Speaking in an interview with Civil Service World, Professor the Lord Peter Hennessy said that “these enormous ground-breaking, scene-shifting bills are just being shoved down, one after the other”, through the Commons and into the Lords by a government apparently experiencing “a kind of mania”.

“I’m a huge fan of Sir George Young, the leader of the House, who chairs the Parliamentary Business and Legislation Committee, but they’ve got to get a grip on this,” said Hennessy. “It’s in nobody’s interest that this stuff comes rushed through semi-finished. It brings the whole process into disrepute.”

Asked why the government is in such a hurry to pass bills, Hennessy said of the Liberal Democrats: “If you’ve been out of office for so long, it’s like winning the lottery: they get over-excited. It’s all too understandable in human terms: ‘My God, we’ve made it. A coalition!’”

What’s more, he added, both coalition parties’ ministers “tell themselves the fairy story from Tony Blair: ‘I didn’t do enough, fast enough, in my first term.’ They’re mesmerised by it, poor souls. They should stand back and pause. Have a little think. Read more; ask more; talk more.”

Hennessy argued that “you’ve got to do some heavy-duty things which are unpopular in your first year, of course. But you haven’t got to do so many, so fast, and on so many fronts. They’re overstretched. They can’t concentrate on the essentials. It’s amazing to me that Number 10 and others didn’t realise how many time bombs there were in the [recently delayed] Health and Social Care Bill. You didn’t need to be Sir William Beveridge or Sir Alexander Fleming to know what this was going to do to this enormously important health service of ours”.

The result of the government’s haste in passing so many major bills, said Hennessy, is that despite the best efforts of the parliamentary draftsmen, “the quality of legislation ain’t what it used to be”. In many cases, he argued, legislation has only been rescued thanks to fast action by select committees and careful scrutiny by the House of Lords. “Without the select committees getting on the case really quickly – the health committee, in the case of the Health and Social Care Bill – and without the second chamber, we would be in real trouble,” he said. “If we were unicameral, think of the manure we’d be in now!”

Written by Matt Ross, CSW