House of Commons Hansard Debates for 7 Nov 1995

Mr. Newton: I thought that my hopes might have been raised too high.

Mr. Janner: Yes, by at least half an hour.

Mr. Newton: I am grateful to the hon. and learned Gentleman for his usual helpfulness and courtesy. I appreciate the fact that he and his colleagues would have liked the period to be even longer, but I hope-- although with little expectation in the light of our exchange, which was intended to be friendly--that they will regard this proposal as a reasonable compromise.

This motion deals with a number of issues, but I think that the only contentious point is over employment. When my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister announced the changes in departmental responsibilities, some concern was expressed that the new arrangements might make it more difficult for the House to deal with employment issues. On Select Committee scrutiny, I hope that the proposals that I have brought before the House today, relating to the four-month period, the size of the Committee and its power to appoint a Sub-Committee, will have gone some way towards allaying those anxieties. As I said, the present Employment Committee will have nearly four months in which to complete the inquiries that it has in hand.

All in all, the motion represents a sensible and balanced solution to the problems that we face in relation to existing Committees, while sticking to what is widely supported: the settled policy of matching Select Committees to Departments.

4.45 pm

Mr. Greville Janner (Leicester, West): I am sorry to dash the hopes of the Leader of the House, but it is the view of nine of the 11 members of the Select Committee on Employment that the so-called "compromise" offered by the Government will not enable the Committee to do its work within the time set; nor will it allow the House to monitor properly the work that was previously within the ambit of the Department of Employment.

My amendment (c) is supported by the hon. Members for Norfolk, North (Sir R. Howell), for Taunton (Mr. Nicholson), for Ealing, North (Mr. Greenway) and for Meriden (Mr. Mills) and by my hon. Friends the Members for Manchester, Blackley (Mr. Eastham), for Wallasey (Ms Eagle) and for Dudley, West (Mr. Pearson). It will not have escaped the attention of the Leader of the House that it has all-party support.

I am sorry that the Government have seen fit to try to make the Employment Committee vanish at the last breath of this Session. They have no doubt done so in the expectant hope that the payroll vote will be rolled out if necessary in order to put forward a proposition that is

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neither in the interests of Parliament nor in accordance with good sense, and does not satisfy the House that the employment work will be done.

The Leader of the House should be careful when I speak because, on the last occasion, in line with my work as a magician, I suggested to the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Mr. Howarth) that the sooner he joined the Labour party and left the Conservative party, the better. I said that we would welcome him at any moment. To my absolute delight, a week later he crossed the Floor of the House. When that happens in response to one of my speeches, the Leader of the House might at least bend slightly in our direction and try to enable us to complete the work as he has suggested.

First, I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will follow the views expressed in the fourth special report, which I shall read to him as unfortunately he did not see fit to mention it. If that is not possible, he should at least ensure that we are not forced to give up our work until the report commissioned by the Central Statistical Office to study options for the monthly publication of International Labour Office unemployment figures is before the House.

I draw the attention of the Leader of the House to the proposed changes to Standing Order No. 30, the fourth special report of the Employment Committee, which was agreed by nine of the 11 members. Paragraph 3 reads as follows:

"We believe that the merging of the Education and Employment Committees will seriously diminish the ability of the House to monitor employment issues. We adduce the following reasons. A committee which is responsible for both the employment and education briefs will not have the time to consider in detail the issues which they raise.

Both Committees have built up a background of knowledge and expertise in their respective areas which will be lost if they are merged into one committee"--

the report says "of only 11 members", but we now all know that it is to be of only 13 members, whereas the combined strength of the two Committees would have been 22 members.

I have consulted members of the Education Committee and found that they share the unhappiness and sense of regret at the Government's position which is felt by the vast majority of members of the Employment Committee.

The Leader of the House referred to a clear structure. I refer him to the original report that led to the setting up of Select Committees, which had in mind flexibility so that the work of the House could be done properly. It is one of the joys of our constitution, both written and unwritten, that there should be flexibility. Unfortunately, we have not yet seen it from the Government on this issue.

I remind the House that the report of the Select Committee on Procedure, which introduced the new Select Committee system in 1978-79, pressed firmly for a more systematic means of scrutinising the public service, which is what we are about. It concluded that "the committee structure should in future be based primarily on the subject areas within the responsibility of individual government departments, or groups of departments".

I stress the word "primarily". None of us would dispute the fact that that is the normal system, but we have fled from normality with the Government's abnormal abolition of the Department of Employment and the spreading of its

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work, not between two Departments, which is the usual-- [Interruption.] I was hoping that a tiny corner of the mind of the Leader of the House might even be open to argument.

Mr. Newton: I apologise for the discourtesy of my feeling the need to have a word with one of my Front-Bench colleagues.

I hope that I have shown, over quite a long period, that I always try to look constructively at points that are made. However, I must say at this stage that I have already done so, to the degree that this is a substantially different proposal from the one that I first floated in several respects, on which I touched in my speech.

Mr. Janner: I accept that, and I thank the right hon. Gentleman, who is always courteous even when he is wrong.

I shall continue reading the very important paragraph from the report, which states:

"We"--

the Select Committee on Procedure--

"therefore accept that this principle must be tempered by some element of flexibility in the boundaries between committees and by adequate provision for cooperation between them."

I wonder whether the Leader of the House realises what has happened to the work that was with the Department of Employment. The training and enterprise councils have gone into the Department for Education, and we are busy, as a Committee, working on a report on the TECs, on which we have spent a great deal of time.

Into the Treasury, of all places, has gone the work of the Central Statistical Office, which includes the setting up of a task force led by an external consultant, a Mr. David Steel--no relation to anyone in the House, I understand--which is due to produce its report by the end of January 1996. I shall return to that subject.

So we have the TECs with the Department for Education; we have the CSO with the Treasury. Strangely enough, workfare, to which I shall return--this is a subject which is vastly important to the Committee and on which we have done a huge amount of work--is with the Department of Employment. Then we have all the issues concerning wages and trade unions, which have gone to the Department of Trade and Industry. [Interruption.] I am so sorry to interrupt--

The Treasurer of Her Majesty's Household (Mr. Greg Knight): Get on with it.

Mr. Janner: Yes; I will get on with it. I will tell hon. Members exactly what I think. I think that this is a deliberate move by the Government, as part of their policy to remove the Department of Employment and the spotlight on unemployment and on the work that is being done on workfare. They are transferring different aspects of work, one by one, into a long series of Departments, so as to spread them out.

Health and safety go to one place and TECs go to another; all the different aspects of our work have been spread about. It is all part of a confidence trick by the Government, in an attempt to remove the attention of the public from the reality of the existing and unacceptable unemployment.

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I will get on with it by congratulating the hon. Member for Norfolk, North, whose work on workfare has been prodigious and without whom our Committee would not have undertaken it. That work has led us not only to interview witnesses in this country but to interview them in the United States. The Government have said that they intend to rely on the experience of the United States when proposing ideas about workfare.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Norfolk, North because it is as a result of his persistence that at least someone is listening. I hope that we shall hear from him, because the main reason why, if the Committee is to go, it should not go until we know what is happening, is that otherwise it will not be possible to complete the type of report on workfare that the House deserves.

I will get on with it by saying to the right hon. Member for Derby, North (Mr. Knight) that he should be more temperate in his language when he is trying to get rid of a Committee whose members have worked happily and in great harmony together for a long time, who have done a superb job in a series of investigations and reports and who want to complete their work properly in a way that is in accordance with the traditions of the House.

We are considering three reports. One report is about TECs. It is possible for us to complete that. It will not be as full as we would want, but it can be done. Secondly, we have a report about employment statistics. That, standing on its own, is of great importance, whatever view--jaundiced or affectionate--anyone may take of the disgraceful way in which the Government publish their employment statistics. I am not surprised that the Government do not want the report, but the Committee wants it. It wants it in its own right and also because it forms the basis of the report that we shall produce on workfare.

One right hon. Gentleman has said, "Well, what does it matter? You can bring your report out on workfare even if you do not know the statistics." That is exactly the sort of rubbish which I will get on with, because the Chancellor of the Exchequer is unlikely to take any interest in a report on workfare based on statistics when other statistics are likely to appear at any minute at the Government's own request.

The question that I was going to ask the Leader of the House, which he stifled at its birth but which he may wish to revive when he replies, is simply as follows. Will he please guarantee that the Committee will have the report of Mr. David Steel before it for a reasonable time before it must pack in, before the Government get rid of it and before the Government get on with their task of getting rid of unemployment by putting it into the Education Select Committee and into a Sub-Committee? Everyone knows that a parliamentary Sub-Committee is a cul-de-sac into which ideas are lured, there to be quietly strangled to death.

We do not want a Sub-Committee; we want the Employment Select Committee to be allowed to continue its work until the end of the current Session.

Sir Terence Higgins (Worthing): The end of the Session is tomorrow, as I understand it.

Mr. Janner: The end of the Session is tomorrow, which is precisely why the debate is tonight--so that there will not be enough hon. Members in the House to vote on it, so that the payroll vote may steamroller any effort that

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we make. The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right and I thank him so much for drawing attention to my error.

We want the Committee to continue its work until the end of the Parliament. If it cannot be to the end of the Parliament, at least let it be until such time as we can bring out our report, not only on the statistics but on the effect that that has on the workfare report.

Every member of the Committee--with the possible exception of two Conservative Members, neither of whom is present--agrees that the level of unemployment, even though, happily, it is lower than it was, is unacceptable. Members of the Committee also agree that the idea that people should be paid for not working when they wish to work, and that they should not pay taxes when they would much prefer to be working and earning and paying taxes, when they are doing nothing with their time but rotting in unemployment--which is a hateful disgrace in modern society--is unacceptable.

We are considering ways in which that can be made better. We cannot guarantee that we shall all agree with the hon. Member for Norfolk, North, but at least let us consider the ideas properly. [Interruption.] The Leader of the House is being passed a billet-doux.

If the Leader of the House is determined to limit his flexibility, in what he chooses to call a compromise, to 1 March 1996, will he at least give us the absolute guarantee that the Committee will have that report before it? I would respectfully suggest that he should look again and consider whether the rush is unseemly.

The right hon. Gentleman has said that there are no real precedents for the change. With respect, I disagree. He referred to the Science and Technology Select Committee, which he described as in migration from one Department to another. I know that we are at the time of autumn mists and that birds migrate, but that Committee has not been migrated.

The Science and Technology Committee considers the work of the Office of Science and Technology. Until July, it came under the Cabinet Office, and the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster was the responsible Minister. Now it comes under the Department of Trade and Industry. The Government do not intend to abolish the Science and Technology Committee, which, if each Committee is meant to monitor a Department, they should; they will keep it going. It is not subsumed by the Trade and Industry Select Committee, as it would be if there were logic in the right hon. Gentleman's intention to get rid of the Employment Select Committee in that way.

Nor would this be the first time that there had been a delay in removing a Committee. On one occasion, changes to the Standing Orders of the House were delayed after a change in the departmental structure of government. The Department of Health and Social Services was split in summer 1988 and the Select Committee on Social Services was not split into two separate Committees until October 1990. It is a matter of the extent to which the Government permit the work of the House, and especially the work of the Departments and the work done by the Departments, to be carried out properly.

The principle that I mentioned, of "one Department, one Committee", has already been tempered by flexibility, but it must be tempered by more flexibility. It would make much more sense to allow the Select Committee on

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Education to continue its work until the end of the Parliament. The Government should allow the Select Committee on Employment to continue its work until the end of the Parliament, when the Committee and some of its members would, regrettably, depart. But until then, they could do the job required of them by Parliament through the sensible monitoring system that exists.

The hon. Member for Norfolk, North will speak for himself. We on the Committee are determined to try, within the time limits that we are given by the House, to carry out our work in a way that brings credit to the House. We cannot properly monitor the work of the Department of Employment, as it was, if we are to have only four months to do so and no power to start any new reports. We shall have to wind up what we are doing and continue our work as a Select Committee--but we are at the tail end of the job.

It is the submission of all but two members of the Employment Select Committee, which I am privileged to chair, that the new arrangements are a mistake. That mistake will prevent the Committee from doing its job properly and has occurred owing to the inflexible approach adopted. The mistake could be avoided very simply--Parliament cannot continue much longer. I ask the Leader of the House, even at this late stage, to think again and see whether flexibility can be extended in a way that does credit to the House.

5.3 pm

Mr. Iain Mills (Meriden): I agree with my colleague, the hon. and learned Member for Leicester, West (Mr. Janner), who chairs the Committee: we need more time. I shall not speak for long as we have only a short time for the debate.

We have achieved inward investment from Toyota, Honda and others. The Committee has not achieved that on its own, but it has used its influence to ensure that those companies have invested here. It is a great shame that the Committee is to be abolished. The Select Committee on Education cannot replicate the work of the Select Committee on Employment. I feel passionately that the Select Committee on Education cannot replicate the job creation aspects of the Employment Select Committee.

All I ask is that we should have a few more months--there is nothing else that we can ask for. We cannot ask for the Employment Select Committee to be recreated, but our achievements should be placed on record. I hope that Hansard will tonight record the inward investment achievements and the help and encouragement that the Employment Select Committee has given to various firms to locate in this country. We should have a little longer to conclude our arrangements.

5.5 pm

Mr. Ernie Ross (Dundee, West): I support my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Leicester, West (Mr. Janner) and my other colleagues who are members of the Committee. Clearly, we are not likely to succeed in changing the view of the Leader of the House tonight to the extent that he will allow us to continue to the end of the Parliament. But if he expects us to lie down, roll over and die, he has made a grave mistake.

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I am sorry that the debate had to take place at the fag end of the parliamentary Session, which has meant that not many hon. Members are here to make the comments that they would want to make on the way in which the Government have sought to forget about employment by burying it within the Department for Education and Employment. The Government have attempted to suggest that their responsibility for getting people into work is based solely on training. A quick re sume of the Government's work on training and their success in getting people into employment would soon dispel any belief that the Government have made a serious attempt to use training as a basis on which to reduce unemployment. I am sure that the Leader of the House could not name a successful Government scheme today to convince members of the Employment Select Committee, whether Government or Opposition Members, that the Government's policy has worked. Our investigation of the various training initiatives introduced by the Government under the guise of getting people back to work reveals an abysmal success rate. The work that we are currently undertaking with the training and enterprise councils has demonstrated how the TEC system has failed. The previous Secretary of State for Employment travelled to Boston, studied the private industry councils and thought that they were a good way of directly involving business people. He brought the policy back to this country; it was introduced in England and Wales as TEC and in Scotland as local enterprise companies. The policy was supposed to be the driving force to tackle unemployment, but the TECs' and LECs' record on getting people back to work is abysmal.

During our present inquiry into the work of TECs, we recently interviewed TEC personnel. Some TECs no longer exist because of the way in which they were run. They could not run themselves properly, but they were supposed to reduce the levels of long-term unemployed. The Government's record on training is abysmal. The Leader of the House must work harder if he wants to convince the Select Committee on Employment that, by abolishing the Department of Employment and placing the emphasis on training, the Government can tackle the present unemployment problem.

As my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Leicester, West said, the Leader of the House will also have to consider the fact that, in the past, when a Department has disappeared, the Committee monitoring it has not necessarily disappeared. My hon. and learned Friend mentioned the Select Committee on Science and Technology and I should be interested to hear what the Leader of the House has to say in response to his comments.

It beggars belief that the Leader of the House and the Government thought that the Select Committee on Employment would simply lie down and die, and become a Sub-Committee of the newly formed Committee. Such a proposal does not tackle the serious problem of unemployment. People who are at present unemployed want to make a contribution. They currently believe that they cannot make a contribution, either on their own behalf or on behalf of their families. They are regularly attacked by Conservative Members as people who do not want to work or make a contribution, but want to live off the state. The Government have decided that the best way to end unemployment is to abolish the Department that deals with it, thereby confusing people and trying to convince

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them that unemployment is no longer the Government's

responsibility. That method will not work; it certainly will not work with us this afternoon. It is unlikely that we shall be able to change the mind of the Leader of the House, but we shall certainly make an effort to do so. We certainly shall not let the debate finish this afternoon until we have heard one or two better reasons. I accept what the Leader of the House has said about the compromises that he believes himself to have made, although I shall not comment on whether they have been made through the usual channels or on whether they are acceptable. However, we require more persuasive, reasonable and sensible arguments from the right hon. Gentleman if we are to accept the need to do away with a Select Committee that has sole responsibility for considering employment and ensuring that the Government's attention is focused on it. 5.9 pm

Sir Peter Emery (Honiton): I apologise to my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House for missing his opening remarks. I was at a meeting.

I rise to speak only because, having heard two speeches, I well understand the disappointment of members of a Select Committee--and its Chairman, who has done his best to monitor the action of the Department involved--when the Department ceases to exist. I do not wish to become involved in an argument about whether there should be a Department of Employment or a Department for Education and Employment, although that strikes me as being part of the purpose of the debate; I heard what the hon. Member for Dundee, West (Mr. Ross) had to say about such matters as training, but it is clear to me that training will have to be dealt with by the new Department. My hon. Friend the Member for Meriden (Mr. Mills) mentioned investment, which will have to be dealt with by the Department of Trade and Industry. As Chairman of the Procedure Committee, I have fought long and hard for each Department to retain its Select Committee, and for the Committees to monitor the work of their Departments. I have proved that over the years with the Select Committee on Scottish Affairs and the Select Committee on Northern Ireland--we had to fight for a long time to obtain that. When the Department of Health and Social Security was split into two Departments, I ensured that separate Committees were set up to monitor the two aspects of its work. If I use that argument, however, I cannot continue to argue that there should be a Select Committee when there is no Minister or Department for it to monitor. I am slightly surprised that the Department of Employment has not been cut off completely and all its work transferred, but I am pleased that the Government have been flexible enough to try to ensure that the Employment Committee's work will not be wasted. A date has been given for the completion of that work. It is true that no new work will be started, but the new work must be done by a Committee that will monitor a Minister. The idea of starting new work when there is no Minister to monitor strikes me as very strange, even if it involves examining only what has happened in the past. The only person who can respond to the Committee's report--and the reports that are published after, or up to, the end of March--will be the new Secretary of State for Education and Employment. The idea that we can retain a Committee that is monitoring a Minister who does not exist is very odd.

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Mr. Janner: I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his many courtesies over the years, and not least for what he has said today. Surely he accepts, however, that the Minister who responds to the report will be the Minister in charge of the Department that is now dealing with the matter concerned. If the report is on employment statistics, for instance, it will be dealt with by the Treasury; if it is on training and enterprise councils or workfare, it will be dealt with by the Department for Education and Employment. There may not be a Minister representing a Department that has been abolished, but Ministers will reply to reports on matters that are within the ambit of their responsibilities.

Sir Peter Emery: The hon. and learned Gentleman may or may not be correct. I assume that all the reports from the existing Select Committee on Employment will be dealt with by the Secretary of State for Education and Employment at first, although it is for her to decide whether to refer them elsewhere.

In any event, I cannot--on behalf of the Procedure Committee--say that it is in the interests of the House to set the precedent that Select Committees can continue to monitor when there is no one to monitor. I must support my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House: I believe that he is taking the right step, and is being generous in setting the end of March as the time by which members of the Committee can complete their work.

5.15 pm

Mr. Archy Kirkwood (Roxburgh and Berwickshire): Let me make three brief points. I listened carefully to the eloquent speech of the hon. and learned Member for Leicester, West (Mr. Janner), the Chairman of the Employment Select Committee; it was what we have come to expect of such a distinguished parliamentarian. I would hate him to think that the House does not appreciate the work that the Committee has done so far--work which has been informative and of high quality, and which has held the Department firmly to account. The House is in the Committee's debt, and I should not like any member of the Committee to think otherwise. It provides an example of what can be done by a Select Committee.

Having said that, however, I think that what is being done is logical. My party has always perceived the elegant synergy between the Department for Education and training and employment, and I was quite happy when the Government made their decision earlier this year. It has left some rough edges, of course, and it will take some time for the House to get used to the idea of the new demarcation and allocation of responsibilities--some of which were not handled very deftly; I would have put some of the bits and pieces in different Departments. It will also take us some time to get out of the habit of referring directly to the Department of Employment.

Although I support the motion, I feel that the eloquent pleas made by Committee members for time to enable them to complete their reports are entirely proper. I hope that the House will do nothing to disturb that work, enabling it to be completed in good time. Finally, I should like an assurance from the Leader of the House about the position of minority parties in Select Committees. I do not believe that there is a place for such parties on either the Employment Committee or the

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Education Committee at present. I should hate to think that, if we adopted the habit of folding Sub-Committees into departmental Committees, that would prejudice the precious few places that minority parties currently have.

There is an argument--although this is not the time to advance it--for providing a place on all departmental Committees for parties such as mine, and for nationalist parties such as the Ulster Unionist party in its various complexions. We often feel that we are under-represented. I know that it is preferable to have small executive Committees to do the work, and by and large they do it very well, but I fear that setting up Committees with Sub-Committees may freeze out the possibility of securing an appropriate number of places for minority parties.

Provided that the Leader of the House can reassure me that he will be diligent in protecting the rights and interests of minority parties--and given the thanks that are due to the Committee for the work that it has done to date--I believe that the motion should be supported.

5.19 pm

Sir Ralph Howell (Norfolk, North): I am glad that the Government have gone as far as they have in letting the Select Committee on Employment continue until the end of February, but I hope that they will listen to this debate and go further, because they are making a serious mistake. Unemployment is the biggest problem that confronts the advanced world and merely trying to hide it in another Department will not solve the problem. That will not help the Government. I ask them to take this matter seriously.

To try to mix education and unemployment in a Committee will not work as the people who are interested in education and the people who are likely to be interested in unemployment are as different as chalk and cheese. To try to put them into one Committee is not acceptable and that will prove to be so.

I congratulate the Government on doing away with the Department of Employment. I thank the Chairman of the Select Committee on Employment for his kind remarks about myself and the right to work/workfare inquiry that I initiated. He is wrong in worrying too much about the old Department of Employment. I found that it was inward looking and, over many years, nothing but obstructive, so I have no problem with its disappearance.

It seems obvious, however, that in the Department for Education and Employment, there must be two separate Departments. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education and Employment is perfectly capable of looking after those two sectors, but she could very well report to two separate Select Committees. I hope that serious consideration will be given to that matter.

To confine those of us on the Select Committee on Employment to a shorter period will not enable us to get to the bottom of what we need to do.

Mr. David Nicholson (Taunton): Whether the old Department for Education and the old Department of Employment will satisfactorily gel together remains to be seen, but my hon. Friend is right in saying, as paragraph 3 of the Employment Select Committee special report points out, that there is considerable doubt that the Select Committee on Education and the Select Committee on Employment will gel together, especially in the last year

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of a Parliament. If that were being done at the beginning of a Parliament, I would understand it, but to do it at the fag end of a Parliament, when it has months to run, is eccentric.

Sir Ralph Howell: I am grateful for that intervention. It reminds me of Question Time today. It is crazy to have education questions and employment questions all muddled up on the Order Paper. They should be in two separate halves, so that we can examine those issues properly and sensibly.

I am especially concerned in relation to the statistical evidence and the report that we are compiling. We need that report as soon as possible, but I doubt that we shall get it before the end of January. We shall then require a lot of time to consider it and the Government will need to consider the statistics much more closely than they have in the past. Again, the Government are doing themselves no service in trying to fob off the unemployment problem as if, because it is falling a little, all is well. All is not well.

A total of 2.25 million people are doing nothing. Even on Government figures, that is costing £11.4 billion, which is a total waste as society gets nothing in return. Those figures, however, do not stand up to examination. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said in October 1992, when she was Secretary of State for Employment only, that the cost of an unemployed person was £9,000 a year. In today's terms, the cost must be at least £10,000 a year. With 2.3 million people unemployed, that works out at £23 billion, so it is no good the Treasury telling us that unemployment is costing only £11.4 billion.

In 1979, 612,000 people were claiming invalidity benefit; that has risen to the huge figure of 1.8 million--1.25 million more people. If one adds the number claiming invalidity benefit in 1979 to the number claiming unemployment benefit at that time, it comes to 1.7 million; the figure now is 4.2 million. We need to know how well we are doing and to get to the bottom of the matter. The Government are intent on cutting public expenditure. That is the only sector where public expenditure could be cut, because there is that enormous figure of waste. I do not know whether the Government figure of only £11.4 billion is right or whether the correct figure is £23 billion or £27 billion, as Labour said in 1992, but I am confident that that is a big sector of waste and one that must be dealt with.

It will be impossible to persuade the mixed Committee, sub-committees or whatever one wishes to introduce, to be as effective as one Committee looking after one subject. This is an important subject. It will remain so and it is no good the Government trying to sweep it under the carpet.

5.26 pm

Sir Terence Higgins (Worthing): The first part of the motions relates to the creation of the Public Service Committee and the abolition, effectively, of the Select Committee on Treasury and Civil Service. I am second to none in believing that the changes that we undertook nearly 15 years ago in the Select Committee system have been the biggest improvement in increasing ministerial accountability to the House, probably even this century. This matter is therefore of great importance and it is right that we should debate it this afternoon. Having said that,

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I believe that the strength of those reforms lay in the fact that the Select Committee system became departmentally related. If one were to divert from that, the system would be greatly weakened. Over the years--and I have had a lot to do with this matter in the intervening period--there has been considerable concern when the departmental structure has changed and when the Select Committees have had to be adjusted to meet that, but I have no doubt that that has been essential and, generally speaking, it has been done almost immediately or as quickly as possible. There was only one exception--and that was not a happy one--involving the Select Committee on Social Security,

On the proposed structure, we can take a lesson from the experience of the Treasury and Civil Service Committee, which has a Sub-Committee that deals largely with civil service issues. I have been well aware of the passion--I think that that is a fair description--felt by the Chairman of the Select Committee on Employment, the hon. and learned Member for Leicester, West (Mr. Janner), my hon. Friend the Member for Norfolk, North (Sir R. Howell) and others on that point, and, as Chairman of the Liaison Committee, I have listened as carefully as possible to the various points that have been put to me.

The initial view was that the change should happen immediately and that that should be that, but I was influenced by the arguments advanced, as was my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House, and two important changes have been made, one of which gives the new Select Committee on Education and Employment the power to set up a formal Sub-Committee, which is a considerable power. Only the Home Affairs, Foreign Affairs and Treasury and Civil Service Select Committees have such a power, so that is an innovation.

Over my 12 years' experience on the Treasury and Civil Service Select Committee, the Sub-Committee dealing with civil service matters was not particularly subsidiary. It is true that at the end of the day, the main Committee stamps the decisions that have been taken, but it has proved an effective method of working. The work carried out by that Sub-Committee has been of great importance. It has produced major changes in proposals for the civil service and so on. There is no reason why that should not be the case for the new Committee.

There is a problem about manning the Sub-Committee. That is why the Leader of the House's proposal to increase the membership of the Committee is so important. No doubt, to some extent there will be some continuity of membership with the two previous Committees. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the House has suggested that the change should not be carried out immediately, as is the case with the Public Service Committee, but that it should be carried out by March next year. I hope that that enables the Committee to complete its work, particularly the proposals on workfare, which it might be true to say have been the life work of my hon. Friend the Member for Norfolk, North. He has done a tremendous job and is now in sight of a major step forward. It may be that the Committee's report will have considerable influence. I am anxious that that should be completed. In recent weeks, my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House and I have sat through 39 sittings of the Nolan committee, so we are seriously biased about this matter. We might feel that the Employment Committee could fit

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in some extra sittings. I would have thought that 39 sittings between now and the end of February would be roughly equivalent to what we did. The hon. and learned Member for Leicester, West and my hon. Friend the Member for Norfolk, North could probably fit that in.

I hope that this is a reasonable compromise and that it will enable the Committee to complete its work. Members of the new Committee will adopt a new guise, but some aspects of the Committee's work are certainly linked. For example, training and education have a close relationship.

If we were to perpetuate the existence of the Employment Committee, as the hon. and learned Member for Leicester, West has suggested, there would be a split into various separate Departments--Education and Employment, Environment, Treasury and Trade and Industry. It would be a mess. Nobody would know which Secretary of State would be called before the Committee next. If the Committee is clearly the Education and Employment Committee, that is the Secretary of State whom the Committee is responsible for monitoring. If we are not to fragment the entire Committee system, that is the only sensible way forward. I hope that, on reflection, hon. Members and Opposition Front-Bench spokesmen will go along with it.

I pay sincere tribute to the substantial and important work carried out over a considerable time by the Select Committee on Employment. Sad though it is, I hope that, on balance, this is the right way forward.

5.33 pm

Mr. Jeff Rooker (Birmingham, Perry Barr): This is an important debate and, as has been said by the Chairman of the Procedure Committee and the Chairman of the Liaison Committee, it is more than just a technical adjustment of our Standing Orders. It is an opportunity to praise the work of hon. Members who serve on Select Committees. Those Committees are sometimes the unsung part of Parliament. They are not usually on television and are not part of the party political battle or the cockpit of policy debate in the Chamber. Nevertheless, the Committees form a vital part of the work of the House.

The tragedy is that, until the implementation of the improvements brought about by the changes for the next Session, the House has never really taken seriously or devoted enough time to the work and the reports of the Committees. It is good that, following the resolutions passed last week as a result of the Jopling proposals, there will be an opportunity in the next Session to debate some of the Select Committee reports on the Floor of the House on at least three Wednesday mornings. The sooner my colleagues from both sides of the House who sit on the Employment Select Committee proceed with the three important reports on which they are working, the sooner they will be available to the Liaison Committee for selection for debate on the Floor of the House. That is important.

This is a sensible compromise. I accept the thrust of the Leader of the House's remarks. I share the disquiet of the Chairman of the Employment Committee, my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Leicester, West (Mr. Janner), because we are mindful of the fact that employment matters do not disappear into a black hole. That point has been made by hon. Members on both sides of the House, but the Opposition are particularly mindful of it. The activities of the Department are being split up and it is not always easy to target what the Government

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