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Mr. Paterson: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Stunell: Certainly. Let us hear the explanation.
Mr. Paterson: May I point out that my hon. Friends the Members for Stone (Mr. Cash), for Tewkesbury (Mr. Robertson) and for Totnes (Mr. Steen) and I are all members of the European Scrutiny Committee?
Mr. Stunell: I am delighted to hear it, but apparently those hon. Members could not persuade enough of their colleagues to become members of the proposed additional Committees. As a member of the Modernisation Committee, I thought it made a good deal of sense for those scrutinising that flood of European legislation to be people who had developed a certain expertise on the topics concerned. I thought that it would be sensible to establish Committees that matched the directorates involved, so that such expertise could be built up. Indeed, I considered such a process to be not just sensible but highly necessary. I should have expected Conservative Members to be entirely committed to achieving that; yet, although they have time to spend on bogus amendments about royal parks, they have no time to join the additional European Committees. Although we shall oppose the guillotine on this particular pair of Bills, the actions of Conservative Members test even our patience considerably.
At the beginning of my speech, I outlined briefly a scheme that would enable the business of the House to be planned so that, more often than not, the problems that we face tonight would be automatically avoided. I also said something else. When Conservative Members wondered how a legislature could possibly get a tighter grip on an over-mighty Executive, I said that one way of doing that would be to have a fairly and proportionately elected Parliament. Their faces fell.
Executives in European Community countries and wider afield are far more beholden to their legislatures than the Executive of this country. The fundamental reason for that is the fact that in those countries there is
no one-party domination. Conservative Members may not like that, but the fact that they do not like it does not mean that it is not true.
Mr. Fabricant: I do not know why the hon. Gentleman thinks that guillotines would be avoided by having proportional representation. They would not. The Italian Parliament has guillotine motions. Why is the Italian Parliament putting to their people in a referendum a proposal to introduce a first-past-the-post system?
Mr. Stunell: We often hear such arguments. I would be more than happy to engage in a debate on proportional representation, but--
Mr. Stunell: I anticipated that that would be your view, Madam Speaker. I would be delighted to have that debate on another occasion.
Instead of this guillotine motion, we should be discussing the serious, practical implementation of ideas that I am not putting to hon. Members for the first time, but which have already been before the House and approved but not implemented. That would get us a long way forward. Ideas have been discussed such as improved pre-legislative scrutiny of legislation and Standing Committees that draw much more strongly on the relevant Select Committee membership, so that Standing Committees considering Bills contain people who know what they are talking about.
The Parliamentary Secretary, Privy Council Office, and I served on the Committee considering the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Bill, and if I may say so we had an unusually well-informed debate. If there was one thing that members of that Committee knew about it was political parties, and that greatly informed the discussion. I am afraid that that is not always so when hon. Members are allocated to Standing Committees.
We need to make better use of other agencies. Westminster Hall could be used for debates on Law Commission reports, for Adjournment debates, for holding Ministers to account and for debates on Select Committee reports. We even need a little self-discipline. Although there is no doubt that hon. Members have, and should continue to have, the right to use the procedures of the House to express their anger and outrage at what any Government are doing--long may that continue--we still require a little discretion, common sense and self-discipline so as not every time to use the shotgun or the sledgehammer to crack the nut.
These two debates have been made necessary by the Government, who have over-reacted to the situation. I suggest to Opposition Members that when we have genuine cause to hold up this or any other Government, we should use the procedure ruthlessly, but if every time we see a space, we fill it, the value of the genuine, deeply held and sometimes bitter opposition to a real issue gets completely hidden in the noise.
9.38 pm
Mr. Desmond Swayne (New Forest, West): I thank the Minister for Tourism, Film and Broadcasting for having the courtesy to come here and propose the motion.
That is something of a novelty, given our earlier proceedings. However, she did not sustain her argument that the Royal Parks (Trading) Bill in particular--I attended the earlier stages of the debate on that Bill--should be subject to a guillotine. She merely said that it was an important Bill, and that the Government wanted it on the statute book.The Minister failed to explain what was so important about the Bill that it required a timetable motion, and what enormous consumption of time had taken place which meant that the motion had to be introduced. She said that it was her preference to spend as little time as possible arguing about the timetable motion so that more time could be spent arguing about the substance of the Bill. That is a fairly honest and honourable position. However, there are times when the consideration of the guillotine motion is more important than the substance of the Bill that is to be guillotined--such is the enormity of a decision to curtail debate and to limit the free speech of Members and their ability to scrutinise a Bill, which is their primary role. Clear justification must be given for that. Frankly, that has been lacking tonight.
I do not dispute that the Government at times have a right to ask the House to support a timetable motion. It may be that a matter has been considered over a great length of time and that it is felt by the House that it should come to a decision and move on, but the Royal Parks (Trading) Bill has not been discussed for a great length of time. Those who were present in the House last Wednesday will, I think, agree that we were making progress and that the Government would have had their Bill that night. For some extraordinary reason, they decided to pull stumps at 10 o'clock, but they would have had the Bill that night. We were making progress. I have no doubt that we would have continued to make progress.
I fear that the timetable motion has more to do with the management of those on the Government Benches, and with addressing some of the concerns that they have raised privately with their Whips, than with delivering the Bill. I now fear that the Bill and its Third Reading will be longer in coming than would have been the case had we pursued the discussion last Wednesday night.
We were told that it was an important Bill. My hon. Friend the Member for Teignbridge (Mr. Nicholls), who has temporarily left the Chamber, was concerned that it represented an attack on small entrepreneurs. That was far from true, according to supporters of the Bill. They alleged that it was an assault on organised crime and the Mafia. That is all the more reason, therefore, for the Bill to receive greater and prolonged scrutiny--scrutiny that is now denied by the motion.
Earlier, a novel argument for the guillotine was introduced by the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne, North (Mr. Henderson). He said that he had no objection whatever to sitting through the night on important measures such as the minimum wage legislation--if it was important Labour Members were prepared to put in the hours. I entirely accept that. However, he wanted a timetable motion because he was not prepared to sit through the night to discuss what he regarded as a consensual or smaller measure--I will not say an unimportant measure; I do not think that he meant that--or a measure of less weight, such as the Royal Parks (Trading) Bill. He believed that such a measure should be guillotined.
As the hon. Gentleman developed his argument, he resiled from that position. He warmed to his theme and became so passionate at one stage that he struck the microphone, but he moved from his initial position and said that all Bills should be guillotined. Timetables should be applied to all Bills, but the length of time should depend on the importance of the Bill.
The question arises who is to determine the length of time, as has happened today. The length of time that the Bill will be discussed is a consequence of the timetable motion. The hon. Gentleman did not dwell on the mechanism by which it would be decided that a Bill was important, or the mechanism by which the time that it should have would be decided, but I did not have much confidence in his argument.
I remember when what I would regard as a very important Bill was guillotined--the Bill that put into English law the provisions of the Amsterdam treaty. It was not guillotined after prolonged scrutiny, and certainly not after prolonged speeches by Opposition Members. Indeed, the Member who spoke longest on that Bill was the Minister himself, who was none other than the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne, North. It was he, if anyone, who spoke at length on that Bill. My view is that he did not speak overlong on the Bill. He certainly did not filibuster. He dealt with the Bill properly, but it was outrageous to curtail debate when he spoke for longer than anyone else. I therefore cannot have any confidence in his judgment that only important Bills should not be time restricted, whereas unimportant ones--perhaps such as the Royal Parks (Trading) Bill--should be so restricted.
I rather felt that the hon. Gentleman gave the game away in finishing his remarks, when he said, "By the way, we should do away with all this voting and vote just once a week. It can be announced that we should all be here on that day; then we could plan our timetables accordingly." That is when the cat came out of the bag. Undoubtedly, it would be for the convenience of some hon. Members if we turned up once a week, disposed of all our voting and did away with argument. However, this is not a congress of ambassadors. It is supposed to be a deliberative assembly, to which we come along to listen to the arguments and then make our decisions.
The hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Mr. Stunell) made much of the need to make greater use of timetabling. However, I draw his attention to what happened during the passage of the Government of Scotland Act 1998, which was substantially timetabled and demonstrated the weaknesses of using that procedure. I also note that the hon. Member for Edinburgh, West (Mr. Gorrie), who is a veteran of that Act's prolonged consideration, is now in the Chamber.
As my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) said, previously agreed timetables are disrupted not only by the tabling of hundreds of Government amendments. Sometimes, it is only when we start the detailed scrutiny of a Bill that we have any inkling of potential problems with the legislation. Time and again as we considered the 1998 Act, some Labour Members were frustrated--it was not a question of delay or filibustering--by the timetable motion, which prevented them from debating and exploring in Committee previously unforeseen issues.
In our consideration of the 1998 Act, frequently the programme motion's effect--I do not think that it was deliberately so; in this case, I am certainly not a
conspiracy theorist--was to silence the hon. Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell). Although I do not think that that was the intention of the timetable, often enough that was its effect. Those who advocate timetable motions should be clear that they will be silencing not only Opposition Members. Earlier in this Session, I watched with awe and much approval as a disciplined group of Labour Members dealt very effectively with opposed private business. If timetable motions were used more often, Labour Members would soon begin to fall foul of their provisions. I do not advocate going down that road.As I said, my fear is that this timetable motion is more to do with the management of Labour Members' disgruntlement than with achieving the legislation. I urge the Parliamentary Secretary, who is essentially Deputy Leader of the House, to find a relatively small group of Labour Members who are prepared to stay on after 10 pm to deal effectively with the arguments that are made by the few Opposition Members who attend those debates. I believe that the Government would find it much easier to get their business by taking that path, rather than by continually pulling stumps, coming back and having to endure--as we shall today--two three-hour debates on timetable motions. I think that the Government would find it more expedient to pass legislation in that way than by using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
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