House of Commons Hansard Debates for 13 Nov 1997 (pt 28)

Mr. Mike Hall (Weaver Vale): It was a good speech.

Sir Patrick Cormack: It was, and it would repay close study by all hon. Members, including those who are not present this evening.

The hon. Member for Milton Keynes, South-West (Dr. Starkey)--another active member of the Committee--made a particularly good point when she said that the Government must not regard improvements to legislation as defeat, and that, when amendments were being considered, the Government should be open-minded. The Government should consider whether an amendment would indeed improve the Bill involved, and, if it would, they should be prepared to concede and

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should not consider that a defeat. I hope that the present Government will heed what the hon. Lady said, and adopt that attitude.

Dr. Starkey: Will the hon. Gentleman also say that it is up to the Opposition not to gloat and take it as a Government defeat when the Government accept their amendments in a constructive spirit?

Sir Patrick Cormack: That is a very good sentiment, but we are all human and we all love a bit of a gloat occasionally. It is the triumph of hope over experience if the hon. Lady thinks that she is going to banish gloating from the Palace of Westminster, but, of course, I take her point.

The hon. Member for Hornchurch is a worthy chip off the old block. Many of us in the House regard his late father with great affection. It was a terrible tragedy when he was killed and a great loss to Parliament. I disagreed with almost everything that he said, but I admired enormously his mastery of our procedures, his persistence and his use of every procedural device; he did it in a way of which Keir Hardie would have been proud. Bob Cryer was a distinguished parliamentarian and the hon. Gentleman seems cast in the same mould. He certainly does not seem to be a man who will be cowed by a Government Whip and I am delighted by that.

I agreed with everything that the hon. Gentleman said about hours, but I gently take issue with what he said about holidays. I am sure that he is as conscientious a constituency Member as his late father was. He never regarded recesses as holidays. He worked jolly hard throughout them and most of us do. That is an important point. In my 27 years in the House, I have never had more than 17 days' consecutive holiday and I do not think that I am unusual in that. It is important that we say that often.

The hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Ms Jones), who is a next-door neighbour of mine in constituency terms, made an admirably lucid and brief speech. She made some good points about timed speeches, but the essence of debate is and must be spontaneity. It is important that there should be opportunity for intervention. If one is always working against a timetable, it is impossible to have interventions. It is a great pity when Members come into the Chamber--she acknowledged this partly, but not sufficiently--read their speeches, sometimes gabbling through them, and are not prepared to give way. They plead in aid the fact that Madam Speaker has imposed a time limit and it stifles debate. I must sit down in a moment so that the Leader of the House gets her 10 minutes, but I add just this.

In the Select Committee on Modernisation of the House of Commons and in all our other deliberations, we must try to bring life back into this Chamber, which should be the cockpit of the nation. I find it infinitely depressing when Members contribute to debates--this does not apply to the hon. Members who have spoken in this debate, almost every one of whom has spoken and come back to his or her place--and then go off and do not return, as happens so often.

I wonder whether we should consider taking a leaf out of the book of the other place, so that Members can put in their names. In doing so, they know that they will be called, but are expected to be here throughout. Apart from leaving to take perhaps an urgent telephone call, to answer

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a call of nature or to take the briefest of snacks, they should be in this Chamber because it is absolutely destructive of proper debate if we have merely a series of spasmodic utterances, with hon. Members who have contributed then leaving. We need this Chamber to be full. The Select Committee, which is full of experienced members, should bend its collective mind to find out what it can do to encourage Members to be here more often, to take part in debates more vigorously and to stay to listen to what their colleagues have to say.

9.49 pm

Mrs. Ann Taylor: With permission, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I should like to say a few words in reply to the debate. I will not have as much time as the hon. Member for South Staffordshire (Sir P. Cormack) to deal with every contribution, but that is fine by me because, in many respects, he was replying on behalf of those of us who served on the Committee. As I said earlier, it was a constructive Committee which produced a unanimous report.

The hon. Member for South Staffordshire was right to say that we have not had what he called "spasmodic utterances" during this debate. We have had a good example today of how Parliament can work and how hon. Members on both sides of the Chamber can listen to the contributions of others and make their own points in the context of an overall constructive debate.

My hon. Friend the Member for Derby, North (Mr. Laxton) made an extremely competent maiden speech which I am sure will please his constituents. He showed extremely good knowledge of their problems and the issues that concern them most. He ventured on to the subject of football, which is a somewhat dangerous thing to do if I am in the Chamber. In that respect, all I have in common with him is the fact that in Bolton we, too, have a new stadium. I have not visited his yet and Derby County has not yet visited Bolton. Perhaps we will see each other later in the year when we can talk about the modernisation of Parliament for 90 minutes--or perhaps not.

Today's debate has shown that the whole House basically welcomes the thrust of the recommendations in the Committee's report. Hon. Members on both sides of the Chamber have emphasised different parts of the report or have suggested modifications to certain elements of what we have proposed. Some have suggested ideas that we might wish to take further forward. Basically, almost everybody who has spoken has, in one way or another, supported the ideas in the report.

In many respects, that is not surprising, because we have heard from a mixture of experienced Members and new Members. It is sometimes said that it is only new Members who want to see change in this Chamber. We have seen today that, with one or two exceptions, that is not the case. There are many hon. Members who have spent many years in the House and who do not feel that the best use has always been made of the time they have spent here. [Interruption.] The right hon. Member for East Devon (Sir P. Emery) is showing himself to be a true moderniser by pretending to applaud instead of saying, "Hear, hear." I do not think that we should provoke Mr. Deputy Speaker too much on this occasion.

As the hon. Member for South Staffordshire said, the contribution made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Mr. Sheldon) was wise and

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perceptive. He took an overview of the changes that are needed and managed to throw in one or two practical changes which might be achieved quite quickly if we were to take them up. He gave us food for thought in that respect.

The same is true of the right hon. Member for South Norfolk (Mr. MacGregor). As a former Leader of the House, he made a positive contribution to the debate and put the changes that we propose into context. He gave us hope that we could achieve a great deal in the future.

My hon. Friend the Member for Burnley (Mr. Pike), whom I have known for many years, is a member of the Committee. He showed his normal common sense in his approach to the debate and his usual honesty. He admitted that, on occasion, he had been party to some of the time-wasting deliberations that have had to take place in the past. After so many years in opposition, we both feel that the weapon of delay never really achieved anything. It might have caused some frustration to Ministers on a few occasions, but it never achieved anything. There was never anything constructive about it. We must try to find ways for everybody to be constructive critics, if that is what is needed. That requires a degree of willingness to listen on the part of the Government.

There will be matters on which there will be no meeting of minds, as the right hon. Member for South-West Norfolk (Mrs. Shephard) mentioned, but on other occasions--I return to debates on the Child Support Agency as an example--we do not have to be confrontational on every issue that comes up. We should not deny the fact that hon. Members on both sides of the House can on occasions agree. We should not pretend that such occasions can never occur and gear all our procedures towards that.

The right hon. Member for East Devon, who has been a member of the Committee as well as having a distinguished record as Chairman of the Procedure Committee, proved that point when he talked of Bills being passed after only a quarter or a third of their contents had been discussed. That was why he was looking for a constructive way of using timetabling, as he had said before.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stockton, North (Mr. Cook) was less happy with some of the changes. Perhaps I can reassure him--not least because his last point, on which I was going to intervene, related to experiments. We are not trying to change Standing Orders in such a way that we never learn anything and lock ourselves into new procedures which may not work well.