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Mr. Bob Cryer (Bradford, South) : Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Newton : I should like to make a certain amount of progress before I give way.
Mr. Cryer : On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Is it true that the judgment on the conduct of the House is in the hands of the Speaker and the Deputy Speakers? On no occasion yesterday was any hon. Member pulled up for tedious repetition. If the right hon. Gentleman is trying to suggest that the guidance in "Erskine May" was breached, he is reflecting on the conduct of the Chair.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Janet Fookes) : There is a range of tediousness. The Chair only rules on that which is particularly tedious and repetitious.
Mr. Newton : I am grateful for that clarification, Madam Deputy Speaker.
Comparisons with the two previous Non-Domestic Rating Bills, which are similar to the Bill before us, are instructive. The one that followed the March 1992 Budget took 98 minutes to complete its Second Reading and a further 98 minutes to complete its remaining stage--a total of just more than three hours. The second Bill, which followed the March 1993 Budget, took two and a half hours to complete its Second Reading and 20 minutes to complete its remaining stages--just under three hours.
So far, we have had five and a half hours' debate on the current Bill, and, given that we started today's debate at just after 5 o'clock, we have another five hours to debate its various stages. That means that the Bill will be subject to more than 10 hours of debate--three and a half times more than was required by either of the previous Bills. I do not believe that the charge of unreasonable behaviour against the Government can stand up.
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The hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw) is not in his place at the moment, but the comparison that he drew yesterday with the previous Bills does not stand up. He suggested that, because those Bills, which had arisen from March Budgets, were not introduced until after the financial year had started, greater urgency was attached to them. We could have argued it in those terms, but we did not, because exactly the opposite is the case. Once the financial year has started, before it is conceivably possible to implement a proposal, rebilling will take place anyway. As a result of the autumn Budget this year, if we proceed rapidly, local authorities will be in a position to do all the work at once and send out the right bills before the financial year starts. It is entirely sensible, reasonable and desirable that that should be achieved.The right hon. Member for Derby, South (Mrs. Beckett) sought at the end of our exchanges last night to make a similar point to that raised by her hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn, but she obviously had not taken full account of the consequences of the change in Budget timing.
Against that background, I do not believe that it would have been reasonable to allow the Opposition to inflict unnecessary inconvenience on the House. Equally, I do not believe that it would have been reasonable to allow the consequences of the further delay, so clearly sought by the Opposition, to be inflicted on local authorities and the business community.
The motion provides for the remaining stages of the Bill to be completed by 10 o'clock tonight. The form of it means that the Opposition can readily give themselves more time for what they say they need to discuss. All they need to do is to guillotine their speeches on the motion and they will then have more time for discussion on the Bill.
Mr. David Winnick (Walsall, North) : Does the Leader of the House recognise that he has a responsibility other than that of just being a Cabinet Minister? He is supposed to be the Leader of the House of Commons. Is he not aware of the general feeling that the House is being treated shamefully by the Government not simply on the Bill, but on other matters and that that has led to the present non-co-operation through the official channels?
Does the right hon. Gentleman not believe that he has a responsibility to try to mend fences? Given the shameful and contemptible way in which the Government have treated the House in the past few months, is it any wonder that delays such as that experienced last night take place?
Mr. Newton : I may touch on one aspect of the hon. Gentleman's question later. I do not believe, however, almost by definition, that the House is being treated in a shameful fashion. I do not believe that any Conservative Member believes that and, to be absolutely frank, there are an awful lot of Opposition Members who do not believe that either. They want a more sensible approach to be adopted to the management of business than the Opposition are allowing. Yesterday, my hon. Friend the Minister for Local Government and Planning set out the case for the Bill with admirable clarity on Second Reading. He dealt in detail with the scheme contained in it and described its benefit for many businesses. He also set out clearly the advantages of early enactment.
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For my part, I emphasised to the House on 16 December, when I announced the business for yesterday, that the early passage of the Bill would be advantageous to local authorities and business rate payers both in giving good notice of the level of business rates for the next financial year and ensuring that authorities do not have to send out two sets of bills for the same year.It is not a contentious measure, despite yesterday's attempt to pretend otherwise. It is not inherently complex, despite the extensive textual quotations that the hon. Member for Blackburn spun out in his speech yesterday. The House could have dealt with it in a day without difficulty, to the benefit of ratepayers and local authorities alike. It now needs to be carried through in an organised, orderly and sensible way. The motion allows exactly that to happen. I now come back to the point that the hon. Member for Walsall, North (Mr. Winnick) raised a few moments ago. I think that he used a phrase about mending fences. I acknowledge that it was perhaps significant that, in her remarks last night, the right hon. Lady the Member for Derby, South (Mrs. Beckett) made no suggestion that there had been no attempt to come to an understanding about the Bill. It cannot be said that we got to this position in some dictatorial way without trying to reach an understanding.
I wrote to the right hon. Lady on 15 December, in a way that I took to be, and certainly intended to be, both reasonable and conciliatory. I set out the case for the Bill. I set out the reasons for wanting to pass it with reasonable speed. I said that it was hard to see why this Bill should require more time than previous similar Bills or why the Opposition should want to cause difficulties for local government and the business community by delayed enactment. I made it clear that our judgment was that that could best be achieved by carrying through all the Commons proceedings yesterday so that the Lords could consider it and it could receive Royal Assent by February, in good time for the issue of rate bills in early March. I concluded by saying that I should be most grateful to know whether that would be acceptable to the right hon. Lady and, if so, whether we could be assured of her party's co-operation.
I make no complaint about the fact that I have not had a formal reply, because the right hon. Lady conveyed her response in another way. I can say only that that could best be described as a clear indication that there was no scope for any understanding of that--or any other--kind or for discussions on how to handle the Bill. So far as I am concerned, it is up to the Opposition to decide whether they want to deal with business in the House in that way. We, as the Government, have to get on with the business. On that I rest my case and commend the motion to the House.
5.22 pm
Mrs. Margaret Beckett (Derby, South) : The overriding purpose of Parliament is to hold the Government to account ; to make the Government justify and explain their actions and intentions, not for the convenience or interest of Members of Parliament, but on behalf of the people by whom we are elected and for whom we are sent here to exercise our responsibilities. That is why we are here.
Today, not for the first time in recent weeks, the Lord President referred to debates that have taken place in the House as "yesterday's performance". Let me remind the
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House what yesterday's performance was. It was Members of Parliament making perfectly reasonable legitimate speeches on an item of Government legislation.The Government are fast reaching the stage where they do not think that anybody should scrutinise any legislation that they introduce, and that we should all simply touch our forelocks and say, "Yes, guv" and let it go through on the nod. That is not why we are here, and any Member who thinks that is reaching the stage of being unfit to hold office and be a Member of the House.
I sometimes think that it is difficult during these debates, because the superlatives have so often been used before. I shall say to the Lord President in all honesty that, looking at today's proceedings, I believe that it is possibly the most dangerous guillotine that we have had before the House, certainly in years here, for one simple reason : it is the most pointless. There is no need for it. The Lord President knows that. The Government are playing games, and in so doing they are setting a dangerous precedent. The Opposition may be dissatisfied when a Government, of whatever political shade, introduce a guillotine, but hon. Members can normally see why it has been introduced. Usually--indeed, I cannot recall a previous precedent--that reason has been self-evidently connected in one way or another with the legislation under discussion.
That connection, the purpose of the guillotine, might be thought by the Opposition to be deplorable, but it has always--to my recollection--been serious. I can discern no purpose in this guillotine whatever. I remind the House that the Government chose to curtail the debate at 10 o'clock last night. They did not choose to continue with it, as they easily could have done, just as they chose to rise early for the Christmas recess and come back slightly later than has often been the norm.
The only conceivable, even political, purpose that I can discern is that the Government might have desired to avoid the debate on the NHS, originally scheduled for today, because they have been avoiding any debate on that issue for a year. The only debates that we have had in the past three years, since 1991, have been held--as was the one a year ago--in Opposition time. It is plain that the Government are anxious to avoid scrutiny of their health policy. If that is their purpose, at least it is one which is unusual in having no connection whatever with the Bill that the Government are choosing to guillotine.
Before Christmas, the Government guillotined two Bills, each to one day's debate. In each case, the costs involved in that proposed legislation were literally hundreds of millions of pounds. One affected every British employee ; the other every British business. It was the Government's action in that respect, as the Lord President and the House well know, which quite rightly led the Opposition to withdraw co-operation from the Government.
But at least we knew why those Bills were guillotined to a day's debate : they were contentious ; they were embarrassing ; and, however low and unworthy the purpose, there was at least the purpose that it was convenient for the Government to avoid debate on the Bills.
Today's guillotine is on a measure that again affects every British business. It deals with one of the most unpopular measures that the Government have introduced during their lifetime. In most cases, the non- domestic rate is unpopular with business, as was the poll tax with the
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public as a whole. The financial implications of each year's non-domestic rating settlement are very important for business, especially for small business.The Lord President sought to play down the significance of the Bill. He sought to imply that it was a simple matter which needed no great time spent on it. The Library has pointed out that, inevitably by its nature, the Bill is technical. In particular, the finance for the transitional arrangements, which is enshrined in the Bill, is of great importance to business, particularly small business. Already in yesterday's debate, to which the Lord President referred so contemptuously, concern has been highlighted about how a shortfall in the rating pool might in future be dealt with. It is in present-day legislation. The Government are reluctant to write such provisions into the Bill and, instead, are calling on those scrutinising it to place their trust in the Government to act as we would hope and wish. That is not something that many of us are inclined to do these days.
It is exactly the kind of issue that is normally explored in depth in Committee. It is not only explored, but the answers to that exploration are reassessed over a period. If the assurances given by the Minister during yesterday's debate are unsound, the domestic council tax payer could be hit, or council services could be affected. That matter is of considerable importance now and in the future.
The Lord President spoke briefly last night and today about the hours of debate that such measures had previously attracted, as though that was all that mattered. What is almost more important than the specific time spent in debate, whether on Second Reading or in Committee, and what the Government are not just ignoring but sweeping aside in the debate, in a most dangerous way, as they did before Christmas, is the correlation between the period during which legislation is in the public domain and still under scrutiny and the hours of debate required.
Every hon. Member knows what happens in the ordinary process of legislative scrutiny and Committee debate. Ministers are asked questions. They are pressed to give assurances. Sometimes those assurances are thought on the spot to be unsuitable or unsound. But hon. Members take the record of those debates, the meat of those assurances and the answers to those questions back to those outside this place. They have the time to do that and those outside this place have the time and opportunty to give their scrutiny to see whether we are justified in leaving those assurances to stand. That is perhaps the most vital part of legislative scrutiny in the House and that is precisely what is being lost when the Government try, as they are doing, to confine all the debates on the measure into one parliamentary day.
I would not myself have raised the matter, but the Lord President referred to the letter that he wrote to me before Christmas about this measure. He did not, I think I am right in saying, remind the House that the letter was received in the week after the guillotining of the Statutory Sick Pay Bill and the Social Security (Contribution) Bill, not perhaps the most fruitful time to seek agreement from the Opposition to curtailing yet a further measure to a single day's debate.
I have no quarrel with the Lord President's description of the terminology of the letter. It was in a reasonable and conciliatory tone. He accepted that he called for curtailing of debate into one day, which is not usual, particularly at the start of a Session, with all of that Session before us in which to debate. He did so in a week in which debate had
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already been curtailed to one day on two previous pieces of legislation and he was asking us to agree to the same procedure in the first week back after the recess.Nor, I think I am correct in saying, did the Lord President say, when I received his letter saying that this was a non-contentious measure, that we had not seen the Bill. It was only just before the Bill was published, but it had not been published. Therefore, we were being asked to agree to a procedure which depended on our taking the Government's word that the matter was non-contentious without being able to look at any of the print, never mind the small print. But, more important, we were being asked to give such agreement when there had been no opportunity, and there was unlikely to be opportunity, particularly given the impending Christmas recess, to consult outside this place.
Hon. Members, from all parties know that it is not enough for any Member, however expert, to rely on his or her judgment about the technical detail of Bills such as this. It is an essential part of proceedings in this place that we are given time to consult outside and that those outside this place are allowed to exercise their right to make their point of view known on matters of this kind which raise technical details.
I say to the Lord President with some regret that it is strongly my view that he had no right to seek the assurances that he sought from me, any more than he had any need to do so. I should have been failing in my duty to the House if I had given those assurances.
Mr. Winnick : Does my right hon. Friend agree that, to some extent at least, the fact that there has not previously been such a breakdown between the official channels is due to the fact that previous Leaders of the House were obviously devoted to the Government, but they played fair with the House? In particular, I have in mind the right hon. Member for Shropshire, North (Mr. Biffen) and, long before that, the then right hon. Member for Chelmsford, now Lord St. John of Fawsley.
Everyone knows that the Leader of the House must be a member of the Cabinet, devoted to Government business. But the Leader of the House has some responsibility, which he does not seem to carry out, to ensure that the Oppositon have a feeling, however controversial a measure may be, that enough time is being given in the Chamber and in Committee fully to examine what is being put forward by the Government. That is not being done at the moment.
Mrs. Beckett : I accept my hon. Friend's contention--it is what makes the role of the Leader of the House particularly difficult, as many hon. Members recognise--that, historically, the role of Leader of the House has been to exercise his responsibility as a member of the Government but also to exercise his responsibility to the House. It is also the case that those who have built up the greatest respect as Leader of the House on both sides of the House have been those who have visibly demonstrated their concern for the House as well as their understandable responsibilities to their party.
Mr. Newton : In view of what has been said in the past few minutes and what was said earlier about mending fences, I should make it clear that I thought and intended that the tone of my letter--it did refer to the breakdown of
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the usual channels at the beginning and that is why it was written--made it clear that I was seeking to bring about a situation in which we could do reasonable dealing with the Opposition on uncontentious legislation despite the difficulties that had arisen. That is not only consistent with, but properly consistent with, the role of Leader of the House.Mrs. Beckett : I accept the Lord President's word on that matter, but I simply say that, irrespective of the matter of the Bill, if he really thinks that it is not raising difficulties and is likely to ease the return to smoother procedures in the usual channels to ask the Opposition to curtail debate on any measure to a day when there seems to us to be no necessity for that curtailing, the Government are losing touch with what Members expect of reasonable and proper procedures of debate in the House.
The Lord President referred in his speech today, as he has done previously, to the few hours that the measure has taken in the past. That is one of the points that he made in his letter. However, he did not point out that those few hours were, as I have observed, spread over a few weeks.
Last year, the parallel piece of legislation was before the House for six weeks and then before the other place for two weeks, even though it was not published until April. Even in 1992, when the general election obviously disrupted the timetable to some extent, the legislation was before the House for four weeks and did not become law until June.
Yesterday, the Lord President said, and he referred to it in his speech today, that we should have understood that the fact that the Budget was earlier and the legislation was published before the start of the financial year, rather than after, meant that the pressures on its debate were heavier rather than lighter than in previous years. I have seldom heard such a lot of old rubbish.
Local authorities have told us in terms that they do not need to know that the legislation is on the stocks until, at the earliest, the end of February. It is turning logic on its head to say that there is less urgency about a matter that is published after the start of the financial year than about a matter that is published before the start of the financial year.
I remind the Lord President that, as my hon. Friend the deputy Chief Whip observed from a sedentary position, in the past these measures have passed through the House by agreement, but they were in the public domain and open to people to scrutinise and check for four weeks in the election year and for six weeks last year. There is plenty of time for that sort of period to elapse before local authorities or businesses need the legislation. I am sorry to have to say that the Lord President's case simply does not stand up. We are at the start of a parliamentary Session which started late and we finished early for the Christmas recess. The Government did not even try to go on with the debate yesterday evening when they could have done so after 10 o'clock. They tell us that it was only their consideration for others, for business and local authorities that led them to press this step on us.
Businesses are none too happy with the curtailing of the timetable for this debate, any more than they were with the curtailing of the timetable for the debates before Christmas, which was also said to be in their interests. As for the notion that the Government care tuppence about the concerns and worries of local government, I imagine that they can barely keep their faces straight at the thought.
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The Lord President will remember that he and I were in opposite positions when the Government introduced massive changes in housing benefit legislation with no concern whatever for the timetable of local government or for its difficulties in implementing enormously complex legislation which deprived many people, including pensioners, cumulatively of hundreds of millions of pounds. The poll tax was introduced practically over the dead body of local government and so was the non- domestic rate to which this legislation refers. We can therefore dismiss with contumely the notion that it was worrying about local government that led Ministers to propose this step. I shall draw my remarks to a close because, like the Lord President, I do not want to detain the House. I end by returning to the point that I made at the outset : this is possibly the most dangerous precedent that the Government have yet set in a string of mishandlings of the House. The purpose of this guillotine is entrely frivolous. There is no justification or need for it. No Government have ever shown such disregard for the parliamentary safeguards that have grown up, for good cause, over the years.I remind the Lord President--I mentioned this in our debate in the last week before the Christmas recess--that it is only three or four weeks since he and I spoke at a meeting jointly organised by "The House Magazine" and the Hansard Society, where representatives of one of the most important and financially crucial British businesses pressed him to give assurances that the House would conduct its business so that legislation could be properly scrutinised in order that we might avoid legislative error and give people time to take full account of the implications of all legislation.
The Lord President gave the assurance--since when three Bills have been taken through all their stages in the House, in effect, in three days. This is a pathetic measure, introduced by a pathetic Government.
5.40 pm
Mr. Archy Kirkwood (Roxburgh and Berwickshire) : Like the right hon. Member for Derby, South (Mrs. Beckett), I do not want to detain the House. Although one must be thankful for small mercies, we must also take account of what the Lord President said. He said that if we take up time discussing the timetable motion we will deprive the House of the opportunity to look at the amendments.
I am a bystander in the war of attrition that is going on above my head. I repeat an offer that I have made before : I will happily run between the Front Benches and use my best endeavours to get the usual channels opened up again as soon as possible. It is of course easy for me to sound pious, but I am worried that the House may bring itself into disrepute if the problem goes on too long.
I can perfectly well understand the frustration expressed by the Leader of the Opposition, if press reports are to be believed, when he decided to implement this period of non-co-operation. I must, however, counsel the official Opposition to be cautious. It is easy to start disruption, but not so easy to stop it. It is not clear to me what the Opposition seek to achieve. If they are trying to give the Government a hard time, I will sign up for that--but I am
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not prepared to sign up if we go so far as to prejudice the sensible scrutiny of legislation. I fear that that may be happening already.There must be a temptation for the Government to retaliate vindictively. They must resist that temptation. In the short term, they must take this on the chin and try as hard as they can to get on with business without being vindictive. I must add that the action that the Government took overnight comes very close to
vindictiveness.
It is not in the long-term interests of the House to suffer indefinite disruption, nor is it in the long-term interests of the legislation that we consider or of the public. I believe I am right in saying that every Bill that this House has sent to the Lords this Session has been guillotined. Is that a record of which the Lord President is proud? He may claim that it is nothing to do with him--that it is all someone else's fault--but the situation is serious.
The House must recognise that if we get into this position early in the new year we will have to think seriously about the new conjunction of the Queen's Speech and the Budget at the back end of the old year. If we do not learn the lessons of this year, there will be more trouble in future years. If the disruption continues, I foresee chaos after Easter, when major Bills come out of Committee and back here for Report and Third Reading. The Government will be forced to impose draconian guillotines on those Bills, and the House will become impossible to manage. Again, I counsel caution. Regardless of who is to blame, I cannot contemplate with equanimity measures such as the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill or the Local Government etc. (Scotland) Bill--important Bills affecting thousands of people--being the subject of guillotines. Once this is all done and dusted we will have to step back and better consider how we conduct business in this House. I find it sad that the Jopling proposals appear to have been lost--
Mr. Kirkwood : People may have differing views about that. I hold no brief for the Jopling proposals as such, but I am willing to talk about any way of improving our procedures. The Jopling opportunity appears to have been lost, however, and that is sad.
If guillotines are to continue to be as customary as they seem to have become, we shall have to consider seriously the possibility of devolving whole areas of legislation
Mrs. Beckett : I do not want to upset my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford, South (Mr. Cryer), but I have noticed this increasingly common suggestion that the Jopling proposals are dead and that there is no point in further discussing them. That is true only if it is what the Government are determined to achieve. I am growing increasingly suspicious that that is the end to which the Government's tactics are directed.
Mr. Kirkwood : That is good news. Both sides are now claiming that it is only the other side that is preventing progress. I must confess that I had given up hope, but I am glad to hear that the right hon. Lady has kept the door open. Our party is certainly willing to continue to try to find common ground--
Mr. Newton : I ought to make it quite clear that I do not accept the hon. Lady's accusation, and I would be most grateful if the hon. Gentleman found an opportunity to provoke her to make a further intervention in which she
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confirmed that she is willing to engage in further constructive discussion, with a view to implementation of the Jopling report.Mr. Kirkwood : I find myself the only channel left open--people are channelling their remarks through me at this point. I shall continue to provide the service at no cost to Government or Opposition. I hope that after the dust settles we will return to the issue and manage some progress.
I was a little disappointed by the lack of attention that the Leader of the House paid to the guillotine motion itself. I know that it is customary nowadays to use such motions as an excuse for more political debate about the contents of Bills. I for one intend to pay more attention to the terms of the guillotine motions in these debates. I am concerned about some of the new developments incorporated in them. I know that the Lord President spent the hours between midnight and 3 am with his inky pen going through the motion bit by bit, so it was difficult for him to get it right in so short a time. That is precisely why he should not be operating in this way. Nevertheless, paragraph 1(1) takes some justification.
The right hon. Gentleman said in a casual aside--it happens to be true-- that we have until 10 o'clock, so if we stop discussing the guillotine now we will have more time to discuss the contents of the Bill. By tradition, however, guillotine motions have not imposed strict timetables on the discussion of Bills such as this one, because that would prevent hon. Members from voting within the allotted period. The time for the votes is taken out of the time allowed for discussion. I consider that tactic an abuse, but the Government have begun to resort to it with increasing regularity. The House should not allow such behaviour to pass without comment. If we are to have timetable motions, the Government must recognise the need to allow the House to express its opinion within the allotted time in a way that does not prejudice further discussion. I consider paragraph 1(1) of the motion objectionable for that reason. Paragraph 2(2) is also extremely worrying. The Leader of the House may contradict me if I am wrong, but, as I read it, it means that several clauses can be lumped together for a single vote. The right hon. Gentleman may say that, given that the Bill is relatively small, there is no cause for concern ; but the application of paragraph 2(2), willy-nilly, to a 100-clause Bill would mean one vote to dispose of all those clauses at a stroke. I understand the purpose of timetable motions to be to enable the Government to limit the time available for discusion of the various stages of legislation, but paragraph 2(2) prevents clause-by-clause consideration.
As I have said, this is a small Bill, and in this instance paragraph 2(2) may be of no moment. Nevertheless, I consider that it sets an objectionable precedent. It is new to me, but I have been looking after this side of the business for only a short time : the Leader of the House may say that it was introduced recently. I find it worrying, however, and I believe that, if the Procedure Committee considered it objectively, the Chairman would also be extremely concerned. It has been introduced overnight, without discussion, and the procedures of the House have effectively been changed : we can no longer consider clauses seriatim.
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I have other worries. The Leader of the House should not allow the parliamentary draftsmen to stick in otiose bits of garbage that are of no consequence. When, for example, was the last occasion on which we required the provisions of paragraph 5(1)? When was the last occasion on which a Bill was recommitted? Not within living memory, I bet. It does the House no service to produce such unnecessary and irrelevant verbiage.I fear that, if the difficulties between the two main parties continue, more and more Bills will be guillotined. I think that the Procedure Committee should consider a Standing Order setting out the parameters within which Governments can introduce timetable motions, and that we should engage in a full and lengthy debate on what Governments can and cannot do. This motion provides evidence that Governments are incrementally removing powers from the House by imposing timetable motions in a draconian, unnecessary and unjustifiable manner. The House should vote the motion down. 5.53 pm
Mr. Derek Enright (Hemsworth) : I am not one of the hon. Members who bored the Lord President of the Council so much yesterday--not because my speech coruscated and was laced with wit, but because so many hon. Members wanted to speak and there was so much to discuss that I could not get in.
Only Opposition Members were speaking yesterday, but these are very serious issues. What worries me is the arrogance of power, which we saw earlier-- [Hon. Members :-- "The Leader of the House is leaving ; he has had enough."] Hang on. What worries me is the arrogance of power that allows Governments--or councils, as in the case of Westminster--to think, regardless of the individuals involved, that they can do anything that they want. The Bill involves a fundamental philosophy which must be discussed : the philosophy of democracy. In his "Politics", Aristotle said--this is a rough translation--that those parties were best to which everyone brought the booze. Similarly, those Governments are best to which everyone contributes ideas ; yet the way in which this tax is organised means the increasing separation of local businesses from their councils. They are no longer a fundamental part of what is happening, and some of us consider that very serious.
Labour Members engaged in an excellent debate at their party conference. It is a shame that the Lord President was not there : he would have been excited by the speeches about regional government. We strongly believe in devolution and regional government, and we think it deplorable that, since 1979, the Conservative Government have taken more and more power to the centre. They have increasingly decided that Whitehall and Westminster should govern the people--in my case, the people of Yorkshire.
That is clearly nonsensical. When the people of Whitehall and Westminster-- whose experience relates to London--see problems and what they consider to be solutions in London, they send those solutions flying out to the regions, where they are totally inappropriate. We have seen that happen in education : if the Secretary of State has his way, all schools will be accountable to a central body provided and staffed by Whitehall, and appointed by the Minister. We have seen it happen in hospitals, too : increasingly, the Secretary of State has made appointments
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for political reasons. I can think of no other reason to justify the creation of trusts such as those in our area, which contain not a single Labour sympathiser, although the vote is 80 per cent. Labour. It is an odd situation ; it may have come about by chance, but it may have been created deliberately.Now there is to be yet another centralisation. The Home Secretary has traditionally governed arguably the worst police force in the country : the Metropolitan police do not compare with the South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire police--
Madam Deputy Speaker : Order. I am sorry to interrupt the hon. Gentleman, but I am finding it increasingly difficult to know how what he is saying relates to the guillotine motion.
Mr. Keith Vaz (Leicester, East) : My hon. Friend has vast experience of local government, having served as chair of the Yorkshire planning committee for four years. Having sat through yesterday's debate, does he agree that it is astonishing that the Minister of State has been unable to explain properly to the House the reason for the fundamental policy shift on the proposed legislation for this year--as opposed to the provisions piloted through the House last year by his predecessor, now Secretary of State for Wales ? We are still waiting for an explanation. We oppose the guillotine motion because we need time to listen to the Government's views, so that we can then go out and consult local authorities and local businesses about the proposals.
Mr. Enright : I, too, find that astonishing.
Let me explain what I mean about centralisation and devolution. This is yet another example of the way in which taxes have been centralised : centralised business taxation is now taken for granted. That is quite wrong. On the continent, exactly the opposite has been happening. For example, in the mid-1970s, France was more centralised than any other country--schools there all taught geography at the same time and everyone knew exactly what was happening in the schools at any given time. However, with regard to taxes and policies, France has increasingly devolved power whereas here the Government have gathered it all unto themselves.
Our argument is that the nature of the business tax is fatally flawed. The way in which it is collected and imposed has nothing to do with the services that it is supposed to render. It seems that business taxes should once again be devolved to local councils. One can think of many spheres in which local businesses would be delighted to have it so.
My hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, East (Mr. Vaz) said that I was chair of planning in West Yorkshire. I recall explaining to representatives of local businesses that we could carry out certain schemes such as pedestrianisation and the building of bypasses on which industry was extremely keen but we made it clear that business would have to pay. It led to constructive dialogue. We did not always agree but at least we kept talking and, by doing so, we knew why the taxes were being raised and what could be done with them. That is no longer the case because now the Government, or nanny in the form of the Minister for Local Government and Planning, knows best.
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Mr. Enright : Nan knows best, indeed. That is not clearly desirable because it is not democratic.
Madam Deputy Speaker : Order. I am sorry to interrupt the hon. Gentleman again but he is discussing the substance of the Bill, for or against. We are considering only the timetable motion.
Mr. Enright : I am grateful, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I shall certainly not intrude on the time allotted to discussing the Bill. I shall deliberately absent myself because I shall have made some of my substantive points.
It was important that we should have discussed such issues in Committee last night because they are crucial. By guillotining the Bill--
Mr. Clive Betts (Sheffield, Attercliffe) : The points that my hon. Friend is making are relevant not only to his but to all our constituents and they are very important and numerous, as he has amply outlined. So many issues are potentially affected by the legislation that a timetable motion that constrains debate carries the risk of our not being able to discuss thoroughly all the issues that could affect the interests of all our constituents.
Mr. Enright : As always, my hon. Friend is absolutely correct. One important aspect which we were not able to discuss and which is a further argument against the guillotining of the Bill is the collection of the business tax. We need time to probe the Government's intentions in that respect. At the moment they have helpful district and county councils to collect it for them or, to put it another way, to do their dirty work for them. They do so at a reasonable cost but we hear a whisper--one that we should have wished to probe if there had been no guillotine--that collection is to be privatised. That is a dangerous and threatening situation
Mr. Betts : Group 4, will lose a bit more.
Mr. Enright : Not only Group 4, although we know that it is somewhat spendthrift and difficult to employ. I shall make no more of that because you would quite rightly stop me, Madam Deputy Speaker. Gladstone set up a magnificent civil service to stop corruption. Since that time, the probity and honesty of our civil service has been the equal of any other. It is perhaps worth going through a list of United Nations Governments and asking which of them are corrupt.
Mr. Vaz : Does my hon. Friend share my concern that yesterday not a single Conservative Member found time to come to the Chamber to debate this important subject although it is Conservative Members who claim to speak for British business? Many Labour Members were prepared to speak on behalf of British business. It is extremely important that we have enough time to discuss the Bill.
Mr. Enright : I was especially disappointed yesterday that the hon. Member for Colne Valley (Mr. Riddick)--I mention him precisely because he is not here--was not in his place because he is always talking about his diligence in voting and how awful local government is. He is absent I know not where, but I should be grateful if the Government Whips could get him here so that he could be taught about democracy.
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