No. There is a remedy, but it is not enforceable in the courts. It is essentially at the discretion of Ministers because it is a proceeding in Parliament and therefore not challengeable outside.
Parliament is very unwise to bring its proceedings into legislation because it is of such constitutional importance that our proceedings are not judicially reviewable. If we legislate in such a way that we bring our proceedings into the orbit of the courts, we have to be careful about whether a judge may feel that Parliament’s intention was to allow the courts to interfere, overriding the Bill of Rights. I therefore take the greatest exception to clauses 2(3) and (4), which are erroneous in terms of what Parliament ought to be trying to do.
The Government really ought to be held to account for clause 5. They removed from the Bill a detailed, if perhaps rather expensive, way of holding the Government to account and put in something of the most utter wishy-washiness.
I return to the question of whether this Bill increases or decreases trust in politicians. When the House of Commons, and later the House of Lords, legislate to say merely that it is nice to do something, but with no means of enforcing it, and failing to use all the procedures that we have at our command to make sure that it happens, are we assuming that electors do not understand what we are doing and that we can pull the wool over their eyes? Will they not look at what we are doing? This is not a real keeping of the commitment that was made. It is a minimalistic, tokenistic approach to pretending that we have done what we said we would do, because when we looked at what we had proposed in our respective manifestos we realised that it was a silly thing to do
because the hypothecation of expenditure is fundamentally unwise in any budgetary system. For that reason, I will oppose Third Reading.
1.49 pm