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Ms Walley: Does my right hon. Friend agree that, if the Environmental Audit Committee had those facilities, that would make an enormous difference to the role which it plays in seeing whether the Government are making progress?
Mr. Sheldon: My hon. Friend is absolutely right.
I hope that the Liaison Committee will act as a clearing house for some of the new ideas. The Treasury Select Committee is undertaking what may be called "confirmatory hearings", and those will be useful in examining the Committee's role in some matters. I shall consult my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House to discuss some possibilities. Clearly, she intends to be a reforming Leader of the House. I welcome her appointment and her actions here.
Madam Speaker:
I will call the right hon. Member for South Norfolk (Mr. MacGregor) next. May I just say that many right hon. and hon. Members are interested in taking part in the debate? Unless those speaking discipline themselves, all Members will not be called. I would not dream of inhibiting the right hon. Member for South Norfolk.
5.58 pm
Mr. John MacGregor (South Norfolk): I shall try to be as concise as possible, Madam Speaker. I speak as a supporter of appropriate modernisation, as I hope I demonstrated when I was Leader of the House--not least in setting up the Jopling Committee. My only regret about that is that there was insufficient time between the Committee's report and the 1992 general election to enable me to implement its recommendations.
I take the point of the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Mr. Sheldon) that it is sometimes easier to get changes through in the earlier part of a Parliament than the latter part. I was pleased that my long-standing friend and ex-colleague Tony Newton, as Leader of the House, was able to make the reforms, with great co-operation from the present Leader of the House.
I wish to make a few general points before I deal with one or two specific proposals. First, I want to refer to the importance of carrying the House on any changes. This is partly a cultural point and partly a practical point.
Paragraph 17 of the report says:
The will to co-operate was in my mind when I set up the Jopling Committee and it is why I sought to have hon. Members of all parties and of different ages and experience on it. Many people then thought--as the Leader of the House said was thought about the present Committee--that it would not be possible to reach agreement in that Committee, but it was, and that was of huge benefit in getting the changes through.
When I was an Opposition Whip, then a Government Whip, then a Minister in various Departments, before becoming Leader of the House, I was frequently struck by the fact that the procedures of the House are such that a determined minority--often a very small one--can hold up processes and make change almost impossible. Many who were then Opposition Members were expert at that, and one had to take that into account when making changes.
I underline the importance of what my right hon. Friend the Member for South-West Norfolk (Mrs. Shephard) said when she stressed the importance of good will, especially among Government Back Benchers, and of the Government's approach to such matters in the House.
I was very disappointed when I heard a Labour Member say, I think, "Now you've spoilt it" while my right hon. Friend was speaking. That comment showed a potentially dangerous misunderstanding of the point that she was making. The hon. Gentleman who said it should be aware of that. There are all sorts of legitimate opportunities to hold matters up, sometimes simply to express the irritation of Members of Parliament who feel that they are being bypassed or that their role is being diminished.
Some of the abruptness and impatience that we have witnessed from the Government, supported by their Back Benchers, should not occur, because, if we are to get the changes through, as we all want, the Government must understand the sensitivities. If there is a feeling that Parliament is being bypassed or ignored or that its role is being diminished by the Government, it is less easy to put into effect the practical, commonsense changes that we think will benefit the House. The Government should be willing to put up with the odd filibuster, because there may be a good reason for it.
Paragraph 7 of the report refers to
If Parliament is to play its proper role in scrutinising legislation, Ministers must be willing to overrule their civil servants, who in turn should not feel that every bit of a Bill that they have drafted is inviolable. Sometimes a Bill comes back from another place with about 500 amendments; how much better it would be if they were made earlier.
I agree with all the criteria set out in paragraph 14, although some are more important than others. I want particularly to stress that
Paragraph 14(d) caught my eye. It says:
I strongly agree with the report's approach on flexibility and its recognition that not all Bills are the same, that some may be treated differently from others, and that we can experiment. One or two of the proposals will probably die a death in due course, but I am perfectly happy for us to experiment with them to find out whether they have a contribution to make.
The Government must recognise that several of the recommendations have a considerable time implication. If the Government are to implement them thoroughly, more parliamentary time will have to be given to Bills and there will have to be less legislation. That applies in particular to some of the suggestions in relation to First Reading.
Mrs. Ann Taylor:
The right hon. Gentleman says that if we give more time to certain Bills we will have to extend the overall time and have less legislation. Does he agree that in the strict routine that we have for legislation we do not always need to give matters as much time as we do? We are very good at wasting time in the House. The fact that we want to extend time in one area does not mean that it could not be saved in other areas.
If we had more draft Bills and early legislation and got the legislation nearer to how it should be at that stage--I believe that the right hon. Member for South-West Norfolk (Mrs. Shephard) agreed with that--it might go through more quickly. We need to be flexible and do what is most appropriate for each specific Bill.
Mr. MacGregor:
One of my hobbies is mind reading, and as I made my last remark I could almost read the right hon. Lady's mind. I knew what she was thinking and I recognise her point, which is why I was treading fairly carefully. She is right in some respects, but I suspect that, in practice, when there is draft legislation followed by the normal processes, those processes may not necessarily be all that much shorter. The great merit will be that the House will pass more considered legislation. I hope that that will lead to our not having to revisit the legislation.
One of our defects--I have been guilty of it myself as Leader of the House--is that we spend so little time considering the revisions by the House of Lords. It is a bit of a scandal that we sometimes make a large number of Lords amendments with hardly any consideration. Many of the amendments are technical, granted, but not all. We agree that the way in which both Houses consider legislation may become lengthier, but will be better.
I am not entirely enamoured of one or two of the specific proposals. I am not sure that they will be a permanent feature. I strongly agree with the drift of the report that permanent legislative Committees are not really the answer, for all the reasons set out in the report. I have some doubts whether the departmental Select Committee is the right place to consider legislation in draft because the membership is already decided for reasons other than the specific piece of legislation.
It may be better to have an ad hoc Select Committee, as the report recommends, because it will be possible to appoint people with specific expertise--in pensions, for example, as the Leader of the House said. The ad hoc Select Committee is probably the right way to take this forward, and I would like some experiments on that. I am doubtful about several of the First Reading Committee proposals, but let us see how they work.
"Another major factor in the largely inflexible approach to legislation adopted hitherto is essentially that of the culture of the House."
I agree with the point about culture, but I do not think that we have been inflexible: many changes have been made and the report builds on them. The paragraph is absolutely right when it says that
"there must be a will in all parts of the House to achieve cooperation wherever it is possible."
I am glad that the Leader of the House acknowledged that when she spoke about good will on all sides.
"a distinct culture prevalent throughout Whitehall that the standing and reputation of Ministers have been dependent on their Bills getting through largely unchanged."
That may be true to some extent, but civil servants also feel that their reputation depends on resisting every amendment, even purely technical ones, to a Bill that they have been involved in drafting. As a Minister in charge of Bills I noticed that "Resist" was written above almost every amendment, even if the point was technical.
"All parts of a Bill must be properly considered".
That will lead me on later to a point or two about timetabling.
"The time and expertise of Members must be used to better effect."
I was glad that the report recognised Members' expertise. That brings me to a wider point, which is perhaps more relevant to the Nolan committee. I have always been a strong advocate of the House being composed of people with outside expertise, not derived only from their constituents, that they can bring to the workings of the House, especially in legislation. That is why I have always strongly advocated Members continuing to have outside interests. The report acknowledges that their expertise can be relevant on Bills and in other ways.
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