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Sir Peter Emery: Did the figures that the hon. Gentleman obtained from the Library take into account Opposition and Government Front Benchers? If not, the figures have a different bearing.
Dr. Wright: I said that I did not want to detain the House with the sordid details but I have studied the figures with care. I discounted certain categories, such as Front Benchers on both sides of the House and right hon. and hon. Members absent through illness. I could give the right hon. Gentleman an extensive list of hon. Members who, without being able to offer any extenuating circumstances, have played no great part in the life of the House over the three years in question. They include hon. Members who are loudest in their proclamations of belief in the importance of parliamentary sovereignty. Public esteem and respect for the House is declining. A few important and useful procedural reforms will not get to the heart of public disquiet. The House must understand that the public now feel that there is something fundamentally wrong.
Mr. Winnick: Although public perception of the House may be to some extent along the lines that my hon. Friend suggests, the public still come to see us, as individual Members of Parliament, when they have difficulties. In the 1930s--a time of great economic insecurity and depression, and of mass unemployment, the House was held in extremely low standing. Professor Joad and John Strachey wrote in 1931 that the House was virtually dying and no one took any interest, yet look how the House responded at the time of greatest difficulty, when the nation was in danger of being enslaved.
Dr. Wright: I accept that there are cycles, and the current cycle relates to the relationship between
Parliament and the Executive--which is always in a state of flux. The relationship has moved substantially in the direction of the Government and away from Parliament. Fifteen years ago, the Procedure Committee made a famous and powerful statement about the nature of that relationship. It sounded an alarm about the loss of powers to the Executive and asked Parliament to do something. Nothing has been done and the situation has grown worse.
My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr (Mr. Rooker) referred to his famous Rooker-Wise amendment of 20 years ago. I do not believe that the present condition of the House allows for any more Rooker-Wise amendments. The balance of power has shifted and parliamentary life has altered, so the kind of Back-Bench independence required to produce substantial interventions in the legislative process no longer exists. There are many reasons. We know, for example, why Prime Minister's questions are conducted in the way that they are. Parliament has to feed the daily media battle, so there is an enormous temptation for the two combatants to do their bit of business every day.
If I may be outlandish, I do not believe that Parliament in a collective sense exists any longer exists. In its place exists a Government and Opposition engaged in an permanent election campaign in the House, lubricated by the usual channels. That explains what transpires in the House far more than any high-falutin', constitutional theory. If we are honest, most of us are in the business of climbing greasy poles, falling off greasy poles or putting more grease on the pole to make sure people do not come up behind us. That is the kind of thing that drives this place along.
Dr. Wright:
Well, we have casualties from that process, who then staff Select Committee and maybe even attain glory in them. We are talking among ourselves--we know that to be true. That is the sort of thing that animates the House. Parliament in a collective sense no longer exists, which is why there is no parliamentary career structure, although there is in terms of the Front Benches. Such a career structure may be achieved eventually.
As to the growth of the payroll vote, the ludicrous situation has been reached whereby even the most junior of junior Ministers has a parliamentary private secretary. The point will soon be reached where the PPS must have a PPS. That regime saps the independence of the House.
Mr. Spearing:
My hon. Friend speaks accurately of the public's perception of Parliament and of his analysis of unfortunate trends. Does he agree that perception is not the fault of the institution, nor necessarily the fault of standing orders or the way that the usual channels operate, but of the old Adam--human nature. The arena in which we find ourselves, which is so illuminated by the media, has heightened the effect--with the results that my hon. Friend partly correctly described.
Dr. Wright:
That was an awesome intervention. I do not feel equipped to pronounce upon human nature. I will stick more modestly to the task that I have set myself, but I understand what my hon. Friend says.
Induction has been mentioned. I am struck by the fact that I am asked by the various organisations who bring them here to speak to parliamentarians about the
procedures of the House of Commons. I am not equipped to do that, partly because I have had no induction. I am inducting Members of the Hungarian Parliament into the ways of parliamentary life when I have had no induction. That is absurd.
Parliament exists in several senses. It exists as a club. Clubs are good and people enjoy them. I am beginning to enjoy this one. Parliament exists at moments of great national rejoicing or national disaster. It certainly existed this morning when we sat in Westminster Hall during that extraordinary and moving ceremony. But it has to be more than that. It must be more than a greasy pole or a club. It must have a robust independence so that it can do the sort of things that Parliaments are supposed to do--hold executives to account and scrutinise what Governments do. It needs to be able to do all the things that we think we are about, but which we do not do very well.
It was said earlier that we are here on the evening after the night before and that this is the black hole of the parliamentary day. I am here, partly because I want to participate in this debate and partly because I have an interest in a private Member's Bill which, tomorrow morning, will be massacred by the Government. It is not my Bill, but it came in the top six in the ballot. It was unopposed on Second Reading, went through the Committee stage and the Government said, more or less, that they would not block it. We consulted widely outside and it has a great deal of support. We now discover that the Government have tabled a raft of amendments that will kill the Bill, which is designed to protect whistleblowers.
It is not difficult to work out why people feel cynical about this place. We raise expectations about what Parliament can do, and then it does not do it. Only this week, a representative of an important outside organisation told me that, effectively, his organisation had given up on the House of Commons. It focused on the House of Lords because it felt that it could still make an intervention in the legislative process there and it focused on Europe because Europe mattered.
If we have reached a point at which people who matter are saying that they have given up on this place because the legislative process is so closed and because scrutiny does not work, we have gone beyond the point at which we can just make marginal changes to the time of the year at which we do things. We must get a grip on all this. We must understand that there is something wrong.
I have probably said this before--it was a formative experience--but one of my first experiences here was to be told that Government Members on an important education Bill, which became the Education Act 1993, were spending their time in Committee writing their Christmas cards. As an innocent new boy I was rather shocked by that. However, I discovered that it was routine and that if we were in Government, we would be doing the same or we would be dealing with our correspondence or slipping out until there was a Division. The textbooks say that we are engaged in scrutiny, but we are not.
If he has not already done so, I suggest that the Chairman of the Procedure Committee reads the definitive account of the poll tax saga. I will not detain the House with the relevant passage, but the authors of that detailed study of the biggest administrative disaster of modern times describe the Committee stage of the Bill as a "futile marathon".
The Committee stage of many Bills is a futile marathon. The Opposition play the game of the soundbite and delay and the Government tell their people to keep their heads down and grit their teeth so that they can get the Bill through. That is not the way that good legislation will emerge and it is not the way that effective scrutiny will happen.
There is too much legislation. One of the many ironies of the period through which we have been living is that the Government said that part of their mission was to legislate less. They have legislated more. On average, we have had 500 more pages of legislation a year than before the Government took office and, we have had 500 more pages of secondary legislation. We know why: because it is a virility contest among Ministers to get Bills into the legislative programme. We should be far more concerned with post-legislative scrutiny to ensure that legislation works. We should be reviewing it, not putting ever more legislation through the same sausage machine straight away.
We have to understand that something is wrong, that the balance between Parliament and the Executive has moved even more decisively in the wrong direction. We have to understand that there are proposals aplenty to reform legislation. Not just vacuous leader writers, but a broad range of people have looked closely at this and have a raft of proposals. I shall not detain the House, but the excellent constitution unit reviewed a great deal of parliamentary procedure and has made 30-odd proposals, all with arguments and documentation.
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