Video 3.3 How the Lords works with the Commons to make a bill law

Legislation and the law-making process

Video titled: Video 3.3 How the Lords works with the Commons to make a bill law

How the Lords works with the Commons to make a bill law

So most bills will start in the House of Commons and when they finished with it and it's been through all its stages there, literally a hard copy is still walked up to the House of Lords, wrapped up in ribbon. It gets brought into the Chamber and a government minister will stand up and read the long title, and this is known as the first reading. And the long title is a paragraph on the bill which just sums up what that bill is doing. And then that hard copy of the bill gets taken out of the Chamber and up to our office where we keep it safe. So second reading is a debate and members take it in turns to stand up and talk about the subject [Voice of proceedings in the back ground] and it's quite useful because they can also take the opportunity to tell the government, well this is what I think of your bill, these are the bits I am going to try and change later on.

Once we receive the bill and once it’s had its second reading then the bill is open for amendments and members come into the legislation office and discuss with us the changes they’d like to make to the bill. And then we put everything in the right order and print it up all ready for everybody to look at when it's in the Chamber.

If at second reading lots of people disagree with the subject and at the end they can have a vote and they can decide to throw out the whole bill there and then. But that doesn't tend to happen very often. My Lords, I beg to move that the house do now resolve itself into a committee upon the bill.

Committee stage, everybody turns up and they go through the bill, line by line, and most of the amendments are a chance to try and work out what the government is thinking, what its policy is in an area, so people suggest changes just to see what the government says about the move and whether they'll accept them on not.

Questions one is, what is the urgency to consider the Report Stage?

So the next stage is called Report Stage and this time they go through the bill line by line again but the amendments are… they're right down to the nitty gritty, these are changes that people really want to make and so quite often we get more votes at Report Stage because people really want to push the government and find out how many people agree with them.

Not Contents: 218 therefore the Not Contents have it.

The very last stages is called Third Reading and this is pretty much just a tidying up, so if there's been a big change earlier on, which has lots of consequential little changes. So after Third Reading all the changes that have been made will be stuck in or crossed out, as the case may be, and then it's wrapped up in red ribbon with a message saying, Dear House of Commons, here’s a bill that the House of Lords passed, please reconsider it.

Message for the Lords.

So ping pong is the point where a bill is going backwards and forwards between the two houses and all they are looking at are the areas where they can’t agree. So everything else that's agreed is put to one side and on the areas where they can’t agree they try and find a compromise. So the House of Lords might say, we don't like this would you think of this instead? And the Commons will either say ‘Yes’ or they might say ‘No, we don't agree with that policy but how about this compromise’. And that whittle it down until everybody's agreed on a way forward.

So when both houses have finished the bill, then the last stage is that the Queen is asked to signify that she's happy with it and when that happens, in both houses, the Speaker and the Lord Speaker stand up and announce that the bill has been given its royal assent.

My Lords, I have to notify the house, in accordance with the Royal Assent Act of 1967 that the Queen has signified her royal assent to the following acts.

Then the bill goes off and the final copy is printed and it's that copy that is taken up to the parliamentary archives and is the official record.

Source: House of Lords

Credit: © Crown Copyright 2020

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