The government must not be allowed to turn parliament into a ‘yes man’, a former president of the family division who now sits in the House of Lords has warned.
Baroness Butler-Sloss (Ann Elizabeth Oldfield Butler-Sloss) told the Lord Speaker’s Corner podcast that she had noticed ‘a creep, a distinct creep’ in the role of the executive in the past 10 years.
‘It’s not just the Lords, it’s parliamentary scrutiny,’ she said. ‘I remember talking to a Conservative MP saying “are you noticing the extent to which you are not now being asked to make the decisions?”'
Any government must not be allowed to turn parliament into a ‘yes man’, she added. The Northern Ireland Protocol bill ‘was an extreme example of the government making every decision, and the bill on changing EU laws, which [former lord chief justice] Lord Judge pointed out were actually British laws because they’d all been turned into British law. The government was expecting both houses just to allow them to decide which should be kept and which should be got rid of without any scrutiny from parliament.’
Abolishing the Lords - as advocated by Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer - would be disastrous, Butler-Sloss told the podcast. ‘The Commons not only produces incomplete and very often nowadays badly drafted bills, which we put to rights in the Lords and for which they are actually grateful.’
Butler-Sloss was president of the family division between 1999 and 2005.
She said she worried about unmarried couples who separate ‘because they don’t come within the matrimonial jurisdiction, but their needs are just as great as those who are married or in civil partnerships’.
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