11 January 2008
We received a petition asking:
"We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Allow England Our Own English Parliament."
Details of Petition:
"Scotland and Wales have their own Governments but still feel they deserve a say in Westminster, this is not fair. England should have our own Parliament and Scottish/Welsh MPs should be completely barred from voting on English legislation."
Read the Government’s response
The creation of an English Parliament is not something that the Government is proposing to take forward. In the first instance MPs representing English Constituencies total over 80% of MPs in the Westminster Parliament. The Government does not believe that it is necessary to establish a separate ‘English’ Parliament to balance the current devolution settlements in the United Kingdom as England is already the dominant partner and English interests are fully represented.
Furthermore, an ‘English’ Parliament would not be much smaller than the existing Westminster Parliament. Such a Parliament would dominate policy decisions and it would be likely to become bureaucratic and difficult to pass legislation, particularly if there were a different party in Government at Westminster, than that of the suggested English Parliament.
An English Parliament would turn the UK into a federal nation. History shows that where one country in a federation contains more than 30% of the economic wealth or population, the federation is unsustainable. England’s dominance within the UK would make a federal UK unsustainable. There would be continued tension between the policies of the English Parliament and Government, and those of the federal Parliament and Government, with the English institutions determining most of the economic and social policies, including public expenditure, but the federal institutions responsible for defence, taxation and macro-economic policy.
The Government does not accept the proposal for English votes for English laws. To do so would be to create two distinct classes of MPs - those who could vote on all matters before the House, and those whose voting rights would be curtailed by virtue of constituency location. MPs play a representative role in considering legislation, considering the welfare of the UK as a whole, rather than narrow geographic interests, and it is right that all MPs continue to have equal voting rights on all matters before the UK Parliament.
The Government is of the view that even matters which may appear confined to England may have an impact on the United Kingdom as a whole. For instance, the funding settlement with the nations and regions of the United Kingdom, means that what is decided on public funding in England affects Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. These are national issues for the United Kingdom and should be debated at the national Parliament by all MPs representing the United Kingdom, not by subsets depending on the location of their constituency.