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9 pm
Dr. Phyllis Starkey (Milton Keynes, South-West): I am grateful for the opportunity to make my maiden speech when you, Madam Speaker, are in the Chair, given your other role as chancellor of the Open university, which is one of Milton Keynes's greatest exports.
I should like to start my parliamentary career in a relatively traditional way and speak of my predecessors who have represented the seat successively known as Buckingham, Milton Keynes and, since 1992, Milton Keynes, South-West. As well as being constituency Members of Parliament of merit, they have had unusual careers.
Two of my predecessors changed political parties. Aidan Crawley was elected as the first Labour Member of Parliament for Buckingham in 1945. He lost the seat and was elected elsewhere as a Conservative Member of Parliament. Sir Frank Markham, having been a Labour Member of Parliament and a parliamentary private secretary to Ramsay MacDonald, was elected as Conservative Member of Parliament for Buckingham. He is well known in the locality: not only was a school named after him, but he wrote a seminal work, a history of Milton Keynes, which I commend to hon. Members.
Two of my other predecessors gained notoriety owing to allegations of financial and/or electoral irregularity: Robert Maxwell and my immediate predecessor, Barry Legg. I pay tribute to Mr. Legg for his work on the Treasury Select Committee and for introducing a private Member's Bill on the control of drugs in nightclubs just before the last election.
My other predecessor, Bill Benyon, was the Conservative Member of Parliament for Buckingham from 1970-83 and the first Member of Parliament for Milton Keynes, from 1983-92. He is a particularly apt role model to cite in today's debate. He was an excellent constituency Member of Parliament and, when announcing in 1992 that he would not stand again after 22 years of service, he said:
My constituency is one half of the city of Milton Keynes. It combines the older centres of Stony Stratford, Wolverton and Bletchley with the much newer communities of Loughton and Woughton. The importance of excellent transport links to Milton Keynes is emphasised by the fact that there are four railway stations in my constituency, not all of which I use all the time.
As a scientist, I am proud of the importance of science, engineering and technology to industrial innovation in Milton Keynes. Wolverton is the home of the railway engineering works where the royal train used to be kept. Bletchley is famous for Bletchley Park where, during the second world war, the Enigma codes were broken using Colossus, the world's first computer, which fills a room about half the size of the Chamber. I am hopeful that under this Government Bletchley Park will succeed in its lottery bid to fund the museum and employment scheme at that important historic site.
Milton Keynes is a unique place: it is the only new city in the United Kingdom and is built, as those hon. Members who have visited it will know, on an American grid system with extensive environmental landscaping. It has a young population and is an optimistic and forward-looking place. Most of the residents have positively chosen to live there, in the expectation that their lives would be made better. Milton Keynes was, to some extent, failed by the previous Government in that its
growth should have been complete by now. It should have a population of 250,000, but actually has fewer than 200,000, and 17 per cent. of the land is undeveloped.
My constituents and those in the other half of Milton Keynes are looking to Labour's policies to provide the environment in which Milton Keynes can develop, in particular to give us the stability and the investment in education and training on which our business growth depends. Businesses in Milton Keynes have frequently told me that their growth is held back by skills shortages, yet, at the same time, 3,000 school leavers come on to the job market every year in Milton Keynes and there are 800 unemployed under-25s. I hope that Labour's policies will bring those two problems together and will give our young people the opportunity to participate in the city's growth while allowing businesses to fuel further growth.
As befits a new city, the people of Milton Keynes take a fresh approach to problem solving--they are not hidebound by tradition--and I shall cite two examples. First, our businesses have joined the chamber of commerce with the training and enterprise council and the representatives of business on that chamber are elected by businesses in Milton Keynes. The unitary council in Milton Keynes and the chamber work closely together and are jointly committed both to economic development and to combating inequality. Businesses in Milton Keynes understand that only an inclusive society that uses the talents of everyone can provide an environment in which business can flourish.
The second example is in education: all the secondary schools in Milton Keynes, whether grant maintained or not, work together co-operatively. That might have something to do with the fact that the city's grant-maintained schools went grant-maintained so as to remain comprehensive schools and to avoid being forced to become selective by the county council, which then controlled them.
My electors voted for me because they wanted me to be part of a parliamentary Labour party that delivered on Labour's promises, as well as wanting me to represent their interests. They expect parliamentary procedures to facilitate the process of government and the implementation of the Government's programme, while including the proper safeguards for the Opposition to scrutinise that legislation. From speaking to my constituents on their doorsteps, I know that they are not always impressed by what they see on television or by some of the legislation that has emerged from Parliament. The obvious recent example of the latter was the legislation that gave us the Child Support Agency which, within a couple of days of my election, was furnishing the vast majority of the complaints that I received from constituents.
Another reason I have for stating why I think the procedures of the House need amending has to do with the sort of people who seek election as Members of Parliament. A good feature of this Parliament is that it is somewhat more representative of the population at large than previous Parliaments--obviously, I am referring to the number of women Members--but it is still not very representative of the population at large in terms of gender, ethnicity, social class or life experience. Many people are put off even thinking about becoming Members of Parliament because of the procedures of this place, so that is another good reason for changing them.
At risk of being controversial, which I know I am not supposed to do in my maiden speech, I have to say that I do not find the adversarial atmosphere of the House to be particularly helpful or conducive to constructive debate. We need to consider changing the way in which the House operates. In addition to suggestions made by hon. Members who have already spoken, I suggest that some sort of time limit on speeches might be quite helpful. I strongly agree with the hon. Member for North Cornwall (Mr. Tyler) that we should consider the physical arrangements of the House. It is ridiculous that Labour Members cannot sit on the Opposition Benches below the Gangway without people starting to think that, emulating my two predecessors, they have changed party.
Mr. Robert Jackson (Wantage):
Procedure is an arcane topic. In a venerable institution such as the House of Commons, it is liable to be taken for granted, with only a small group of procedural experts refining the details of ancient custom and practice while the rest of us get on with what we want to do under the rules as we find them.
The danger in that is that our House of Commons will fail to move with the times. Like the hon. Member for Milton Keynes, South-West (Dr. Starkey), whom I congratulate on her elegant maiden speech, I am not a procedural expert, but I envisage three dangers in the discussions.
One danger is that, in our self-satisfaction with our 700 years of history, broadening down from precedent to precedent, we shall fail to pay regard to the way in which bodies like ours function elsewhere--sometimes better than we do. Another is that we shall tend to regard small innovations as huge breakthroughs, which is how I would characterise the establishment view of the Select Committees. The third danger is that we shall tend to make the changes that we do make in a such a piecemeal fashion that the ramifications and interactions of those changes are never fully worked out in advance.
For those reasons, I enthusiastically support the Government's proposal for a new Select Committee on Procedure. Such a Committee could and should help us to overcome the dangers that I have mentioned. It goes without saying that the Government must carry all parties in the House with them in the reform of its procedures; but the huge majority that the Government currently have gives them an historic opportunity and a major incentive to undertake extensive procedural developments.
The opportunity lies in the fact that the Government have such a big majority that they can afford to create new procedures, offering a chance of genuine pluralism in our debates and decision making. The incentive is that, if they fail to do so, they will soon encounter serious demoralisation--and worse--on their Back Benches.
I suppose that most new Labour Members, like Conservative Members, have entered Parliament, not only determined to give of their best in the public service, but wholly persuaded that theirs will be more than a full-time job. It remains to be seen how they will feel when they
discover the facts of life under our existing procedures. They will be lucky to catch Madam Speaker's eye more than once a month or so at Question Time, and perhaps once every six months for a debate in the Chamber, with an audience of about 10 colleagues.
They will not be selected to serve on the Standing Committees of Bills in respect of which their expertise makes them too keen to serve, and when they are summoned to Standing Committee duty they will be told by their Whips that speeches are unwelcome--that has been mentioned several times tonight--so it will be a good opportunity for them to catch up with constituency correspondence.
If they happen to be one of the minority summoned to serve on a Select Committee--probably one on a subject on which they are not too conveniently well-informed--they will find that it takes months for the Government to respond to their reports, and that when they do, they show scant regard for their labours.
Perhaps I have been exaggerating for effect, but Members who have been in the House for some time know that there is a large measure of truth in the sombre picture that I have painted. What should we do about it?
I shall make a concrete proposal in a moment, but to lead into it, let me return to what I said about piecemeal changes whose full ramifications are not thought through.
The starting point of all our procedural debates should be the so-called Jopling reforms of the last Parliament, which have been mentioned. These welcome changes reflected the reality that hon. Members were no longer willing to sustain the pretence that open-ended debates and the archaic ritual of the all-night sitting offered effective parliamentary control over the Executive.
The truth is that the Jopling reforms went only half the distance. They dismantled one admittedly obsolete system of parliamentary influence--that which was based on the struggle for parliamentary time--but failed to erect an alternative system. The net effect is that Parliament is now even weaker vis-a-vis the Executive than before. The challenge to us in this Parliament is surely to build that alternative system for which Jopling created the space.
I urge the House to take to heart the other dangers that I have mentioned in our time-honoured approach to procedural reform: our complacency about the way in which other Parliaments--I have heard them referred to here as lesser Parliaments--work. I believe that we have much to learn from them. In a modern legislature, the main source of parliamentary influence over the Executive is to be found in the structures of institutionalised pluralism and a diversity of centres of influence which have to be negotiated with and operated by a well-informed and professionally disciplined cadre of Members. The best way to ensure that--as we can see by looking at Parliaments on the continent of Europe, in the United States and in the Commonwealth--is to rebuild our parliamentary life around an array of powerful subject-specialist committees.
My proposal, accordingly, is that we do away with the existing Standing Committees and Select Committees. Our Standing Committees are constituted ad hoc for particular legislation so that there is no continuity of membership or accumulation of expertise in them. Their membership is determined in reality by agents of the Executive in the Whips Office. Their Chairmen are limited to a purely procedural role which denies them any influence over policy.
Our Select Committees, meanwhile, do not compensate for these deficiencies. Their membership is once again controlled by the Whips and, more fundamentally, their arduous investigations are wholly disconnected from the legislative process, so that they have no levers with which to give practical effect to such expertise as they may develop. To replace these arrangements, we need a new unified Committee structure--a system of specialist Committees, each with its own subject area. By the way, these should not be limited to particular Departments of the Government.
The Committees should be constituted at the beginning of each Parliament, and every Member of Parliament who is not a member of the Government should be a member of at least one of those Committees. Their composition must reflect the balance of the House, but although the Whips will have a hand in deciding who goes where, their influence will be much diminished by the fact that all Members must be found a place. Each Committee should choose its own Chairman and Vice-Chairman to serve for at least two years under an overall agreement, giving a fair share of these positions to each party.
The task of these specialist Committees should include the conduct of investigations into whatever area of policy they choose within their remit--that is the function of the existing Select Committees. They should include also the detailed scrutiny of all legislation--primary and secondary, national and European--falling within their remit. That is the function of the present Standing Committees.
In both functions--the investigative and the legislative--they should be led not by Ministers, but by hon. Members of whatever party who are chosen by the Committee to serve as rapporteurs on a particular subject or a particular Bill. Rapporteurs should assist in another function that I see the new Committees performing--scrutinising expenditure on policies within their field of reference. That is a task that--with all respect to the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Mr. Sheldon)--I believe the existing Public Accounts Committee does not have the subject-based expertise to perform.
The arrangements that I am suggesting would give every Back Bencher a serious job to do and would ensure that Members were much better informed and up to date in their knowledge than they can hope to be under our present system. They would create in the institutional esprit de corps of each Committee and in the persons of its Chairman, Vice-Chairman and rapporteur the genuinely pluralistic network of diffused centres of influence which is the only viable basis for an effective modern legislature.
"I am very disillusioned. One of my interests in Parliament was trying to reform its archaic procedures."
I hope that, in my time as the Member of Parliament for Milton Keynes, South-West, we shall succeed in reforming the archaic procedures of Parliament and that I can therefore be a worthy successor to Bill Benyon.
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