Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

We chose 2020 in order to ensure that the committee has had the experience of a full fixed term. After all, the Bill is not law yet. We argue that a fixed term is good not only because that takes that power away from the Prime Minister, but because it enables us to have a much more sensible set of arrangements. I hope it might mean that we would no longer need to have a wash-up process, because everybody would know when the parliamentary term would end. It may also help with handling pre-legislative scrutiny at the front end of the process—something for which we have been criticised. If a Government can be certain when a Parliament starts, how long it will last and how much time they will have, that will enable them to plan their legislative programme, including pre-legislative scrutiny, through that Session, which may result in some improvements. Such benefits will be properly seen only in the Parliament beginning in 2015; they will not be seen in this Parliament because the arrangements were not in place from the beginning of it. That is the reason for the 2020 date. The reason for the other two dates that the hon. Gentleman mentioned is simply to make sure that the commitment to set up a Committee is not open ended, in which case some people might lack confidence in whether the Prime Minister would set it up. The Prime Minister has to set it up between those two dates; those dates refer to the arrangements to set up the Committee. [Interruption.] Well, it would depend on what the Committee was looking at and how long that would take. It will not have to report by 30 November. That seemed an appropriate situation, and it is only a short period after the date of an election, so it did not seem to be an undue delay.