Early Election Required the Government to Either Get Two-Thirds Majority Support in a Parliamentary Vote, Or Introduce a Bill Which By-Passed the FTPA

Published on The Institute for Government (https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk)

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Calling general elections [1]

When is the next election due? [2]

Under the 2011 Fixed-term Parliaments Act (FTPA) the next election, due to be held every five years, was scheduled to be held on 12 December 2024. However, the FTPA will be shortly repealed and replaced by the new Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill. The bill sets out that Parliament dissolves “at the beginning of the day that is the fifth anniversary of the day on which it first met”, with the election being held 25 working days after that date.

What is the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill? [3]

The bill aims to reverse the FTPA. Elections will still have to be held no more than five years apart, but the timing of elections would be otherwise determined by prime minister. The Conservatives committed to repealing the FTPA in their 2019 manifesto, arguing that the FTPA was responsible for the parliamentary deadlock that happened over Brexit in 2019.

How is the government changing the calling of elections? [4]

The ability to call for the dissolution of parliament and an election used to be a Royal Prerogative, exercised on the advice of the prime minister. In other words the prime minister would ‘request’ a dissolution of parliament at a time of their choosing, albeit within five years of the previous election. This allowed the prime minister to threaten to call an election if his party, or the Commons as whole, did not support him in a vote on an important issue (a "matter of confidence).

The introduction of the FTPA removed the prime minister’s ability to call an election at a time of their choosing. Under the Act, triggering an early election required the government to either get two-thirds majority support in a Parliamentary vote, or introduce a bill which by-passed the FTPA.

By seeking to reverse the FTPA, the new Dissolution bill aims to recreate the Royal Prerogative.

What are the problems with returning to the old way of calling elections? [5]

By repealing FTPA, the government is effectively restoring a royal prerogative. This has not been done before because normally the direction is always in turning historic crown powers into statute. While there has been debate as to whether it was possible to ‘revive’ a prerogative, the government is doing so by legislating to make a previous power under the prerogative ‘exercisable again’.

The major concern is that the government is taking away from the Commons the right to decide when Parliament should be dissolved and instead giving the prime minister unconstrained power over elections. The criticism of this is that a parliamentary role protects against an abusive dissolution, for instance an attempt by a prime minister to dissolve Parliament again following an election in which he or she did not get an overall majority. There is also an argument that a system in which parliament calls elections is more democratic, not least because parliament is being dissolved. Research has found that, on average, a prime minister gets a vote share bonus of 6% and a seat share bonus of 12% when they pick the election date, increasing the chances that they stay in office.

The new Bill also raises concerns relating to the role of the Monarch. A prime minister ‘requests’ a dissolution, implying that the Monarch can refuse that request. The circumstances in which that request might be refused are, however, ambiguous. As part of the bill, the government has published ‘dissolution principles’. This mirrors advice from the 1950s which set out how a monarch might refuse a request if a parliament remained “vital, viable, and capable of doing its job”, if an election would be detrimental to the national economy or if the Monarch can find another prime minister who could “govern for a reasonable period with a working majority in the House of Commons”.

The 2019 prorogation saga, when the Queen felt compelled to grant Boris Johnson a five week prorogation

1 of Parliament (later reversed by the Supreme Court), highlighted the Monarch’s difficulty in dissenting from the advice of her ministers. To do so would expose the Monarch to allegations of political interference of an undemocratic nature, even if the intention of the refusal was to preserve the good functioning of democracy. This makes for an uneasy role if a future dissolution occurred controversially.

How did the FTPA work? [6]

Under the FTPA, if the government tabled a motion for an early election it required at least two-thirds of all MPs in the Commons (434 MPs) to vote in favour. Prime minister Theresa May used this mechanism on 19 April 2017 to trigger the election on 8 June 2017. May’s sudden announcement after the 2017 Easter break showed that snap elections were still a feature in UK politics despite the FTPA.

The second route to an early election under FTPA was more complicated. If the government lost a motion that ‘this House has no confidence in Her Majesty’s Government’, it would have started a 14-day period in which either a second vote was won that the ‘House has confidence’ in the government, or an election is triggered.

Was it possible to call an election outside of the FTPA? [7]

Although the FTPA required a two-thirds majority for an early election, it could be by-passed through a short bill which set aside the provisions of the FTPA to allow an election on a specific date. Such a bill only required a simple majority to pass – although it would also need to pass the Lords and would be open to amendment. In 2017, Theresa May explored this option when she called a snap election. The short bill option was used by Boris Johnson in 2019, after three attempts to get an early election using FTPA. Following the Early Parliamentary General Election Act 2019, the election was held on 12 December 2019.

Why was FTPA controversial? [8]

One of the problems with FTPA is what was supposed to happen during the 14-day period between confidence motions. It could have seen the same government trying to pass a second vote, having been defeated in the first motion. It could be a new Conservative prime minister, elected by Conservative MPs, attempting to pass a second vote. Or, in theory, it could have allowed for a government to be formed by the opposition and attempt to pass a confidence vote, but that would require the incumbent prime minister to resign. This is important because there will sometimes be circumstances when an alternative government might need to be formed without an election taking place, for example if a prime minister had attempted but failed to form a government after a hung parliament result and the opposition formed an alternative government without needing a second election.

As well as confusion about how the 14 day period would work, FTPA also bred confusion about how confidence motions worked. In the past, ambiguously-worded motions of no confidence or censure could lead to a government resigning in favour of a new government, without an election being needed. It had been considered a possible loss of confidence if a government could not pass a budget or a Queen’s Speech. Instead, under FTPA, there was uncertainty about whether only an FTPA-worded confidence motion mattered or whether a government would also be forced to resign if it lost a Queen’s Speech or another major confidence motion, even though these did not trigger an early election.

From the government’s point of view, FTPA meant that if Parliament did not want an election and the government did not want to resign, a government would be forced to remain in office with little ability to get its business through the Commons. The government argues that such a ‘zombie parliament’ is what happened in the Autumn of 2019 when Parliament feared that Boris Johnson would use a dissolution of Parliament to force through no-deal Brexit without their say.

In the run-up to the 2019 election, both the Conservative and Labour party manifestos committed to repealing the FTPA.

Update date: Tuesday, December 31, 2019

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