Everything about Parliament Act 1911 totally explained
The
Parliament Acts are two
Acts of
Parliament of the
United Kingdom, passed in 1911 and 1949, that form part of the
Constitution of the United Kingdom.
The first Parliament Act, the
Parliament Act 1911 (1 & 2 Geo. 5. c. 13), asserted the supremacy of the
House of Commons by limiting the legislation-blocking powers of the
House of Lords (the
suspensory veto). Provided the provisions of the Act are met, legislation can be passed without the approval of the House of Lords. Additionally, the 1911 Act amended the
Septennial Act to reduce the maximum permitted time between
general elections from seven years to five years. The first Parliament Act was amended by the second Parliament Act, the
Parliament Act 1949 (12, 13 & 14 Geo. 6. c. 103), which further limited the power of the Lords by reducing the time that they could delay bills, from two years to one.
The Parliament Acts have been used to pass legislation against the wishes of the House of Lords on only seven occasions since 1911, including the passing of the Parliament Act 1949. Some constitutional lawyers had questioned the validity of the 1949 Act; these doubts were settled in 2005 when members of the
Countryside Alliance unsuccessfully challenged the validity of the
Hunting Act 2004, which had been passed under the auspices of the Act. In October 2005, the
House of Lords dismissed the Alliance's appeal against this decision, with an unusually large panel of nine
Law Lords holding that the 1949 Act was a valid Act of Parliament.
Parliament Act 1911
The purpose of the Parliament Act 1911 is explained by its
long title:
» An Act to make provision with respect to the powers of the House of Lords in relation to those of the House of Commons, and to limit the duration of Parliament. This new tax would have had a major effect on large landowners, and was opposed by the
Conservative opposition, many of whom were large landowners themselves. The Conservatives believed that money should be raised through the introduction of
tariffs on
imports, which they claimed would help British industry. Contrary to British constitutional convention, the Conservatives used their large majority in the Lords to vote down the Budget, but for the Liberals built on the wide-spread unpopularity of the Lords to make reducing the power of the Lords an important issue of the
January 1910 general election.
The Liberals returned in a
hung parliament after the election: their call for action against the Lords had energised believers in hereditary principle to vote for the Conservatives, but had failed to generate much interest with the rest of the voting public. The Liberals formed a
minority government with the support of the
Labour and Irish nationalist MPs. The Lords subsequently accepted the Budget when the land tax proposal was dropped. However, as a result of the dispute over the Budget, the new government introduced resolutions (that would later form the Parliament Bill) to limit the power of the Lords. The Prime Minister,
Herbert Henry Asquith, asked
Edward VII to create sufficient new Liberal
peers to pass the Bill if the Lords rejected it. The King assented, provided that Asquith went back to the polls to obtain an explicit mandate for the constitutional change.
The Lords voted this 1910 Bill down, so Asquith called a second general election in
December 1910, and again formed a minority government. Edward VII had died in May 1910, but
George V agreed that, if necessary, he'd create hundreds of new Liberal peers to neutralise the Conservative majority in the Lords. The Conservative Lords then backed down, and on
10 August 1911, the House of Lords passed the Parliament Act by a narrow 131–114 vote, with the support of some two dozen Conservative peers and eleven of thirteen
Lords Spiritual (who normally don't vote).
The Parliament Act was intended as a temporary measure. The preamble states:
» whereas it's intended to substitute for the House of Lords as it at present exists a Second Chamber constituted on a popular instead of hereditary basis, but such substitution can't be immediately brought into operation.
One of the reasons for the Irish MPs' support for the Parliament Act, and the bitterness of the
Unionist resistance, was that the loss of the Lords' veto would make possible
Irish Home Rule (for example a
devolved assembly, similar to those in place in Scotland and Wales since 1997 and in Northern Ireland technically since 2000, but in reality only since
8 May 2007). The previous Liberal government's attempt to initiate Irish Home Rule had been vetoed by the House of Lords in 1893: at the time of his retirement in 1894,
William Gladstone hadn't attracted sufficient support from his colleagues for a battle with the House of Lords.
Provisions of the 1911 Act
The 1911 Act prevented the Lords from
vetoing any public legislation that originated in and had been approved by the Commons, and imposed a maximum legislative delay of one month for "
money bills" (those dealing with
taxation) and two years for other types of bill.
Parliament Act 1949
Immediately after the
Second World War, the Labour government of
Clement Attlee decided to amend the 1911 Act to reduce further the power of the Lords, as a result of their fears that their radical programme of
nationalisation would be delayed by the Lords and hence wouldn't be completed within the life of the parliament. The House of Lords didn't interfere with nationalisations in 1945 or 1946, but it was feared that the proposed nationalisation of the iron and steel industry would be a bridge too far, so a bill was introduced in 1947 to reduce the time that the Lords could delay bills, from three sessions over two years to two sessions over one year. Since the 1911 Act required a delay over three "sessions", a special short "session" of parliament was introduced in 1948, with a
King's Speech on
14 September 1948, and
prorogation on
25 October.
Acts passed under the Parliament Act display a modified form of
enacting formula:
The usual enacting formula, used on other Acts, also refers to the advice and consent of the Lords
Spiritual and
Temporal, and omits the reference to the Parliament Acts.
Use of the Parliament Acts
The Parliament Acts have seldom been used. The 1911 Act was used only three times before its amendment in 1949. Three main concerns were raised:
The continued ability of the House of Lords to veto a bill to prolong the life of Parliament wouldn't be entrenched if the 1911 Act could be used to amend itself first, removing this restriction.
The 1949 Act could be considered to be secondary legislation, since it depended for its validity on another Act, the 1911 Act; and the principle that courts will respect an Act of Parliament without enquiring into its origins (an emanation of parliamentary sovereignty) wouldn't apply.
Under the 1911 Act, Parliament (that is, the Commons and the Lords acting together) delegated its ability to pass legislation to another body (the Commons alone). Following legal principles established when the United Kingdom granted legislative powers to assemblies in its colonies in the late 1700s, a subordinate legislative body can't use the Act under which legislative power was delegated to it to expand its competence without an express power to do so in the enabling Act (see Declaratory Act).
To address these concerns, a Law Lord, Lord Donaldson of Lymington, presented a Private Member's Bill in House of Lords in the 2000–2001 session of Parliament (the Parliament Acts (Amendment) Bill), which would have had the effect of confirming the legitimacy of the 1949 Act, but prohibiting any further such uses of the Parliament Act to amend itself, or use of it to further modify or curtail the powers of the House of Lords. Another Parliament Acts (Amendment) Bill was introduced independently by Lord Renton of Mount Harry in the next session, but neither of these Bills proceeded to a Third Reading. Because a second defendant was prosecuted under the War Crimes Act, and was sentenced to life imprisonment and since the War Crimes Act was later amended by both two further acts (the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 and the Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act 1996), which were passed by both Houses and received royal assent, the validity of War Crimes Act isn't under question. In the High Court, the wording of the 1911 Act was held not to imply any entrenchment. The Court of Appeal refused to give the Countryside Alliance permission to appeal their decision to the House of Lords; however, a petition for permission to appeal was submitted directly to the Law Lords and granted in July 2005. Argument in the case was heard on 13 and 14 July 2005 by a large committee of nine Law Lords, rather than the normal five. In a unanimous decision, the Law Lords upheld the validity of 1949 Act.
Future developments
After the "first stage" of reform of the House of Lords was implemented in the House of Lords Act 1999, the Wakeham Royal Commission on the proposal of a "second stage" of reform reported in January 2000. Subsequently, the government decided to take no action to change the legislative relationship between the House of Commons and the House of Lords.
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