Urgency in the House Part 1

As a keen follower of Parliament, one of the issues I have tracked in the past has been use of urgency. Back in around 2011 I was concerned about the amount of urgency being used, and actually worked with Grant Robertson and Trevor Mallard to publicise its use and overuse. I am told that campaign was part of the following reduction in urgency.

I’ve been meaning to do a follow up for some time, as there has been a lot of urgency in the last two years.

Now I am not one of those who think all use of urgency is bad. If urgency just involves the House sitting later at night, that isn’t a bad thing. The urgency which I think is most problematic is when select committee processes are entirely bypassed. This is generally bad as it robs the public of a say, and eliminate the ability of submitters to point out flaws in the bill.

There are sometimes reasonable grounds to bypass select committee. Budget or tax measures. A simple repeal. A change that was widely debated and submitted on in the very recent past – so all the issues are known. But these should be the exception. In Part 2, I will get more into this.

In Part 1 I wish to look first just as how many hours the House is sitting each year, and what proportion of these are in urgency.

I tend to think more sitting hours is not a bad thing. I want MPs passing laws. There is always a big back log of bills on the order paper. So we can see that 2024 and 2025 were some of the longest house sessions with 566 and 644 hours respectively. The average is 508 hours.

Now let us look at what proportion of the total hours were under urgency.

Here I have divided years with a change ion government up into pre and post election. The short sessions after the 2008 and 2023 elections saw a high use of urgency as the incoming Governments repealed on introduced laws or bills in line with their manifestos. I don’t have a big issues with that. So let’s focus on the other years.

In 2009 and 2010 urgency was over 20% of the House sitting time. After extended sittings came in, it was generally 10% or less. In 2020 it rose to 30%, for obvious Covid-19 reasons. In 2021 and 2022 it was 11% to 13%. However prior to the 2023 election it was 25% in 2023. In 2024 it was 28% and in 2025 it hit a high of 32%. So last year almost one in three hours of the House was in urgency.

If we look at raw numbers, they are:

So over 150 hours of urgency in 2024 and over 200 hours in 2025. They are both record numbers.

Now again, not all urgency is bad. In Part 2 I will go into how often urgency was used to have bills avoid select committees. That is the use of most concern.

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