ABSTRACT
Parliamentary privilege is a reasonably straightforward and discrete topic and most students find it fairly easy to master the basic and clearly established principles. It is, however, an area replete with unresolved questions and students should ensure that they are aware of the conflicting authorities and views on these questions, are able to offer a sensible evaluation of them, and can formulate their own opinions. The proliferation in constitutional law of new areas to study, such as devolution, the Human Rights Act 1998, and the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, has tended to marginalise parliamentary privilege or push it off syllabuses altogether, and to reflect this, we have deleted one question in this chapter on privilege to make way for more topical ones elsewhere. Students need to be familiar with the main thrust of the report of the Nolan Committee on parliamentary regulation of members’ outside interests, the rules and mechanisms for their enforcement, including the Commons vote in May 2002 to relax the rules regarding their outside interests. In the area of members’ freedom of speech, the Defamation Act 1996 has introduced a significant change. Both of these matters are covered here, as is the possible impact of the Human Rights Act 1998 on both areas of privilege. Finally, students should of course be familiar with the impact of the Parliamentary Standards Act 2009 as amended by the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010. The result of both pieces of legislation has been that only MPs’ expenses, not their outside interests, have been subjected to independent regulation; in the end, therefore, they are not of much constitutional significance, since it seems generally agreed that the claiming of expenses is not part of ‘proceedings in Parliament’; hence the statutory changes do not affect Parliamentary privilege at all. The topic lends itself equally well to either essay or problem questions, although the latter seem to be more common in practice.
