The Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg recommends that for any government to successfully attempt to deliver reform in the UK they should be able to govern over a fixed-term period of five years.
Under a tight deadline, the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee collated the ‘Fixed-term Parliaments Bill’ (HC 436) in response to this proposal. The principle behind the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill is that it is wrong for a Prime Minister to be able to time a general election to his own partisan advantage.
Views on whether a fixed-term Parliament would be a beneficial development were mixed; the Committee raised concerns about the consequences of a premature end to the fixed-term.
The Bill provides that an early election would only be held if either:
- at least two thirds of the Members of the House so agreed, or
- if within 14 days no Government had formed that had shown that it could command the House’s confidence.
Contributor to the Bill and Professor of Constitutional Law at Kings College London, Robert Blackburn, argued that of all governments that have run for five years in the past, “the last year of every one has been pretty awful”.
In light of the weaknesses of the proposal, the Committee highlighted key strengths of fixed-term elections, including:
- A greater degree of predictability and continuity
- More certainty about planning for a government’s legislative programme, including proper parliamentary scrutiny of the programme
- Far less space for political and media speculation about the likely date of the election, which has been a negative distraction in recent years.
Due to the rushed timetable for this Bill to be put forward, no clear conclusion has been made. There is no urgency for the Bill because the Prime Minister has volunteered not to call a General Election before May 2015. There is therefore time for the Bill to be redrafted and for the issue to be fully investigated.
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