On its benefits Bill too, Labour is avoiding scrutiny with Parliamentary trickery

Telegraph

2 days ago

It has become hard to judge whether Sir Keir Starmer has had a good or a bad week. With his first anniversary as Prime Minister only a few days away, his net approval rating, according to a recent opinion poll, is -39 per cent, worse than any other party leader.
Labour cannot pretend that it is just Starmer dragging it down either. An Ipsos survey this month showed that only 25 per cent of those surveyed would vote Labour at the next general election: that share of the vote would be its worst performance since the Coupon Election of 1918.
The most pressing woe for Starmer and his ministerial team is next week's Second Reading debate on the Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill. The Government hoped that welfare reforms would save £5 billion a year by 2030 and slow the increase in the number of benefit claimants. These cuts were too swingeing for many Labour members, some of whom intoned the value-free and knee-jerk anguished plea, 'I didn't become a Labour MP to cut benefits for disabled people'.
The danger became real when reasoned amendments were tabled. These are amendments saying 'this House declines to give the Bill a second reading' and then explaining the objections, and are a standard way of opposing a Bill at Second Reading. But one of the reasoned amendments was in the name of Dame Meg Hillier, the Labour chair of the Treasury Committee and hardly a natural rebel; more than 120 of her colleagues signed it. That would be enough to overturn even Starmer's 174-seat majority.
The situation was not just bad but potentially catastrophic. Only twice in the past 50 years have government Bills been defeated at Second Reading, the more recent being the Shops Bill, which was lost by 14 votes in April 1986. Then, the government took defeat on the chin and did not seek to bring the measures back.
The Prime Minister may have averted that humiliation: he has conceded that there will be no cuts in benefits to existing claimants, and a £1 billion support plan scheduled for 2029 will be brought forward. Hillier and others have said they can now support the Bill, though a hard core of Left-wingers are likely still to oppose it. It also remains to be seen where the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, will find the estimated £1.5 billion these concessions have been estimated to cost.
Even before this expensive white flag was waved, ministers had been looking for salvation through sleight of hand. When the Leader of the Commons, Lucy Powell, announced the House's future business on Thursday, the Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill was set down for consideration in Committee of the whole House and all remaining stages on Wednesday 9 July, just eight days after MPs debate it for the first time.
Most Bills are sent to a committee, generally of 17 MPs, which goes through the text line-by-line and can also hear evidence on the subject. A small number are taken in Committee of the whole House, which happens in the Commons chamber and is open to all members. It is generally used for major constitutional Bills or measures which have to be passed very quickly, and the Universal Credit Bill does not sit easily in any of the usual categories of eligible Bills.
What this procedure does mean is that there will be no opportunity for hearing evidence from those who will be affected by the Bill. It gives very little time for members to consider and table amendments, and it will see the entire remaining consideration of the Bill by the House of Commons compressed into about six hours, including votes. I have sat through individual select committee hearings not much shorter than that.
The business managers' coup de grâce (perhaps coup de main?) is that it expects the Bill to be certified as a Money Bill. This process, decided by the Speaker, applies to any Bill which 'contains only provisions dealing with national, but not local, taxation, public money or loans or their management', and under the terms of the Parliament Act 1911 it is effectively waved through the House of Lords and can, if necessary, be passed without the assent of the upper House.
Squeezing the whole Commons stage of the Bill into two days, battering through them within little more than a week, seeking to have it effectively insulated from the House of Lords… perhaps this is what 'mission-driven government' looks like. Not quite what I had in mind.
Eliot Wilson is a former House of Commons clerk