Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

The problem with that argument is that, yes, it is true that if the election is in May then normally you have the Queen’s Speech the following year, in November. But if there is an election in October—and one that I vividly remember is the one in October 1974, because it was when the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, went out and I came in—the Queen’s Speech is the following November. The convention is that the Queen’s Speech is in November and if the sequence of elections means that that does not happen, it is quite right that there is a long Session of 18 months. There is a bit of a case for that, I suppose; all Governments are wild with enthusiasm when they come in and have lots of exciting things to propose, such as Fixed-term Parliament Bills, and so on. So it goes for a longish Session. But this was a choice for the Government, once they had decided that there would be a five-year Parliament, between having a year Session or a two-year Session. If he thinks there is not much to choose between an 18-month Session, which as he rightly says obtains when there is a May election, and a two-year Session, let me say that it would have been heaven to me as Chief Whip to have had a two-year Session. There is no pressure on you and no trouble; you can spend as long as you like on Committee and Report stages, and so on. So I do not think that that argument held up very well. I do not suggest evil intent on the part of the Minister or anyone else in the Government in this respect at all. I am simply saying that not much thought went into what was in fact a quite substantial shift of power between Government and Opposition. As I said, that is a pretty delicate matter in our parliamentary procedures in both Houses, because it shifted the balance of power substantially in favour of the Government. I thought that the Minister really gave the game away in this second sentence: "““There was an option to truncate the Session about now, but it was thought that the best thing to do was to go to next year””.—[Official Report, 21/3/11; col. 526.]" The question from where I am standing is: the best thing to do for whom? In whose interest was it unilaterally to determine that there should be a two-year Session? I simply put two questions to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace. First, was there any consultation through the normal channels about the Government's decision unilaterally to decide, for the first time in the past 30 or 40 years—I am sure that the historians could go much further—on a two-year Session which is massively to the Government’s advantage? Secondly, I really would like to know, once it was determined to be the ““best thing to do””, in whose interest the decision was thought to be made. I beg to move.