FactCheck: Mandelson out of time?
Updated on 30 June 2009
Lord Mandelson says there is no more time to push plans on selling stakes in the Royal Mail through parliament before their summer break. But just how busy are our MPs?
The claim
"What I said was that I'm jostling for parliamentary time in the next two to three weeks, before the summer recess, because there are other bids for legislative time - I have to acknowledge that.
"I sponsor the legislation but I don't allocate the parliamentary time."
Lord Mandelson, Channel 4 News, 29 June 2009.
The background
Lord Mandelson said yesterday that plans to sell a stake in the Royal Mail had been delayed; partly because of the "market conditions", and partly because he had run out of time to get the laws through parliament before the summer recess.
The Conservatives told FactCheck that Mandelson was effectively the deputy prime minister, so it was "ridiculous" to suggest he was not capable of pushing through some legislation, even if he only had a few weeks before MPs go on their holidays.
The Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, for its part, told FactCheck that Mandelson's fears about a lack of legislative space were primarily founded on Gordon Brown's announcement yesterday of a draft programme of 11 bills for the last session of parliament. The PM's key push before the election.
FactCheck investigates.
The analysis
All the legislation which has gone - or is going through - the legislative mill in the 2008-2009 session in published on the parliament website. You click on this list and get weekly updates on the progress of legislation, under the Public Bills before Parliament 2008/09 heading.
It shows that as of 27 June 2009 a total of 119 acts had been either passed into law during the current session, or were in the process of being debated. This list includes Mandelson's Postal Services legislation.
If you compare it to the 27 bills and acts in the system at the start of the year it is certainly a more crowded schedule. But you would expect it to be.
One way to assess whether Mandelson's claim holds water is to examine the legislative process from the same period last year, and find out how many bills were turned into acts in those final weeks before summer.
Interestingly, it shows that as of the final week of Parliament in July 2008 a total of eight government bills managed to get rubber-stamped in the final four weeks, when cross-referenced with the list for 28 June 2008.
These "last minute" acts included Jack Straw getting his Criminal Evidence (Witness Anonymity) Act through, Douglas Alexander getting his Crossrail Act through, Alan Johnson getting his Health and Social Care Act through, Hazel Blears getting her Housing and Regeneration Act through, and Alistair Darling getting his National Insurance Contributions Act through.
So, no shortage of cabinet heavyweights, and former heavyweights, getting their legislation through in the nick of time then. Critics would suggest that where there is a will, there certainly seems to be a way.
It would be unfair not to point out that 12 government bills did not get Royal Assent before the summer break, although that number included controversial legislation such as the Climate Change and the Human Fertilisation and Embryology bills
It would be also be unfair not to point out that Mandelson's Postal Services bill is one of 15 government bills currently waiting to be turned into acts, even before Brown's raft of promises announced yesterday are taken into account.
It will be interesting to see how many of these 15 outstanding bills do make it into law before the summer, to see how busy the schedule really was...
The verdict
The fact that various members of the cabinet were able to push through legislation in the final weeks before last summer's break, shows that if Mandelson had really wanted to get this signed up before the recess, he seemingly could have done.
But it's also true that the schedule is crowded - especially by Brown's plans - and it may just be a case of waiting in line.
FactCheck rating: 3.5
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The lower end of the scale indicates that the claim in question largerly checks out, while the upper end of the scale suggests misrepresentation, exaggeration, a massaging of statistics and/or language.
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