaw upskirting a while back, and there was an attempt to use exactly that procedure to get it through. It was a presentation bill, and it was hoped by its proposers that no one would object. And of course our old friend Sir Christopher Chope did object because he felt it was a new criminal offence and ought to be debated on the floor of the House of Commons, which in some sense is not an unreasonable point, although given the opprobrium that flowed towards Christopher Chope after that, I’m not sure I personally would’ve chosen that particular hill to die on.

Ruth Fox: No, quite. Well, Steve is right that Christopher Chope did present 39 private members’ bills. If you think that he doesn’t like these things and thinks they’ve got to be properly debated and properly drafted and so on, it seems a very large number. But it was actually 65 bills that were presented on Monday by backbenchers. So the first issue is why that many on that day? And that’s because Monday was [00:39:00] the first opportunity this session for presentation bills to be introduced. So we got an unusually long list of them on the Order Paper. Presentation bills cannot be introduced until the ballot bills have been presented, and that happened last week. So hence this week was the first time for presentation bills. So we got a large volume and a significant number from Sir Christopher.

Mark D’Arcy: And there used to be a slightly bizarre ritual in which people would camp out overnight outside the public bill office to be first in the queue to deliver their presentation bills the next morning. And there would be a sort of sleepover in a committee room, which is almost directly above the chamber of the House of Commons as it happens. And people would bring their sleeping bags and watch TV on their iPads and have pizzas delivered or whatever as they stayed there. I remember Caroline Lucas at one point in an earlier parliament, wanting to do a presentation bill and then realising that this might entail her having to share a room with several male Conservative MPs for the entire evening, and not finding that a particularly [00:40:00] attractive prospect. And actually a deal was arranged where they facilitated for her to get her bill presented. That ritual ended with the COVID era when bills were then submitted by email, and it hasn’t been brought back since then. So it’s now possibly, you might think, a slightly more sensible system, frankly, that they don’t have this bizarre overnight camp out. But it was used by a kind of cabal of Conservative MPs, mostly on the right of the party, to present what they used to term an alternative Queen’s Speech, lots of bills embodying particular causes of theirs. And also, I noticed from the list of bills that we’ve got here, actually, there’s a lot of MPs revisiting issues that they have brought in bills on before. It’s not just Christopher Chope doing a bill relating to mobile homes. His constituency in Dorset it is a place with a lot of mobile home parks. A bit further down the list, Maria Eagle has a bill about the security and safety precautions in high rise car parks, which I think was occasioned by a horrible incident, and she wants some better [00:41:00] fencing and 24 hour staffing of those car parks as a preventive measure. So there are issues like that that a number of MPs are bringing back in.

Ruth Fox: Yes, I noticed there was also a private member’s bill from Jeremy Corbyn about having a Gaza Independent Public Inquiry. Wendy Chamberlain interestingly, the Liberal Democrat Chief Whip, got something on the Gambling Act, mandatory conditions of lottery operating licences, which I think she’s also introduced before. And then the Scottish National MPs have clubbed together to put several bills in, one being the Scotland (Independence Referendum) Bill to amend the Scotland Act 1998, so that the decision about legislating for Scottish independence would transfer to the Scottish Parliament. I think it’s fair to say that won’t happen. These are difficult to get into law precisely because, as you say, they don’t get priority time. They may slip through. I’ve had a look at the numbers and since the start of the 2010 Parliament, up to the end of the last session, [00:42:00] 1,122 presentation bills have been introduced to Parliament of which 19 have become law. So that’s 1.7%.

Mark D’Arcy: I’m surprised it’s as high as that, to be honest.

Ruth Fox: Yes. Well, interestingly, 12 of the 19 have happened since 2012. The numbers are inflated, I think, because of in the 2022-23 session, seven of them got through. And if you remember, that was a session where there was a real logjam in the government’s legislative programme. They had promised an employment rights bill that had never appeared and they carved up a lot of it into ballot bills, private members’ ballot bills, that got through.

Mark D’Arcy: Bite-sized chunks of it were put through individually, yes.

Ruth Fox: Yes, and there is a sense all of those seven presentation bills were sponsored by Conservative MPs. Now, I don’t know that they were all government handout bills, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they were. Again, Christopher Chope had one on Mobile Homes (Pitch Fees) Act [00:43:00] 2023, so his got through. So if you take 7 of the 19 out that have passed in since 2010, then the numbers don’t look quite as good.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. But it is an interesting little parliamentary byway that a few astute players who’ve read the rule book can make use of. And a figure to watch out in all this as Rebecca Harris, who was the Conservative Whip in charge of private members’ bills during the fag end of the Conservative government. And she actually had a huge hit rate in using the private members’ bill procedure to get stuff through, including those bits of employment law that the government had been unable to get into its Queen’s Speech for whatever reason. So it’s a procedural area that can be exploited by the cannier MPs. And if nothing else, occasionally you get a chance to make a quick speech and tell your constituents that you’ve made a quick speech on some issue that you care about. And you can also say, I have presented a built to Parliament on this issue. My first experience of this whole thing was way back when I was working for the Leicester Mercury in [00:44:00] the 1980s, where Keith Vaz had an issue in his Leicester East constituency with a very noisy factory in an otherwise residential area. And he grandly announced that he had presented a bill to Parliament on this issue. And he had indeed presented a built Parliament. There was no chance of it being debated. There was certainly no chance of it becoming law. But he had presented a bill to Parliament. So it made for a great press release if nothing else.

Ruth Fox: The point to make is that you don’t actually, when you introduce them, as has happened this week, you don’t actually need the full legislative text. You only need that if it’s going to be debated at second reading. Some of these bills, because they’ve been introduced so many times, you mentioned Maria Eagle’s bill on multi-storey car park safety, and that’s been introduced in successive sessions, so that probably is drafted, that’s known locally in her constituency as Gabe’s Law after her constituent that fell from the car park and died. But a lot of them won’t actually exist other than the short title.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes, absolutely. So you’ll have something like a [00:45:00] bill to make provision about the use of UK country of origin indicators in the labelling and marketing of food products. That’s it. There’s often not very much more than a couple of sentences to describe a bill, and that’s all you need unless you actually do somehow, by some weird stroke of fate, manage to get it through the gates into actual legislation.

Ruth Fox: Yes. But as you know, Mark, delegated legislation is my favourite subject, and yes, there is a presentation bill on that subject.

Mark D’Arcy: The cup runneth over.

Ruth Fox: Sir Christopher has brought forward the Statutory Instruments Act 1946 (Amendment) Bill to provide that a draft statutory instrument which is subject to the affirmative resolution procedure may be amended by either House of Parliament before it is approved. Now he’s brought that in several times, and I can guarantee that will not get through and that won’t be making it to the statute book, but that is one of the 39 bills that he has presented. So his bills account for 60% of all those presented [00:46:00] this week. Next highest number, Gregory Stafford, who presented four, and then there were a couple by Mike Wood and John Milne. So Sir Christopher is a one-man legislative machine.

Mark D’Arcy: Very true. And I’ve spent a disturbing portion of my life watching him speak to his bills as they’ve been introduced, covering “Today in Parliament” on a Friday. So it is seared into my consciousness. So Steve, I hope that answers your question. It’s a strange abstruse part of the way Parliament works, and it often absolutely baffles people who don’t quite see the logic of it, but then almost nobody does.

Ruth Fox: And with that, Mark, it’s very hot, the temperature is rising, I think, with that, we should leave it for this week. Come back next week and see how things have panned out and if we’ve got any further news on the emerging Burnham administration, or indeed whether there will be a Labour contest.

Mark D’Arcy: And we’ll wait with bated breath. See you next week.

Ruth Fox: See you next week.

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 @HansardSociety.