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The Parliament Acts are two Acts of Parliament of the United Kingdom , passed in 1911 and 1949, that form part of the Constitution Of The United Kingdom .An earlier Act of the Convention Parliament in 1660, entitled "An Act for removing and preventing all Questions and Disputes concerning the assembling and sitting of this present Parliament", is also sometimes known under by the Short Title of the Parliament Act 1660; it was dissimilar to the modern acts, and was repealed by the Statute Law (Repeals) Act 1969 . The first Parliament Act, the Parliament Act 1911 (1 & 2 Geo. 5. c. 13), asserted the supremacy of the House Of Commons by limiting the legislation-blocking powers of the House Of Lords (the ''suspensory veto''). Provided the provisions of the Act are met, legislation can be passed without the approval of the House of Lords. Additionally, the 1911 Act amended the Septennial Act to reduce the maximum permitted time between General Elections from seven years to five years. The first Parliament Act was amended by the second Parliament Act, the '''Parliament Act 1949''' (12, 13 & 14 Geo. 6. c. 103), which further limited the power of the Lords by reducing the time that they could delay bills, from two years to one. (SN/PC/675) (last updated 10 September 2004 , in PDF format, 24 pages) The Parliament Acts have been used to pass legislation against the wishes of the House of Lords on only seven occasions since 1911, including the passing of the Parliament Act 1949. Doubts that existed in academic circles concerning the validity of the 1949 Act were refuted in 2005 when members of the Countryside Alliance unsuccessfully challenged the validity of the Hunting Act 2004 , which had been passed under the auspices of the Act. In October 2005, the House Of Lords dismissed the Alliance's appeal against this decision, with an unusually large panel of nine Law Lords holding that the 1949 Act was a valid Act of Parliament. PARLIAMENT ACT 1911 The purpose of the Parliament Act 1911 is explained by its Long Title : An Act to make provision with respect to the powers of the House of Lords in relation to those of the House of Commons, and to limit the duration of Parliament Background to the 1911 Act ]] The 1911 Act was a reaction to the clash between the Liberal government and the House of Lords, culminating in the so-called " People's Budget " of 1909. In this Budget, the Chancellor Of The Exchequer David Lloyd George proposed the introduction of a Land Tax based on the ideas of the American Tax reformer Henry George .1 This new tax would have had a major effect on large landowners, and was opposed by the Conservative opposition, many of whom were large landowners themselves. The Conservatives believed that money should be raised through the introduction of Tariff s on Imports , which they claimed would help British industry. Contrary to British constitutional convention, the Conservatives used their large majority in the Lords to vote down the Budget, but the Liberals built on the wide-spread unpopularity of the Lords to make reducing the power of the Lords an important issue of the January 1910 General Election .2 The Liberals returned in a with the support of the Labour and Irish nationalist MPs. The Lords subsequently accepted the Budget when the land tax proposal was dropped. However, as a result of the dispute over the Budget, the new government introduced resolutions (that would later form the Parliament Bill) to limit the power of the Lords.4 The Prime Minister, Herbert Henry Asquith , asked Edward VII to create sufficient new Liberal Peers to pass the Bill if the Lords rejected it. The King assented, provided that Asquith went back to the polls to obtain an explicit mandate for the constitutional change. The Lords voted this 1910 Bill down, so Asquith called a second general election in 1911 , the House of Lords passed the Parliament Act by a narrow 131-114 vote,6 with the support of some two dozen Conservative peers and eleven of thirteen Lords Spiritual (who normally do not vote). The Parliament Act was intended as a temporary measure. The preamble states: whereas it is intended to substitute for the House of Lords as it at present exists a Second Chamber constituted on a popular instead of hereditary basis, but such substitution cannot be immediately brought into operation One of the reasons for the Irish MPs' support for the Parliament Act, and the bitterness of the had not attracted sufficient support from his colleagues for a battle with the House of Lords. Provisions of the 1911 Act The 1911 Act prevented the Lords from Veto ing any public legislation that originated in and had been approved by the Commons, and imposed a maximum legislative delay of one month for " Money Bill s" (those dealing with Taxation ) and two years for other types of bill. The Speaker was given the power to certify which bills are classified as money bills. If a money bill is not passed by the Lords without amendment within one month after it is received, the bill can be presented for Royal Assent without being passed by the Lords. For other public bills, the 1911 Act originally provided that a rejected bill would become law without the Lords' consent if it were passed by the Commons in three successive sessions, provided that two years elapsed between Second Reading of the bill and its final passing in the Commons. The 1911 Act still allowed the Lords to veto a bill to prolong the lifetime of a Parliament and it could only be used to force through a bill originating in the Commons, so the Lords also retained the power to veto any bill originating within the House of Lords. In addition to curtailing the power of the Lords, the 1911 Act amended the Septennial Act 1715 , reducing the maximum duration of any parliament from seven years to five, and provided for Members Of Parliament (excluding government ministers) to be paid £400 per year. Eric J. Evans , ''Parliamentary Reform, c. 1770–1918'' PARLIAMENT ACT 1949 ]] |
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