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Mr. Dale Campbell-Savours (Workington): The right hon. Gentleman has forgotten something: it is now taking many of us as many as seven, eight, 10 or 12 hours to get back to our constituencies. Some of us have to leave on Thursdays. He might ask the right hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Mr. Maclean) what he had to do last weekend to ensure that he was even at the debate today--it is a disaster out there. That is why the House is not being fully attended.
Mr. Forth: I doubt whether the hon. Gentleman is seriously suggesting that that explains the attendance
every Friday since he and I have been in the House; in fact, he has been here longer than I have. Even given the exigencies and difficulties of the moment, if Members thought that it was sufficiently important to be here to debate embryology, as they had an opportunity and, I argue, a duty to do last Friday, they would have made appropriate arrangements so to do--even given the distance that I know the hon. Gentleman has to travel and the difficulties that he may be experiencing. That is the point that I want to make.
Joan Ruddock: The right hon. Gentleman will acknowledge that I was also here debating on Friday. I endorse what my hon. Friend the Member for Workington (Mr. Campbell-Savours) has said. The right hon. Gentleman will remember that a number of Members who participated in the debate excused themselves on the basis that they had to leave early because of the transport situation. I know colleagues who wished to speak and who were unable to keep obligations in their constituencies--this is not a matter of convenience--such as surgeries, which for most of us are a critical duty.
Mr. Forth: That may be. It is a matter of choice as to whether or when hon. Members do surgeries. When I did surgeries, I did them on Saturday mornings. I concluded that that was a waste of my time as well as that of my constituents, but the point is that many Members do surgeries on Friday evenings or on Saturdays.
Again, the hon. Lady illustrates my point. She is trying to find reasons not to be here on a Friday. When I came into the House in 1983, it was assumed that Friday was a parliamentary day on which the House would want to do its work, and that Members would be here for it. I believe that many more Members were here on a Friday then, but the difficulty is that the assumption has arisen--and has been strengthened by debates such as this--that it is more important for Members to do I know not what in their constituencies, perhaps as glorified social workers, than to be at Westminster as Members of Parliament.
Mr. Forth: I give way to my right hon. Friend first.
Mr. Maclean: Does my right hon. Friend recall the many occasions in the 1980s when both major parties were whipped on three lines on a Friday for Government business? Occasionally, our party was whipped on three lines when important Adjournment debates were secured by the then Opposition, but all sides assumed that business on Friday meant full attendance, or nearly full attendance.
Mr. Forth: Indeed; my right hon. Friend confirms my point. It depends on the view that Members take of their duties in general. I make no apology for the fact that I regard my duty primarily and principally to be here at Westminster, in the House of Commons: doing my best
to hold the Government to account and to participate in debates and votes. I regard that as the main part of my duties.
Helen Jackson: Is the right hon. Gentleman really saying that, because he takes that line, he belittles the view of by far the majority of Members, who feel that they have a duty to listen to the views of their constituents in their constituencies on issues of the day, such as embryology or drug education--which I was talking to youngsters about last Friday?
Mr. Forth: The answer is yes, and I would go further. If the hon. Lady's constituents realised that, after their in-depth discussions with her, she felt unable to spend enough time here, for example, to represent their views on embryology, they might have some thoughts about the effectiveness of their Member of Parliament. If that Member of Parliament chooses to spend less and less time here and more and more time talking to people in the constituency, the thing has got hopelessly out of balance. I shall elaborate on that theme as I develop my remarks, but let it suffice for now to say that the hon. Lady sums up my views extremely accurately.
Joan Ruddock: As the right hon. Gentleman is making great play of the subject of embryology--which I agree is an enormously important subject--it is important to make it clear that, when there are votes on the subject, there will be a proper full-time debate in the Chamber. Last week's debate was but a Friday Adjournment debate.
Mr. Forth: I will take a small bet with the hon. Lady that, when that occasion comes, some hon. Members will complain bitterly that they do not have an opportunity to participate, whereas, as she will recall, we finished last Friday's debate early. Is it not another irony--as it is one of the points that I wanted to make, I shall develop it now, a little earlier than I had intended, before returning to my theme--that one of the main arguments for the ghastly Westminster Hall started with the assertion that we did not have enough time in the House properly to discuss all the matters that hon. Members wanted to discuss, such as Select Committee reports and individual constituency matters? The truth, of course, is that we have always had plenty of time in this place.
One of the things that we have had an excess of is time. We had Fridays, before they were effectively abolished by the Government. Additionally, when business finished early, as it did last Friday, and as it has done many times recently, we had the opportunity, for example, to take other business--were it not for the fact that the Whips have always assumed that, for the convenience of hon. Members, Members should not have to stay here in case we took subsequent business. The Whips believe that hon. Members must be allowed to be away from this place and away doing what they want to do, and then come back when it is convenient for them to do so.
We know that business has been prolonged in the House many times, when Whips have ushered in hon. Members saying, "Keep it going; we can't allow the business to collapse because colleagues are out of the House and don't want to be inconvenienced." It is on such occasions that hon. Members, if they took their duties seriously, could be in the Chamber having a series of short debates, rather than artificially prolonging the business.
Let us therefore do away with the assertion, on which the entire so-called modernisation has been based, that there is not enough time in the Chamber properly to deal with Select Committee reports and the like. There is plenty of time in the Chamber--there always has been and there still is. If the House chose to sit on Fridays, there would be even more time. The assumption that it is more important to be elsewhere than here and the priority given to the personal convenience of hon. Members have driven us to this point of what is inaccurately called modernisation.
We have an accumulation of factors, such as Fridays having effectively disappeared. Furthermore, as my right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir G. Young) said, Thursdays are being eaten into as well. Indeed, one can already feel the pressure of hon. Members who resent having to stay here as late as 7 o'clock on a Thursday evening and are champing at the bit to get back to their constituencies and to do undoubtedly important things there. Equally, we know that some hon. Members do not even come to Westminster until late on a Monday.
We can also predict--with a fair amount of certainty, I think--that, when the ghastly strangulation of the House that the Government unilaterally imposed on us a couple of weeks ago takes full effect, we shall have the "one day a week" Parliament, when the only day on which hon. Members will have to attend will be a Wednesday, to wander through the Lobbies with a slip given to them by the Whips and cast their votes in some eccentric way.
Surely that would be bad enough were it not for the fact that, apparently, at the very moment when the Government are conspiring with the modernisers to reduce the House of Commons to one day a week, the Senior Salaries Review Body is being urged by the Government to increase the allowance given to hon. Members. What a strange phenomenon: fewer days of work and less effort here at Westminster, but more money from taxpayers to support that diminished effort.
We have the ultimate irony, do we not? At the very time the modernisers are urging us to spend less and less time here--and cause the Government less and less inconvenience, by the way; that is a happy coincidence--the very same people, or at least a very large overlap of people, are urging that they need ever more taxpayers' money to support them in doing ever less here at Westminster. That should be taken into account when it is decided what we should do in the House.
The Thursday sittings are bad enough. However, when we look at the Westminster Hall experiment, matters get considerably worse. The basis on which the argument for the experiment was made--lack of time--is false. To make matters much worse, business is now being shunted off into a sideshow which, we have now been told, is little more than a facility for electronic press releases. Hon. Members have said that the excitement of Westminster Hall resides in the fact that regional television uses many of the debates to provide cheap coverage.
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