My apologies to all those who glance over my blog on a regular basis. In the last week I have written several blogs on the same theme and I appreciate that is not a subject that concerns all of us. However taking a step back allows one to reflect on the benefits of even the most frustrating experiences. In the passage of the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (DRIP) the legislation has travelled a route that usually takes several weeks or even many months. However putting aside any concerns with process (for this do check out my previous blogs, beginning here) there are some clear benefits in a society that generally dislikes politics and politicians. I am no expert in Political structures, but in the last year I did focus on another Bill that the Government introduced and passed, so with the understanding that this comparison is not a piece of research that has been peer reviewed here are my comparisons.

The two laws are the DRIP Act and the “Transparency of Lobbying, Non-party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act” which for the sake of this blog I will refer to as the Lobbying Act. The antecedents of the DRIP were an European ruling on 8th April 2014 and those of the Lobbying Act a speech by David Cameron in March 2010 prior to his arrival in No 10. The draft Bill for DRIP was published on 10th July, while the draft lobbying Bill was published on 17th July 2013. The DRIP completed its passage in the Lords and received Royal Assent within a couple of hours, all on the 17th July 2014, the Lobbying Act passed through the Lords on 28th January 2014 and gained Royal Assent two days later on 30th January 2014.

It is clear from this comparison that there is now no need for such an expensive and elaborate Parliament.

An enormous reduction in time is in the period between the first announcement by a Government, or Government in waiting of a Bill they are promising to introduce and its draft being published. It took the coalition 3 years to produce a draft Lobbying Bill, yet only 3 months to produce a draft DRIP. This is a huge saving in time, but because it does take place outside of any formal processes it is hard to control. However in the future we should not accept delays longer than 3 months from a manifesto promise to the publication of draft Bills. Any longer is clearly profligacy by the party or coalition.

The period between a draft Bill and the end of its passage in the Lords has been compressed from 6.5 months to 6.5 days. Once again an enormous saving and we should expect all Bills to pass through Parliament in this sort of time scale. This is at the heart of the second change we should expect to see in our future Governments. If we apply the same saving to future Governments, we would expect to see a 5 year or 60 month Parliament reduced to a 2 month or 60 day Parliament. This would then leave 58 months of each Parliament for the Palace of Westminster to be used for other purposes such as housing some of the Homeless Londoners, hosting Weddings etc. The saving in terms of Parliamentary expenses and Salaries for our MPs would also be enormous.

When the impact of this saving first occurred to me, I tweeted to several Conservative MPs that a faster Parliament would lead to a smaller Government. Both of them agreed that this would be a good thing. We can only wait for the manifestos to reflect this. The idea of Parliament sitting for only 12 days every year would mean that barriers to access by all sorts of people currently unable to participate easily would be dropped. It would also mean that no MP would have an excuse for not understanding the real world (apart from the wealthy ones). I guess the worst part may be a 4 years and 10 month election campaign in between each Parliament.