Select committee: Constitution Committee
Conclusion 14
12th Report - A Question of Confidence? The Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011
Published 4 Sep 2020
Paragraph 87
Constitution Committee Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Conclusion (the committee's words)
A government’s authority derives from possessing the confidence of the House of Commons. The Fixed-term Parliaments Act did not change this constitutional principle, but it has clouded the situation. It is now possible for the Government to retain the confidence of the House of Commons in a statutory sense—winning a vote on a motion of no confidence—while having lost it in the political sense of lacking support for a key part of its policy agenda.
From: Constitution Committee, 12th Report - A Question of Confidence? The Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011, paragraph 87, 4 September 2020
Government response
The government responded to the whole report on 1 December 2020 (deadline 4 November 2020).
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response. It is not the government's own words.The Government says its draft Bill will repeal the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 and revive the pre-2011 prerogative powers over dissolution, so that no Commons vote is required.
- It agrees that these powers should not be "abrogated to the Courts", and the draft Bill contains an ouster clause making their exercise and limits non-justiciable.
- It agrees that certainty on term length is desirable: the draft Bill provides that, if an election is not called earlier, Parliament will automatically dissolve five years after it first met.
- It considers the two-thirds majority requirement under the FTPA "undesirable", and says confidence motions operate most effectively as a matter of convention rather than in statutory form.
- It does not accept that the power to set the date of the election should be given to the Commons or be subject to Parliamentary approval.