Motions for “an humble Address” are not themselves particularly odd. The House regularly agrees a whole host of other kinds of humble Address motions, for example:

• to thank the Sovereign for their speech at the beginning of a Session;

• to annul a statutory instrument;

• to appoint someone to a public office; and

• on 26 February 2024, to welcome the restarting of government in Northern Ireland.

So it is important to add the qualifying words “for a return of papers” after the description “humble Address”, to distinguish the motion from these less controversial forms.

The motion for a return is an historical method of Parliament winkling information out of the government. As such, it had long been thought to have been superseded by parliamentary questions, the command paper system, statutory obligations, select committee demands, freedom of information and open government. Long before the turn of this century it had largely fallen out of use – or “fallen into desuetude”, to use the traditional phrase. But it survived in one important form: the unopposed return.

Unopposed humble Addresses for a return of papers are not uncommon. They are used to give a paper not published by a Minister – often the report of an independent inquiry and board – the protection both of parliamentary privilege and of the provisions of the Parliamentary Papers Act 1840, which essentially protects them from legal challenge, most obviously from claims of defamation. A recent example was the unopposed Return ordered on 25 March for the report of the Rycroft review of foreign interference in elections.

Such motions are placed on the Order Paper before questions and cannot be debated or voted on. They are “unopposed” because they are in the name of a Minister asking the government to hand over papers for printing, which they are clearly happy to do since a Minister is moving the motion.

In 2018, two individuals named in a report on the child abuse scandal on St Helena tried to sue the report’s author for defamation. The report had been published in response to an unopposed return and their case was stayed on the basis that the report enjoyed the protection of privilege and statute. When the case reached the High Court, the judge, while finding that the report was indeed so protected, did so with some “unease” in view of the fact the House had had no opportunity to debate whether to confer that protection. It was a point well made – as Erskine May puts it (paragraph 16.31):

“Her concerns were that the unopposed Return procedure was not a matter of debate; rather it was a device to allow the Executive to publish material under the cloak of parliamentary privilege.”

It is certainly a peculiar procedure where, apparently, not only is no debate allowed but neither is any vote. Erskine May remains silent on the procedural consequences of the court’s lucid and well-founded criticism.

But what about the once rare opposed motion for a return? There was a particular political and procedural stimulus to the revival of this apparently defunct procedure. After the Conservative administration had effectively lost its majority in 2017, the government had adopted a new tactic to avoid embarrassing defeats on Opposition Days: it began to instruct its MPs not to vote at all on Opposition Day motions, allowing them to pass either without a division or on an empty division with only Ayes voting. The intention was clearly to cast these resolutions as purely political gestures without practical significance.

The opposition parties grew increasingly frustrated by this perhaps somewhat underhand approach and began to search for motions which might have some kind of unavoidable effect on the government, in order to flush out its MPs in the hope of inflicting damaging defeats. Did they perhaps consult some of the Clerks? In the event, it was then that they seized upon a procedure long regarded as defunct: an opposed motion for an humble Address for a return of papers.

The Opposition moved the first of this new generation of opposed motions for a return on 1 November 2017. It sought the release of so-called sectoral assessments of the impact of leaving the EU, which Ministers had claimed had been prepared in advance of the withdrawal negotiations. It was in the following terms:

“That an humble Address be presented to Her Majesty, That she will be graciously pleased to give directions that the list of sectors analysed under the instruction of Her Majesty’s Ministers, and referred to in the Answer of 26 June 2017 to Question 239, be laid before this House and that the impact assessments arising from those analyses be provided to the Committee on Exiting the European Union.”

The Government, not confident of its majority, allowed the motion to pass without a division. There was then much toing and froing about whether the order was indeed binding, while the government dragged its feet, occasionally claiming that it was unclear whether the documents even existed.

At the Opposition’s instigation, the House agreed a further Address on 31 January 2018. The Speaker confirmed that the motion was binding on the government, and the documents were eventually provided to the Committee on Exiting the EU, which subsequently published them in full. The documents were widely ridiculed for being both poorly constructed and apparently drafted after the Secretary of State had made his claim to the Committee about their existence. They added very little to the sum of human knowledge but definitely embarrassed the government.

Having discovered this opportunity to unsettle the government, there have been 16 subsequent occasions on which this form of motion has been utilised. One of the most consequential was the motion agreed on 13 November 2018 seeking the publication of legal advice given by the Attorney General on a draft of the UK-EU Withdrawal Agreement. The government (not without foundation) argued that legal advice might be privileged and beyond the reach of even an Address. This gave rise to an Urgent Question on 29 November from the opposition’s Brexit spokesperson, Sir Keir Starmer. The Government then published a summary of the Attorney General’s advice, and on 3 December, the Attorney General made an oral statement to the House.

This in turn led to an historic vote on 4 December 2018 (on a motion given precedence by the Speaker as a matter of privilege) where the House (by 311 votes to 293) found the government as a whole to be in contempt of the House for its failure to provide material ordered to be produced (a government amendment to refer the matter to the Committee of Privileges having been defeated by 311 to 307). Government Ministers were thus found to have committed a contempt for the first time in the history of the UK Parliament. The Government published its legal advice in full on the following day.

Subsequently both the Public Administration & Constitutional Affairs Committee (PACAC) and the Procedure Committee published reports upholding the right of the House to seek publication of legal advice if a majority could be found to support it. The PACAC concluded in a January 2019 report:

“The motion for return using an Humble Address is a power of the House of Commons that has not hitherto been employed as part of the usual to-and-fro of party politics. This is not a device that should be overused or used irresponsibly, particularly if there is a minority. The credibility of the unlimited powers of the House of Commons depends on their responsible exercise … Where the limits on these essentially unlimited powers lie is a matter for negotiation between Parliament and Government and both should be careful about setting any precedent with long-term effects in reaction to short-term political pressures.”

These wise words fell largely on deaf ears. On 9 September 2019 the House agreed (by 311 to 302) a further Brexit-related motion demanding papers relating to the government’s preparations for a ‘no-deal’ Brexit and discussion of the prorogation of Parliament – which in fact took place later that same day and which the Supreme Court subsequently found to have been illegal. The order for a return was effectively superseded by the applications to the courts by Joanna Cherry and Gina Miller which produced that historic judgment.

The tactic of the “humble Address for a return” lost its efficacy as a means of forcing Conservative MPs to a vote once the Conservatives regained a majority in the December 2019 general election. However, it did not disappear entirely. Following the brouhaha over the amendment made on 3 November 2021 to postpone a decision on the Committee on Standards’ recommendation to suspend Owen Paterson for 30 days, the Opposition moved another such motion on 17 November seeking records of the meeting between Mr Paterson and others which formed the nub of the standards case. It was agreed without a vote, the government once more presumably fearing that it might lose despite its majority.

On 29 March 2022, the Opposition yet again tabled a motion for a return seeking papers relating to the appointment of Evgeny Lebedev as a member of the House of Lords (on the recommendation of Boris Johnson but allegedly against the advice of the security services). The motion was agreed with the support of a number of Conservative MPs, but the government refused to comply on the grounds that the information could damage national security. On 12 May, two weeks after the deadline set in the original motion, the government released a limited range of information which failed to address the issue of security service advice. The Minister, when releasing this limited response, said that “the disclosure of these documents reflects the need to protect national security, to maintain integrity in the system for the awarding of honours and dignities by the Crown, the vetting of nominees for probity and the data protection rights of individuals”. Questions over the satisfactoriness or otherwise of this response were largely forgotten following Mr Johnson’s announcement in July that he was standing down as Prime Minister.

Ironically, the newly-arrived Labour government, despite its very comfortable majority, was then hoist with its own petard when, as noted above, the Conservative opposition used a motion for a return, in rather similar circumstances to the Lebedev case, to demand papers relating to the appointment of Lord (Peter) Mandelson as the UK Ambassador to the USA. The government’s response was a good deal more thorough than had been the case with the Lebedev motion.

One outcome of the release of these documents is worth recording. On 28 April 2026, the Speaker granted priority to a motion in the name of the Leader of the Opposition to refer Sir Keir Starmer’s conduct to the Committee of Privileges on the grounds that he had misled the House about the nature of his role in the appointment of Peter Mandelson. This was almost the exact fourth anniversary of the motion moved on 21 April 2022 by the then Leader of the Opposition (Sir Keir Starmer) to refer the conduct of the then Prime Minister (Boris Johnson) to the same Committee on much the same grounds. In 2022, the motion had been agreed without division and formed a link in a chain of events that not only dislodged Johnson from his premiership but ultimately saw him leave the House of Commons in disgrace. In 2026, the motion was defeated (223 votes to 335) but nevertheless Sir Keir eventually relinquished his premiership within a few weeks.

Has the revival of these motions really been about reasserting Parliament’s historical right to information? In practice the response to almost all these humble Addresses has tended to be disappointing, inadequate, uninformative, intellectually dispiriting or, in the case of the Mandelson affair, largely indigestible in its undifferentiated quantity.

The “weaponising” of the humble Address for a return has in practice mostly been useful as a method available to the opposition for testing the degree to which a government can depend on the unswerving loyalty of its backbenchers in the division lobby. In that respect, this “arcane”, and indeed almost entirely obsolescent, procedure has proved on occasion surprisingly effective.

[1] Despite its majority, the Government anticipated that it might lose if it sought to defeat the motion and therefore tabled an amendment excluding “papers prejudicial to UK national security or international relations”. It subsequently appeared uncertain that even this amendment could command a majority, so during the debate the government tabled a hastily concocted amendment to its own amendment, seeking to send any papers deemed to fall into this category to the Intelligence and Security Committee. The House agreed to this revised version of the amendment and to the motion as amended without any division.