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Mr. Shepherd: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. With the best will in the world, does the speech of the hon. Member for Greenock and Inverclyde (Dr. Godman) not demonstrate the very purpose of the guillotine, which is to deny him the opportunity to raise detailed criticism during the debate?
Mr. Deputy Speaker: I am obliged to the hon. Member; he anticipates me. I must treat the hon. Member for Greenock and Inverclyde (Dr. Godman) as I did the right hon. Members for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe) and for Blackburn (Mr. Straw). The hon. Member is straying far too much into detail. I understand his original argument, but he must stick to the question of the allocation of time. He cannot go into such detail.
Dr. Godman: I am exceedingly grateful for your advice, Mr. Deputy Speaker. If I drifted, it was because of the intensity of my feelings about the legislation and how it will affect implementation in Scotland. The Government are sailing into dangerous waters. There must be a partnership between the two Parliaments. The Scottish Parliament has not formally debated the measures yet. In fairness to the Home Secretary, he has acknowledged the problems.
The Secretary of State for Scotland will have power over the designation question, yet we shall not have the chance to debate that.
Mr. Andrew Stunell (Hazel Grove):
The Home Secretary was as slick and professional as always, but it occurred to me that he had taken some advice from the late Winston Churchill, who would write a marginal note when devising his speeches. I believe that one of Winston Churchill's notes was, "Weak argument: shout." The Home Secretary's presentation included a considerable amount of shouting and arm waving. We were presented with not so much an argument, but a sieve through which the words dropped.
This major Bill is complex and has been debated long. Many amendments to it were made in the other place. Today, we have the final, ultimate opportunity to consider the Bill, and the 367 amendments from the Government and the two from the combined might of the Opposition.
This is the fourth guillotine motion that we have debated in four days.
Mr. Stunell:
My hon. Friend reminds me that it is two days.
In yesterday's debate on the timetable motion, our attention was drawn to the Railways Act 1993 and other Bills to which many amendments have been tabled in the past. According to the figures given by Ministers yesterday, the ratio of the number of amendments coming back from the Lords to the number of clauses in this Bill is even more dramatic. Now our time is even more restricted.
I want to stay strictly in order while I draw the attention of the House to two or three specific issues that the guillotine will prevent from being discussed fully and properly. The first is Lords amendment No. 1, which introduces a new and different form of detention into United Kingdom law. A fundamentally new principle will be skated over in the debate that is to be crammed into our remaining time.
As the hon. Member for Greenock and Inverclyde (Dr. Godman) said, many of the amendments covered by the guillotine motion are about the difficulties created by the backlog of asylum seekers in this country, and they are much too low down the list to be discussed properly.
The serious new proposals that are coming to the House from the other place will therefore not be discussed. They will have an impact not only on asylum seekers, but on local authorities and communities, especially in the south-east, but elsewhere as well. They will not be afforded the proper attention that the House would pay them if it were doing its duty.
Over the past two years, the House collectively has made serious efforts to improve the way in which it deals with legislation. It is a great pity that this Government, at this stage, in this Session, is throwing away much of that
progress by repeatedly moving guillotine motions. It is a great shame to see the benefits thrown away, and to realise what damage will be done and what potential faults and flaws will pass into law as a result of our failure to discuss the amendments properly.
The guillotine is unnecessary. We had days of slack business last week, including parliamentary days that ended early. We had a serious substantial debate, not on asylum or on new powers of detention but on--
Mr. Stunell:
Yes, it was on whether we should write our Acts on vellum. If arranging for votes about vellum is the best that the Government business managers can do to get the business of the House in good order and to make good legislation, it is a sad commentary both on their performance and on that of the Government.
Mr. James Clappison (Hertsmere):
The guillotine is a serious mistake. The nature and history of the Bill make it especially unsuitable to be subject to a guillotine in the routine way to which we seem to be becoming accustomed under the present Government.
I shall briefly dispose of the Home Secretary's argument about the Opposition's past conduct towards the Bill. I am rather curious about his attitude, because at the end of last month, when it was announced that record numbers of people were seeking asylum in this country, the right hon. Gentleman was quoted in The Daily Telegraph as saying as saying that the figures showed the need for the Tories to stop opposing the Bill.
I was not aware that Tories had ever started opposing the Bill. The records will show that on both Second and Third Reading, this party did not oppose it. May I let the Home Secretary into a little secret? The Conservative party was about the only organisation that did not oppose the Bill. The Liberal Democrats opposed it--although they never seem to get the blame, perhaps because they pay the Home Secretary nice compliments on the Floor of the House before they vote against his Bill.
Almost every organisation that appeared before the Special Standing Committee criticised the Bill. Hardly any of them had a good word to say about it. Indeed, the procedure followed in the Special Standing Committee is another reason why the Bill should not be subject to a guillotine. The Government are in a curious position because, at first, they said that the Bill required great debate and careful consideration, and therefore needed a Special Standing Committee. I give them credit for doing so, although perhaps the Home Secretary was almost obliged to, because he had made the absence of a Special Standing Committee his principal ground for opposition to the Asylum and Immigration Act 1996.
I heard what the Home Secretary said about the virtues of Special Standing Committees, and I hope that there will be many more of them in future--but I am not holding
my breath. After the Special Standing Committee finished its deliberations and the Bill came back to the Floor of the House, the Government applied a guillotine straight away, before there had been one word of debate on it, although the Bill was of great interest both inside and outside the House--not least on the Government Benches.
Then the Bill went to the House of Lords, and a huge mass of amendments, some on entirely new subjects, were made. Yet when the Bill comes back to the House of Commons, it is guillotined again. Some of the amendments require detailed debate. My right hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe) has already referred to one of them, which was introduced by the Bishop of Southwark. According to the Home Secretary, the bishop, along with all the Cross Benchers and all the other bishops, seems to have joined the forces of Conservatism.
That amendment requires extremely careful consideration, because the Government's case has always been that no one should be subject for long to the new system that they propose to set up. They have said that people cannot be expected to live under that system for long periods. The link has rightly been made by the amendment in lieu and the amendment, and we need time to debate the matter.
That is especially true because things have moved on since the Home Secretary gave evidence to the Special Standing Committee in March and told us, on the subject of waiting times, backlogs and decision times, that he was "on the case". What has happened since then? I am afraid that the backlog has got even bigger, having increased from 75,000 to 90,000. The number of decisions being taken is lagging hopelessly behind the number of applications from asylum seekers, so the whole system is in imminent danger of collapse.
Nobody takes the Government's contention about waiting times seriously, because the average waiting time for all applicants now, for the first time, exceeds four years. The Home Secretary tiptoed into the arguments about the nature of the system that he inherited. Indeed, if he could get back to the levels of decision making and clearance of the backlog that existed under the previous Government, that would be a wonderful achievement by the present Government's standards.
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