Make Parliament Work
22 Apr 2022To improve the quality of legislation we wish to see a much higher level of prelegislative scrutiny for every bill before parliament.
We would investigate measures intended to reduce the power of party leaders and front-benchers in parliament.
We would investigate the possibility of permanent elected legislative committees for each government department in the Commons rather than ad hoc public bill committees. There are a number of approaches that could work in this area and we would aim to trial a number of options to decide which is likely to be the most effective.
We would implement an evidence-taking stage for all bills in addition to pre-legislative scrutiny. We would limit the use rules to restrict debate in the Commons to cases of actual abuse of the rules of the House. We would roll out post-legislative scrutiny on all important policy-changing bills before new bills on the same subject are considered.
We would require the maintenance of a register of lobbyists as well as a record of all meetings between lobbyists and legislators or government officials.