We are taught that Parliament is central to law-making. Yet, at Westminster, the majority of Bills which become law are drafted by the Government. People often doubt Parliament's importance in the legislative process. Is Parliament really central if the Government's Bills nearly always succeed? Does Parliament really scrutinise government Bills? Is Parliament little more than a “talking shop”? The question of how central Parliament is to the legislative process is the subject of Meg Russell and Daniel Gover's book, which injects some much needed empirical analysis into debates about Parliament's influence on law-making. Through an analysis of parliamentary amendments to government Bills, the authors contend that Parliament exerts greater influence over the law-making process than is commonly supposed.

Amendments are proposals made by parliamentary actors to change the text of a Bill by adding to, removing or replacing some of its content. A parliamentary actor is an individual or a collective group who occupies an institutionally defined role within the Westminster law-making process. The amendment of Bills can involve a range of different parliamentary actors – government ministers, the opposition, government backbenchers, non-partisan parliamentarians within the House of Lords, select committees and cross-party working groups – who each may, at various stages of the law-making process, desire changes in a Bill's content. Russell and Gover's convincing analysis demonstrates that parliamentary influence is both visibly and obscurely exerted through amendments. They identify what they label as the multiple “faces of parliamentary power”, some visible and others less so. Parliament's visible “faces” include power to change Bills through the amendment process. Significantly, Russell and Gover adopt a broad understanding of how this power is exercised in practice. They view this power as being exercised in two ways: through the recognised approach of focusing on proposed non-governmental amendments which formally succeed, and through those amendments which formally fail, but which in substance are taken up later in the process through concessionary amendments offered by ministers. Including the latter was an astute choice, for a study of the former alone would exclude the possibility that non-government actors influence amendments proposed by ministers, which could distort findings. Other visible “faces” include the power to politicise issues in government Bills and the power to make ministers explain and justify their Bills. Parliamentary power is also visibly exercised through its ability to refuse consent to the Government's Bills. The authors rightly draw attention to commonly ignored obscure “faces” of parliamentary power, including the power to cause the Government to anticipate Parliament's potential response to their Bills through fear or to incentivise the Government to internalise parliamentary desires. Fear influences both the drafting of Bills and the extent to which ministers respond to parliamentary pressure through concessionary amendments. Furthermore, because the Government relies on parliamentary support, Parliament exerts an invisible and compelling power to shape ministerial thinking.

The persuasiveness of the authors’ claims is shown by the wide scope of their study and their methodology. For their case study, Russell and Gover did quantitative and qualitative analyses of 4,631 amendments proposed to 12 government Bills between 2005 and 2012. This interval captures a single party majority government (the Labour Government of 2005–10) and a coalition government (the Conservative–Liberal Democrats coalition from 2010). The interval studied also allowed the authors to account for differences in bicameral relations, since prior to 2010 no single party held a majority within the House of Lords, whereas following the general election of 2010, the coalition held a majority in the Lords. The 12 Bills were selected to be representative of the range of government Bills. Their selection captures both flagship and controversial Bills (e.g. the Identity Cards Bill and the Public Bodies Bill) and minor Bills (e.g. the Saving Gateway Accounts Bill). The length of these Bills varied, and the departments from which they originated differed. To ensure that the authors could track parliamentary influence across the two chambers, financial Bills were, wisely, omitted. The decision to track amendments across both chambers distinguishes this study from similar previous studies. Analysis of these Bills focused on how proposed amendments sought to alter the content of the Bills and the ways in which parliamentary actors exerted pressure on the Government for these changes.

Of the 4,361 amendments proposed to these Bills, only around 25% were subject to a formal decision and of those around 3% were rejected. Around 75% were either not selected, called or moved or were withdrawn following debate. However, as the authors argue, these recorded outcomes can be misleading. Amendments may be withdrawn when a government promises to bring forward its own proposals; amendments can also be overturned at a later stage in the legislative process. To allow for such influences, Russell and Gover sought to trace how proposed changes were pursued throughout the legislative process and whether they ultimately resulted in a change to the Bill. They use what they call “legislative strands”, which record the connections at different stages of the legislative process between amendments that sought the same or a similar change. For example, an opposition amendment proposed at the Commons committee stage may be rejected, but an identical or very similar amendment may be proposed by a cross-bench member at the Lords committee stage. Once again, the amendment may fail. However, at the Lords report stage, the Government may put forward a concessionary amendment the same as or similar to the original amendment proposed by the opposition and cross-bencher. Thus, the “strand” shows how a government's amendment can be traced back to pressure from non-government actors. The 4,361 amendments resulted in 2,050 strands, of which 300 (15%) resulted in a change to the Bill. A further 176 (9%) strands were deemed neither to succeed nor to fail, as another strand which contained a similar amendment was accepted.

To form the strands, Russell and Gover collected information about the content of the amendments from public sources. This was supplemented by qualitative information, obtained through 10 off-the-record interviews per Bill with the relevant ministers, civil servants and other parliamentary actors. From this information, a description of the amendment was constructed and then coded. Since parliamentary pressure can push in competing directions across the different legislative stages, Russell and Gover accounted for the fact that various parliamentary actors might propose similar amendments with different intentions. Each strand could only have one amendment per stage unless the minister offered a concessionary amendment. This ensured that only one actor could be identified as the original source. Thus where several actors proposed an identical or very similar amendment within the same stage, each proposed amendment was coded as a new strand. Nevertheless, similar strands were coded as “siblings”. This methodology is set out across ch. 2 and Appendix 1. Although Appendix One provides a detailed explanation of how these “strands” operate, ch. 2 would have benefited from a greater explanation about the strands than was provided. Given how central the “strands” are to the authors’ arguments, it is a curious that they provide no early explanation of the “strands” (e.g. in ch. 2) to allow readers – especially those from a non-political science background – more readily to understand the authors' arguments in subsequent chapters, and to make those arguments clearer and more coherent.

The authors fill the main body of the book with an account of how different actors within the legislative process exert parliamentary influence, and, in the case of the Government, the ways in which the Government predicts and responds to such influence. Each chapter focuses on one actor. These include the most visible actors in the process; the Government (ch. 3), the opposition (ch. 4) and government backbenchers (ch. 5). In contrast, later chapters focus on the more obscure parliamentary actors, such as non-partisan parliamentarians within the House of Lords, select committees and cross-party working groups. Traditionally, this kind of analysis has omitted or excluded these actors. For example, select committees are normally ignored because they primarily carry out post-legislative forms of scrutiny, and the existence of cross-party working groups is often doubted by most of the existing literature. However, Russell and Gover demonstrate that these actors can and do exert influence over the legislative process. By design, each of these chapters can be read as a free-standing contribution to the specific scholarship on each of the parliamentary actors listed above. Their finding highlights the need for more research on these obscured actors. These chapters are made accessible to those unfamiliar with the existing literature, as Russell and Gover provide a comprehensive summary of each actor and the existing literature on them, before analysing that actor's influence over the selected Bills.

Some readers may be interested in comparing these findings with previous studies of Parliament's influence, most notably J.A.G. Griffith's Parliamentary Scrutiny of Government Bills (1974). Griffith's study analysed the amendments proposed to all the Government Bills enacted during the period between 1967 and 1971. Russell and Gover acknowledge that their study is a spiritual sequel to Griffith's. Both studies focus on Parliament's ability to amend government Bills. Russell and Gover's book is the first attempt at a large-scale analysis of parliamentary amendments since Griffith's study. However, it is not possible to compare the two studies meaningfully. Griffith did not explain his methodology clearly. Although one of the strengths of Russell and Gover's study is that they were able track parliamentary influence across the two chambers, this prevents comparison with Griffith who did not attempt to trace parliamentary pressure and amendments across the two chambers. And Griffith's work has become outdated due to changes within Parliament: MPs are more independently minded, the reformed House of Lords is more assertive, outside experts now give evidence to Public Bill Committees, and a Select Committee system with independent chairs has developed. This is unfortunate as it limits our ability to determine the extent to which parliamentary influence might have increased since 1970s.

Overall, the authors offer critical insights into the Westminster legislative process and a new methodology for analysing parliamentary influence. Both of these should be of particular value to public lawyers. For too long critics and defenders of the UK's constitutional arrangements have based their claims on untested assumptions about Parliament's influence over the law-making process. For those who favour a legal conception of the Constitution, these observations and assumptions may justify greater judicial power to constrain Government, whether through the common law or a written constitution. Even those (such as Adam Tomkins) who would defend a political conception of the Constitution often argue that parliamentary control over the Government should be greater. Yet these writers end up preaching the popular “parliamentary decline thesis”, a questionable narrative claiming there was once a golden era of parliamentary law-making. Interestingly, those who defend the political Constitution have tended not to make use of empirical methods to help refine and justify their vision of a constitution centred on a strong representative legislature. This book provides some necessary empirical insights into this subject. Furthermore, Russell and Gover's methodology could offer public law scholars a useful analytical tool. There is no reason why public lawyers could not adopt Russell and Gover's methods to analyse Parliament's influence over individual pieces of legislation which are of constitutional significance. For example, given the fundamental importance which the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill 2017–19 will have on the future of our Constitution and our relationship with the European Union, public lawyers and the legal historians of the future could use this approach to analyse how much influence Parliament exerted over the Bill during this critical period. Russell and Gover's methodology could offer the tools necessary to carry out this analysis and thus provide public law scholarship with useful insights about the creation of constitutional statutes.