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Mr. Hope: When the right hon. Gentleman was on the commission and proposed strengthening the Select Committee system, did he take into account Conservative Members' appalling record of attendance in Select Committees? The whole debate has rested on the assumption that the Select Committee system works. Clearly, Opposition Members failed to turn up and failed to make the existing system operate well.

Mr. Brooke: I have noticed--indeed, the House cannot have failed to notice--the hon. Gentleman's obsession with people's attendance in Select Committee and their participation in reports, and shall come to that matter before I conclude my remarks.

I hope that the criteria set by the commission will be reverted to in judging the functional virtues of other reform proposals and, as a member of the Liaison Committee, whose chairman, the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Mr. Sheldon) is still sitting loyally in the Chamber, I shall be happy for our report to be subject to those tests. I am not in a position to criticise the Prime Minister for his inability to recognise the Deputy Speaker, as I did the same thing at business questions last week,

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although I did it only once. The Prime Minister, however, seemed to have difficulty in recognising the Deputy Speaker even once, although today may be the first time that the Prime Minister has been in the Chamber in this Parliament with someone other than the Speaker in the Chair.

I was more troubled when the Prime Minister said that Northern Ireland had been asking for devolution for 100 years, as it has already had it for 50 of the last 100. I know that the Prime Minister has an idiosyncratic definition of conservatism, but reform is best based on a broad understanding of where one has come from as well as where one wishes to go. My membership of the Liaison Committee derives from chairing the Select Committee on Northern Ireland Affairs. The hon. Member for Corby (Mr. Hope) rather leads with his chin with his obsession with attendance at Select Committee meetings. I am content for him to read out my attendance record, but he should not disguise the fact that five minutes' attendance out of, say, 105 minutes, which is the standard duration of our meetings, is enough to secure a Select Committee member a 100 per cent. record of attendance, provided he or she turns up to every meeting.

Mr. Hope: I could not agree more with the right hon. Gentleman. Some Conservative Members have the habit of turning up for five minutes to register their attendance and then leaving, which, in my opinion, is turning up without turning up. Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman could have a word with his colleagues about that further abuse of parliamentary procedure.

Mr. Brooke: Forgive me, but, except for 45 minutes, I have sat through every sitting of the Committee that I have chaired. In fact, I have observed the behaviour of members of all parties, not simply of my own.

Angela Smith: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Brooke: No, we have a 10-minute rule.

I confess that I once missed 45 minutes of an evidence-taking session in Belfast because planes could not take off from Heathrow. The incidental consequence was that for our Committee's sittings in Northern Ireland yesterday, to mark the marches of the 12th, I had for safety's sake to fly out on Tuesday night, and thus missed the entire substantial business of the remaining stages of the Police (Northern Ireland) Bill, which, as the Select Committee Chairman, greatly and personally embarrassed me. The relationship between a Select Committee's work out of London and departmental business relating to that Committee in the Chamber is itself worth quiet scrutiny in the margins.

The hon. Member for Sheffield, Hillsborough (Helen Jackson) referred to the Jopling report, to which I do not think the right hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Mr. Maclennan) did. Nor did I catch his references to the Select Committee reforms introduced by the Conservative Government in 1979. The hon. Lady linked the Jopling report to the Modernisation Committee report. Although I acknowledge that the commencement order for the introduction of the Jopling reforms was

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delayed by the then Opposition Chief Whip, the right hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Mr. Foster), until, as he said a year or two ago, he was confident that Labour would win the election--significant words in themselves--the final report was unanimous, to the credit of the Chairman, my noble Friend Lord Jopling, and other members of the Committee.

I listened to the hon. Members for Hillsborough and for Milton Keynes, South-West, and I sensed that they found my right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir G. Young), the shadow Leader of the House, wanting for not having been prepared to allow the latest Modernisation Committee report to be adopted unanimously. I will simply say that they should judge my right hon. Friend's views, which are in the report, by the criteria set out in the Norton commission's own parameters. Ultimately, to strengthen Parliament's scrutiny of the Executive, reforms need to concentrate on that central objective rather than on the convenience of the Government or individual Members of Parliament.

Mr. Andrew Love (Edmonton): As a member of the Norton commission and a long-standing Member of the House, is the right hon. Gentleman at all concerned that the hijacking of the commission's recommendations means that the only one that has appeared in the press is the proposed change to Prime Minister's Question Time?

Mr. Brooke: When he launched the report, my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition said:

However, I am conscious that previous Oppositions have launched policy commissions with great fanfares, and then conveniently left their reports on the shelf gathering dust when they return to Government. To make sure that that does not happen with the Norton Report, I can today make three specific commitments that will form part of our manifesto for the next general election.

However, my right hon. Friend had also said:

It would be an insult to the work of the Commission to announce within minutes of the Report's publication which recommendations my party accepts, and which we reject.

The Leader of the House did an admirable job of exegesis when she explained to me what her deputy, the hon. Member for Sherwood (Mr. Tipping), had meant by his crystalline adage in the debate on House of Lords reform:

Being democratic does not necessarily mean having elections.--[Official Report, 19 June 2000; Vol. 352, c. 124.]

I look forward, in a separate debate on the Modernisation Committee report, to the Lord President's exegesis as to why that report is intended primarily to strengthen Parliament's scrutiny of the Government. It was to her deputy, during one of the Leader's very rare absences, that I remarked that the Government's initial reaction to the Liaison Committee report had seemed to exemplify what the Prime Minister would describe as the evils of conservatism.

I hope that the debate on parliamentary reform will go on. I speak as the Member for a constituency whose franchise before 1832 was so generous that after the great Reform Act the electorate fell. We owe it to future Parliaments to ensure that we are intellectually honest during the debate that we are having.

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5.29 pm

Mr. Peter Bradley (The Wrekin): There have been many thoughtful contributions to the debate, and I do not intend to add to them because that is not the purpose of the debate. The tone was well and truly set by the Leader of the Opposition. This was an extraordinary topic to choose for a six-hour Opposition day debate. As I heard him galloping on at the Dispatch Box, he reminded me of the charge of the Light Brigade, but without the magnificence because he was leading his troops into the gunfire.

As the right hon. Gentleman progressed, I thought more of the eccentric Peruvian goalkeeper, El Loco. Those who remember his performance in past world cups will know that he used to take the ball out of his penalty area, dribble it up field, lose possession and then have to trudge back to his goal to pick the ball out of the net. Such was the inspiration that characterised the right hon. Gentleman's speech.

Conservative Members have been trying to make a fist of conducting a serious and principled debate, but they were all waving their Order Papers in the air when the Leader of the Opposition sat down. As other right hon. and hon. Members have point out, Opposition Members are not very good at opposition. They do not like it. [Interruption.] I hope that they will get used to it and get better at it. Currently, they regard it as an unwelcome and irritating interval between periods of uninterrupted, unfettered power. They simply do not have time for opposition. That is the problem.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Bury, South (Mr. Lewis) said, Opposition Members are interested only in power--the power that they wield in this place. They come to this place without a vision, and too infrequently with a sense of duty. They come to exercise power and, often, to benefit from it. Today's debate is another little tantrum on the part of a party that has had its favourite toy taken away from it.

Mr. Hayes: Does the hon. Gentleman agree that it does the debate no favours, and himself no favours, to suggest that hon. Members come to this place without a vision? Most come to the House with a vision, regardless of political party, and most come with a desire to do some good. They do not come principally because they are interested in power. They come because they are interested chiefly in the power to do some good.

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