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Report from the House of Commons Reform Committee on Rebuilding the House

I agree. I am not going to address the role of Select Committees, because the subject is too large, but the fundamental point about them is far more significant than the fact that they should be elected; it is that they should be given resources. Our Select Committees are very modest in comparison with their congressional counterparts, and they have very limited ability to get ahead of the political agenda and to start to set it in the way congressional committees do. We are going to need to look at that further. The key point is the importance of having control over the timetable from which the House currently suffers. The present arrangements are damaging in two particular respects. First, far too much legislation passes through this House without proper scrutiny—indeed, not just without proper scrutiny, but with barely any scrutiny at all, as has been pointed out. Let us remind ourselves of what Lord Butler, the former Cabinet Secretary, said this month: "Successive Governments have come to take Parliament for granted so they rush through very bad legislation." As has been pointed out, we now rely almost wholly on the other place to do the job of scrutiny that we are elected to carry out. That leads to the second danger: our powerlessness in the House damages the whole credibility of our democracy. If the hon. Member for Gloucester reflects on the other points that he raised, he will see that this is the key point. We are elected to the House for three principal purposes: to prevent the abuse of power, to ensure the passing of good laws, and to raise money for the Government, while guaranteeing that it is spent wisely, as was said earlier. Who today honestly believes that the House begins to carry out those functions effectively? That brings me to the separation of powers. When Montesquieu studied the British constitution in action in his "The Spirit of Laws" of 1748, he observed, albeit partly mistakenly, the separation of powers between the Executive, the legislature and the judiciary. The separation of powers has become a founding principle of democratic constitutions around the world; it is not something that we should fear, but something that we should seek to promote. It is particularly exemplified in the constitution of the United States. In fact, there never can be a complete separation of powers. The US President, for example, can veto new laws—a legislative function. He also personally appoints new Supreme Court justices. However, the founding fathers of the US constitution would have shuddered at the idea that the White House could determine the weekly business in the House of Representatives. Yet that is what our Government can do in our Parliament. That is not Montesquieu's separation of powers, but a fusion of powers.