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[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. Coming up

Ruth Fox: The Tumbrils roll, as the House of Commons prepares to remove the remaining hereditary peers from the House of Lords.

Mark D'Arcy: It's not exactly been JFK, has it?

So what have we learned about this government in its first hundred days?

Ruth Fox: And MPs are under growing threat of physical violence from the public. A new Speaker's Conference is going to look at how to protect them. So what is it, and what might it do?

Mark D'Arcy: But first, Ruth, we're rather in the calm before the budget storm at the moment, waiting for Rachel. It's an [00:01:00] existential drama in which the main tax increases never appear, but the big parliamentary event that's going on even while the budget is in gestation is the bid to remove the hereditary peers, the remaining 92 of them who sit in the House of Lords, from the upper house so that they will no longer be entitled to seats in the legislature at all.

And that is a very big deal. We're talking about removing an element of Parliament that's been there since, what, the 1400s?

Both: Mm hmm.

Mark D'Arcy: And it's a major constitutional change being done in actually quite a mini piece of legislation. This is a five clause bill that quite simply removes the right of hereditary peers to sit in the Lords and doesn't attempt any wider constitutional change beyond that.

So it's both very big in one sense and quite minimalist in another.

Ruth Fox: Yes, and that was the heart of the debate on the second reading this week in the Commons. So one of the questions, Mark, that we didn't know is exactly what position the Conservatives would take.

Mark D'Arcy: And I'm not sure [00:02:00] we're any the wiser now.

Ruth Fox: Well officially they put down an amendment to the Government's motion at second reading. So the official line is that they don't think that this bill is an acceptable or effective method of enacting major constitutional change. It proposes a significant alteration to the composition of the Lords and that should be considered not in isolation from the other reforms.

They say it drip feeds changes that hinder proper scrutiny of measures that could change the relationship between the two houses. It risks unintended consequences. And uh, the thing that did amuse me was that, um, they're concerned that it reflects not just a lack of political consensus on Lords reform, but also that the government's rushing it through.

There's been a lack of consultation, a lack of pre legislative scrutiny, that would have given the opportunity to develop a cross party consensus on this issue, which, which

Mark D'Arcy: Well in fairness, yeah, the existing

Ruth Fox: That's true, but.

Mark D'Arcy: The existing dispensation in the House of Lords has gone on since 1999, and it was always intended as an interim measure, [00:03:00] so there's been plenty of time for plenty of people to think great constitutional thoughts about what should happen next.

Ruth Fox: So it's hardly rushing into change in the way that the Conservatives were suggesting in the debate. But on the other hand, the bill is going to have a fairly limited amount of scrutiny.

Mark D'Arcy: Yes, and that's one of the things that I suppose bothers me a bit about the way this is being handled, is that there's going to be one day of Committee of the whole House consideration of this, probably about five hours, and a similar amount of time for report stage consideration a bit later on.

So the House of Commons is basically going to polish off a major constitutional change in very little time indeed. It is a small bill, but it's a big issue. And where there's a big issue, maybe there ought to be a little bit more time to contemplate what's being done here, because this is going to change the rather delicate ecosystem of the House of Lords.

A whole element of it is going to be uprooted, taken out, and binned.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. The argument that the Conservatives, or quite a number of the Conservatives, were making was that this should be considered in the [00:04:00] context of much broader reform of the House of Lords. One argument being that you're only going to have one opportunity to get Lord's reform through in this Parliament.

Both: Yeah.

Ruth Fox: Which may or may not be true, they're possibly right, but therefore you should be looking to put some more ambitious reforms in there. We can talk about what the suggestions were from the Conservative benches in a moment. Look out, the bishops, they've got their eye on you. And, uh, there was also sort of this, debate about what impact it's going to have on the hereditaries themselves.

I mean the assumption is that the 92 will go at the end of the session in which this bill gets royal assent, so at the end of this session presumably, unless the Lords play up and they have to put it through via the Parliament Act in a subsequent session. So it will reduce the numbers, it will have an effect on the number of Conservatives particularly because they've got most of the hereditary peers.

Mark D'Arcy: Although the Conservatives will still be the largest party group on current figures even without their hereditary peer members. So the idea that this is vast scale political gerrymandering is, I think, a little bit harsh because the Conservatives have got quite considerable numbers in the House of Lords [00:05:00] and they were actually the third largest group, I think.

Ruth Fox: Yes. And I think one of the interesting things that was said by the Labour lead on this, Nick Thomas Symonds, in the Commons debate, was that essentially he put the ball in the court of the Leader of the Opposition, or the future Leader of the Opposition, and said it will be for him or her to decide whether to put forward hereditary peers as life peers, so essentially that they could stay on in the House of Lords after this bill by giving them a life peerage instead, so they'd retain their seat and their voting rights. And the question then would be, well, how many? So it may not reduce the numbers in quite the way that may have been anticipated at the outset, but it would abolish the hereditary principle in the Lords.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, well, Keir Starmer is doubtless a generous soul, but I can't really see him granting Rishi Sunak the right to nominate 50, 60, 70 Conservative hereditary peers as life peers. So some of them might get a consolation prize of being able to stay in, but I, I'm pretty sure an awful lot of 'em won't.

Yeah. So that's one side of it. Another thing that might be done here [00:06:00] is answer the criticism that this leaves the House of Lords wholly appointed. There will be no member of the House of Lords who doesn't owe their position to some minister or other. Maybe one way to answer that criticism is to beef up HOLAC, the House of Lords Appointments Commission, which at the moment doesn't really have much power other than to be a sort of Greek chorus on the end of things, saying, hang on a minute, that person maybe shouldn't be there, and a Prime Minister can ignore them.

You could give HOLAC, the right to block appointments, you could give HOLAC the right to vet appointments on the grounds of competence as well as ethics and integrity questions, and whether this person has done enough to be a legislator for life. You would have an independent element there that could raise a majestic hand to the Prime Minister and say no this person should not sit on the red benches and that would help at least.

Ruth Fox: Well presumably that's one of the things that you would be thinking on the opposition benches, particularly perhaps the Liberal Democrats, that you'd be looking to put an amendment in on.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. Yeah, that's a very logical point. I mean the [00:07:00] amendment that's attracted a lot of attention has come from the Conservative Gavin Williamson, the former Chief Whip, former Defence Secretary.

He has a reputation as a very Machiavellian figure and he's come up with this amendment to get rid of the bishops, the Church of England bishops. Now Mr Williamson's a Catholic and he said in his speech in the second reading debate this week that he thought that it was a weird anomaly that the Church of England had legislators sitting by right in the House of Lords.

And other faiths did not have the same kind of representation by right. Now, should add here that the Catholic Church, I think, actually forbids its clerics from sitting in the Parliaments and taking political roles. I mean the days of Cardinal Wolsey or Cardinal Richelieu or Cardinal Mazarin being Chief Ministers of Monarchs have gone now.

Ruth Fox: We have the Pope. Head of State.

Mark D'Arcy: So the Catholic Church is a little bit wary of those kind of arrangements.

Ruth Fox: And there are other representatives from other faiths.

Mark D'Arcy: Chief Rabbis in there and imams and so forth. So, so there are people from other faiths [00:08:00] in there. But he has put his finger on an anomaly. But it's a very big anomaly to try and deal with, because you're talking about essentially disestablishing the Church of England. And this sort of thing has been talked about before, I mean, when the Nick Clegg Reform Bill was going through, I think a number of people contemplated doing something similar back in the coalition years.

And I remember the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, Rowan Williams, saying, to what problem is removing bishops from the House of Lords the answer?

Ruth Fox: Yeah, this is the intriguing thing isn't it, because of course the Church of England used to be known as the Conservative Party at Prayer. That died away somewhat in the 1980s.

But there were quite a number of MPs on the Conservative benches who did indicate support for abolishing the Bishop's roles and some of them have been advocates of it for quite some time. And Gavin Williamson said, I'm willing to defy my whips to deliver the reform that many of us want to see. I mean he was sort of sticking his neck out.

But the question I think is, is it a serious proposition, from Conservatives in terms of a principled position? Or is he trying to put down an amendment that just creates immense difficulties [00:09:00] for the Labour Party to persuade Labour MPs to have to vote against it if presumably the government doesn't want this?

That's not been part of the plan.

Mark D'Arcy: It's difficult to imagine a future Conservative leader being able to whip their troops to remove Church of England bishops from the House of Lords. It doesn't strike me as an awfully capital C Conservative position, but there's room for a bit of freelancing at the moment, because there's essentially a political vacuum at the top of the Conservative party as they wait for their next leader to decide what the party line is going to be.

On reform of the House of Lords and indeed on all sorts of other issues, the budget for example, a bit later on. That gives the space for people like Gavin Williamson to do a bit of freelancing, to come up with wacky ideas and say we think this is a good idea and I'll defy my whips. Well, we'll see what, um, Kemi Badenoch or, or Robert Jenrick has to say about that when, uh, they move into the leader's office.

Ruth Fox: Well he wasn't the only one, of course, because Simon Hoare also in the debate said that he was more than likely to vote for this bill on second reading, and so he should have probably told his whip about that, but he said

Mark D'Arcy: Simon hoare, of course, now chairing the constitutional

Ruth Fox: Public Administration and [00:10:00] Constitutional Affairs Committee.

I'll get the title out in the end, PACAC. I mean Simon basically dissed Oliver Dowden's amendment to the second reading motion and he said his reasoned amendment seems to have been written more because of the need to write something rather than actually make a case to persuade. So yeah, it was a bit of a ragbag.

But um, as you say, it's not going to get an awful lot of time in the commons. A day in committee, a day in report and, uh, then over to the Lords and we'll see what they make of it and I think it'll get a bit more of a grilling.

Mark D'Arcy: I think there will be quite a lot of interesting action when it does hit their Lordships House in due course.

I mean, there have been several attempts before to get rid of the hereditary peers. It was almost an annual event that the Labour peer, Lord Grocott, who was once Tony Blair's Parliamentary Private Secretary.

Ruth Fox: Former Chair of the Hansard Society. He appointed me to my job. He's a hero.

Mark D'Arcy: Note the scrupulous declaration of interests here, by the way.

Ruth Fox: I should also say in that respect that Ann Taylor is also current chair of the Hansard Society. She's also a member of HOLAC, so we should probably get that on the record if [00:11:00] we're doing interests.

Mark D'Arcy: Absolutely. But the, the point here is that he, as it is almost an annual event, he'd bring forward a bill to stop the by elections, to create new hereditary peers when one died or retired from the House, and thereby ultimately remove the hereditary element.

And those bills were fought, almost to the death by a couple of Conservative peers, Lord Caithness and Lord Trefgarne, would filibuster furiously away to try and stop them, and said this was a breach of the promise that there wouldn't be further reform until a big all singing, all dancing plan for a new elected upper house had been put forward.

And that of course has never happened and isn't going to happen probably now. I can't conceive of the current Government wanting to legislate to create the sort of Gordon Brown blueprint for a House of the Nations and Regions. It's just too big a legislative undertaking and, uh, the history of the 20th century is littered with failed attempts to try and reform the House of Lords to some sort of design like that.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, but when it gets to the Lords, do you remember during the general election campaign you and I went to talk to [00:12:00] Lord Kinnoull for the podcast?

Mark D'Arcy: Convener of the Crossbench Peers.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Listeners can have a look at the back catalogue of, of the pods and, and, and find that interview. And we did put this case to him. We were talking about what was in the manifestos, that this hereditary Peers Bill would be coming forward.

It's in the, in the Labour Manifesto. The convention is that on manifesto bills, the House of Lords will give it a second reading. They won't unnecessarily delay things. They won't put down wrecking amendments and so on. What was he thinking that the position would be, would that convention be adhered to?

And we gave him a number of opportunities to say yes, and he didn't.

Both: Yeah

Ruth Fox: I mean, that may just have been him being very wary about getting out in front of his skis when, you know, the House was not sitting, would need to consult his crossbench group on these matters, but he was given several opportunities to say yes.

To say yes of course we'd be adhering to that and he didn't so we'll have to see what happens when it gets there.

Mark D'Arcy: Well I suppose on an issue of the composition of the Lords itself, peers may not follow their normal conventions. And then you've got a couple of possibilities opening up, one is that the [00:13:00] government makes concessions that buy off enough of the opposition that they can get the bill through, which is essentially what happened in 1999, which is how you got those 92 hereditary peers continuing to sit in the House when the rest were excluded. So you may get some further concession, you know, a large number of peerages for the most active hereditary peers, or maybe even all of them might be offered life peerages so that they weren't immediately taken out themselves, or there might be some other concession along the lines we were talking about of beefing up the House of Lords Appointments Commission, or some other concession to sugar the pill that I can't quite imagine at the moment, but they could do that.

Alternatively, and this is the hook that the Parliament Act provides, if the House of Lords resists this and fights this bill to a standstill, this is where the Parliament Act might come in. Now this of course is the mechanism by which the House of Commons can override opposition in the House of Lords, essentially by passing the same bill twice in consecutive sessions of Parliament.

And if the bill is fought to a standstill in the House of Lords this time around, or amended in a way that the government [00:14:00] doesn't like and on ping pong they can't get the Lords to budge. What can happen is that in the next parliamentary session after the state opening, the Commons can debate the bill again, and pass the same bill again, it would then go to the House of Lords, and the moment the House of Lords laid a glove on it, the Parliament Act would kick in, the Speaker would sign a certificate, and badda bim, it would go to the monarch to be signed into law.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Essentially then, from the peers perspective, the risk is that they would get no concessions, whatever.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah.

Ruth Fox: They'd be facing the bill that the government wanted, and they've lost their traction.

Mark D'Arcy: That's the dilemma that they would face, is that, yeah, any concessions the government was going to offer, it would offer in the Lords, precisely so that it would be the Lords, okay, you either get the bill as we proposed it, or you get these concessions, but if you kill the whole thing the concessions might be, uh, less than you would want, but it's more than you'll get in the other way.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. I mean, it's high stakes stuff, because essentially the government would either have to collapse the session and start a new one, or it might have to run shorter than they'd planned. Um, and obviously that's disruptive of the government's own legislative programme, so it [00:15:00] won't want that. So there'd be some potentially high stakes negotiations, but in the end, my suspicion is, partly because of the sheer scale of the majority in the House of Commons, that the House of Lords will give way, but they just might, as you say, fight it out on some of those concessions, including things like strengthening HOLAC. I mean, if we don't get an amendment from the Liberal Democrats, for example, it's not beyond the realms of possibility we're going to see that then come through in the House of Lords.

Mark D'Arcy: And you could imagine that there are advantages for Keir Starmer in all this, with all this criticism that he's already getting low level stuff around Taylor Swift's concert tickets and so forth. A measure that relinquished a bit of Prime Ministerial patronage on the appointment of peers might help him look a bit squeakier and cleaner than he does at the moment so that there is potentially some sort of political advantage there to relinquishing the very real patronage that comes with being able to name peers or at least creating someone who can say, no, you can't appoint that person. It may not be total relinquishment of the patronage. The other thing here though is is this striking [00:16:00] cultural divide over the question of hereditary legislators For a large chunk of people, all of the Labour Party, I would think, pretty much, all the Liberal Democrats, pretty much, the idea that people should be entitled by birth to be considered for a seat in the House of Lords is just a complete anathema.

For others, it's, oh, this is an independent segment of Parliament that's steeped in the traditions of the nation, and there's a sort of quasi mystical bosh about how these people are raised in a tradition of public service. That's not to sneer at individual hereditary peers. An awful lot of hereditary peers are very diligent legislators.

The question is, should they be there simply by virtue of who they are? Rather than going through the formality of getting elected.

Ruth Fox: But the challenge there of course was put by some of the Conservatives who are defending the hereditary principle in the House this week to the Labour benches which is, you're against the hereditary principle in relation to the House of Lords, where do you therefore stand on constitutional monarchy?

Because, you know, the head of [00:17:00] state is the apex of the constitution. And the defence there from the Labour minister was, the monarch does not reject bills, you know, royal assent goes through, or has for centuries, and the position that the monarch has popular support. Those were the two lines of argument.

But it is an odd position for people to find themselves in, I think, defending that in a, in a modern democracy.

Mark D'Arcy: Indeed, I just remember once a conversation I had with the late Lord Onslow, who was one of the leading hereditary peers for quite a long time, who would say that his position was clearly anomalous and a bit strange.

I'm only here because my great great great great great grandfather got pissed with Pitt. He would explain. I mean, I'm beginning to sound a bit like, you know, the Monty Python and the Holy Grail sketch. You know, where the peasant is telling King Arthur, supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses.

You know, you can't have some farcical aquatic ceremony where some watery bint hands you a sword. But there is a principle here. And it's a real one.

Ruth Fox: [00:18:00] Oh dear, well with that, uh, listeners, I think we'll take a break. We'll be back shortly to discuss 100 Days when i've recovered.

Mark D'Arcy: And we're back. And Ruth, this week the government has been celebrating a glorious moment. A hundred days in office. But the celebrations have been a bit low key. I haven't really detected a sort of John F. Kennedy camelot moment. Style, vibe, high idealism, dynamism, exuded from the portals of Downing Street.

Not that I'm actually in favour of that anyway. I do think that it's possibly about time that incoming governments got off the idea that they have to sort of replicate a 1960s press release from the JFK White House and demonstrate some great spasm of initial activity. It's too easy a trope if you like.

And in any case, what celebrations there have been, have been distinctly muted and

Ruth Fox: Yes. If you look at the position the government finds itself in and all the criticisms and the brickbats and the polling numbers, it does [00:19:00] feel like it's squandered quite a lot of political capital, really. And the sort of sense that it's a bitter drift, that there's some infighting going on, there's a lack of clarity about the strategy and the messaging.

And a lot of it obviously stems from the problems right from the top of the government that they're having with Freebiegate, which has been going on for weeks and they still don't seem to be able to get a grip on. And if you recall in a previous podcast, I think it was probably during the election campaign when we were talking actually about the government's proposal to have a, an independent sort of ethics and integrity commission, which we have not yet seen signs of.

We said, you know, the government, when they were in opposition has taken quite a high moral tone. And they want to convey to the public that they are going to do things differently, that this is a change of tone, a change of culture. And we said then that Keir Starmer would need to clamp down on the first minister that stepped out of line in order to convey that.

What we didn't anticipate was that the problem would be Keir Starmer himself.

Mark D'Arcy: It's been a mess. I mean, you do feel [00:20:00] that Tony Blair's Downing Street operation would have knocked this on the head much more quickly and efficiently than Keir Starmer's has been able to do. And the whole thing has just rumbled on with a miserable, low level backbeat of new ministers admitting that they've taken Taylor Swift concert tickets.

The horror, the horror. It's been, I think, massively overblown in terms of the sort of Richter scale of corruption. But you use the phrase high moral tone. I think in the House of Lords this week, Lady Butler Sloss, the former very senior judge, put her finger on the issue when she said that if you strike a high moral tone in opposition, you can't then go and take freebies in government.

And they didn't even seem to see it was going to be a problem. I mean, Sue Gray, the Prime Minister's now departed Chief of Staff, was the head of the Propriety and Ethics section in the Cabinet Office, for heaven's sake. Surely if anybody was equipped to say, Hang on a minute, lads, this is a problem, it was her.

But somehow [00:21:00] or other, this stuff went on and everybody enjoyed themselves at concerts and they plundered straight into this sort of low level quagmire.

Ruth Fox: A lot of this was foreseeable if you look at Keir Starmer's register of interests in the last Parliament. I mean this hasn't just happened whilst they've been in government.

This sort of hundred thousand pounds worth of the freebies and gifts that he's registered have come over the course of the last parliament over four and a half years. So it's interesting, I think, that journalists didn't pick it up and weren't running on this in the previous Parliament, but now are starting to get interested.

I mean, it may well be that Sue Gray was, or, and others were raising it, in his private office and saying this is problematic and he wasn't listening.

Mark D'Arcy: And nothing happened.

Ruth Fox: And part of the problem I think is that we keep hearing this recitation of this is within the rules. We've registered them. You know, this is in keeping with the code of conducts and so on. As long as we've we've registered, the rules, we've obeyed what's required. Well, I think, what you don't hear very often is, is this within the seven principles of public life?

Now, I can't remember to recite all seven, [00:22:00] which itself is problematic. \

Mark D'Arcy: There was one about selflessness, I recall.

Ruth Fox: Selflessness, which is a good question of what that means. Integrity, openness. Yes. Honesty, trust, those kinds of things. But I do think it is that gap between obeying the rules and having a rules based approach and having a cultural approach in which the question is, how is this going to look to my constituents, accepting significant sums of money for your clothing and your glasses, from somebody who's not a close relative, just seems a bit weird, frankly.

And I do, I think I've possibly said this on a previous edition of the podcast, I do think it is problematic for him to be accepting football box tickets, when the Football Governance Bill is being negotiated. I think afterwards it's less of a problem, but whilst ever you've got that big piece of legislation that affects clubs and their millions of supporters across the country, to be accepting and sitting in a private box with corporate interests.

Mark D'Arcy: And also, I think you've got to be very careful about the [00:23:00] idea that saying something was within the letter of the rules makes it okay. Sufficiently old that I can remember at the height of the parliamentary expenses scandal, Margaret Beckett, the deputy leader of the Labour Party back in the day, appearing on Question Time and people were raising things and she was saying, but this is within the rules and she clearly thought this was a complete defence.

But no, the audience at Question Time were not impressed, because the audience at question time thought that the rules were simply too loose. And I don't think that the public will be particularly impressed by people taking large amounts of freebies at a time when they're likely to be cutting all sorts of entitlements.

I think the pensioners heating allowance is probably just the beginning of what we might see in the budget. And that kind of gives the press a licence to go after this stuff, because it speaks to private extravagance by ministers during a time of public, dare I say, austerity.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Yeah. That's the ethical side, which is getting a lot of attention, rather less attention focused on the legislative side, which is where I'm particularly keeping an eye on things.[00:24:00]

And again, the government promised change in approach, a change in a sort of attitude to the way it would legislate, higher standards, better practices. More time for scrutiny.

Mark D'Arcy: And here we are, back with the same old sins being re enacted once again. Skeleton bills. Bills which just give ministers the power to do whatever they want when they've figured out what their policy actually is, for example.

And we've seen that in a couple of measures. In particular, the Employment Bill just seems to be a complete skeleton bill giving ministers the power to work out what the regulations for employment law will be later on.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean, that is a very lengthy bill. I mean, that's 158 pages, you've got 100 pages of explanatory notes, you've got a 90 page delegated powers memorandum.

Well, they need it because the bill essentially, as you say, it's framework. It is all powers and not much policy detail. So that gives the powers to ministers to decide what it is that they want to do when they've got it. It's going to get its second reading in the House of Commons next week. But again, there's not a lot of time for scrutiny.

Once it goes into public bill [00:25:00] committee, it's estimated to come out, I think, towards the end of January from that, and then it'll go into a report stage in the House of Commons. And my expectation on that is it looks like it's going to get a day on that. Well, on a 150 odd page bill, to only have a day's worth of consideration of amendments on it, Now, granted, not many amendments are probably going to come through at public bill committee because the line is, apparently, according to a Guardian story, that the whips have told Labour MPs that they shouldn't be tabling amendments to bills, which is a pretty extraordinary story if true.

I rather suspect that's overdrawn. I think it's been probably badly communicated and a bit cack handed.

Mark D'Arcy: There are a few people it wouldn't stop anyway.

Ruth Fox: Quite. So it's quite possible that, you know, very few amendments are going to come through. But nonetheless, you'd expect a little bit more time for scrutiny of these detailed powers.

Because once ministers have these powers, they've then got them in perpetuity. And obviously not just them, future ministers. And it also lays precedence for future bills.

Mark D'Arcy: And you can say almost exactly the same set of things about the, um, Product Regulation and Meteorology. [00:26:00] Metrology. Metrology, there's a word for you, which is, um, despite its technical sounding title, something that has quite interesting implications for how this country relates to the European Union and the single market and so forth in the future.

And again, this is a measure which basically gives ministers power to do whatever they want later on when they've decided what it is.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. In the House of Lords, the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee that, that looks at all the bills and looks at the powers in them that are going to be, you know, given to ministers to legislate later on by regulations.

It assesses whether these are appropriate and reports to the House of Lords. I mean, it's issued a report in the last few days that is pretty condemnatory of this bill. I mean, it says it's another skeleton bill. Principal aspects of policy should be on the face of it. Essentially, what's happened here, this is a first session problem that you find with all governments, is that they need to get legislation through, they want to get bills onto the statute book as soon as possible.

They've got to fill the parliamentary [00:27:00] time, so those early bills, in the early months of a government, inevitably are more rushed in terms of the policy detail than would be ideal. But the problem is, when they are all powers, you are essentially passing a huge amount of influence and power in the future to ministers to legislate in in ways in which Parliament doesn't know how they intend to use them.

And you mentioned the EU, and I think that's really critical in terms of this bill, because essentially the powers would enable ministers to either, in certain areas in relation to products, product manufacturing, product marketing, units of sale, and so on, some really important aspects of the economy, it would enable ministers to either diverge from the direction of travel in EU law, or actually to align with it.

And the point the Delegated Powers Committee makes is we don't know, you're not giving an indication of, of what your direction of travel is. But you're expecting Parliament to give you the powers to decide at a later date. That's not really good enough and [00:28:00] constitutionally it's not appropriate. And in fact the Delegated Powers Committee has suggested that I think three clauses of the bill should be struck out.

Mark D'Arcy: Well that's quite an interesting start and a figure to watch out for in the future on this kind of thing is the very senior Conservative backbencher Sir Bernard Jenkin who's just been appointed to chair a new joint committee that will be looking at statutory instruments, delegated legislation, all the kind of orders and regulations that are generated by these kind of sweeping ministerial powers later on.

So keep an eye on Bernard Jenkin because he might have quite a big role in the Parliament in, in the, uh, months and years to come.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, the other person to keep an eye on is the position of the Attorney General Richard Hermer, KC, who's, has been in the House of Lords. He gave a speech, the Bingham Annual Lecture on the Rule of Law, this week, and he talked about defending and strengthening Parliament's role in upholding the rule of law.

And he talked about this, you know, the need for better balance between primary and secondary legislation. So between bills and regulations, bills and statutory instruments. He said in recent years, it had been weighted too heavily in favor of ministers having delegated [00:29:00] powers. He talked about excessive reliance on Henry the Eighth powers.

Well, the Employment Relations Bill has got, I think, seven or eight Henry the Eighth powers.

Mark D'Arcy: Henry the eighth powers, I should explain for the uninitiated, are basically, um, a term that has its roots in Henry VIII's attempt to get the power to make law by proclamation so that law would be whatever he proclaimed it to be, which actually the Parliament at the time stood up against, to its enormous credit, since you risk being beheaded if you upset Henry VIII.

Ruth Fox: Specifically, it enables the ministers, by regulation, to amend primary legislation that Parliament has passed, and to do it using a much lower level of scrutiny in a regulation than would attract if they had to do it by law, by a bill that then became an act of Parliament. And he talked about the new government, you know, it's an opportunity for a reset, a sharper focus on whether taking delegated powers was necessary, how it was justified and so on.

All sounds fantastic, exactly the sort of things that we ought to be hearing and the Hansard Society is listening out for. But the test is not just whether you say it, it's also whether you do it. And the [00:30:00] worry at this stage, granted it's early days, but these kinds of ways of legislating, quickly you become, ministers become habituated.

Mark D'Arcy: It's a habit forming drug.

Ruth Fox: And the question is then, you know, the real test will be the second session, and we'll see what happens there, but if ministers get used to this idea that, you know, I can get my bill through quickly, I can decide later, I don't have to complete all these consultations and do this difficult policy work first, they'll be looking to, say, the Employment Relations Bill or the Products Bill, You know, the ex minister managed to do it that way.

Why can't I? And it's, it's going to be incumbent upon people like Richard Hermer, people like Lucy Powell, the leader of the House of Commons, to crack down through the Cabinet Committee system and say no, we're not doing it that way. So I would make an appeal to people like Richard Hermer that our proposals for a delegated legislation review would give them a way forward in this, because if you actually get the scrutiny system for statutory instruments right, You don't need to have to worry so much about the powers.

We all know in a [00:31:00] world where technology, AI, and so on is moving so quickly that governments need to legislate quite quickly. And quite often we find that bills have got onto the statute book and they're already superseded by the technology.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, you put your finger on it when you're talking about the internet.

That's moving so fast that by the time you've legislated the whole thing's moved onto the platform.

Ruth Fox: So in some ways the legislative system needs to be a little bit more agile or have means to be more agile in the areas where it's needed. And our argument would be, if you put forward bills like these that are essentially framework, then fine.

There are sometimes occasions when it's needed, but then you've got to get the scrutiny system downstream right. And at the moment, the government is getting away with having framework bills and a really poor scrutiny system. And therefore they benefit from that. And that's why the balance of power between parliament and government is out of sync.

Move forward with our proposals for reform of the delegated legislation system. Improve the scrutiny, particularly in the House of [00:32:00] Commons, of statutory instruments. And it would be less of a problem.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, all oppositions want to do the kind of thing you're describing. All governments, once they're in power, discover the seductive lure of not doing those kind of things.

And with that, Ruth, should we take a break? When we come back, we've got plenty more to talk about. There's the whole issue of protecting MPs from a rising threat of physical violence. And there's a new bunch of private members bills to discuss. We talked about a couple of them in our last pod, but there's plenty more on the stocks now, and we know what they are.

See you then.

Ruth Fox: Westminster is always buzzing with political drama and rumours. But whatever the daily gossip or the latest crisis, lawmaking and parliamentary scrutiny carries on regardless. So it's crucial to stay informed about what's happening in Parliament each week. That's why we've launched our new Parliament Matters Bulletin. Our weekly analysis of what's coming up in Westminster as a complement to this podcast. Our approach is inspired by the informative articles Mark [00:33:00] used to write each week for the BBC, which many of you have told us you miss. So if you want to know what's coming up in Parliament, sign up to our Hansard Society newsletter to get the Bulletin straight to your inbox every weekend.

You go to hansardsociety.org.uk and click on the newsletter button in the menu bar at the top and fill in your email details. It'll only take a minute, Again, that's hansardsociety.org.Uk.

Well, we're back and, uh, Mark, we've concentrated in the last few episodes of the podcast on the assisted dying private members bill. We've talked quite a bit about that, but we now know the full list of the 20 bills that will be considered this session. We won't go through all 20 of them, but I think it's worth having a look at a few of them that will be of interest.

What took your eye?

Mark D'Arcy: I was quite impressed with the New Home Solar Generation Bill, which is basically a requirement for any new housing to have solar panels on the roof. This is [00:34:00] proposed by the Lib Dem Max Wilkinson, and frankly it's something I think we should have done this 20, 30 odd years ago.

But it's a way of getting an awful lot more climate friendly electric generating capacity built piecemeal, bit by bit. Every house, unless it's so overshadowed that it's impractical, has solar panels on the roof.

Ruth Fox: We won't talk about Roz Savage's Climate and Nature Bill because we discussed that at some length last week, but, uh, but Clive Lewis has got a bill down on water.

So he wants to set targets and objectives relating to the water companies. But interestingly, he wants to make provision for the establishment of a Citizens Assembly on water ownership. Not quite sure why we need a Citizens Assembly, but it is the policy solution of the day. It's very fashionable.

Mark D'Arcy: I mean, I'm a sceptic about the whole idea of Citizens Assemblies.

I think we have a giant Citizens Assembly in this country and it's called Parliament. And I'm not completely convinced of the virtues of having sort of a randomly selected group. Maybe the prime purpose of them is to get politicians off the [00:35:00] hook and be able to point to, this Citizens Assembly recommended that this was a good idea even though it's expensive and, uh, It's going to cost you, members of the public.

So that's why we're doing it. It gives them an alibi, but I think it's a way of Parliament not having to take tough decisions for itself. At which point, what's the point?

Ruth Fox: Yes. We know with Citizens Assemblies, there have been some in Parliament, I mean, select committees have run Citizens Assemblies, for example, but at the end of the day, what's the point?

It's the relationship to Parliament and to Government, and is there a commitment to implement them?

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, it's a bit like Royal Commissions, they produce reports, and if the reports are too uncomfortable in their recommendations, they just end up gathering dust on a shelf somewhere. But it shouldn't be underestimated quite what a toxic issue water, and in particular sewage pollution has become and so Clive Lewis in taking this on is taking on a very difficult subject. Now he's a Labour MP. He was in Jeremy Corbyn's shadow cabinet He was someone I suspected might have picked up the Climate and nature bill that we were talking about last week That's in fact been picked up by the Liberal Democrat savage But he's someone [00:36:00] who's taking on something that may not be entirely comfortable to his party leadership. Let's put it that far

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Next up is a bill from Josh McAllister. Protection of Children Digital Safety and Data Protection Bill. Now it doesn't actually mention the word that this bill is really about, which is phones. So essentially banning, as far as I can tell, banning phones or the access to phones by school children in school.

Mark D'Arcy: You can see what it would mean, children wouldn't be constantly sort of scrolling and accessing their phones when they were supposed to be learning. And there are plenty of people already saying, surely this is a matter for individual headteachers and this is over regulation. But maybe it would give some schools cover to take a decision that perhaps the children, and indeed the parents, didn't like very much.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Next, Rare Cancers Bill, which is Dr. Scott Arthur. Now this is a bill that's been actually promoted by Dame Siobhan McDonagh on the, uh, the Labour benches, after the death of her sister, Margaret Mcdonagh, General Secretary of the Labour Party in 1997, when Labour won the general election, Margaret [00:37:00] died of, uh, I think of a form of brain cancer, glioblastoma, and Siobhan's bill proposes to incentivise research and invest in treatments for rare cancers of the kind that, uh, that Margaret suffered from, so this bill would, uh, would try and take that forward.

Mark D'Arcy: The idea is to incentivise research into cancers that affect so few people, that companies don't find it economic of itself to invest in researching a treatment. So it's quite an interesting idea, and one of those things that is a cause that has been diligently fought from a corner. This doesn't have the whiff of a government handout bill, some minor tweak to regulations the government wants to use the private member's bill system to get.

This is a cause that's kind of bubbled up from the grassroots, as it were, in parliament.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. So what do you think are the handout bills? I mean, we've talked about the first sort of half dozen there, which will have priority on the first sitting Fridays. But what about some of the other bills lower down?

Can you, with your seasoned, uh, seasoned eyes, spot some of what looks like handout bills?

Mark D'Arcy: Well, there's the Controlled Drugs [00:38:00] Procedure for Specification Bill. Now that is a measure to smooth out the process for designating a new drug as something that ought to be controlled and regulated. I think we're talking about designating things as harmful narcotics, really, here.

And this has the whiff of a bill that just makes things procedurally easier for the government. It's number 12, 13 on the list, so it's quite far down the batting order, and it's the sort of thing that, therefore, probably is only likely to happen with a bit of government support behind it. Licensing Hours Extension Bill.

Now that, remember, during the Women's. Football World Cup, there was an issue about getting extra licensing hours so people could watch collectively from the pub some of the final matches of that tournament, as England were doing rather well in it at the time, and Parliament wasn't sitting so it couldn't be done. This changes the procedure to make it possible for that sort of thing to be done.

Ruth Fox: And I'm pretty sure that was in the last session and fell for the general election. And then we've got an Unauthorised Entry to Football [00:39:00] Matches Bill related to Football Banning Orders being imposed. So that's possibly also a, a handout. Then what took my eye, the Space Industry Indemnities Bill from John Grady, which would, um, present a bill to require operator licenses authorising the carrying out of space flight activities to specify the licensees.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, well, with talk of creating spaceports, or at least facilities to launch satellites, I think is what it really means, in Cornwall and possibly in the north of Scotland or in the Scottish Islands. There is a question of what happens if a bit of a rocket falls and lands somewhere and does some damage or even hurts or kills someone. So clearly an issue that needs to be covered.

But again, it sounds like something that has got a government department worried. And they've decided that they need a little bit of legislation to fill a gap that no one had envisaged earlier on.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And then we've got, well it's not officially called this, but the Let's Regulate Airbnb bill, from Rachel Maskell.

It's a Short Term Let Accommodation Bill, which essentially is trying to, um, make provision for the licensing of short term let accommodations and how that is all [00:40:00] marketed.

Mark D'Arcy: That's been a huge issue in a lot of areas where whole neighbourhoods and whole areas have been taken over with short term lets.

Communities get very annoyed when there's constantly partying in blocks of flats or small neighbourhoods near the seaside or whatever it is. And they just want to have some level of planning restriction, requirement for planning permission for an endless series of short term lets because of the disruptive effect it can have on the life of a community.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, and there's a couple of, um, I suppose what you'd call animal welfare bills, quite low down the list, sort of 16 and 17 I think they are, so one to expand the ban on fur import and sales to all sort of animal species areas where sale of fur is currently permitted, would henceforth be prohibited. And then there's another one on, um,

Mark D'Arcy: The import of cats, dogs, and ferrets.

Ferrets. I'm particularly interested that ferrets are specified in this one.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, that would restrict the importation and non commercial movement of them. And then, uh, lower down we've got a Sale of Tickets, Sporting and Cultural [00:41:00] Events Bill. This is number 20, so it's right at the bottom of the list, but I think it's

Mark D'Arcy: Sale of Tickets, Sports and Cultural Events (Oasis Concerts) Bill.

Ruth Fox: Yes, yes. So that's probably going to attract quite a lot of interest and support. But it's not hard to see how some of these, you know, there's going to be big campaigns running behind them. The phone's in schools. The bill's got its own website, which I don't think I've seen before. But they will kick off with the first bill, 29th of November, when, as we expected, Kim Leadbetter has chosen that date for her second reading of her assisted dying bill.

That's not its name. We now know its title is the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. That's going to be a big, big moment in the life of this Parliament.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, we were talking last time about how if this bill gets stuck in a public bill committee for a prolonged period, it could delay all the other bills.

That certainly remains true unless the government takes action to allow the setting up of another public bill committee to deal with private members bills. I mean, this all gets very terminologically interwoven. [00:42:00] But unless that happens, I mean, it does require positive action to, in effect, change the rules to keep the system turning over.

And you could end up with a situation where, you know, Private Members Bills lower down the batting order, actually get back into the Commons Chamber before the Assisted Dying Bill does. But it does require positive intervention, which may or may not happen, to speed that through. It depends, I suppose, on how many of these other bills the Government wants to see passed.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, and I think it'll also depend, and we're making an assumption here that the Assisted Dying Bill gets through second reading, but if it does, I think it'll also depend upon how big is the support in the Commons for it.

Mark D'Arcy: It's completely untested at the moment. We simply don't know what the new intake, which is more than half of the current House of Commons, thinks about these issues yet.

So watch this space because it's not impossible, I think unlikely, but not impossible that this bill could be defeated at second reading. It happened to the, I think, 2017 Rob Marris incarnation of the Assisted Dying Bill. It could yet happen again.

Ruth Fox: We should say we haven't seen the text of any of these bills yet.

All the [00:43:00] MPs who'd got through in the ballot had to do this week is present their short and long titles for their bills. So the interesting question will be, when do we see the final text of Kim Leadbetter's bill? How far in advance of second reading on 29th November? I mean, best practice would suggest at least two weeks, but it will have to see.

Mark D'Arcy: Certainly on an issue like this.

And I do suspect, I mean, the very title that she's actually given, this official title of the Terminally Ill Adults End of Life Bill suggests that it will bear more than a passing resemblance to the kind of private members bills that the former Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, was trying to put through the House of Lords in previous years.

Ruth Fox: He's indicated he, I think he's withdrawing his bill in the House of Lords now that, that Kim Leadbetter's bill is down as, as number one and will go forward in the Commons.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, but I suspect that his involvement in the drafting will mean that there is a, a pretty well rounded piece of legislation.

Ruth Fox: But I think it'll be quite narrowly drawn is the impression.

I mean, from what we've heard in the media reports about Kim Leadbeater's bill, we think it's going to address [00:44:00] situations where there are terminally ill people with six months left to live only.

Mark D'Arcy: So it's not a wider right to assisted dying whenever you wanted it for whatever reason, or nothing even vaguely approaching that.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, and even for very serious illnesses, where, you know, there isn't that terminal diagnosis in the six months, then it wouldn't apply. But of course, the difficulty is going to be around how that is determined. Because of course, you know, we know with medical conditions that people can last longer than expected, or they can go more quickly than expected.

And the problem for the bill could be it ends up satisfying no one that actually people who supported this assisted dying actually wanted to have broader scope than it than it has and you get into the whole debate about slippery slope and...

Mark D'Arcy: ...thin ends of wedges. But I think if I were if I were a supporter of assisted dying I might prefer to have a thin end of the wedge through than nothing at all after years and years of trying so I don't think that even if they privately regarded the bill as not nearly enough that that would stop them voting for this.

But we shall see. It's all yet to come and there's doubtless plenty more [00:45:00] manoeuvring to do.

Ruth Fox: Perhaps turn now, Mark, to another tricky issue that the House of Commons is going to have to grapple with. Um, one close to home and that's the that this week we've seen the establishment of a Speaker's Conference on the safety of MPs and candidates.

Now, Speaker's Conferences are quite rare. These are bodies, similar to a Select Committee, but a Committee of the House which is under the auspices of the Speaker, officially chaired by the Speaker, although I wouldn't expect him to be chairing every session. It'll have, uh, 14 MPs on it. And it is being set up to look at the factors influencing the threat levels against candidates and MPs, to assess the effectiveness of responses to such threats, and to make recommendations about how to hold free and fair elections in the future in light of these threats.

And of course this comes off the back of a general election campaign in which so many candidates expressed concern about the level of vitriol that was expressed online and offline at the time. The intimidation that some candidates in all parties felt that they [00:46:00] faced. And of course this week we've marked the third anniversary of the murder of Sir David Amess.

We had Jo Cox during the EU referendum campaign. We've had MPs who've been stabbed during their advice surgeries over the last decade at least. So a couple of a couple of mps have faced that. Rosie Cooper, former Labour MP who faced a big right wing threat against her life. People went to prison as a result of that.

We've had MPs, particularly female MPs, who've faced intimidation and harassment and where, again, criminal charges have been laid and have gone through the courts. So this is an escalating problem, but one that's very difficult to grapple with.

Mark D'Arcy: There's a huge difficulty for democratic politicians because it's very difficult to even be a democratic politician if you're having to operate from inside a security bubble which separates you from the very people that you're trying to represent.

How do you easily get the views of the general public if you have to be accompanied by a bodyguard or if you can only interact with people online for safety reasons. So there's a huge concern about [00:47:00] not putting up more barriers than are absolutely essential between the politicians and the people that they are supposed to speak for.

And that's a very, very difficult problem to resolve. I mean, there are several sorts of responses that the Speaker's Conference might generate, you know, making sure that the physical arrangements for members of Parliament and indeed their staff, say at constituency offices, are met, are good enough that there's a sufficient security there to protect them against most threats.

Maybe there's a need for a tougher line on social media companies to clamp down immediately on posts that are intimidating or trying to incite violence against politicians or indeed candidates in general elections. Because the threat extends to MPs immediate staff as well. Let's not forget the name of Andrew Pennington who was the councillor who was with the Liberal Democrat MP, Nigel Jones, who was attacked by a man with a samurai sword in his constituency surgery and was killed. And even behind that, there's a sort of general [00:48:00] backbeat of unpleasant incidents, moments of threat that MPs and their staff have had to endure.

Ruth Fox: I'm very struck. When I worked for an MP sort of 20 odd years ago, we used to do advice surgeries on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings in the local advice centre in the, And it was first come, first served.

We didn't do bookings. We didn't know how many people were going to turn up. And if there was a long queue, we would sit there and get through the end of the queue. You know, if we had to be there three, three and a half hours, that's what happened. But it was very much, you know, people just walked in off the street.

We didn't know who they were. All we needed to know was what was their address. Were they definitely Bill's constituents? Now, I'm very struck that most MPs now do not do that. that model. It's bookings, some of it's online surgeries, some of it's, you know, the staff are separated out from the public, there's barriers between them and, and the public.

We used to sit in a small office, knees almost touching with the constituents, it was that [00:49:00] cramped. I just don't think you'd contemplate that these days.

Mark D'Arcy: And that's a loss in itself.

Ruth Fox: Yes, and all democracies across the world are facing this problem. But I think it's a particular problem for Westminster model democracies, where that constituency relationship, that very local level of representation, is so fundamental to how your system works.

And particularly in, in the UK, where the extent to which MPs want to be in touch with, and want to have contact with, and want that local link to is difficult. And Nigel Farage is It's obviously an example in recent weeks since the general election where I think he's intimated, more than intimated, that he'd got advice that he shouldn't hold face to face advice surgeries and that's why he hadn't been in Clacton.

He's since resiled a bit from that and the suggestion is that perhaps he shouldn't hold them until the security was in place to enable him to hold them. But it is difficult for a prominent politician like him to just turn up in these places and [00:50:00] have that personal one to one interaction because they are facing threats.

Mark D'Arcy: And indeed beyond that it's an outright disincentive for people to run for Parliament. Certainly there's a sort of drip drip of MPs who've decided I don't want to go through this anymore, I'm going. Yeah. But before that there are people who think should I be a parliamentary candidate? I'm very interested in public policy. I want to get into parliament. And then think, ah, but I'll be under threat. My family may be under threat. I may be the subject of hate campaigns against me. Do I really want to go into this?

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I think the Speaker's Conference is going to have to grapple with these in sort of a much bigger picture, a much broader context, really.

Because yes, there's the risk to the chilling of public debate. There's the balance between the right to free speech and the infringing of the freedoms of the MPs and the candidates and ensuring free and fair elections.

Mark D'Arcy: And at what point do you draw the line? When is heckling an MP, which is a time honoured British tradition, when does that morph into a serious threat or unacceptable [00:51:00] behaviour?

Ruth Fox: Yeah, so how do you balance that right to free speech with sort of openness and accessibility, both locally and nationally? There's also the concern, I think, that the Speaker's Conference will be interesting how much they can talk about this in public sessions, is the threat from external actors, particularly state actors, like, let's be honest, Russia, probably China, Iran, who are using technology and social media and so on for disinformation to stir up problems in democracies like ours, and to what extent some of the online social media pylons against politicians are driven by that.

Mark D'Arcy: Orchestrated.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, as opposed to things at the local level in, in the constituencies. That again is a whole other set of, you know,

Mark D'Arcy: It's worth remembering that before he became Speaker, when Lindsay Hoyle was the Senior Deputy Speaker, the Chairman of Ways and Means, he was actually the point person for MPs with security concerns.

It's arguably one of the reasons why he became Speaker, because he handled that very assiduously and took [00:52:00] an enormous interest in making sure that MPs felt that the system was listening to them when they had real concerns about their safety or that of their staff and families. So, he's someone who's very much been immersed in this.

Now, having said that, I don't know whether he's going to be able to spare the time to constantly chair.

Ruth Fox: Doubtful, I think.

Mark D'Arcy: The Speaker's Conference.

Maybe Nusrat Ghani, who's now the senior deputy speaker, will be taking up the reins on that. We, I mean, we don't really know how this conference is going to operate.

Ruth Fox: And we don't know who the members are going to be. So there are 14 members that are going to be appointed, which is bigger than a normal select committee, which is usually 11. So that might suggest, that possibly the smaller parties are going to get some representation, which would seem appropriate. I mean, you look at, we've talked about Nigel Farage and Reform, for example, it would seem very odd if some of the smaller parties didn't have a voice in that.

And of course, that was the criticism of the Modernisation Committee, that there's no role for the smaller parties, but we will have to see. These are quite rare. I mean, there've only been, I think, eight Speakers' Conferences over the last century or so. [00:53:00] They've got a mixed checkered record in terms of success, in terms of implementation of the recommendations.

The last one, just a couple of years ago, looking at ways in which, you know, MPs' staff were employed and dealing with some of the harassment issues. There was one about ten plus years ago which looked at representation, and particularly whether, you know, there were enough women and enough support for disabled candidates.

Again, mixed record in terms of implementation of the proposals.

Mark D'Arcy: But this is such an internal Issue to Parliament though and such a direct concern to a lot of MPs that there's a huge incentive here to get something done

Ruth Fox: Yeah,

Mark D'Arcy: and it's something that's within the purview of Parliament rather than requiring a government to go out and legislate necessarily.

Ruth Fox: Possibly. Well, we don't know how it's going to operate. So watch this space, but I think that's probably all we've got time for this week. We'll be back next week with the latest updates.

Mark D'Arcy: Indeed, we'll be looking at amongst other things the membership of the new set of select committees. I mean lots of interesting nuances to that

Ruth Fox: So we'll see you then.[00:54:00]

Well, that's all from us for this week's episode of Parliament Matters. Please hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast app to get the next episode as soon as it lands,

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Ruth Fox: Mark, tell us more about the algorithm.

Mark D'Arcy: What do I know about algorithms? You know, I write my scripts with a quill pen on vellum and then send it in by carrier pigeon.

Ruth Fox: Well, before we go, a quick reminder also that you can send us your questions on all things Parliament by visiting hansardsociety.org.uk/pmuq.

Mark D'Arcy: We'll be discussing them in future episodes, including our special Urgent Questions editions dedicated to what you want to know about Parliament.

Ruth Fox: And you can find us across social media at Hansard Society to get more content related to the show and the wider work of the Hansard Society.[00:55:00]

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 @Hansard Society.