Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Indeed. As the hon. Gentleman said earlier, a privileges Act will be needed at some point, and I hope that the Government turn to such legislation. I realise that there are problems with any written or ““codified””—to use the Minister's term—constitution, because one risks making it justiciable and must then decide what will be the justice that oversees it. Will it be a supreme court or a constitutional court, such as many other countries have? That is a debate for another day, however. The issue of the Speaker's certificate can be addressed only in relation to how it is operated in motions of no confidence, so I do not intend to stray far, Mrs Primarolo, from the specific issues involved. Nevertheless, in the previous debate the Minister said that all the amendments dealt with wildly hypothetical situations. Those were not his precise words, but broadly speaking that is what he meant, and he was right in a sense. When one starts writing bits of the constitution into statute, however, one has to provide for the hypothetical situation that suddenly arises when, for example, voters have cast their votes not so conveniently as to provide for a single majority party in government, or when a party—as has happened regularly over the past 200 years—has collapsed into two parties and is not able to sustain itself in power. It is important that we consider the unlikely outcomes that might transpire, because if they were to transpire they would provide us with an enormous constitutional headache, and we would have literally no means of sorting them out, because we would have no other court to appeal to in order to sort out the constitutional row. For instance, if the monarch decided to sack the Prime Minister—this point was raised earlier—other than revolution I know of no other means that we would have to enforce what we all understand to be the proper constitutional settlement. I presume that the Government have drawn up the provision on the Speaker's certificate as they have done in an attempt to mirror provisions in the Parliament Act 1911, as amended of course in 1949. In an attempt to ensure that in accordance with the Bill of Rights the courts did not interfere in parliamentary proceedings, that legislation tried to provide a cast-iron process whereby the Speaker could certificate that certain Bills were money Bills and did not, therefore, have to go through the same process in the House of Lords as other Bills. It also provided that if a money Bill were amended or not passed by their Lordships within a certain period—I think it is a month—it would be automatically be sent to Her Majesty for Royal Assent. I also presume that the Government have used that legislation to draw up the legislation before us, because section 1(3) of the 1911 Act states that"““the Speaker shall consult, if practicable, two members to be appointed from the Chairmen's Panel at the beginning of each Session by the Committee of Selection.””" That process still occurs, and Mr Speaker doubtless went through it before he recently certified several Bills as money Bills. There is a difficulty, however, with transposing that provision directly into provisions for a situation in which the Government have lost a motion of no confidence, or into measures that provide the Speaker with a series of fairly significant powers. The Speaker will get to decide when to issue that certificate. As the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex has already said, that means that the Speaker will decide whether nodding people through when Members are on the parliamentary estate and a Whip, by agreement between the Whips from both sides, nods them through at the end of a vote by saying, ““And two more,”” is allowed. The Speaker will decide also, for instance, whether 14 days have passed since the no confidence motion has been carried. That is important, because past debates on a motion of no confidence might have started at 3.30 in the afternoon, but they certainly did not finish by midnight; sometimes, they took up the whole of the next day's business. In parliamentary terms, Members were still on the first day, so the question whether 14 days had transpired would be a moot point. Further, the Speaker will decide what is a motion of no confidence. I therefore presume that, similarly, he will decide what is a motion of confidence. The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that many of those issues could be dealt with in Standing Orders. That would be very helpful to the House on the question of what counts as a motion of no confidence or of confidence, in particular, because this is a matter not of partisan advantage or ideological divide, but of trying to ensure that there are practical measures to obviate a constitutional disaster should the moment arise. It would be helpful if the Minister were able to tell us whether he is minded to suggest to the Deputy Leader of the House that there should be motions to change the Standing Orders of this House to make some of the conventions that currently exist part of Standing Orders. For instance, there is the question whether we should have in Standing Orders the provision that when the Opposition demand a motion of no confidence it should usually be provided, say, within 24 or 48 hours, or provision concerning how the Speaker goes about the certification process.