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Mr. Paterson: Will the hon. Gentleman please answer the question posed by my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth)? He was here
from 9 am until 2.30 pm on Friday; I was here for the later stages of the debate. As for the hon. Member for Cambridge (Mrs. Campbell), who complained during business questions, the hon. Member for Milton Keynes, South-West (Dr. Starkey), who is not here today, and the hon. Member for Gloucester (Ms Kingham), who is leaving the House in a great blaze of publicity, none of them were here. If they will not turn up between 9 am and 2.30 pm, when will they turn up?
Mr. Henderson: That is a schoolboy debating point, and I shall not waste time on it. The debate is about the House facing up to its responsibilities, and about whether it is prepared to introduce real measures that will reform it.
I do not normally take part in debates of this kind, but I feel compelled to do so on this occasion because I think that the House is bringing itself into great discredit. There is enormous cynicism among Members of Parliament about the purpose of this place, and that cynicism is being transmitted to the public. If anyone doubts me, he or she should come to Newcastle with me on Friday and ask those who visit my surgeries, or whose community centres I visit, what they think. They will tell any Member of Parliament what they think about the House of Commons.
The aim of marauders--who act sometimes on their own behalf but, I suspect, sometimes with the co-operation of the Opposition Front Bench, although I do not blame the Opposition Front Bench for this--is to discredit the Government and to suggest that the Government pay no attention to Parliament, and will railroad everything through. The effect of their actions is not only to discredit the Government--in fact, the public will judge whether the Government have been discredited--but to discredit Parliament. Parliament is now viewed with great cynicism, which is why I believe that we must make reforms.
Parliament is not about the nonsense of staying up all night being very inefficient, making silly and often drunken points after 10 pm. The test of virility seems to be how long Members can speak, not what they say. Members would do well to visit the European and Scottish Parliaments--I have not visited the Welsh Assembly, so I cannot comment on that--and note the efficient way in which they conduct their business. It is possible to argue about the end result, but they conduct their business far more effectively, and when we consider reform of the House we should also consider whether we can learn from some of their procedures.
When it comes to reform, we must differentiate-- I know that this is repetition, Mr. Deputy Speaker--between important issues and issues that are less important. We must differentiate between issues that should be discussed in the House--all night, if they are important and it has been agreed that the time is needed--and issues such as ice-cream vans in royal parks, which I think can be dealt with by a Committee. Ice-cream salespersons and park officials would be happy to hear the arguments put in a Committee; they do not need to hear them put in the Chamber.
Another major reform should be made: everything should be timetabled. A guillotine system is hopeless, because the accusation will always be made that the Government are acting for their own reasons in the
particular circumstances. It will be said that there has not been enough debate, and that the Government made the decision even before Report. The only way to avoid such arguments is to timetable every piece of business dealt with by the House and its Committees, giving it an appropriate allocation of time that will depend on the seriousness of the issue.The timetable should not be something that can be imposed only by Government Whips. There should be a Government recommendation providing for some fallback--an appeals structure, as it were, giving those who do not think enough time has been given an opportunity to challenge the timetable. Such motions should not be debated every day for three hours: there should be an occasion to deal with them.
We waste far too much time voting: there is no need for that. We should have electronic voting once a week, when everyone would know they had to be here. The votes could take place very quickly, and there could still be provision for consequential voting when that was essential to the procedure.
The guillotine motion needs the support of the House if we are to make progress with the business. However, we will be back again in a couple of weeks with more such motions unless we face up to the issue of reforming the House.
5.20 pm
Mr. David Maclean (Penrith and The Border): This is an important guillotine motion, because never in my recollection have two guillotine motions been imposed in one day to drive through four Bills when they have had so little debate. We have heard that one Bill may have been debated for one hour 13 minutes or one hour 14 minutes, and another for one hour 12 minutes. All told, there has been a total debating time in Committee on these two Bills of two and a half hours. We have no time to debate either Bill on Report, and we have a guillotine motion to drive both Bills through this afternoon.
I start from the principle enunciated by a great parliamentarian, who said:
- All guillotines are an affront. . . .
Guillotines, surely, represent a failure of the parliamentary process. They imply that the House has neither the disposition nor the time to deal properly with the matters in hand. They also render impossible the main function of the House, which is to scrutinise legislation properly; and they deny Back Benchers, in particular, an opportunity to give their attention to it. I suspect that they also imply the existence of an excess of legislation.
- The fact that a guillotine needs to be introduced at any stage of the parliamentary Session suggests that the Government are putting too much legislation before the House, and the House feels that it is not being given proper time to deal with it.--[Official Report, 9 May 2000; Vol. 349, c. 663.]
We also heard the wise words of the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody). Labour Members may dismiss what I say or what my hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire (Sir P. Cormack) said
with his usual eloquence--even more so today. He made some telling and powerful points--and not just those in my defence or in defence of my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst.The hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne, North (Mr. Henderson) described us as "marauders", but Labour Members cannot dismiss the wise words of the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich. It is not as if she has just come to the views that she now espouses. I can remember being in government as a junior Minister sitting on the Government Benches and cowering behind our Leader of the House as a guillotine motion was advanced to close a Bill with one day's debate having spent 130 hours in Committee. I can also recall when, as a junior Whip, I went to the then Leader of the House, Lord Wakeham as he now is. I do not tell tales of the Whips Office--never have and never will--and I do not think that this is telling tales out of school. I said, "We are bogged down upstairs. Members are keeping us going on Scottish legislation. We need a guillotine." He said, "Come back when you have done 130 hours. We will talk about it then."
Just 10 years ago, there was no question of the Government having the gall, the effrontery or the arrogance to come to the Dispatch Box and to put a guillotine motion before the House until we had done at least 100 hours in Committee upstairs, with the prospect of doing another 100, still not being past clause 6 and still being bogged down in Committee. There would have been no question of coming before the House with a guillotine motion on Report when we had not even had the Report stage of a Bill.
Again, I have sat on the Government Benches as the then Government defended themselves at the Dispatch Box from attack after attack by Labour Members, including the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich who has consistently attacked guillotines that she considers excessive and act too quickly or peremptorily. I remember sitting on the Government Benches as we advocated a guillotine to give six hours, 10 hours or two days to the remaining stages of Bills when we had already spent days bogged down on Report. Those were the days when we were kept up all night. Some research is called for. I shall commission it shortly at the end of the debate.
Mr. David Taylor (North-West Leicestershire): The right hon. Gentleman is recalling his experiences when he was on the Government Benches. Would he care to confirm my own research on the number of guillotined Bills? In 1987-88 it was six, in 1988-89 it was 10, and in 1989-90 it was 4, making a total of 20. That was the number three years after the June 1987 election, compared with 15 at this point in the current Parliament. Does he agree that the Government whom he supported were even more enthusiastic users of the guillotine, which he now criticises the present Government for using?
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