Back to Business: procedure at the start of a new Parliament (special collection)

Remaining pre-Brexit business

• The UK can leave the EU on 31 January 2020 ‘with a deal’ only if both it and the EU have by then ratified their Withdrawal Agreement. For the UK to do this, Parliament needs to have passed the EU (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill (WAB) which implements the Withdrawal Agreement in UK law.
• The WAB passed through all its House of Commons stages without amendment on 20 December and 7-9 January. The House of Lords started considering the WAB on 13 January and is due to hold its remaining proceedings on it on Monday 20 and Tuesday 21 January.
• If the House of Lords does not amend the WAB, the Bill will have passed by the evening of Tuesday 21 January and will be ready for Royal Assent.
• If the House of Lords amends the WAB, as seems more likely, there will be ‘ping-pong’ between the two Houses on Wednesday 22 January until both Houses accept the same version of the Bill. In practice, if the House of Lords makes amendments which the House of Commons then rejects, the House of Lords is probably unlikely to press its views further. Neither House has made provision for further proceedings on the WAB after 22 January.
• For the EU to ratify (‘conclude’) the Withdrawal Agreement, the European Parliament must give its consent. The Parliament’s Constitutional Affairs Committee must first make a recommendation to the plenary on whether it should do so. The Constitutional Affairs Committee is scheduled to meet on 23 January to decide on its recommendation. The draft recommendation going before the Committee is in favour of consent. The European Parliament plenary is due to hold its consent debate during the afternoon of Wednesday 29 January, with the vote at around 5pm UK time.

Expedited EU (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill (WAB) process …

The new UK Parliament is considering the EU (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill (WAB) with an extraordinarily limited amount of time and scrutiny for a Bill of the WAB’s complexity and constitutional importance. In the interests of passing the WAB in time for the end-January Brexit deadline, there have been departures from normal parliamentary procedures and practice for the consideration of bills:

• In the House of Commons, the Speaker allowed the government to introduce the WAB (that is, have it given a 1st Reading) on 19 December – the day of the Queen’s Speech – without notice. (No notice of parliamentary business can be given until after the Queen’s Speech.) Given the government’s wish to hold the WAB’s 2nd Reading debate before Christmas, without this permission it could have been obliged to try to introduce the Bill and hold the 2nd Reading debate on a single day on 20 December. This would have meant even less time for MPs to familiarise themselves with the Bill.
• The House agreed to a Friday sitting on 20 December to hold the WAB’s 2nd Reading debate. Normally, the House sits on Fridays only to consider Private Members’ Bills (PMBs).
• Timings on the WAB on 19-20 December violated the ‘best practice’ convention that there be two weekends between a bill’s 1st and 2nd Readings.
• Whereas its predecessor declined to do so in October 2019, having given the WAB a 2nd Reading the new House of Commons agreed to undertake the Bill’s remaining stages in three days (on 7-9 January – committee stage in two days, and report stage and 3rd Reading in a further day). In the event, the House of Commons did not use the full allocation of time it had agreed for the WAB’s committee stage, and made no amendments to the Bill, so no report stage was needed.
• The new House of Commons’ proceedings on the WAB will be completed before its select committees are re-established.
• The House of Lords has set aside two of its Standing Orders for Tuesday 21 January, so that the WAB’s report stage and 3rd Reading can take place on a single day, and to allow the late tabling of manuscript amendments for consideration at 3rd Reading.

… taking place amid expedited start-of-a-Parliament procedures

Beyond proceedings on the EU (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill (WAB), at the start of the 2019 Parliament the normal start-of-a-Parliament ceremonies, procedures and processes were also expedited or disrupted. This was due partly to the immediately pre-Christmas timing of the Parliament’s first meeting, and partly to the government’s wish to move quickly to proceedings on the WAB:

• In the new House of Commons, the newly re-elected Speaker received the Queen’s formal approbation on the day of his election, rather than the following day, so that swearing-in – which cannot go ahead until the Speaker is in place – could begin.
• House of Commons swearing-in then started immediately after the Speaker’s election, rather than only on the following day as is usual.
• More hours than normal were made available for swearing-in, so that it could be completed over fewer days.
• The House of Commons did not adjourn after swearing-in before the Queen’s Speech, but held both during an uninterrupted set of sitting days.
• The House of Commons interrupted its Queen’s Speech debate, to take all stages of the EU Withdrawal Agreement Bill (WAB), before then resuming and concluding its debate. The House of Lords held a shorter Queen’s Speech debate than normal, so that it could move on to consider the WAB as soon as the Bill had completed its Commons stages.

House of Commons turnover

• Given the speed and complexity involved, consideration of the EU (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill (WAB) may have been especially challenging for new MPs. Much of the WAB amends the EU (Withdrawal) Act 2018 (EU(W)A), which was itself a highly complex piece of legislation, and passed by the previous Parliament. New MPs will also be unfamiliar with the legislative and scrutiny procedures of the House of Commons. (Fifteen MPs who are ‘returners’ – that is, they have been MPs before but were not Members of the last Parliament – will be more familiar with procedure but not necessarily with the detail of the EU(W)A and the WAB.)
• In the 2019 House of Commons, 140 of the 650 Members have never been an MP before. This is 22% of the House. The recent benchmark for House of Commons turnover is the 2010 general election, when 35% of those elected had never previously been an MP.

Some historic timing statistics

• At five days, from 12 to 17 December, the gap between the general election and the first meeting of the new Parliament in 2019 was the equal-shortest since 1922. It was five days in 1922 and also 2017.
• The date of the start of the 2019 Parliament (17 December) was the latest in a calendar year since at least 1900.
• At two days, from 17 to 19 December, the gap between the first meeting of the new Parliament and the Queen’s Speech was the equal-shortest since at least 1918. As well as in 2019, the gap was also two days in 1955 (when there were 20 fewer MPs elected and needing to swear in during it.)
• The Queen’s Speech at the start of the 2019 Parliament marked the first instance since 1974 of there being two Queen’s Speeches in a single calendar year. The gap between the two Queen’s Speeches was the shortest since 1948.

This panel was last updated on 18 January 2020.

• A new House of Commons must elect its Speaker because the previous House can have elected a Speaker only for itself, not for its successor.
• By contrast, the House of Lords elects its Speaker for a five-year term, renewable once. The Upper House therefore does not necessarily need to elect its Speaker at the start of a new Parliament. Lord Fowler, the current Lord Speaker, was elected for the first time in June 2016 and took office on 1 September of that year.

December 2019 Speaker election

• The election of the Speaker at the start of the 2019 Parliament took place in line with convention: the previous Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, was returned to the House having stood in his constituency (Chorley) as the ‘Speaker seeking re-election’ without any of the major parties running candidates against him; and he was then re-elected by the new House unopposed, on 17 December, the first day of the new Parliament.
• The unusual aspects of Sir Lindsay’s re-election concerned timing: he was re-elected by the new House only two sitting days after he had first been elected by its predecessor, on 4 November 2019, the penultimate day of the 2017 Parliament.
• Until the House has chosen a Speaker, the Father of the House takes the Chair. The Father of the House is the MP with the longest continuous service who is not a minister. After the December 2019 general election, in which Ken Clarke stood down and Dennis Skinner lost his seat, the Father of the House in the 2019 House of Commons is Sir Peter Bottomley.

This panel was last updated on 7 January 2020.

• Normally, House of Commons swearing-in only starts on the day after the Speaker’s election, and takes place over several hours each day over two to four days.
• At the start of the 2019 Parliament, House of Commons swearing-in was expedited: it started on the same day as, and immediately after, the Speaker’s election on 17 December; and more hours than normal were made available for the process on that day and the following day. As a result, 421 MPs were sworn in on 17 December, and only five MPs had not been sworn in by the time of the start of the Queen’s Speech debate on 19 December. (They swore in on 20 December.)

This panel was last updated on 7 January 2020.

• The Queen’s Speech at the start of the 2019 Parliament, delivered on 19 December 2019, set out an extensive legislative programme. The government has indicated that this programme is unlikely to be completed within the normal year, and that the first session of the 2019 Parliament is thus likely to last into early 2021.

December 2019-January 2020 Queen’s Speech debates and the EU Withdrawal Agreement Bill (WAB)

• The House of Commons is concluding its debate on the December 2019 Queen’s Speech on Monday 20 January. The Commons’ debate was interrupted after only one day, on 19 December, to allow the House to consider all stages of the EU Withdrawal Agreement Bill (WAB) either side of the Christmas/New Year recess, before the Queen’s Speech debate was resumed on 13 January. This was the second successive time the Commons’ Queen’s Speech debate was interrupted for Brexit business, after this also took place in October 2019. As is usual, the Commons’ 2019-20 Queen’s Speech debate is a six-day debate.
• The House of Lords’ debate on the December 2019 Queen’s Speech was shorter than normal, to free the House then to consider the EU Withdrawal Agreement Bill (WAB) from the week of 13 January 2020, as soon as the Bill’s Commons stages were completed. The Lords’ 2019-20 Queen’s Speech debate lasted four days and was concluded on 9 January.

December 2019 Queen’s Speech and State Opening: some historical comparisons

• The Queen’s Speech on 19 December 2019 marked the first instance since 1974 of there being two Queen’s Speeches in a single calendar year.
• Of the seven such cases since the start of the twentieth century, the gap between the two Queen’s Speeches in 2019 was the second-shortest, at only just over two months. Among these cases, the gap was shorter only in 1948.
• At two days, from 17 to 19 December, the gap between the first meeting of the new Parliament and the Queen’s Speech was the equal-shortest since at least 1918. It was two days also in 1955.
• The date of the December 2019 Queen’s Speech (19 December) was the latest in a calendar year since at least 1900.
• The State Opening of Parliament on 19 December 2019 was ‘dressed-down’ and involved less ceremonial than normal, with the Queen arriving by car not carriage and wearing normal clothes rather than the Robe of State. In this respect, the 2019 State Opening replicated the 2017 occasion, and similarly partly reflected the fact that it followed an early general election which left less time than normal for preparation.

This panel was last updated on 18 January 2020.

• The principal Deputy Speaker also holds the position of Chairman of Ways and Means. The Chairman of Ways and Means chairs committee-stage debates on constitutional bills (which are taken in the Chamber, in Committee of the whole House) and also normally debates on financial matters such as the budget. The two further Deputy Speakers are the First and Second Deputy Chairmen of Ways and Means.
• The principal Deputy Speaker and one of the others (the Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means) must come from the opposite side of the House to the Speaker (under Standing Order No. 2A, which sets out the election process). The remaining Deputy Speaker (the First Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means) must come from the same side of the House as the Speaker. Under Speaker Hoyle, this is the opposition.
• Standing Order No. 2A also prescribes that among the Speaker and the three Deputy Speakers there should be at least one man and one woman.
• The election of the Deputy Speakers takes place by secret ballot, using the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system.

January 2020 Deputy Speakers’ election

• At the start of the 2019 Parliament, the three Deputy Speakers elected (on 8 January 2020) were: Dame Eleanor Laing (principal Deputy Speaker and Chairman of Ways and Means), Dame Rosie Winterton (First Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means) and Nigel Evans (Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means). Dame Rosie was elected automatically, having been the only nominated candidate from the opposition side of the House. Five Conservative MPs contested the remaining two posts.
• All three of the Deputy Speakers elected in January 2020 have held the post before – Nigel Evans in 2010-13, Dame Eleanor since 2013 and Dame Rosie since 2017. Dame Eleanor and Dame Rosie stood unsuccessfully for the Speakership in November 2019, losing to the previous principal Deputy Speaker, now the Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle.
• Dame Eleanor is the first woman to be Chairman of Ways and Means.

Deputy Speakers and Committee stage of the the EU (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill (WAB)

• The Deputy Speakers’ election at the start of the 2019 Parliament was held three House of Commons sitting days after the Queen’s Speech – so, if anything, more quickly than normal. Nevertheless, it was too late for the new principal Deputy Speaker to chair the Committee of the whole House on the EU Withdrawal Agreement Bill (WAB). This took place on 7-8 January, the new House’s fifth and sixth sitting days, and two and three sitting days, respectively, after the Queen’s Speech. The Deputy Speakers’ election was on the second of these days, 8 January. On 19 December, the House had appointed temporary Deputy Speakers “up to the first sitting day following the election of the Deputy Speakers” – that is, 9 January.
• The temporary Deputy Speakers at the start of the 2019 Parliament were Sir Roger Gale, Sir George Howarth and Sir Gary Streeter. Sir Roger was the temporary principal Deputy Speaker and Chairman of Ways and Means, who was thus in the chair for the Committee of the whole House on the Withdrawal Agreement Bill (WAB).

This panel was last updated on 18 January 2020.

At the start of the 2019 Parliament, the Private Members’ Bill ballots in both Houses took place in line with normal practice:

• In the House of Lords, the ballot took place on 20 December, the day after State Opening and the Queen’s Speech. Eighty-four Peers applied for a PMB. The ballot allocated the order in which each bill will be introduced in the Lords, starting from Wednesday 8 January and running through to Wednesday 5 February.
• In the House of Commons, the ballot took place on 9 January, the second sitting Thursday of the session. The ballot bills will be introduced on Wednesday 5 February. The top seven MPs in the ballot were: Mike Amesbury (Labour); Darren Jones (Labour); Anna McMorrin (Labour); Laura Trott (Conservative); Chris Loder (Conservative); Paula Barker (Labour); and Philip Dunne (Conservative).

This panel was last updated on 18 January 2020.

Re-establishing House of Commons select committees at the start of the 2019 Parliament

• At the start of the 2019 Parliament, House of Commons select committees will not be re-established before the UK leaves the EU on 31 January 2020. Given the length of the process and the timing of the start of the Parliament (immediately before the Christmas/New Year recess), this was always the likely prospect.
• Initial steps in the House of Commons process have been taken broadly in line with timings at the start of previous Parliaments, at least in sitting-day terms. The Committee of Selection (which must nominate members of other committees) was appointed on 15 January, and the motion allocating elected committee chairmanships to parties was passed on 16 January. (The motion was tabled on 9 January, within an extended deadline agreed by the House on 20 December to accommodate the Christmas/New Year recess.)
• The elections for select committee chairs will take place on Wednesday 29 January. The Speaker brought the date forward by one day compared to the timing specified in Standing Orders. Nominations close at 4pm on Monday 27 January.
• The distribution of select committee chairs and members is supposed broadly to reflect the party balance in the House. In the House of Commons elected in December 2019, among the largest parties this balance is: 56% Conservative; 31% Labour; 7% SNP; and 2% Liberal Democrats. Under the motion agreed on 16 January, the Conservatives will have 16 of 28 elected chairmanships (57%), Labour at least nine and the SNP at least two (the party affiliation of the Backbench Business Committee chair is not specified, but must be a non-government party).
• Parties large enough to qualify for select committees seats must nominate their members, by passing names to the Committee of Selection. For committees with elected chairs, select committee members are normally nominated after the chair elections. The same timing is normally followed for committees which do not have elected chairs and instead choose them from among their members. However, with the Committee of Selection in place, there is no procedural obstacle to the members of these committees being nominated earlier. The nomination of select committee members is not attached to any deadline.

Possible sources of delay or disruption

• One factor that could delay or disrupt the process of re-establishing House of Commons select committees is the government’s promised post-Brexit reorganisation of Whitehall. In some cases, MPs could win election as chairs on 29 January only to find their committees are being abolished, after the departments they shadow are eliminated. Depending on its scale, a Whitehall reorganisation could necessitate approval of a new motion by the House of Commons changing its committee line-up, and a re-distribution of chairmanships among parties.
• The promised government reshuffle could also see new select committee chairs or members resign quickly, if they were to take up government office.
• The Labour leadership contest could also delay or disrupt the process of getting House of Commons select committees re-established. The leadership contest could cause Labour to be unable to nominate its select committee members in a timely fashion, or new Labour committee chairs or members to resign quickly to take up frontbench roles once the new party leadership is in place.

Special provisions for the 2019 Parliament

• On 16 January 2020 the new House of Commons passed a government motion re-establishing the Brexit Committee for one year. This is despite the fact that the government has indicated that, following Brexit, it will abolish the Department for Exiting the EU (DExEU) which the Committee has shadowed. (The Brexit Committee has only ever been established under a temporary Standing Order which lapses at the end of a Parliament.)
• The government is asking the House of Commons to set aside for the rest of the 2019 Parliament the Standing Order which sets a term limit for select committee chairs. (The limit is whichever is the greater – two Parliaments or eight continuous years. Between April 2018 and the end of the 2017 Parliament in November 2019, this was raised temporarily to ten years.) If the government’s motion is passed, it would allow three chairs who have been in post continuously since 2010 to serve again for the whole of the 2019 Parliament: Clive Betts (Housing, Communities and Local Government); Sir Bill Cash (European Scrutiny); and Sir Bernard Jenkin (Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs).

House of Lords select committees

• At the start of the 2019 Parliament, as is normal, House of Lords select committees were re-established more quickly than their Commons counterparts. The Lords completed their process on 9 January 2020.
• This greater speed meant that the House of Lords debated the EU (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill (WAB) with three of its select committees having published reports on it, whereas the House of Commons completed consideration of the Bill without its select committees being in place.

This panel was last updated on 18 January 2020.