How Well Does Parliament Perform Its Various Functions?

'The House of Lords is now more effective than the House of Commons in checking government power'. Discuss

Any proposed amendments by the House of Lords have to be approved by the House of Commons, as this is where the government dominates, which can mean no amendments go through.

Legislation is a law or a couple of laws made by the government and finalised by the parliament. The parliament decides whether the legislation is good enough or needs improvement.

The executive branch in a parliament is held accountable to the legislative branch and the head of the government. A parliament is usually found in the United Kingdom, like Great Britain and other Asian Areas that were once ruled by Britain. The Parliament has two houses. There is an upper house and a lower house. The upper house is known as the Senate and the lower house is known as the National Assembly. A Prime Minister is elected by the majority of the parliament party vote. They are expected to follow all rules and laws strictly. The parliament has a house of the Lord and House of the commons. The parliament is under a Prime Minister. To be a member of a parliament, one must be chosen by a political party. If a bill goes before a parliament, it is done by a majority vote for the bill to pass. In Congress the selection is done by the people based upon their political career, plans and profile and future while they are serving in office (Wilson, Dilulio, Jr. and Bose

Before evaluating whether or not Parliament is sovereign, it’s important to define what sovereignty means. Sovereignty can be split into two; political and legal. Legal sovereignty is the ultimate power to make laws which will be enforced within the state. Members of Parliament and the Prime Minister have ultimate legal power because they propose and enforce legislation. Citizens have no legal sovereignty because they don’t play a role in the legislative function even though pressure group activity may influence decisions. Political sovereignty is where real political power lies, and depending on the situation political sovereignty doesn’t always lie within Parliament. Critics have argued that due to recent changes, Parliament is no longer

Parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law are both concepts that are key to shaping the British constitution, however there is ambiguity as to which concept is the heart of the UK’s constitutional arrangement in the recent years.

A Bill has a number of stages that it goes through before it is presented to the Queen to be signed. It starts off as a discussion in the House of Commons, and if decided to be an effective new policy idea then it is sent off

A secondary way in which parliamentary sovereignty in the UK can be seen to be moving is though the introduction of devolution which is challenging the UK parliament’s sovereignty. The UK is a unitary state, so only one body can in theory

Parliament has a central function in carrying out a scrutiny role. It carries close inspection and where it is necessary, amendments maybe proposed this is carried out in both houses. It holds the government collectively and the PM and other ministers accountable for their actions. It does this in debates, question times and through the work of Departmental Select Committees (DSC). However it maybe be argued that is not enough since scrutiny does not often involve blocking legislation. It is not expected that parliament will make substantial changes, but it does

The checks and balances that the founders of our country put into place to limit the power of the executive branch have failed and allowed the Prime Minister to gather unprecedented and unchecked power. There is a need to establish or re-establish effective checks for the prime minister, at different steps along the policy making process. The traditional checks and balances on the executive branch have come from the house of commons, the senate, and the Governor General. These institutions are meant to work together to ensure that the country is being governed fairly and in the name of the people. However, over the last thirty years the power has been moving away from the legislative branch towards the executive. In a system where majority

For many years it has been argued that parliamentary sovereignty has, and still is, being eroded. As said by AV Dicey, the word ‘sovereignty’ is used to describe the idea of “the power of law making unrestricted by any legal limit”. Parliamentary sovereignty is a principle of the UK constitution, stating that Parliament is the supreme legal authority in the UK, able to create and remove any law. This power over-rules courts and all other jurisdiction. It also cannot be entrenched; this is where all laws passed by the party in government can be changed by future parliaments. In recent years sovereignty of parliament has been a

The House of Lords is the second chamber of the UK Parliament and is independent to the Commons although it complements the work of the Commons. Members of the Lords play a vital role in scrutiny, there are two main reasons for this, the first being that they are independent to the Commons and in many ways have increased power which they often use to stand up to the Commons by blocking reforms. Lords also have a better balance of parties so no government has a majority. The Government however can override Lords by using Parliament Act; this was used when the fox hunting ban was being put through under Blair’s government as there were too many in opposition of the ban in the House of Lords. The Parliament Acts, although rarely used, provide a way of solving disagreement between the Commons and the Lords. The Parliament Act of 1949 also prevents Lords from delaying bills for more than one year.

“Parliamentary sovereignty is no longer, if it ever was, absolute” (Lord Hope). Discuss with reference to at least three challenges to the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. Parliamentary sovereignty is the concept that Parliament has the power to repeal, amend or create any law it wishes and therefore no body in the UK can challenge its legal validity. There are many people who would argue that this is a key principle to the UK Constitution, on the other hand, there are those who strongly believe that this idea is one of the past, and that the idea of the UK Parliament being sovereign is false. One of these people is Lord Hope, who said “Parliamentary sovereignty is no longer, if it ever was, absolute”. During the last 50 years there have been a variety of developments that have proved to be a challenge for the legitimacy of parliamentary sovereignty, and the ones which will be examined in this essay are: the devolution of powers to the Scottish Parliament; The United Kingdom’s entry into the European Union in 1973; and finally the power of judicial review. Starting with the devolution of powers, these challenges will all be evaluated when discussing whether or not the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty applies to the United Kingdom. Westminster’s sovereignty has been gradually diminishing over time as varying amounts of power have been devolved to Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland. In this essay, the devolution of powers to the Scottish Parliament will be

There is a House of Commons Select Committee for each department within Whitehall. These were set up to scrutinise government and hold them to account. The formation of these committees consist of a minimum of 11 members and look at three aspects of each department – Administration, Policies and Spending. With this established, we will be looking at the policy aspect of scrutiny and evaluate how much Select Committees influence the content of legislation. The paper will be structured by starting with the analysis of current literature on this topic and trying to pinpoint what has already been stated about the influence select committees have

A majority of judges even said obiter that Parliament could not extend its lifetime beyond five years, even if the 1911 Act was to be expressly repealed and the extension bill then passed. That leads to the question if there are basic constitutional rules that parliament simply cannot change. Lord Steyn and Lord Woolf held that the courts might have to revisit the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, if Parliament sought ‘to abolish judicial review of flagrant abuse of power by government or even the role of the ordinary courts in standing between the executive and citizens’. In such an event, the court might have to ‘qualify’ the supremacy of Parliament, ‘a principle established on a different hypothesis of constitutionalism’.