Search

This article examines the nature and implications of reforms to the House of Commons that were implemented during the 2001–5 Parliament under the guise of ‘modernisation’. It describes the reforms that were implemented during this period in order to enhance the House of Commons' scrutiny capacity over the executive and attempts to assess the degree to which these reforms represent a shift in the balance of power. In order to ground the analysis and provide a clear conceptualisation of power the article adopts a resource-dependency framework that identifies and traces the transfer and deployment of key resources in order to prevent or facilitate change. The article concludes that the common distinction between ‘modernising parliament’ and ‘parliamentary reform’ needs refining and offers an ‘incremental-bounded reform’ model which provides a framework for not only gauging and understanding the process of reform but also explaining the nature of restraints. This model suggests that scrutiny reforms implemented during 2001–5 should not be dismissed, particularly in the context of the parliamentary decline thesis. A number of significant ‘cracks and wedges’ have been achieved and these may expand over time through a gradual process of extension, accretion and spillover. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the paradoxes of parliamentary reform. Focusing mainly on the House of Commons, the first section highlights the contradictory roles of parliament and utilizes a distinction between the ‘Whig’ and ‘Peelite’ conceptions of the Whitehall-Westminster model to demonstrate the ambiguities and tensions that exist. This framework is then applied to a case study of parliamentary reform under Labour governments since 1997 in the second section. The third section emphasizes that parliament cannot be studied in isolation. It suggests that the British constitution is at a critical historical, political and institutional juncture in which a number of inter-linked emerging agendas are altering the relationship between parliament and the executive. The significance of these emerging agendas is that, unlike internal reform of parliament, they are largely beyond the executive’s control. The combined influence of these factors is likely to impel the executive, at some point, to support a coherent and far-reaching reappraisal of the structure, role and powers of parliament. Consequently the degree to which Britain ( de facto ) remains a parliamentary state will be subject to intense and increasing debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]