Legislative Agenda
Bills fallen, Bills passed, Bills yet to be
With Parliament returning next week from its summer recess and the end of the parliamentary Session looming, ahead of the King’s Speech on November 7th, where is the current Conservative Government up to in its legislative agenda?
The 2022-23 legislative logjam
The current parliamentary Session began in May 2022 with the Government's legislative agenda in the 2022 Queen’s Speech, delivered for the first time by the then-Prince Charles in the absence of his ailing mother, the late Queen, including proposals for almost 40 Bills.
This time last year, in one of my first newsletters, I noted that the Government had made slow progress given its 80-seat majority.
However, in May 2023, one year in to the Session, poor progress had been made, with 28 of the Bills tabled since the 2022 Queen’s Speech still without Royal Assent.
It was indicative of the crisis in Government during that first year of the Session — with Boris Johnson and Liz Truss both being brought down by their own party — that proportionately greater progress was made with non-Queen’s Speech Bills (i.e. not part of the legislative agenda but tabled later in a more ad-hoc fashion) than Queen’s Speech Bills.
That gap remained when Parliament went on summer recess in July.
This shows a Government unable (or unwilling) to carry out the legislative agenda it was elected on — again, with an 80-seat majority! — and having to respond to short-term crises (energy, Ukraine, cost-of-living, small boats, breakdown at Stormont, death of a monarch, etc.) rather than long-term plans.
On top of that, several controversial pieces of legislation faced stiff opposition in the House of Lords, which was able to delay progress through parliamentary ping-pong.
The state of play as of this summer
As Parliament went on its summer recess in July, it had moved on a little, with 61% of Bills introduced in the Session having received Royal Assent, including the flagship Illegal Migration Bill.
However, many Bills mentioned in the 2022 Queen’s Speech were never introduced or were dropped, such as the controversial Bill of Rights Bill, which was officially shelved in June.
There are ten Bills in play that the Government have to bring to completion before prorogation ahead of the November 7 state opening and the new Session, eight of which are currently in their second House (having passed through the Commons but not Lords or vice versa) and therefore cannot be carried over to the next Session.
The Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill, the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill, and the Procurement Bill are already in ping-pong between the two Houses and could be concluded soon.
The Online Safety Bill and the the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill have been amended in the House of Lords and so will need to return to the Commons before receiving Royal Assent.
The inability of the Government to pass those two flagship pieces of legislation thus far, both of which had their Second Reading over a year ago, is indicative of the failure of the Government’s legislative agenda this Session.
The Data Protection and Digital Information (No. 2) Bill, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill, the Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill, and the Victims and Prisoners Bill, as well as the High Speed Rail (Crewe – Manchester) Bill and the Holocaust Memorial Bill, are set to be carried over to the 2023-24 Session.
The draft Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Bill, the draft Media Bill and the draft Mental Health Bill, have all undergone pre-legislative scrutiny from Select Committees and could be introduced in the autumn or in the new King’s Speech.
What to expect in the autumn and the King’s Speech
Looking ahead, Penny Mordaunt told the House of Commons in June that a Bill to ban so-called conversion therapy would be published “very shortly” and would “go to pre-legislative scrutiny to be ready for the fourth Session”.
Back in February, Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, told the House of Commons:
“We hope, in the forthcoming King’s Speech, to introduce legislation to fundamentally reform the [leasehold] system.”
He was referring to Government plans dating back to 2017 to to tackle the growing problem of newly built houses sold as leasehold rather than freehold, and to limit ground rents on new lease agreements, a system Gove decried as a “feudal form of tenure”.
The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, which the UK joined in July, requires some changes to Government procurement and intellectual property law through primary legislation.
There is a raft of draft secondary legislation dealing with financial services reform subsequent to Jeremy Hunt’s Mansion House speech in July, including regulations to reform Solvency II, the prudential regulatory framework for insurers and reinsurers, the draft documents to which note that:
“The Government expects that reform of the risk margin will be in force in legislation by year end 2023… [and] is considering options to enable reforms to the matching adjustment to come into force by the end of June 2024, and the remainder of the new regime will come into force by year end 2024.”
It is also worth paying attention, as I noted last week, to the looming December 31 deadline, which will bring the removal from the statute books of specified pieces of retained EU law (REUL) — after the controversial “sunset clause” abolishing all remaining REUL was amended in May.
Bills to campaign on
More speculatively, Rishi Sunak could use the King’s Speech to introduce legislation aimed at clawing back some points from Labour in the polls, ahead of the general election, and establishing his leadership over a divided Conservative Party, which he needs to be singing from the same hymn sheet on the doorstep.
Given the controversy over the ULEZ environmental policy, which allowed the Conservatives to hold on in the Uxbridge by-election, there could be new energy policy trying to seize that momentum, but that could depend on the true colours of new Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero — and Sunak loyalist — Claire Coutinho.
Crime will be a campaigning theme for both parties in the next year. Law and order has already been the talking point over the past week or so, with the Government announcing plans to make offenders face their sentencing, through the use of “reasonable force” (whatever that means), promising that “Legislation to introduce these changes will be set out in due course”.
Political commentator Katy Balls wrote earlier this month that the King’s Speech will include “at least two crime bills… involving tougher sentencing”.
Further appeals to voters on illegal immigration could be made through the strategy outlined by former PM Boris Johnson in his Daily Mail column to “get Rwanda done” (sound familiar?), suggesting the Government should “take further steps and, if required… change the law”.
The Government will be going to the Supreme Court to appeal the Court of Appeal’s decision that plans to send asylum seekers to the east African nation were unlawful.
So, if the Supreme Court rejects the Government’s appeal, there could be some kind of human rights related legislative agenda, too, perhaps reviving aspects of the binned Bill of Rights Bill.
However, Sunak seems reticent to endorse calls from some on the Tory Backbenches for the UK to leave the ECHR.
Some are even suggesting the Tories could campaign on a promise to legislate for a “Brexit part II” referendum on leaving the ECHR, though that seems unlikely for now.
It’s a fault-line he will have to navigate carefully if he isn’t to meet the fate of his predecessors after Tory party conference at the start of October.
The penultimate Budget before the election?
Then there is also the autumn Budget to look forward to, with Jeremy Hunt set to double down on tackling inflation.
Hunt told the Financial Times in July that the autumn Budget would not include popular tax cuts if they risked exacerbating inflation, despite pressure from within his own party to lower taxes.
And he admitted that meeting Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s promise to halve inflation by the end of the year was “going to be more challenging than we thought”.
Maybe the election-friendly policies are being saved for the spring Budget… ahead of a general election (!) expected either in May or October 2024.
Parliamentary Insight
Parliamentary Insight will be there along the way with analysis to keep you informed.
Going forward, this newsletter will be landing in your inboxes every Saturday with analysis of central and sidelined debates and Select Committee hearings in Parliament.
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