Parliament has more important priorities than this spiffwaddle

Today Parliament will debate the Government’s Social Action, Responsibility and Heroism Bill, or SARAH for short. But SARAH hasn’t had a great life. She came into the world with enormous fanfare. The Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling, made grand promises that she would slay the “health and safety” dragon, and deal with the “compensation culture”. He promised SARAH would promote volunteering and protect have a go heroes from the threat of litigation. And all delivered despite her diminutive size! She is made up of just five clauses.

In Arabic, Hebrew and Persian, Sarah means a woman of high rank, or princess. That’s why it’s a shame that the Government chose to name their Bill SARAH as there’s nothing regal or high ranking about it. She has never lived up to the hype. From the moment SARAH was published, she has been roundly criticised. Even the usually faithful Conservative Home website put poor SARAH on a list of bills that should never have made the Queen’s Speech.

When SARAH had her Second Reading in the House of Commons, not a single speaker from the Government benches – bar an incredibly isolated Justice Secretary – wanted to speak up for it. One Tory MP however did speak – the former Solicitor General Sir Edward Garnier QC MP who didn’t pull his punches. He said the SARAH Bill “will be the subject of derision and confusion, or that even if that does not happen, it will fall into disuse” and that “I cannot support it”.  Sir Edward had grasped what an empty shell of a Bill this is.

When a Bill reaches Committee Stage, it is normally an opportunity to invite along expert witnesses to give their views on the content of Bills. For MPs, this is a valuable forum to hear the pros and cons of bills as drafted, and get to the bottom of what the real impact will be. At SARAH’s Committee Stage, none of the witnesses the Government invited to speak up in defence of the Bill attended, which was very telling indeed. Instead, it was left to Matt Wrack of the Fire Brigade Union to tell MPs “health and safety is a life and death matter, and we object strongly to people trivialising it and turning it into a joke or headline grabbing stories”.

Now the Bill has returned to the House of Commons today, for its Report Stage and Third Reading, and it seems even the enthusiasm of the Secretary of State has waned. He isn’t even turning up at the House of Commons Chamber to defend his own legislation. Like a child with a short attention span, he’s bored with his new toy, and has moved on to other issues. He got his favourable hit in the media, and to him that’s all that matters.

Of course, who could disagree with the aim of getting more people volunteering, and no one wants there to be barriers in the way of people doing good deeds. But nothing will change as a result of this Bill. There will be no slayed health and safety dragons, there will no reductions in the number of cases brought before the courts. It is a parliamentary placebo.

What’s clear is that SARAH is the actions of a zombie Government. They’ve run out of ideas. But nature abhors a vacuum. And this vacuum has been filled with a bill of such poor quality that it is an insult to MPs and to the British public. SARAH looks likely to join the annals of the most useless bills ever.

When parliamentary time for Bills is so precious, when there are many serious issues facing the country, this is frankly unacceptable. Day to day, millions of people across the country are struggling to pay their bills and keep a roof over their heads. In the justice system, there is a prisons crisis, the probation service is in meltdown and access to justice is becoming the preserve of the rich as a result of this Government’s actions. But obviously none of these are important enough in the eyes of the Government. Instead, they have made a conscious choice to prioritise SARAH, which says everything you need to know about what David Cameron’s government thinks is important.

Naming this Bill SARAH showed the Government’s liking of acronyms. But I have another one for them – SpiFWADL – spin first, worry about details later. This bill is an obvious case of spiffwaddle if I ever I saw it. But that’s a bad way to govern. Legislation should not be used for just for public relations purposes. It treats the public like they are fools, and breeds cynicism. In the current anti-politics mood, that’s dangerously fanning the flames of people’s discontent with Westminster.

Rt. Hon. Sadiq Khan MP is the Shadow Justice Secretary