The Speaker of Parliament, Alban Sumana Kingsford Bagbin, has cautioned against the growing practice of setting aside Parliament’s Standing Orders just to push Bills through quickly.
He says the House will no longer entertain such requests as a matter of routine, and will only consider them when a genuine urgency is clearly shown.
The Speaker explains that the frequent use of this shortcut to speed up lawmaking has now become a major public concern that must be addressed.
Addressing the House at the start of the Third Meeting of the Second Session of the Ninth Parliament in Accra on Tuesday, November 3, 2026, Speaker Bagbin said setting aside the rules, though allowed in rare cases, must not be turned into the normal way of doing parliamentary business.
“I recognise that there may be exceptional circumstances in which the suspension of particular rules becomes necessary to enable the House to respond to urgent national business. Our Standing Orders themselves contemplate such circumstances.
“However, a procedure intended for exceptional situations must not become the ordinary method by which we conduct our legislative business,” he said.
He told MPs that the different stages a Bill goes through are not just formalities. They are put in place to make sure every proposed law is properly examined before it is passed.
Those stages, he noted, give MPs enough room to study Bills, spot possible legal or constitutional problems, and suggest the needed fixes.
“The credibility of Parliament as a law-making institution depends not only on our ability to pass legislation but also on the quality, coherence and constitutional soundness of the laws we enact,” he stated.
Mr Bagbin was worried that rushing Bills had, on some occasions, led to mistakes being found only after the Third Reading.
In those cases, he said, the House had been forced to reverse its own proceedings at that stage just to correct the errors.
“While our procedures permit the House, in appropriate circumstances, to revisit decisions already taken, this must not become a substitute for diligent legislative scrutiny,” he said.
He therefore charged MPs not to mistake speed for efficiency when it comes to passing laws.
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