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8.51 pm
Ms Jenny Jones (Wolverhampton, South-West): I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the debate. I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Derby, North (Mr. Laxton) on his maiden speech.
Like other new Members, I hope that my remarks will not be considered presumptuous. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House and her Committee on their work so far and on producing the report, which I have read. I found the chart at the back helpful. I also find the new Order Paper helpful, as do other hon. Members.
The Leader of the House said that she was inviting us to state our priorities. I am going to take up her invitation, although I suspect that I shall add to the long list of demands and requests for the Committee to work its way through. I gather that the Committee will in the next few weeks consider the conduct of debates. Timed speeches have been mentioned several times. I wish to refer especially to timed speeches on the Floor.
I am at pains to emphasise that I am not asking the Committee to consider timed speeches in the interest of speed. I agree with other hon. Members that speeding up legislation can be bad. Scrutiny is important. There have been examples of bad legislation that was speeded through the House with disastrous effects. As has been said, it is our electorate who must live with bad legislation. I raise timed speeches in the interest of the quality of debate.
Like other hon. Members, I come from a local authority background. As in most council chambers, we had timed speeches. Timing can vary and be quite flexible. I am not arguing for five or 10-minute speeches but for a mechanism that encourages hon. Members to be succinct and concise. The most valuable thing about timed speeches is that they enable as many people as possible to get into the debate. The way things stand, hon. Members are called by order of seniority, which we all understand, and in the interest of getting the right cross-party political mix.
I know that you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, and Madam Speaker work hard to try to fit us all in. I by no means I decry that, but in debates when many hon. Members want to speak, some cannot get in. By the nature of things, that tends to affect Back Benchers, especially newer Members. Apart from the frustration of hon. Members who have researched and prepared speeches that they cannot deliver, the House is the poorer for that, because it loses the practical knowledge and fresh approach that new Members in particular can bring to debates.
I had been in the House a week when a Conservative Member described me and other new Labour Members as Lobby fodder. New Members do not regard themselves as Lobby fodder. We are here to do a job of work. We are privileged to represent our constituencies. I am particularly privileged as the first Labour Member to represent my constituency. We come from a variety of backgrounds and have a lot to contribute to debates. We want to be active on the Floor as well as in Committee and in our constituencies.
The other reason why I should like the Committee to consider timed speeches is that several hon. Members have mentioned the public perception of the House and the way in which we debate. We must be sensitive to the fact that the public have a different perception of our conduct in the House and of our speeches. My constituents have told me that they perceive--I am being diplomatic--longer speeches of a meandering nature as reinforcing the unfortunate perception that Members of Parliament are merely in love with the sound of their own voices and opinions.
Mr. Ben Bradshaw (Exeter):
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Ms Jones) on being the second person in the debate, which began at 4.45 this afternoon, to take less than 10 minutes to speak. I shall not name the other person because it might be embarrassing.
I welcome the report and I am grateful to my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House for all the hard work that she and her Committee have put into it. I was reassured by her comment that this was only the beginning of a process. I am sure that she is aware of the great well of support, particularly from new Labour Members, for radical change in how Parliament is run. If we are to achieve the modern Britain that we talk about, we need a modern Parliament. My hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright) made the strongest case for that in this debate.
When many new Members came here--we were prepared for it--this place struck us as a men's club. Our hours are extraordinary. I do not argue, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hornchurch (Mr. Cryer) suggests some of us might, for cutting our hours. We all realise that we are here to put in very long hours; otherwise, we would not have gone for this job. However, we have inherited
our hours from an age when most Members of Parliament were not paid to work here or it was their second, third or fourth job. They came here in the afternoons.
I support my hon. Friends who have made the case for introducing a system of core hours in which we start at 10 or 11 o'clock in the morning and work until 7 o'clock in the evening. That does not mean that we could not have Committees in the evenings or outside those times. Previous speakers have already mentioned the effect that our existing hours have on family life. Many of us have no family life or loved ones within easy reach of the building, but many others do. I urge them to consider the fact that most businesses that operate effectively take into account people's basic human need to see their families. When the hours of the House were set, most of the men who inhabited these seats had few, if any, family responsibilities--that was all done by servants.
The length of speeches has already been mentioned by other hon. Members. Madam Speaker is already on record as expressing her concern that the BBC is thinking of getting rid of "Yesterday in Parliament". Over the past few years, many hon. Members have expressed concern about the decreasing interest, among not just the broadcast media but the printed media, in what happens in this Chamber. That is evidence, if any were needed, that we are, by and large, a turn-off. Most of the 15-minute speeches that I have heard since arriving here on 1 May could easily have been made in five minutes. We could then have fitted in more people. I whole-heartedly support the idea of restricting the length of speeches to 10 minutes. I do not understand why they could not be a little shorter.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Derby, North (Mr. Laxton) on his excellent maiden speech. The fact that he was here to make it reminded me of the problem that I had making mine. The problem is shared by many new Members, who sit through hours and hours of debate, having taken a long time preparing their maiden speech, and are then not called to speak. I heard of one hon. Member to whom that happened five times, so I urge my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House to consider the whole system of maiden speeches. Until a new Member makes a maiden speech, he or she is gagged. If that is not the strict rule, they at least feel gagged, because they cannot contribute to debates in the Chamber.
So far, no one has raised the issue of the dress code in the House. I do not mind wearing a suit every day, but I object to being told that I must do so. Others in the Chamber--please rule me out of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker if I am--have to sit here in diamante, buckled shoes, wearing swords and wigs. They may like that, but we should be aware of the image that we project to the world outside.
My next point is about applause. One of my abiding memories is of my first day in the Chamber for the re-election of Madam Speaker. I was sitting next to my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody). When the Prime Minister entered the Chamber, there was spontaneous applause from the Labour Benches. I shall not easily forget it because I received a sharp elbow in my ribs--I was one of those who were clapping--and it was made clear to me in no uncertain terms that applause was not allowed in the Chamber. Why not? Moments later, the most
extraordinary animal noises were emanating from her mouth. Apparently, that was how we were supposed to express our appreciation. I do not know of any other modern Chamber in the world that does not allow polite applause.
Prayers are fine and I attend when I can, but I have to say as a high Anglican that I have not in years attended a church service where the prayers were as archaic as those we say in this Chamber at 2.30 pm.
My hon. Friend the Member for Burnley (Mr. Pike), whom I shall reveal as the other hon. Member who spoke for less than 10 minutes today, talked about the seating. I know that doing so would not be physically easy, but I do not see why we cannot change the Chamber seating into a horseshoe shape. We do not need to move the Benches: Labour Members could all sit at one end, with the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and the other minority parties at the other. I know that that would not allow the confrontation across the Dispatch Boxes that we have now, but is that confrontation necessarily a good thing?
If we want to move to a new politics of a more collaborative or inquisitorial nature, why are we so hooked on the system of Front-Bench spokesmen--currently my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House and the shadow Leader of the House, the hon. Member for South Staffordshire (Sir P. Cormack)--facing each other at a distance of a few feet, often shouting at each other? Even if changing the seating meant that they sat further apart, they could still have a discourse, albeit one that was less confrontational.
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