REFORMING THE PREROGATIVE - Professor Robert Hazell and Charlotte Sayers-Carter

Is it right for the executive to control the sittings of parliament; or should parliament decide when it should sit, and for how long? The Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 (FTPA) transferred the power of dissolution to the House of Commons; in the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act 2022 the Johnson government transferred the power back to the executive. [...] Howarth posited these two different views of the constitution and the way the political system operates: According to the Westminster view, Parliament, and especially the House of Commons, sits at the centre of the system … The other view, the Whitehall view, posits that the Crown, now largely in the form of its ministers, is the centre of the system. [...] The Whitehall view was clearly espoused by the Johnson government, sensing that the Westminster view had been discredited by the travails of the Brexit parliament; it was the leitmotif underlying the constitutional reform proposals of the Conservative 2019 election manifesto, and the constitutional changes initiated by the Johnson government once in office.13 Executive autonomy is also the thread. [...] Dissolving and Proroguing Parliament The constitutional history of this country is the history of the prerogative powers of the Crown being made subject to the overriding powers of the democratically elected legislature as the sovereign body. [...] First, it recognised that the content of the convention was fundamentally in the hands of the government and was seriously unstable.79 Second, it suggested that in a democratic society, the legitimacy of the government’s use of the war-making power stems from maintaining the confidence of the House.80 PACAC concluded that the instability of the convention was undermining the government’s accountab.