House of Commons Hansard Debates for 6 Jul 1992

Mr. Stern : On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. This debate is timed for one and a half hours. My hon. Friend the Minister in opening the debate confined his remarks to 15 minutes. The hon. Gentleman has already been on his feet for half an hour and still has two pages to go. Is not that an abuse of the House when he still has the right of reply?

Madam Deputy Speaker : In the particular circumstances, the Chair has no power over the length of individual speeches.

Mr. Sheerman : I have given way many times in the debate. It is an important debate and I hope that hon. Members will have a chance to intervene and ask questions

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Mr. Geoffrey Dickens (Littleborough and Saddleworth) : We want to make speeches.

Mr. Sheerman : We have an hour and a half and I am sure that the hon. Gentleman has time to get in. It is important to get on the record what the Labour Front Bench believes about this important measure.

Although the Wolds has been open only since April, it is already holding one third of the prisoners that it will hold at full capacity. There have already been major problems, about which we know little because of the cloak of secrecy. If the incidents that occurred there did so while it was only one third full, one wonders what will happen when it reaches capacity. It is important to remember that the prisoners at the Wolds are far more experienced in prison life than the staff, as the officers know. Had the Government bothered to wait to see what happened at the Wolds, as they promised, we would be able to judge how effectively the private security company is coping.

I have already mentioned the problem of secrecy. Members of the House and the public have the right to know whether the Crown controller, installed to monitor the performance of the Wolds, will publish an annual report. I hope that the Minister will tell us in his reply. Will there be a published annual report? Will it tell us how much it costs a year to run the Wolds? We have a right to that information. It ill befits the Government with all their recent talk of open government to fob off important questions on the grounds of commercial confidentiality.

Finally, we have long argued that the current obsession with privatisation is having a corrosive effect on morale in existing prisons. Here I come to the nub of the argument.

Mr. Gerry Steinberg (City of Durham) : Will my hon. Friend give way?

Mr. Sheerman : No. In two seconds I will.

Prison governors, prison officers, probation officers, prison teachers, prison chaplains, prison administrative staff and all the major prison reform groups are against privatisation. I wonder why. The Government had a unique opportunity-- [Interruption.] Perhaps hon. Gentlemen do not want to hear this--after the tragic events at Strangeways, with the Woolf report, which has been enthusiastically endorsed by all those working in the field, to make real changes in policy and produce an appeals system that did what people wanted. Yes, let us provide prisons where people can repay their debt to society and spend their sentence, but prisons that do not demean and dehumanise them. Let us provide prisons where people are given the chance to rebuild their lives and become decent citizens again. That is an objective that I thought nearly all hon. Members would agree with. That opportunity, post-Strangeways, of the Woolf inquiry report has been thrown aside. Privatisation is merely a piece of ideological baggage that the Government will not put down.

We are angry at what is happening, and we represent enlightened opinion on penal matters. That opinion says that the Strangeways riot and the Woolf report provided an opportunity to rebuild anew our rotten prison system. Producing one or two or even a dozen prisons with good conditions avoids the hard job of modernising our prison system and giving governors, prison officers and the people who have kept the lid on our prison system, as Woolf said,

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for 30 or 50 years, a chance to do the job. At present only a few are being given that opportunity in places such as the Wolds and Blakenhurst.

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There is a real challenge for a reforming Government to invest in the prison system and in all the men and women who work in it. We oppose the order because it is doctrinaire and avoids the opportunities presented by Woolf and takes us down a narrow, miserable path.

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11.7 pm

Dame Angela Rumbold (Mitcham and Morden) : I am delighted to have an opportunity to speak in support of the order. It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman), who spoke more concentrated claptrap than I have heard for a long time. Moreover, it was ideological claptrap, which made it even less interesting.

It is important to extend privatisation from the Wolds to other new prisons and, I hope, to existing prisons. The argument adduced by the hon. Member for Huddersfield for allowing prisons to be managed only by the state does not stand up to scrutiny. It is skating on thin ice to argue for subsidy and for the state to manage these institutions simply because they are part of the state. Such arguments are based on ideology and not on fact.

The Wolds has shown the practicality of allowing the private sector to manage prisons. It contains people who have been sentenced as well as those who have not been for trial. It is important to extend that to Blakenhurst and to other prisons with sentenced populations. As my hon. Friend the Minister will know, the most difficult part of the prison population with which to deal is the remand section. The Wolds has managed its affairs slowly and there have been one or two disturbances, but the governor and controller of that prison and many of the employees have been in the prison service for a long time, and know precisely what they are doing. That cuts across the point implied by the hon. Member for Huddersfield, that the private sector has no people with experience in the prison service.

As my hon. Friend the Minister said, the difficulty that the Wolds' employees face is in introducing prisoners into a new prison. There have been great disturbances in new prisons in the public sector, not least earlier this year in Moorlands, where there were some outrageous disturbances by some of the young offenders. They had not been there more than a few weeks before a wing was demolished. That was a disgraceful event that we hope will not be repeated. It is important to recognise that the staff in the Wolds are no less well trained and experienced than many of those in the public sector.

Mr. Steinberg : Does the right hon. Lady believe that the Prison Officers Association has any role to play in the privatised prisons?

Dame Angela Rumbold : I have never had any problems with the Prison Officers Association. It seems that it can live alongside the private sector ; it is up to the private contractors to negotiate with the prison officers if they wish to serve in those prisons. Nobody has ever suggested that they would be prevented from doing so. An arrangement already exists in the Wolds between the trade unions and the staff so that their affairs can be managed under the system currently operated by prison officers in some of the state prisons. It is important to extend the programme to sentenced prisoners because it will not be as difficult to manage a sentenced prison population as it is to manage a remand prison population. The Wolds and private prisons have better regimes. My hon. Friend the Minister frequently mentioned in his opening speech the extended number of hours that prisoners spent outside their cells. He spoke of the better regimes and treatment and of the greater opportunities

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that exist for remand prisoners in the Wolds and, one hopes, for those in Blakenhurst. It is exceedingly important that the work carried out in the contracted-out prisons should be repeated and seen to be successful in prisons such as Armley, Wormwood Scrubs and Wandsworth. It has been seen that it is possible for the contracted-out prisons to take in difficult prisoners who have no reason to behave themselves, but do so because the regime is better and more sensitive to their needs and provides them with something more constructive to do.

When I was a Home Office Minister, it was always the Government's intention --I am sure that it is still the intention of my hon. Friend the Minister and my right hon. and learned Friend the Home Secretary--to improve the regimes within our prison system following the Woolf report and the undertakings that we made in the White Paper published last summer. We cannot improve prison regimes overnight, but that improvement will occur much more speedily if it is demonstrated clearly, as it is through the private prisons of the Wolds and Blakenhurst. That will act as a spur to those in the existing prison system to manage their prisons better and undertake to allow the prisoners to have better regimes. That is a good reason to support the order.

11.14 pm

Mr. Robert Maclennan (Caithness and Sutherland) : It is a little surprising to hear the former Minister with responsibility for prisons, the right hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Dame A. Rumbold), speaking so coolly about the experience of the state sector and, by implication, overlooking the good work that is being done in the public sector to improve the state's handling of prisoners. It was also surprising to hear her suggest that something as modest as the Wolds experiment can teach those who have been in the business for generations anything of great importance.

I know that the right hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden has visited many prisons in her time, and I am sure that she has seen prisons of different sorts and qualities. I can only think that dogmatism leads the right hon. Lady to suggest that there is a great deal to be learned from Wolds. I share the surprise expressed in the intervention earlier by the hon. Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell) that it should be thought almost unpatriotic among Conservative Members to suggest that, if the state sentences a person to the deprivation of his liberties, the state has a responsibility-- whether exercised directly or indirectly--to ensure that custody is properly effected.

Many people assume, probably rightly, that that is the direct responsibility of the state, the Government, and the House--just as they assume that the defence of the realm will be handled by officers of the realm. We would no more think of sending a brigade of mercenaries to teach the Royal Navy and the Royal Marines how to do their job than we would of expecting the private sector to tell the prison service how to run its affairs. [Interruption.]

Madam Deputy Speaker : Order. There are too many seated interventions. It is becoming difficult for me to hear the hon. Member.

Mr. Maclennan : The Wolds is rather like a beauty spot on a rather nastily pock-marked face. It is designed to distract attention from the reality of the ugliness of today's prison system. It seems to have had some success in respect

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of the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman), for he focused a speech of 35 minutes on that little beauty spot. I am not as informed as even the hon. Gentleman about the Wolds, and few of us would feel confident about passing judgment on it at this stage. In any event, it would probably be premature to form a view about the Wolds.

Mr. Battle : We cannot get the information.

Mr. Maclennan : We certainly cannot, and there are certain difficulties in having questions on the subject answered in the House, which is rather deplorable. I hope that the National Audit Office will have full access, and will be able to bring any uncertainties that it has before the Public Accounts Committee--which will, no doubt, have an opportunity in due course to consider whether the public are getting value for money.

I regret that the Government did not take the opportunity provided by this debate to declare their hand as to how far they intend to go with the experiment. Do they seriously intend to solve the problems outlined by Lord Justice Woolf and Judge Tumim by going down the privatisation route full scale ? Is it intended--as was suggested at the weekend--to deal with top security prisoners in that way ? The Home Office does not usually leak the kind of stories that have been circulating among the national press without the intention of following through. It would have been better if the Government had told the House tonight what are their intentions. The reports that have appeared will give rise to great anxiety in the prison service, and to great uncertainty in sectors where a little settling down after the excitements of the last year or two might be a very good thing.

Mr. Dickens : Is the hon. Gentleman really telling the House that the Government ought to publicise prison incidents ? Would that not encourage the copycat effect all over England, thereby inciting others in custody to commit similar offences in their prisons ? I think it far better for the House of Commons to be satisfied with not knowing exactly what is going on, thus preventing similar events from happening in prisons throughout the United Kingdom.

Mr. Maclennan : In many ways the hon. Gentleman is a rather better publicist than I am, and I suspect that he is better at grabbing the headlines in regard to prisons than I could ever be. I have no intention of pouring oil on the flames of prison disputes and other troubles, but I believe that it ought to be possible for the hon. Gentleman to find out whether disturbances have taken place in a prison. The Minister made it plain that such disturbances had taken place, and he has made no attempt at a cover-up.

Mr. Peter Lloyd : That is an important point. I agree with the hon. Gentleman rather than with my hon. Friend the Member for Littleborough and Saddleworth (Mr. Dickens). If disturbances take place in a prison, the House should have an opportunity to ask questions and learn from the answers. Let me make it absolutely clear that hon. Members can ask my right hon. and learned Friend the Home Secretary about any disturbance in the Wolds, just as they can ask about disturbances in any other prison for which he is responsible.

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Mr. Maclennan : I am grateful for the Minister's intervention, although I think that there is still some uncertainty about whether it is possible to table questions that will enable those issues to be raised. I have no doubt that they can be raised on the margins of other questions, but that involves problems.

Mr. Battle : As one who has tried to put questions about the matter, I feel that the position is the same as that applying to social security benefit agencies. We are told that such agencies are--like private prisons- -at one remove from the Government, and that they are therefore not subject to direct question from the House of Commons. We are told to write to the governors and the heads of the organisations concerned, and that means that we may not be able to question the answers that we receive.

Mr. Lloyd rose--

Mr. Maclennan : I am sure that you would not approve of an intervention on an intervention, Madam Deputy Speaker. Perhaps the Minister will be prepared to hold himself back until the end of the debate.

So far, alas, the debate has been remarkably unrevealing. The Government have chosen to focus attention on the modest little experiment at the Wolds, almost as if they were providing a lightning conductor ; but it is too soon to judge. I think that we would do better to put our criticisms of the Wolds on hold until more information is available, and to press the Minister to be more revealing about the Government's medium-term intentions in regard to the extension of privatisation.

I strongly suspect that the motion is directed at the Prison Officers Association at least as much as it is directed at the House. There has been considerable criticism of the association in Government circles on the ground that it has stood in the way of reform. It is not possible for outsiders to judge the merits of the argument ; but I doubt that they, or anyone else, will be overly impressed by what has happened to date.

The Liberal Democrats consider it necessary to go a great deal further in implementing the Woolf report than the changes in the prison system contained in the modest order that we are discussing. In particular, we recommend the establishment of a separate prison agency, managed by people with experience of the prison service. That, we think, would enable us to move much faster in the direction recommended by Woolf.

Our prisons are now full to bursting, and conditions in many community prisons are worse than they were when those prisons were built over 100 years ago. The prison suicide rate is causing many people to worry greatly about our capacity to deal with prisoners, particularly those on remand. I do not think that we are focusing on the real, important issues tonight, and I regret that.

11.24 pm

Mr. John Greenway (Ryedale) : The hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman) said that private sector involvement in the prison service was wrong in principle. It seems to me that what is wrong in principle is the Labour party's blind ideological refusal to accept that the private sector has any role to play in the improvement of our prison service. Week in, week out, many incidents occur in state prisons. Therefore, I welcome the progress that the Government have made in introducing the order.

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It is worth recalling the progress that has been made. When the Criminal Justice Bill was considered in Standing Committee, there was originally a clause that provided for only one prison to be run by the private sector--Wolds prison. Some of us thought that that was a wicked waste of parliamentary time and that at the very least we should extend that provision to allow for a widening of the experiment in years to come. That is why a number of my hon. Friends and I tabled a new clause, which the Government gratefully accepted. The point has already been made in the debate--I believe during an intervention by my hon. Friend the Minister--that the fact that in many respects remand prisoners are more difficult to handle than sentenced prisoners was a matter that some of us had in mind when we suggested that the private sector should be involved in the provision of prisons for sentenced prisoners.

We should be discussing not ideology but two simple questions. The first relates to the best management structure for the prison service. One has just to read not the detailed reports but the summaries of Judge Tumim's visits to many of our prisons to realise that there is a lot wrong with our prision service. I believe that the management structure needs to be changed. If we are to change the management structure, we should do so in a way that allows for public and private sector involvement. That is why I am an enthusiastic supporter of the order. It allows for private sector involvement. Secondly, we should address the question of standards. Some hon. Members have referred to that question. How can standards be raised? The Woolf report into the Strangeways riot made a number of recommendations. The Government are to be commended for embracing its key recommendations and trying to bring some parts of our prison estate up to sratch. However, just as we modernise our Victorian prisons, so, too, must we modernise the management structure of our prisons. That is the key issue. The need is urgent.

Even if we approve the order, as I hope we shall, it will still be 12 months before this further experiment comes to fruition. We are not exactly running at a hare's pace. However, this is a welcome development.

The House must ask itself a final question : where will all this lead? To put on the private sector a proper contractual obligation for the way in which prisons should be run suggests to me that this will lead to a prison regime under which each prison in this country, whether it is in the public or the private sector, follows a properly defined set of standards and criteria. In time, they will have to publish their own reports--

Mr. Enright : Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Greenway : No ; I shall not give way because there are only 15 minutes left, and I am not about to finish my speech.

A prison will have to publish its own report and accounts to show how it has used public money, whether it is in the private sector, receiving fees for handling prisoners, or in the public sector, as now. [Interruption.] We can open up to proper scrutiny all that is going on in our prison service. What has been happening in Armley gaol in the past few years, about which the hon. Member for Leeds, West (Mr. Battle) is as concerned as I am, is an absolute scandal. [Interruption.] Our prison service is a disgrace. We need to bring the private sector into play.

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Madam Deputy Speaker : Order. Some of the interventions from the Labour Benches are quite unacceptable to me. Will hon. Members please keep quiet ?

Mr. Greenway : I believe that much of our prison service is an absolute disgrace. It must be improved, but blind ideology and dogma mean that people refuse to accept that the private sector has a role to play in achieving that improvement.

11.30 pm

Mr. Mike O'Brien (Warwickshire, North) : Despite everything that the Minister said, privatised prisons will reduce parliamentary scrutiny. The Minister said that the cost difference between private and public prisons is minimal. Privatisation will only reduce hon. Members' ability to scrutinise how a prison is run.

Standards will not rise. In the United States, the first privatised prisons provided excellent conditions, but they were show-piece prisons and loss leaders. Evidence suggests that their successors, free from the glare of press publicity, got down to the real task of privatised prisons--making profits for shareholders. Standards began to fall accordingly. The Wolds will try to create a superior prison environment because Group 4 wants to ensure that it is awarded future contracts and will loss-lead to make it successful. The Government will then claim that privatised prisons deliver higher standards, but that will not be true. As in America, standards will fall as profits are squeezed by the Government seeking to impose cheaper contracts on prisons. Shareholders will receive state subsidised dividends to ensure that managers keep their jobs. That is unacceptable when Government deprive people of their liberty.

The Government say that standards will be maintained through enforceable contracts, but the effective policing of standards in prisons is notoriously difficult. It depends on prisoners reporting breaches, which is a very unreliable method, or on an inspectorate, and the inspectorate needed effectively and constantly to police all the terms of the contracts will be enormous and expensive. In other words, it will not be properly enforceable at all.

Do not the Government apply double standards? They have been anxious to insist on standards in the private contracts for the Wolds, yet the Home Office went to the European Court to fight attempts to secure the same standards in state gaols. Is not it unreasonable for the Government to argue that higher standards should be achieved in private prisons while insisting on lower standards for state prisons? Rather than subjecting prisoners' care to market forces, money should be spent on bringing state prisons up to the standards of the Wolds and to other private standards that we are seeking to enforce. The clear moral question is whether it is right that money should be made out of a person who has been sentenced to imprisonment. Having been deprived of their liberty, it is wrong for prisoners to be put at the mercy of market forces. It is wrong that if the profit margins of private prisons are squeezed, as the Government will seek to do, the prisoner deprived of his liberty should see his conditions squeezed to maintain shareholders' profits.

What sort of companies would want to run Britain's prisons? With honourable exceptions, most of the security industry has an appalling record of low- paid staff, long hours, poor training and of employing persons often of

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dubious character and sometimes ex- criminals. As a criminal lawyer, I remember representing a person who was employed by Group 4, no less. He had previous convictions and was subsequently convicted of another offence but continued to work for Group 4 and, for all I know, probably still does--although not, I hope, at the Wolds.

While at the Home Office, the right hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Dame A. Rumbold) said :

"I don't want to foist an idea on a system without having sufficient caution to say that I am not going headlong down that route. I am going to take it step by step so that we can test it properly."

Test it properly? It has been open only since April. This is not a step-by- step approach. The order represents a headlong rush. Instead of having a measured assessment of how privatisation is going at the Wolds, the Government are hell bent on advancing nothing but political dogma.

The order is a shallow attempt to shift the debate away from the appalling state of our prisons, as reported by Judge Tumim, and from the Government's disgraceful record on prisons. It is an attempt to shift the debate to a peripheral argument about privatisation. The Home Office has said that it will train and screen workers for private prisons, but for how long will it do that before it decides to privatise training? I am not the only one who dislikes the idea of Group 4 or any other company being told whether applicants are of good character. Group 4 is not an official body, and it has no right to information about a person's character from police files. The Howard League has done the only significant independent research into the management of private detention centres. Its conclusions are very interesting because they reveal obsessive secrecy, poor staff in-service training, racist stereotyping by staff and no tangible commitment to justice.

It is the state which rightly reserves unto itself the right to take a person's liberty and the state should take responsibility for all that flows from that. It is directly responsible for the care of prisoners and should not abdicate its responsibilities to others. Its responsibilities include the right to use force to subjugate prisoners in certain circumstances and also, as we heard earlier, in certain circumstances to open and read prisoners' mail. That is not something that should be privatised and given to persons who are not directly answerable to the House.

The real problem is that we have too many bad prisons and too many people in them and a Government who have allowed crime to rise and prisons to become degraded. Privatisation will not deal with the real problems as identified by Lord Justice Woolf after the disturbances at Strangeways ; nor will it deal with the failings of the prison service outlined in Judge Tumim's report. The order is a camouflage for what is happening in the prison service, which is why we shall vote against it.

11.37 pm

Sir Ivan Lawrence (Burton) : One would think that the prisons in this country were an outstanding success, that they were beautiful places in which people could be properly rehabilitated, where those who are likely to

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offend could be deterred from offending again and where prison officers would be proud and happy to work. In fact, they are a disgrace.

They are a disgrace despite a massive expenditure of public money--£1 billion--on building more and more prisons. They are also a disgrace despite the dynamic activities of the chief inspector of prisons, Judge Tumim, and they are a disgrace despite the Woolf investigation, inquiry and recommendations. They will continue to be a disgrace as long as they are in the type of buildings that they are in, as long as we are subject to the existing old-fashioned practices, and, unless someone takes an initiative to move the prison service away from the circumstances which is has endured for far too long, prisons will go on being disgraceful places, letting down our society as much as they do.

The Government are proposing a new initiative. But one would think that Labour Members did not wish prisoners to spend less time in their cells, did not wish to see cleaner accommodation, the changing of bed linen and clothing, greater access to telephones and the more respectable approach of educating people in prisons.

One would think that Opposition Members were happy to maintain the situation without any improvement or change. I simply do not believe that any Opposition Members are really content with the present situation. Nevertheless, once again their spokesman, in a knee-jerk reaction, has attacked any move towards privatisation or rationalisation of the system. Have not they learnt the lesson that, broadly, the privatisations that have been undertaken so far have been an outstanding success ? Have not they learnt the lesson that every time they speak for the trade union movement-- for old-fashioned unions like the Prison Officers Association, which wishes to maintain the old operative systems that have so let down the prison system--they make themselves absolutely incapable of winning any general election ?

Mr. Battle : The Prison Officers Association is not affiliated to the Labour party.

Madam Deputy Speaker : Order. I have warned Members before about seated interventions of that nature.

Sir Ivan Lawrence : This is one of the ways in which the Labour party has continued to make itself incapable of winning general elections. It sides with the unions that adopt old-fashioned practices. When Labour Members have managed to control their obsession with maintaining the last vestiges of the abuse of trade union power and have given privatisation a chance as it begins to show signs of great achievement in the Wolds--and it will continue to demonstrate great achievement--they will realise that the prison system is being improved.

Many of the objections that have been voiced are absolute nonsense. The hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman) said that he would deal immediately with the point about vetting those who run the prisons, but he did not come to it at all. He cannot face up to the Government's clear undertaking that they will continue to ensure that there is proper vetting by the Home Office--the Home Secretary, the directorate of prisons, and the institutions that will monitor the private prison undertakings as they have monitored the state institutions and will reveal anything that has gone wrong. Let Opposition Members get a grip of themselves and give this initiative a chance. I have no doubt that if it

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appears to be failing the Government will change their mind, as they have done in the past. All Governments change their mind. Equally, I hope that, for the first time, the Opposition will change their mind. Actually I do not mean that. The Opposition have changed their mind over the sale of council houses ; they have changed their mind over unilateral disarmament ; they have changed their mind over a number of nationalisation issues. And I predict that when the new privatised system, introduced experimentally in some prisons, begins to work, they will change their mind about that too.

11.42 pm

Mr. Neil Gerrard (Walthamstow) : I listened very carefully to the Minister's introductory speech. Everybody agrees that we want improvements in conditions. Nobody has any complaint about good conditions in the Wolds, but we want to know why that matter is connected with privatisation. Why cannot we have similar investment in the other prisons that have been mentioned? What is at issue is the extension of privatisation from new remand prisons to institutions for convicted prisoners. Regardless of what has been said by Conservative Members, this move is fundamentally different from what was talked about when the legislation was passed last year.

My hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman) referred to the then Minister's comment that only if the contracted-out remand centre proved to be a success might we move towards privatisation of other parts of the service. Well, has it proved to be a success? When points about incidents at the Wolds were being raised, the Minister said that the system was still in the process of bedding down. If so, how can it be proved a success?

What evidence is there of adequate staff training? We have heard assertions about that, but no evidence. What evidence is there of correct recruitment policies? I have asked about staff recruited at the Wolds. Not a single member of staff there has an ethnic minority background.

If the case is not proven now, will it ever be? And what about accountability? We do not know the costs of employing Group 4 at the Wolds. The Minister would not tell us. We do not know what profits it will make ; the Minister would not tell us. We are told that that is a commercial consideration.

We have been told that five of the eight--

It being one and a half hours after the commencement of proceedings on the motion, Madam Deputy Speaker-- put the Question, pursuant to Standing Order No. 14 (Exempted Business) :--

The House divided : Ayes 251, Noes 200.

Division No. 52] [11.45 pm

AYES

Ainsworth, Peter (East Surrey)

Aitken, Jonathan

Alexander, Richard

Allason, Rupert (Torbay)

Amess, David

Ancram, Michael

Arbuthnot, James

Arnold, Jacques (Gravesham)

Arnold, Sir Thomas (Hazel Grv)

Ashby, David

Aspinwall, Jack

Atkinson, Peter (Hexham)

Baldry, Tony

Banks, Matthew (Southport)

Bates, Michael

Batiste, Spencer

Bendall, Vivian

Beresford, Sir Paul

Blackburn, Dr John G.

Bonsor, Sir Nicholas

Booth, Hartley

Boswell, Tim

Bottomley, Peter (Eltham)

Bottomley, Rt Hon Virginia

Bowis, John

Boyson, Rt Hon Sir Rhodes

Brandreth, Gyles

Brazier, Julian

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