Parliament has many roles - Identify and discuss its roles.

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Hina Safdar

Parliament has many roles. Identify and discuss its roles.

This essay discusses the major roles in Parliament by referring to both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The roles include Law Making, Scrutiny and Representation. It will then discuss whether the roles are effective or not.

Legitimation is a main role of Parliament. Legitimating means that Parliament has the right to make laws. All policy proposals that come from the government must be legitimised by Parliament as a whole; this includes both the Commons and the Lords voting for or against policy. For the proposal to become a law it needs to have the majority of votes.

In 2001 the Labour party only received 41% of the vote, where as the Conservative party received 33% percent of the vote, which shows with the Labour government being in power not everyone is represented, in fact on 41% of the people are represented. So it can be argued that the Labour Government today lacks legitimacy, as only 1 in 4 people voted for a Labour Government. Not everyone voted for certain MPs and most of the law passed comes from the government itself and cannot be changed by individual MPs because they are controlled by the Whip system. This shows that the House of Commons does lack legitimacy.

However the House of Lords also lack legitimacy because it is an unelected body therefore it is undemocratic, unaccountable and unrepresentative. There is no link between the people and the Lords. The Lords are constrained in power by something known as “democratic deficit”. However because of this there is no party majority it has the best people for the job and can scrutinize effectively as it has specialists.

I think that both the House of Commons and the House of Lords lack authority because they have not been voted in by the majority of the people. More people had voted against the Labour party but it still came into power and the House of Lords is an unelected body with no link to the people.

Scrutiny and accountability is another role of Parliament. In this role Parliament has to examine, criticise and hold the government to account. It needs to check and debate on policy proposals. It also needs to check on the Governments work to ensure that they are working on the interests of the country and examine the expenditure of the governments. Scrutiny can be done by both Houses of Parliament but also by the governments own supporters.

The House of Commons scrutinises the government through debates, vote and the standing committee. The House of Commons is given the opportunity to work on and amend government bills. However this depends on what the government wants. Even if a debate does take place on whether a bill should be passed or not, if the government wants to pass it, it will most likely pass them.

The governments proposed policies can also be scrutinised when it gets to the standing committee stage. Standing committee members study the bill clause by clause, making any needed changes. Members of the standing committee come from different parties which are chosen by the whips. Standing committees are AD-HOC and most of the committees consist of about 40 members. However there are problems with the standing committee because they do not have specialist knowledge or expertise on most issues, so it is pointless for certain MPs to be in there. The House of Commons have a large number of bills to look at, that they cannot do the job effectively. The whips choose the membership of these standing committees so only choose members of the House of Commons with either no knowledge or those that are loyal to be put on a committee, so that it can not be scrutinised to critically. There is also an in-built majority in the committees. The government can easily apply the guillotine when looking through bills allowing there to be only a set time to look at bills. The outcome of standing committees is usually predictable. The standing committee lack information due to lack of evidence and information sources passed from outside and individual bodies.

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The House of Commons also has to hold the government to account; this can be done through Prime Ministerial and Ministerial Question Time, Debates, Voting and the Shadow Cabinet. At Prime Ministerial Question Time half an hour is given to the Commons to ask questions. At Ministerial Question Time more time is given. The first question is planned and the second is a supplementary question that can be asked without notification to the table. The civil servants write out the responses. Questions are asked at question time because it can scrutinise the government. It can also get vital information ...

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