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In this edition of Parliament Matters, our resident procedural expert Paul Evans joins Ruth and Mark to unravel the intricate mysteries of Report Stage procedure. Drawing on his experience as a former senior Commons Clerk, Paul highlights the hidden dangers posed not only by opposition to the assisted dying bill but also by a seemingly unrelated Private Members' Bill aimed at regulating the importation of ferrets.

He also explains how amendments are selected and grouped for debate, how the debate itself is structured, and how opponents of the assisted dying bill might exploit parliamentary rules in an attempt to thwart its progress.

This transcript is automatically generated. There are consequently minor errors and the text is not formatted according to our style guide. If you wish to reference or cite the transcript please first check against the audio version. Timestamps are provided for ease of reference.

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Intro: [00:00:00] You are listening to Parliament Matters at 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 welcome to the latest in our series of special mini pods following the detailed progress of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, the bill that will allow assisted dying.

This week we're gonna preview the Report Stage of the bill, the latest rite of passage in its legislative process. This has been a bit of a moving target. Originally, Report Stage was scheduled for today, the day we're recording Friday the 25th of April, but Kim Leadbeater, the promoter of the bill, has now delayed report until Friday the 16th of May.

She [00:01:00] says it's because MPs need more time to consider amendments made at the public bill committee stage. It's also worth noting incidentally that the impact assessment the government has promised for the bill still hasn't been published. We're still waiting for that and hoping that it arrives before that vital report stage.

Ruth Fox: So we're delighted again this week to be joined by our resident parliamentary procedural guru, Mr. Paul Evans, a former senior clerk in the House of Commons, and a longstanding member of the Hansard Society to unpack this next stage of the legislative process and uncover what may or may not happen at report stage.

So Paul, as Mark just said, Report's now gonna be the 16th of May, which is gonna be that first opportunity for all the MPs who were not on the public bill committee to speak and vote on proposed amendments and new clauses that they'd like to see in the bill. It's often at Report Stage that private members' bills face some of the most challenging procedural hurdles and we'll come on to some of that.

But before we start, can we sort of just [00:02:00] unpack what is the purpose of report stage and how does it differ to committee stage?

Paul Evans: Glad to be here to help. So private members' bills all go to a public bill committee where they're picked over clause by clause, and eventually when the committee has got to the end of the bill, the chair of the committee then reports the bill back to the house.

That's where the title Report Stage comes from it. Formal title is consideration on report. So the bill is now back before the plenary, before the House as a whole. It may have been amended, as the bill has been, in committee and it's a chance for the whole house to have another look at it. There's some important distinctions between committee stage in procedural terms and Report Stage, the most significant of which is that the Report Stage doesn't go through the whole bill all over again. Mm-hmm. Clause by clause. That's all been done in committee. In Report, the only things that are considered are amendments, which are [00:03:00] proposed to the bill. If there are no amendments proposed to a bill, the report stage disappears.

There is no Report Stage, so the House doesn't have to go through the whole bill all over again. It only has to pick out those items which it wishes to consider specifically. In a sense, you might say the Report Stage is an opportunity for the house to endorse or reject the committee's choices about how to rewrite the bill.

It's a look at the newly formed bill, the changed bill, or the unchanged bill as the case may be. And the House has a chance to say it approves this or it disapproves that. It is always a more condensed stage than the committee stage, because as I say, it's not going through all the words of the bill.

Mark D'Arcy: So you don't have this endless sort of clause stand part thing that punctuates committee stage.

Paul Evans: You don't have that endless clause stand part thing. And the other significant distinction when it comes to debate is that in committee, new clauses are taken to the end and at Report, new [00:04:00] clauses are taken at the beginning. That alters both the strategy of the people who are trying to amend the bill, and the nature of the debate, quite often, because of the new clauses coming at the beginning, because they tend to be importing new matter rather than fiddling with the existing wording. After the Report Stage has been concluded, the bill goes for its Third Reading, its final stage in the House until the Lords send it back, if they do, and that can be very short and generally is quite short, but it's once the Report Stage is finished that Third Reading stage is, as it were, automatically triggered.

Mark D'Arcy: Now, as we were saying earlier, the Report Stage has been postponed for a few weeks. It was originally going to be April the 25th. It's now going to be on May the 16th. Is there anything we can read into that? Why? Why do you think Kim Leadbeater decided to do that?

Paul Evans: I suppose we can take it at face value that she wanted to give more time for consideration of amendments. You've pointed out the surprisingly stubborn [00:05:00] impact assessment that the Government still haven't managed to produce. Not that I myself think the impact assessment is going to say anything startling or convince anybody who's against the bill or for the bill to change their minds.

But it may do. I may be wrong about that. I think the other thing is that this Friday coming, up the tail end, of the Easter holidays and where some of the nations of the UK are still on their Easter holidays, it's probably quite a bad week for getting people to turn up on a Friday, especially since the previous day had been backbencgh business, I think.

So it was a bit of a dead water day.

Ruth Fox: There was also a suggestion that quite a number of MPs were not very happy about turning up on the Friday before the local elections next week, that they wanted the sort of the campaigning time and had pressed for a delay as well.

Paul Evans: That seems a very persuasive idea that that might be the factor. For Kim Leadbeater to get the bill through on its Report stage, she needs her supporters to be there and turn up and vote, and if [00:06:00] she feels that she's not able to get them out in force, that's going to be a real problem for making the progress with the bill.

Mark D'Arcy: Now, Report Stage is also where a private member's bill in particular can be procedurally very, very vulnerable. If MPs decide to produce a deluge of amendments and want to try and get as many of those debated as possible and possibly talk out the time, a bill can be stopped by procedural means rather than by a straight yes or no vote. What would be the telltale signs if that was to happen?

Paul Evans: The telltale signs are first a cascade of many, many amendments being tabled for report stage.

I think that's already begun with this bill, so the evidence is it's not going to be allowed to slip through easily at this stage. You then when you get into the actual debate on Friday the 16th, if that's when it happens, you will begin to see whether members are deliberately trying to draw out debate.

There is a real problem if you have more than really a handful [00:07:00] of significant amendments, which you're going to discuss at report stage. It's very easy to fill the four or five hours available for that day, and if you run the clock down, and you haven't got to the end of the bill, you haven't cleared through all the amendments that have been proposed by 2:30, the Report Stage is adjourned and it then loses its priority for future Fridays over new report stages and it's probably dead. And that's where many private members' bills come to their final stop when their Report Stage is adjourned.

Ruth Fox: When we talked earlier in the series about the committee stage amendments, we talked about grouping and selection of amendments.

So how does it work at report stage?

Paul Evans: It's a bit of a shifting target because the culture of report stages has changed for government bills and probably for private members' bills as well. So when I was talking, when we were talking earlier about grouping and selection [00:08:00] for committee, you try and make groups which have an internal logic and which are quite self-contained.

So they might be all on one theme. They might be dealing with alternative propositions about how to deal the same thing, or they might be just gathered around one clause or whatever that is. In principle, what happens at the Report Stage, the Speaker of the House is the one who does the official selection at Report Stage as opposed to the chair of the committee.

There has been a tendency in recent years, increasingly, to have huge omnibus groups, so if that pattern is followed, we might well end up with just one big group for report stage on the 16th of May, which would be odd, but would be in line with practice. In the past, you would've expected to have perhaps four or five groups.

And if I could just be permitted of an anecdote here,

Mark D'Arcy: Do go on.

Paul Evans: Many years ago, in about 1995, 1996, I was clerking a [00:09:00] private member's bill to set up a disability rights commission. And it went through the committee stage fairly calmly. The government didn't want to kill the bill, so the minister let the bill conclude its committee stage and it came up for its report stage and a couple of days before the report stage was due, probably on the Wednesday evening, someone arrived in the office where I was with a thick sheath of about a hundred amendments or more, and I looked at these with despair and thought, oh no, I'm gonna be here all night.

Trying to edit this stuff to make sense, and then put it in the right order as the amendments appear in the bill. But after I turned over a couple of pages, I realized that not only were the amendments perfectly drafted, but they're also presented in the correct order in the bill. And all I had to do was hand it over to the printers.

Now, this was a clue that these may have been professionally drafted anyway. I then had to do the grouping, and as I mentioned before, new clauses come first and new clause one in this big [00:10:00] chic of amendments, tabled in the name of a Conservative backbench MP, Lady Olga Maitland was a new clause saying something like, the government must report on the progress in disability rights protection annually to parliament.

And I just crossed this out. I said, no, I recommend against selection. This is time wasting. All this is going to do is produce another Second Reading debate at Report Stage. And that's not what report stage is for sort of wide ranging talk about disability rights and what a good thing they were. So I recommended against selection.

The Speaker accepted my recommendation, as did my boss, and we published the selection list and then all hell broke loose and the government started running all over the place and shouting. And they went to see, first of all, my boss and said, you've got to select new clause one. And he said, no, perfectly right selection, this recommendation was correct, it's not a proper amendment for Report Stage. So they went to his boss and he upheld that and then they went to the Speaker and she said, [00:11:00] no, I took their advice and I think it's right new clause one is not selected. So we get to Friday morning and the poor junior minister, DHSS probably, was a chap called Nick Scott, a very charming and pleasant Conservative.

He was there at the table at 9 35. As we got onto the first group of amendments, which I had grouped and selected, and it became clear very quickly that the civil servants had only prepared briefing for new clause one and had not had sufficient time to prepare any detailed briefing dealing with the amendments themselves.

This substantive ones. And the poor minister floundered around, had no idea, and there were lots of people on the backbenches who were quite expert in this area, and so that when they were present, opposing generally, these amendments, they were doing, uh, quite critically, and I'm afraid the minister didn't really have a reply and it was a, an embarrassing scene that ensued.

But anyway, they managed to spin it [00:12:00] out till 2:30 and kill the bill. But there was a huge row in the press. The minister's daughter happened to be a leading figure in a disability charity, and she attacked, wrote a letter at The Times, attacking his behavior, and it was all very, very embarrassing. And on the Monday, one of the supporters of the bill came to see me and said, how can I find out who drafted those amendments?

How many were drafted by the government? And I said, well put down a parliamentary question for written answer. And we drafted and it said, how many of the amendments tabled on such and such a day were drafted in the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel, which are the Government's professional drafters, and the Leader of the House, Tony Newton at the time, being an honest chap, replied. All of them. The extent of his answer. And so we then revealed that the Government had been trying to kill this bill, and the whole thing became very toxic for the Government. And in the next session they introduced their own bill to create a disability rights commission after all this embarrassment.

Ruth Fox: So it's all due to you.

Paul Evans: It can [00:13:00] backfire if you try and thwart a private member's bill at Report Stage by overloading the thing with amendments. You don't have to try very hard to spin the debate at 2:30 unless there is only a single group, in which case it may be possible for the promoter of the bill to get a closure on that group.

Mark D'Arcy: Uh, the magic word closure there. Yeah. One of the things that happens here is if you've got several groups of amendments, the promoter of the bill has to try and make sure that the debate on each group doesn't go on too long and use up all the available time, so they do finally get the bill to vote at the end.

So what's the process for bringing the debate on a group of amendments to a close?

Paul Evans: Well, we use this phrase claiming the closure. So any member can stand up in a debate and say, I beg to move that the question be now put. The chair has discretion as to whether to accept this. And they will normally accept it on a private member's bill if they feel there's been a reasonable time and if they think there's been [00:14:00] time wasting going on.

But there's always a bit of a balance about how long the chair thinks is reasonable for a debate and how soon they will accept a closure. If the chair accepts a closure, there can then be a vote, and there usually is. And in that vote, in order to win the closure, as it were, you have to have at least 100 members voting on your side.

And of course the majority in total. So that's a big hurdle to cross, especially on a Friday, to get those 102. Because you need two tellers as well, so you have to have 102 supporters.

Mark D'Arcy: So this is why private members' bill promoters work so hard to get people there, particularly for the Report Stage.

They've gotta have that a hundred figure to make it work. Yeah, 102 indeed.

Paul Evans: On this bill, likelihood is there'll be well over a hundred members in the House. Probably 400, possibly or more. And a closure might not be won. And if you don't win the closure, that's basically the end. Your bill's dead if you can't win a closure.

Mark D'Arcy: But you may have to do this several times.

Paul Evans: But if you [00:15:00] have three or four groups or more, you would have to win three or four closures.

And that's pretty hard because you've got four or five hours. It's hard to think of a group which deserves less than an hour's debate before the chair feels able to accept claim for the closure.

Mark D'Arcy: And if you win the closure motion, you then go straight to a vote on the group of amendments.

Paul Evans: Yes.

Mark D'Arcy: So you have two votes, one hard after the other.

Paul Evans: Yes, exactly. So if you win the closure, you go to a vote on the lead amendment in the group. And as we discussed when we talked about committee stage, once the lead amendment has been accepted or defeated, the chair will make a decision about which other amendments to call for a separate division in that group, if any. If there are no one's from the promoter, the likelihood is they won't call any of the amendments in the group. So once you close the group, you've not only closed the lead amendment, but you may have closed off 30, 40, or however many amendments there are on the group. Or you [00:16:00] may have just stopped the debate and you then have a series of votes on matters, but without any further debate.

Mark D'Arcy: And one of the telltale signs that there's a filibuster going on is when it takes an unconsciously long time to have the actual vote. And you often find the person in the chair saying, well, the Sergeant at Arms shall investigate the delay in the no lobby, or something like that.

There's an occasion when someone built a fort out of bound copies of Hansard, in the middle of a lobby, I seem to recall.

Paul Evans: I think that may be apocryphal, but I'm prepared to believe it. But I think the other thing about this particular bill is everybody's been, and, and it was a bit the same with the disability bill back in the day, nobody wants really to be seen to be killing the bill by mere procedural maneuvering, the lowest form of which is hanging around the lobby and delaying a division. It just looks very bad. And so I would predict that there will be few members who are prepared to play those kind of procedural games on this bill. They want a proper clean fight.

Ruth Fox: And on [00:17:00] some of them, on the closures, for example, presumably they won't all have to be put to a division if it's taken on the voices initially. And it's pretty clear that the numbers are in the House. There's at least 102 on Kim Leadbeater's side. They could just take that on the voices and do the divisions on the amendments.

Paul Evans: It'd be very rare to take a closure on the voice, particularly because of the one hundred requirement. You need to actually measure it. It is, of course, open to the opponents not to oppose, not to say no when the division is called and the division could be taken on the nod. I wouldn't be surprised if that's what the opponents chose to do.

They would say once the closure's claimed, if they think it's a fairly reasonable one, and the Speaker decides it's reasonable, they're not going to oppose it. They're going to allow the closure to go through on the nod.

Mark D'Arcy: You talked about MPs being conscious that they didn't want to be seen to be just using procedural gimmickry to frustrate bill. Do you think now that more and more MPs get that the public is watching that? There's gonna be a lot of interest in this debate. A lot of people will be watching on BBC Parliament, [00:18:00] via the internet, whatever, and will be not very impressed if they see sort of chucklesome, filibuster games being played on an issue they care a lot about.

Paul Evans: That's absolutely right and a lot of people, as we know from past experience on this bill, will be watching it. Probably got one of the biggest audiences for its public bill committee stages that's ever been seen, I suspect, and it will continue, I'm sure, to be closely watched by many thousands if not millions of people, when it comes up for Report Stage, so I think MPs will be very conscious they're appearing before a large audience, which is quite different from most Fridays. For example, today, when I suspect not many thousands of people will be watching the Absent Voting (Scotland and Wales) Bill proceedings.

Ruth Fox: Of course today, they didn't expect probably to get a debate on their bills because it was planned to be the assisted dying bill, so it's every bill in the queue behind the assisted dying bill for today that was on the order paper that suddenly got time. I should say that, that top of the list, they [00:19:00] would've expected perhaps to get five minutes at the end of the Report Stage.

Mark D'Arcy: You can imagine some of the MPs who had these bills further down the order paper weren't even planning to be in Westminster today, and suddenly are having to cobble together Second Reading speeches and try and line up a few supporters to ask them helpful questions and and so forth when they've got other plans.

Ruth Fox: Well, as of last week, quite a number of the bills were not printed. So, if they're not printed, they can't be progressed.

Paul Evans: I think Mr. Gething's bill was one of those. The lead bill today was only published a day or two ago.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Can we just go back to the amendments? Does Kim Leadbeater, if she puts down any further amendments, some of which may be her own, some of which may be on behalf of the Government, does she have, as the sponsor of the bill, any priority in having her amendments considered over and above any another MP?

Paul Evans: There is at the beginning, the member in charge can choose the order in which new clauses are placed on the paper. So, to that extent, they have considerable influence over the [00:20:00] opening debate if there are new clauses, and if she has a new clause of her own, she could obviously put that first. Lower down, dealing with amendments to the clauses, the key distinction is that the Speaker would almost invariably select for separate division, after a closure, for example, any amendments tabled in the name of the member in charge so that they would always get a decision on those, whereas most members and most amendments, won't get a decision because they will not be selected for a separate vote, by the Speaker.

Ruth Fox: If an amendment was considered or a new clause and it had been rejected in the public bill committee, does that influence whether or not it can be selected or is likely to be selected by the Speaker and put to a decision?

Because that a number of MPs, some of whom were on the committee, some of whom were not, and whose amendments were considered and rejected in committee have already got them back on the order paper for Report Stage. How will that affect what [00:21:00] the the Speaker chooses or indeed what the clerk apparently chooses and the Speaker will endorse, judging by your earlier anecdote?

Paul Evans: No, the clerk doesn't choose. The clerk recommends and the Speaker decides whether to accept those recommendations. It's certainly a criterion for selection that an amendment which has been exhaustively considered in committee should not be rehashed for Report.

That's the principle that's generally applicable, but I talked a bit about the tendency to have these great big, baggy single groups at Report Stage nowadays, even on government bills. And that reduces the need for forensic selection quite a lot because you just throw them all in the bag. You have a single debate.

And then the crucial thing is whether the Speaker allows, separate divisions after the end of the debate on a government bill, and similarly, really on this bill. So it would depend partly on how many groups the Speaker is thinking of having. But certainly [00:22:00] the point of report stage is not to rehash all the debates in committee stage.

And it's easier on government bills because in the back of the Speaker's mind, if not the forefront, will be, has this amendment got any chance of being agreed? And on a government bill you can be fairly sure a non-government amendment, unless you've some very good reason, it will not be agreed. And that is a good reason for not having a re-do, you know, you've had the debate, there's no point in having the debate all over again just in order to lose. Again, this bill is a bit more tricky because we don't know how the numbers will fall, so the Speaker will be under pressure to be more liberal in that selection.

Ruth Fox: And that's because the bill is not written as a party bill.

Mark D'Arcy: Exactly. So we've got a situation where we might have several groups of amendments. So let's assume for a moment that you actually managed to get to the end of Report Stage earlier. We were expecting that there would be a whole separate day set aside for a Third Reading debate, and they were gonna have their Report Stage on today, the 25th of April, and then they were gonna have the third reading debate on [00:23:00] the 16th of May.

Now we've got the report stage on the 16th of May. Having completed report stage, do they now want to have a separate day for their Third Reading debate, or should they be much more worried about getting their bill to the House of Lords as soon as possible and getting it through there in good time?

And so maybe sort of shrink the third reading debate and get it done as quickly as possible.

Paul Evans: They should be worried about getting the bill through the Lords and back again to the House of Commons. That's the question. If the Lords amend it, what they've got to do is get it back, and if it comes back after the last of the available private members' bill Fridays, that's a real problem.

Mark D'Arcy: And the last of the available private members bills Fridays is in July, isn't it?

Ruth Fox: 11th of July. Yeah.

Mark D'Arcy: So it's a pretty quick turnaround for the House of Lords if their Lordships get the bill, even on the 16th of May.

Paul Evans: I think on the other hand, if the Lords do get the bill through and give it a third reading and send it back with an amendment or two, there'd be immense pressure on the government to make an available extra time for that consideration of the Lords Amendments if possible, [00:24:00] even after the 11th of July. I suppose we would be talking about a bill that's had a third reading in both houses.

So it is not really in the hands of the promoter, whether they have the third reading on the 16th of May. It depends how long the Report Stage lasts. And it may still be necessary to have a third reading on a later date if the Report Stage exhausts the time available, so it really depends when the Report Stage finishes.

Ruth Fox: So time on Friday the 16th of May, time expires at 2:30 PM, so in order for Report Stage to finish, they need to have wrapped up the debate and the votes on the groups of amendments by 2:30. So there's two scenarios. One is they do. And then the question is, do they take third reading immediately afterwards?

If they have passed 2:30, can they do third reading immediately afterwards, or would that have to be passed to the next sitting Friday, which would be the 13th of [00:25:00] June? I mean, it's nearly a month later. That's one scenario.

Paul Evans: Yes, I'm going to introduce an unnecessary complication in my answer to that, which is that can always take unopposed business after what we call the moment of interruption, which is 2:30 on Friday.

Ruth Fox: Yeah.

Paul Evans: So if you thought the Third Reading was going to go through on the nod, you could have the third reading after 2:30.

Ruth Fox: That seems unlikely in this scenario.

Paul Evans: That seems unlikely. Even if the Report Stage is completed, the opponents of the bill who opposed it on Second Reading are very likely, uh, certainly a proportion of them, to wish to oppose it on Third reading

Mark D'Arcy: And it would only take one person to shout object, wouldn't it?

Paul Evans: And it would only take one person to shout object.

Ruth Fox: Okay. So I think that's unlikely to happen, so,

Paul Evans: That's unlikely to happen.

Ruth Fox: So the alternative scenario is they haven't wrapped it up by 2:30 and there isn't time for a Third Reading debate and vote.

That would have to pass to the 13th of June.

Paul Evans: Yes. The Speaker would say, or the chair would [00:26:00] say, Third Reading, what day? And the member in charge would say, 13th of June. The advantage is that Third Reading would take priority on the 13th of June, and it's very unlikely to be any other Third Readings. Well, there can't be really any other third readings on the 13th of June for private members bills, so it will be top of the list. And it needn't take the whole day for third reading.

Ruth Fox: But that rather fits with the argument that certainly some MPs have made that for a government bill. As we said, third, reading is often quite a cursory process, you know, very short period of time added on at the end of Report, everybody knows what the outcome is going to be.

This is a different kind of bill. It doesn't break on party lines. It breaks on, you know, matters of principle as to whether or not you can support assisted dying. And if you do support assisted dying, can you support the measures in this bill to deliver it and to operationalise it? We don't know whether the votes at Second Reading will stack up again, or whether there'll be supporters of the bill at Second Reading who decide actually, I can't support this. It hasn't been amended in the ways that I hoped. Or it's been amended in ways [00:27:00] I'm now opposed to. So we could end up with quite an extensive Third Reading. It could be quite different to what we used to, but as you say, it doesn't need to take up all the time on the 13th of June. If it went to the 13th of June, we are then looking at it going to to the House of Lords. And as you said, coming back, unless the government were prepared to make time available, it would have to come back by the 11th of July, so that would give the House of Lords barely a month to look at it, which is one of the issues of concern, I think about the tight timetable.

Paul Evans: The tightness of the timetable is very significant. And the Lords stages are, in particular, the Lords tend to be quite picky about, for example, having two weekends between the arrival of the bill, the first reading of the bill, and its second reading, and then further intervals after that between stages. It will be taken in Committee of the whole House in the Lords, as most bills are, and that could take a couple of days. I mean, the difference is the Lords are not tied to these [00:28:00] private members bills' Fridays in the same way, they are much more flexible about setting their own timetable, so they could choose to devote much of the time between the 16th of May and the 11th of July to this bill. They're much more flexible about how they could timetable it, but they will have government bills to deal with, and other business that they want to deal with, so it's not an infinitely elastic process.

And of course, it will depend on how dogged any opposition might be in the Lords to the whole principle of the bill, whether they're going to allow it to have a thorough, but not obstructed, passage as it were.

Ruth Fox: What happens if Report Stage is not finished on the day and it has to slip then into a second day?

What would we do? Pick up proceedings on the 13th of June and carry on with report stage?

Paul Evans: In principle, you could. The difficulty is that if another bill has completed its committee stage and is named for its Report Stage on that day, on [00:29:00] 13th of June, then it would take precedence because new Report Stages take precedence over adjourned Report Stages on PMB Fridays.

Mark D'Arcy: Right, so you wonder if you might start seeing supporters of the assisted dying bill spinning out the bill committee proceedings of another bill just to make sure it couldn't get to the wicket on that day.

Paul Evans: Well, let's just talk about those other bills for a moment, if I may.

Ruth Fox: He's got a glint in his eye.

Paul Evans: There are nine private members' bills that've had their Second Readings. None have yet gone into public bill committee and slightly to my surprise, this week, yet again, the committee of selection did not appoint a public bill committee for one of the private members' bills. The Committee of Selection may eventually get round to appointing a public bill committee for one of the private members' bills.

You could envisage a scenario in which members of that committee span out its proceedings so that it couldn't get its Report Stage before the 13th of June, which wouldn't take huge amount [00:30:00] of ingenuity, I suppose. But one should also bear in mind that of those nine bills that have got their second reading, eight are what we call handout bills.

In other words, they're bills drafted by the Government and handed to members who were successful in the private members' bill ballot to take through something that's often deplored. I'm sure some of those members feel passionately about ferrets, for example, and want to take their bills further.

But they are all essentially hidden government bills. And of those nine bills, just out of interest, four of them, we just talked about being passed on the nod, in other words, without a division, after the moment of interruption 2:30. Four of those nine bills were passed on the nod after 2:30, so they haven't been debated at all.

Ruth Fox: That's parliamentary scrutiny for you.

Paul Evans: That's parliamentary scrutiny for you. And one of them, further, [00:31:00] one had five minutes debate just after the assisted dying bill had gone through on the 29th of November and was then allowed to have its Second Reading. So they're a pretty rum collection of bills. The other thing is that between them, uh, we will leave out one, which is the non handout bill, which is, Bob Blackman, Conservative MP's, Homelessness Bill, which slipped through accidentally because the Whip was looking in the wrong direction at the time, the last Friday, and didn't shout object. And didn't shout object. But leaving that aside because it's not going to make progress, I don't think, and it's at the bottom of the list.

There are fewer operative clauses in these eight bills than there are in the whole of the assisted dying bill. One of the bills, which is about space indemnities, changes two words in another act. That is its total operative effect. Maybe an important two words, but only two words. And [00:32:00] most of the bills are quite small and deal with quite small matters.

For example, Ruth's favourite bill to change the procedure for extending licensing hours of pubs on important football match days from affirmative procedure under delegated legislation to negative procedure under delegated legislation. What I'm saying is they don't, on the face of it, need five more days debate at Report Stage.

Ruth Fox: Before we get to the next question, I should just explain for listeners that my interest in that bill is not the drinking, well, it might be, but it's not the priority. It's the delegated legislation and the football. So this bill's being introduced because the Government got itself into a bit of a problematic position when the England women's football team made progress to the final of a major championship and the Government wasn't able to extend the licensing hours. So that's to amend that situation, so that the Parliament, uh, doesn't need to be sitting in [00:33:00] order for that to happen in future. What is the second bill in the queue behind the assisted dying bill.

Because that, as you said, the committee of selection has to appoint a public bill committee for each of these bills that have had its Second Reading. There's a pipeline. I should explain, there's can only be one public bill committee at a time for private members bills. Unlike for government bills where you can have multiple happening at the same time.

We would've expected after the assisted dying bill came out of committee for a new committee to be appointed for the next bill in line.

Mark D'Arcy: Only a very suspicious mind would read anything into the non appearance of this new committee.

Ruth Fox: Surely not, but I'm just interested. Of these nine bills, what will be second in line?

Presumably the bill that, followed the assisted dying bill and snuck through in those that last five minutes back in November.

Paul Evans: Indeed, you would expect it to be that one, which is the 'Animal Welfare (Import of Cats, Dogs...' and for some reason '... Ferrets)'.

Ruth Fox: Um, no Yorkshire jokes please.

Paul Evans: Which is promoted by Danny Chambers, [00:34:00] who is a Liberal Democrat MP, and slipped through, as we said, in the five minutes after the end of the Second Reading debate on the Assistant Dying Bill.

The bills don't have to go into public bill committee in the order in which they had got their Second Reading, but that is the presumption that they will do. But the committee, it's a bit of mysterious process that goes on in the Committee of Selection. Also, we shouldn't blame the Committee of Selection for the non appointment of another public bill committee entirely, because it's up to the Member in Charge to put together their team and then propose it to the Committee of Selection.

The Committee of Selection can't really act until the member in charge has given them the list to act upon.

Mark D'Arcy: So it's entirely possible that Mr Chambers is just dawdling.

Paul Evans: Um, yes, all of the above possible. The next bill in line, for example, is the Dogs (Protection of Livestock) Bill, which is promoted by Aphra Brandreth, Conservative MP,

Mark D'Arcy: Daughter of the more famous Giles. I seem to recall.

Paul Evans: Indeed, who was, [00:35:00] I think, the only MP, Conservative MP successful in the ballot in the top 20.

Intro: Mm-hmm.

Paul Evans: And the third one is the Licensing Hours Extension Bill, which we just talked about. And so if Mr. Chambers didn't come up with his list, it's not impossible for the committee of selection to get impatient and say, right, we're going to put one of those ahead of you in public bill committee.

But it's very much, as I say, it's a fairly opaque process. This moving things into committee. The assumption is it goes in the order of which they receive Second Reading. But there have been variations on that in the past.

Ruth Fox: And you said earlier that, um, you thought eight of these nine other private members bills that have now had a second reading were government handout bills.

So just for our listeners, uh, insight, how do you know?

Paul Evans: Because on the front page of the bill, it says explanatory notes are available for this bill, which have been drafted by the department of [00:36:00] administrative affairs or whoever in cooperation with the member in charge. And that is your red flag if you like or your whatever that tells you that this is a handout bill, because the explanatory notes had been drafted by the government.

Mark D'Arcy: And handout bills are bits of micro legislation that the government somehow couldn't get into its queen's speech or didn't realise it needed at the time and it suddenly decided it needs to do.

Paul Evans: Well, that's usually the explanation and you're right, Mark, but I'm always puzzled as to why. Yeah, they can't just slip these things into a bigger bill sometimes. You know, they, they often seem very small things, and also if they were government bills they'd whistle through with no trouble an instant.

I'm never quite sure why the whips say that there isn't time for the, for example, the space indemnities bill, which changes two words in a previous act just to be knocked through on a Wednesday evening, probably after the moment of interruption if they wanted. But anyway, that's the story. It's things that departments haven't managed to get into the legislative program, which they then try and persuade sympathetic private backbench members to [00:37:00] do for them.

Ruth Fox: And can we just tap your insight into how to look at the amendment paper? Because it, we've talked about the fact that this bill has got such a huge audience on tv, there's also an awful lot of people who wouldn't normally look at things like an amendment paper, actually exploring these issues, wanting to have a look at what amendments have been tabled and so on.

But it can be quite difficult to understand. So how should people read the amendment paper? What's the sequencing? What's the numbering?

Paul Evans: Well, the sequencing is one of the things to notice. It starts with the new clauses, if there are any, and they're listed first, ultimately in the order in which the member in charge chooses.

And then you get onto amendments to the bill itself, to the different clauses, bits, and places, and possibly schedules. And those amendments are listed ultimately in order in which they appear in the bill. So starting amendments to clause one and so on. So working through to the end. So the problem is they [00:38:00] are numbered in the order in which they arrived in the public bill office in which they were tabled.

So the numbers will often appear completely random to these amendments because once you put the amendments in the order of the bill, the numbers will be in a completely different order down the side. You'll then have explanatory notes under some or all of the amendments explaining. Particularly worth looking out for is those that say this amendment is consequential upon.

But also the amendment, they may say, this amendment does this, or this amendment does that. But the ones that say, this amendment is consequential upon, there's a lead amendment somewhere, the one that they're consequential on. And then these all have to be added on to make sense if the amendment is made to make the bill consistent throughout.

But I see that currently there are only about 40 amendments and four new clauses tabled. Now, whether the people would've pounced and tabled more, if Kim Leadbeater hadn't announced the delay, one doesn't know, but that's a manageable amount of amendments at the moment, probably. [00:39:00] And if they're not all selected, some of them may well be out, considered outside the scope of the bill, particularly the new clauses. One of the rules about selecting a new clause is that if it could be better done by an amendment to the text of the bill, then the new clause is not going to be selected because it's just an attempt to jump the queue. So who knows whether the new clauses will be selected.

Ruth Fox: There's still quite a way to go, isn't there, in terms of time MPs have got to table them. I mean, as we are recording this on, there is now yeah, 25th of April MPs, I think it's usually three days.

So they've got to table any amendments by that time. The House rises on Tuesday the 13th of May, so it's still a while, yeah.

Paul Evans: Still plenty of time now. If it had taken place today, that was what would've been the list, but I'm sure there would've been others added.

Ruth Fox: Yeah.

Paul Evans: So that's basically how you read the amendment paper.

Ruth Fox: And just one final question, Paul, about tactics we've talked about. Report Stages, procedural hurdles, you know, we've talked about potential to flood the order paper with amendments to fill out time, [00:40:00] delaying tactics in the voting lobbies. One of the things that's often raised in debate is this idea that, MPs will speak at length.

They'll try and filibuster the debate to take up a lot of time, but formally, procedurally, that's not permitted. So what will happen if the Speaker thinks that an MP is trying to drone on at length, if I can put it that way,

Paul Evans: The Speaker has power to sit a member down if they become irrelevant or are repeating themselves, or are clearly spinning the thing out. They will begin by drawing the member's attention to the fact they seem to be drifting away from the point and their speech is not relevant to any of the amendments in the group. They will become increasingly strict and keep on doing this until they lose their patience, tell the member, unless they terminate their speech within a couple of minutes, they will sit them down and they do have power to sit a member down, and order them to stop speaking. And if you defy that order, you are in big trouble and the Speaker could have ultimately name [00:41:00] you or just throw you out of the chamber without naming you.

Mark D'Arcy: But there isn't, is there a any kind of time limit here? And as long as the MP who's speaking manages to keep within the kind of just a minute rules and avoid deviation, repetition, et cetera, they can go on for quite a long time.

Paul Evans: Yes. It's quite difficult because in my experience, occupants of the chair all are more or less good and forcing a bit of discipline.

Even when a member is keeping in line with the letter of the law, they may be breaching the spirit of the law. And chairs will be more or less strict about making them actually get on with things.

Mark D'Arcy: And, one of the telltale signs is often what's known in the trade is in flight refueling, where, you know, someone's flagging a bit and an ally interrupts them.

Will my honorable friend give way? I'm delighted to give way to my honorable friend. He's a great expert on this subject. I thank my honorable friend for giving way. He's being most generous with his time and he's making an excellent speech. And, you know, you've wasted a couple of minutes with parliamentary courtesies without having said anything substantial and the chair can't really do anything about it.

Paul Evans: Yeah, they can't, except [00:42:00] express their disapproval and make sure that the member who's doing the interventions doesn't get called to speak in the debate later on, doesn't succeed in catching the Speaker's eye. So there are moral pressures that can be applied. Filibustering is in theory, in its technical sense, not permitted within the rules, but members try hard to make their speeches very long. And the longest recorded speech is supposed to be 16 hours and something, I think it is, by a Labour member called John Golding on the Telecommunications Bill 1983. But, that was in fact in standing committees, what we called public bill committees in those days.

So it was spread over several sittings. And, he couldn't be closured because he was moving an amendment and he had spotted the fact that the closure can only be done to put the question, not to propose it. So eventually, when everybody had listened to him for 16 hours and come to a state of complete hysteria, the chair of the committee applied to the House for a new [00:43:00] standing order power, new power, to allow what we now call the Golding Closure, where you can claim that the question be proposed. Because there's only once you've made the question be proposed that you can then have it put. So I think that still stands as the record, but as I say, it was a bit of a cheat because it was spread over more than one sitting of the standing committee.

Mark D'Arcy: I still have post-traumatic memories of watching a guy called Andrew Dismore making a very, very long speech in a private member's bill, and when there was a change of the Deputy Speaker presiding over the debate, he simply took some pages of the speech that he already read out, put them on the top and read 'em out again.

The Deputy Speaker didn't notice and I think almost everybody else was too shell shocked by that stage to spot it either. Well, Paul Evans, that's a very handy insight into the very considerable intricacies of Report Stage proceedings. I suppose we're going to have to find a, an equivalent of your good self to talk us through what might happen in the Lords if the bill gets through.

But thanks very [00:44:00] much indeed for joining us on Parliament Matters and I'll make some recommendations

Paul Evans: And when we get to consideration of the Lord's Amendments, you'll need me again.

Mark D'Arcy: Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Ruth Fox: Thanks Paul. See you soon.

Paul Evans: Thank you. Bye-bye.

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