Urgency Stats Part 2

In this part, I look at how often urgency has been used to bypass select committee consideration of a bill, and also how often the 6 months standard consultation period has been reduced.

This practice is what should most strongly be pushed back. Bypassing select committee robs the public of the ability to submit on laws, and also for technical improvements to be identified.

This data, from the Clerk’s Office excludes money bills, or bills that the House (by leave) or Business Committee agreed to bypass select committee. So this is just bills that would normally go to select committee.

2015 was an unacceptably high year with 10 bills bypassing select committee. Then from 2017 to 2019 it was at more modest levels. It did rise to six in 2019 which is still quite high. Now in 2020 it went to 11, but many would agree that the Covid-19 emergency meant some (but not all of these) had to be done urgently.

However very high levels continued in 2021 and 2022 at 9 and 13. In 2023 there were 4 passed before the election and six afterwards. I do think you can justify a small number of law changes under urgency after an election, when they are repealing laws as part of a manifesto commitment.

But in 2024 it has been a huge 15 and 13 bills that bypassed select committee. This is way too many. Basically National passed 28 bills without select committee in two years, and Labour did 22. This is not a competition you want to win.

In any calendar year I would expect that the number of bills that bypass select committee due to urgency should be less than five as it was from 2016 to 2018.

Now another thing we are seeing more and more of is the House instructing a select committee to report a bill back in less than the standard six months timeframe. Now again there are times when this can be justified. Not every law needs months of submissions and consideration. Also a reduced select committee process is superior to no select committee process at all. Even a two week period to submit is better than nothing. However a shorter period should be the exception, not the rule.

So the proportion of bills that had a normal select committee process was 58% in 2015, around 80% from 2016 to 2018, and then a big drop to 44% in 2019. Since then it has rarely been over 50%.

A 3 to 5 months report back isn’t a huge shortening of time. But those with under 3 months are challenging. They often will have only a week or two for submissions.

So what proportion of bills had no or a very short select committee process. In 2016 to 2018 it was around 10% (ignoring the short post-election period). In 2019 it was 22%, then 40% in Covid-19 2020 and in the high 20s from 2021 to 2023. In 2024 it was 30% and in 2025 dropped back to 16%.

I started collecting this data because I was concerned that the National-led Government has been using urgency too often, and bypassing or shortening select committee too often. And I believe they clearly have been. However I was surprised to see that the Labour Government in 2021 and 2022 wasn’t much better (and with far less attention paid to it). 2020 was a justifiable reason for use of urgency, but not 2021 and 2022.

Hopefully 2026 will see less use of urgency, especially to bypass select committee.

The standard hours of the House are 17 hours a week, of which four hours are used for question time and general debate. The Government in its own right can do an extended sitting for four hours. The Business Committee can extend it even further.

It could even be time to look at making Wednesday and Thursday morning house sittings routine. That would be preferable to having so much urgency.

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