| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. John Maxton (Glasgow, Cathcart): It is pointless sitting here when there is so much constituency work and Select Committee and Standing Committee work as well as other work to be done. Nine hon. Members in 10 or 99 out of a hundred are unable to take part in debates because so many wish to participate. Sitting here does not seem to be the most useful way for an hon. Member to use his time.
Mr. Sheldon: I agree. There is much work to do. We must see to correspondence and telephone calls and we look after our constituents in a way that our predecessors did not. However, something is being lost in that process, and anything that can be done to enable us to return to some aspect of what we had would be valuable.
Standing Order 20 debates are at the discretion of the Speaker. Madam Speaker rightly decides whether a specific and important matter should have urgent consideration. If she decides that they deserve priority, they are debated. In the past few years, there has been an increase in such debates, and we are grateful to Madam Speaker for making that improvement. The procedure had almost fallen into disuse until the past few years, and it has brought alive some of the important issues. Such rights are important, and whatever can be done to allow them to continue deserves our encouragement.
Select Committees are enormously important. Their great value is that they bring together people from all parts of the House to look at the facts. It is astonishing how well people can work together in areas of common interest. I shall give an extreme example: it is not typical by any means. The Public Accounts Committee operates like that. We looked at all the privatisations. There were enormous differences in Committee, but our remit was to see whether privatisation was carried out efficiently and gave proper value for money. The Government decision is not questioned. Such operations are evident in other Select Committees. Their members look at the facts and try to find how a process can be made more efficient. They may say, "The Government have got this wrong and should be doing more." A Select Committee's enormous advantage is being able to look at the facts and bring them to the attention of Ministers.
Sir Peter Emery (East Devon):
In following the speech by the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Mr. Sheldon), I should like to mention one of the old traditions of the House, that in debates each speaker picked up points that the previous speaker had made. I should like to add to what the right hon. Gentleman said
I congratulate the Leader of the House on her appointment. I shall attempt to be non-partisan, with the exception of one matter, which I shall mention later. Many hon. Members want to play a political game, but many of us are honestly interested in trying to improve the way that Parliament operates and legislation is scrutinised. The right hon. Lady has heard me say many times that I have spent 14 years trying to drag our procedures screaming into the 20th century. If she can continue with that tradition into the 21st century, I shall be delighted.
We must proceed only with the agreement of the whole House. When that is not achieved, attempts at modernisation will frequently fail--the introduction of morning sittings in the 1960s is an illustration of that.
I shall now turn to the partisan matter, but I shall not dwell on it, because it is to be debated. The Leader of the House was ill advised to introduce the new format for Prime Minister's Question Time without consultation or consideration and against the recommendation of the Procedure Committee. On that Committee, four of her hon. Friends, one of whom is now a Minister, agreed with the recommendation that a new format was not to the advantage of the House. We shall return to that matter.
Mr. Connarty:
The hon. Gentleman speaks about procedure and consultation. Does he not think that the new format is a vast improvement on the turmoil over the past five years during Prime Minister's questions?
Sir Peter Emery:
The Procedure Committee made suggestions for improving Prime Minister's Question Time. However, they were not debated, because it was not the wish of the then Leader of the Opposition to move in the way that he has now moved. I have read to the House the letter that he wrote to the Committee.
The value of Prime Minister's Question Time derives from open-ended questions. In a debate with me on television, the new leader of the parliamentary Labour party spoke about questions in depth. When that happens, it will do away with the open-ended question and it will be an entirely different way to proceed. Judging by press comments on Prime Minister's questions, the new format is no better than the old one.
On two occasions, the Procedure Committee made recommendations about the timetabling of Bills. First, it recommended a legislation business committee. When that was debated, it faced the strongest opposition from all parts of the House that I have ever known. All the Front-Bench Labour spokesmen opposed it, and there was a one-line whip. The Government payroll vote turned out in full to defeat it. I remember that because it was debated on my birthday, and it was a birthday present of no great value after a great deal of work by the Procedure Committee.
The Committee took another sheet of paper and made further suggestions about the way that every part of legislation should be considered by Committees. There is
something wrong when only a third or even less of a Bill has been considered upstairs before returning to the House. We must find a way to overcome that. Perhaps the Leader of the House will ask the Committee that she proposes to set up to look at the final suggestion by the Procedure Committee. It set out a method by which such a problem could be dealt with in Committee by ensuring that every part of a Bill would be considered before it was reported. That is of considerable importance in improving the manner in which the House deals with legislation.
I ask the Leader of the House to look again at the work of the European Standing Committees. The Procedure Committee originally recommended that there should be five Committees, but only two were appointed. They have not functioned well, because the amount of work that two Committees have had to do on a range of subjects has been much too much for the people who have had to serve on them. We suggested five Committees on different subjects so that we could build up expertise on tax and trade in one Committee, agriculture in another, transport and other factors in another, and so on. We could have encouraged specialists on those subjects to serve on those European Standing Committees. At present, we almost have to drag people into serving on European Standing Committees because it is such a drudge. They should be a way of using the talents of the House better than they have used before.
Mr. Bernard Jenkin:
As someone who served in the last Parliament for five years on European Standing Committee B, I endorse what my right hon. Friend says. Does he agree that there is something rather daft about a legislative process in which we discuss draft documents before Ministers go off to debate matters in the Council of Ministers and we never receive a report so that we can give a view on whether the deal that Ministers have concluded is right or wrong for this country? Does my right hon. Friend agree that, if we had more Committees, we could have time for a proper report from Ministers and time to cross-examine them so that they were properly brought to account on how they delivered what they told the Committee they would?
Sir Peter Emery:
I accept what my hon. Friend says. There is no way of doing that if we have only two Committees, because they are permanently full of work and cannot check on what has been achieved. It would be to the benefit of the House and the country to know how the regulations were dealt with by Ministers in Europe.
I recommend to the Leader of the House other suggestions by the Procedure Committee on the way in which European business is dealt with. We went to the extent of recommending stronger links with the European Parliament. The one way in which the House of Commons can have influence on the way in which European legislation is passed is for it to influence the European Committees which deal with it. There could be a link between our Select Committees and European Committees so that European Committees know the views of the House. That does not happen at present.
I have suggested the appointment of--to use a European term--a rapporteur to each of the departmental Select Committees, whose job would be to be in touch with rapporteurs of similar Committees in the European Parliament so that we know what is going on. We should have a link so that we can influence their decisions at the
stage of drawing up reports, not after the rapporteur has made his report. That would give us some input into regulations that come out of Brussels such as we have never been able to achieve.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |