Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill

It is precisely because there have been at least two elections of the kind that the hon. Gentleman draws attention to that the Fixed-term Parliaments Act has not done what it said on the tin. It has failed the Ronseal test. For those who advocated the Fixed-term Parliaments Act in the first place, all sorts of arguments were made about the importance of the predictability of election timing, and, of course, the Bill palpably failed to achieve that in the way that it failed to achieve so much else. What we are doing with this legislation is restoring a tried and tested method by which Prime Ministers can command the confidence not just of this House, but of the country.