| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
4.1 pm
Mr. Peter Brooke (Cities of London and Westminster): Proceedings on the Bill before it went to the Lords were a model for the lack of rancour with which they were conducted. There were occasional moments, but there are in any Committee. The Minister for Housing and Planning earned the praise of the Committee at the end of the proceedings for the manner in which he had conducted them. I am very sorry that the Government have tabled a guillotine motion, because it has introduced some rancour to the House's deliberations on a Bill which everyone agrees is important.
I admire the Leader of the House. I am glad that she survived the July and October reshuffles, because she is a good Leader of the House. I am not criticising her, but there was a time when the holder of her post attended and moved the motion in debates on guillotines. The right hon. Lady's one failing is that she has some of the characteristics of the speaking clock when she reads out that there is going to be a guillotine motion. I am not sure whether my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) drew attention to the fact that her two references to the first debate taking four hours were inaccurate by 53 minutes, because it took three hours and seven minutes, although I acknowledge that it was followed by a Division. Not having Divisions is very new Labour. It may be a reflection of the evils of Conservatism that we retain an old-fashioned democratic affection for an occasional vote, so I do not feel bad about the fact that we divided at the end of the first debate. Even so, the right hon. Lady greatly exaggerated the length of time that it took.
When the Bill came to us in Committee it had 270 clauses and 30 schedules. We added a further 30 clauses in Committee. It then went off to the House of Lords. My understanding is that after the to-ing and fro-ing with the
House of Lords is concluded, the Bill will have 413 clauses. That means that the Bill will have more than a third as many clauses as it had when it left this House and will have increased in size by more than 50 per cent. since it first went to the Standing Committee all those days ago in January. That is a massive increase, reinforcing what my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham said.
I shall not follow others--started by the Minister for Housing and Planning--in referring to candidates. Several Labour Members are, in one of Mr. Neil Kinnock's famous phrases, fighting like ferrets in a sack. In these days of political correctness, I should not want to say anything that was in any way disobliging to ferrets.
Mr. Richard Shepherd (Aldridge-Brownhills):
I wish to join my right hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr. Brooke) in what he said, which bears upon the way in which we conduct debates.
My right hon. and hon. Friends have made cogent and powerful points, as did the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Mr. Stunell)--not the least of which is that there is a misprint in the motion. I do not know whether the Government will address that before we commence. If not, the misprint will stand as the order of this House if we go to a vote and the motion is approved. Will the Government move an amendment in advance of the decision on the motion? As it stands, the motion refers to amendments Nos. "500 to 450", which could cause confusion in terms of the intervening amendments.
I have had a long struggle against the use of guillotines, which have become routine for Governments. The present Government in particular are not weighing sufficiently carefully what they are doing. For many years--back to the 1930s--the House has been concerned about Henry VIII clauses in Bills. Now we have a Government who, like Henry VIII, believe that any proclamation of the King should be law.
Effectively, this motion is a proclamation. Within the first set of amendments to be considered, Nos. 213 to 422 deal with measures relating to London Transport. Effectively, these make up an additional Bill. Under any other Government, these measures would have made a separate, free-standing Bill. We know that that is the Government's own view; they would not have constructed a Bill which omitted such a fundamental principle if they held that the measures should be part of the original Bill.
Mr. Forth:
Does my hon. Friend agree that, taking what he has just said together with the remarks of my right hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr. Brooke) about the proportion of the Bill considered in relative detail in Committee and the enormous number of amendments to be added with no consideration at all, this could set a dangerous precedent that could be used by a Government who might be tempted to put an entirely new Bill into one that had
Mr. Shepherd:
And how! Clearly, this matter concerned the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Mr. Stunell), who said that it was the constitutional duty of this House to debate. I do not demur from that. Any understanding of the role of Executive Government and the function of the House of Commons comes down to the fundamental basic job of the House of Commons, which is to debate the public measures and policies put forward by the Executive. In this case, the Executive have decided to create what could be a free-standing Bill in its own right, insert it into the original Bill in the House of Lords and present it to this Chamber. [Interruption.] The Under-Secretary may or may not agree, and I am happy that he is participating--like Back-Bench Members--in this debate. Could he give us a greater insight into the use of the guillotine?
I am becoming alarmed by the way in which the Government believe that their proclamations are law, and by their disregard for the purposes and processes of this House. I have seen Governments of a different colour nodding their head at that idea. The guillotine is constructed so closely--apart from the misprint, which I accept--that the motion states that the House
The Government will eventually stand in front of the public at a general election, but it takes a long time for it to become widely known that important issues of substance are no longer at the core of Members' role in addressing--as my right hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster does--vital London constituency issues. Because of the nature of some of the amendments, I, too, now have vital constituency issues to address in the Bill. The issue of road user charges is an important one in principle for people living in Aldridge-Brownhills or anywhere else in the west midlands. Nevertheless, the provision has simply been driven into the Bill, with no opportunity properly to discuss it.
Mr. Bercow:
I do not know whether my hon. Friend heard the Minister for Housing and Planning sedentarily comment that my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) was paranoid. In the light of that sedentary interjection, does my hon. Friend agree that the Minister now has a duty to tell us whether hon. Members' treatment today is intended to be an isolated case and will not be repeated, or whether it is now to become common practice, and, if so, whether he has the audacity to think that none of us should be remotely concerned about it?
Mr. Shepherd:
My hon. Friend is, of course, right. He used the word paranoid. We often in our debates make allegations, become excited and make claims about other
Much more important than characterising each of us as trying to represent our narrow constituency interests, however, is whether we are truly able to discuss the substance of matters that will have a bearing on our constituents.
I know--because of the good grace of my colleagues, the "Today" programme and other sources--that the Minister for Housing and Planning is running the campaign of a candidate in the London mayoral election. We know that the hon. Gentleman's sympathies are not so disdainful of the House--surely he must know that, in normal times, the Government's proposed use of this guillotine, and the huge transformations effected in the Bill, would be thought most inappropriate.
Mr. Simon Hughes (Southwark, North and Bermondsey):
I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman--who is always assiduous in dealing with respect for the rights of the House--has considered one supplementary point. The right hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr. Brooke) commented that the House is expected to consider, in two days, about 90 new clauses and about 10 schedules--some of which are pages long, and some of which, in both their general and detailed provision, have huge financial implications. I have never known the House to be expected to consider 90 new clauses and 10 schedules at this stage in a Bill's passage, and I doubt whether the hon. Gentleman has, either.
"doth agree with the Lords in all the remaining Lords Amendments."
We know full well that we shall not be able to debate all the amendments, simply because of the scarcity of time allocated to do so by a majority of Labour Members. However, the guillotine is being used as a device to prevent us even from voting against provisions that we may judge to be inappropriate or wrong or as giving a wrong balance to the legislation. Is that a development in the employment of guillotine motions?
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |