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Mr. Tyler: Has the right hon. Gentleman attended any of the debates in Westminster Hall initiated by his Conservative colleagues? He shows a complete lack of respect for their parliamentary talents and for their effective opposition to the Government. They have been using such occasions to hold the Government to account.
If the right hon. Gentleman were to go and listen to some of his colleagues' contributions, he might cease to disparage the proceedings.
Mr. Forth: I am glad that the hon. Gentleman led me to that point. I have looked at the number of Members from all parties who have participated in the dreadful experiment. The answer to my question to the Leader of the House on the matter revealed that fewer than 50 Conservatives out of a total of more than 160 have bothered to use Westminster Hall. Fewer than 90 Labour Members have attended, out of a total of about 300--if I take away the payroll Members. But--surprise, surprise--the party with by far the biggest proportion of Members using Westminster Hall was the Liberal Democrats. Of course--Westminster Hall is tailor-made for them: an irrelevance, babbling on the sidelines, designed for electronic regional press releases.
Mr. David Heath (Somerton and Frome): I find the right hon. Gentleman's argument about the duty to attend Adjournment debates particularly compelling, and I share some of his views. As he knows, I am a regular attender on Fridays. However, I wonder why that duty is such a flexible friend in his case, and does not apply to his attending an Adjournment debate called by the House of Commons--in which he is paid to represent his constituents as a Member of Parliament--if it happens to take place a few yards away in Westminster Hall.
Mr. Forth: My whole argument is that I do not believe that this artificial creation, this spin-off, this sideshow, this irrelevance should be given succour. I choose not to do so, because I want to be able to argue here that the experiment has failed and should not be continued. I hope to divide the House on the matter and to persuade as many hon. Members as possible to vote appropriately.
Let us put aside the fact that Westminster Hall cost the best part of a million quid. It astounded me when the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hillsborough (Helen Jackson) said with some pride that we had turned a dingy old room into something really rather special. When she goes back and mixes with her constituents--as she frequently does-- I doubt that she tells them proudly that she has been party to spending £1 million of their money on refurbishing a room at Westminster for what amounts to a sideshow.
Helen Jackson: Let us get the facts right. The cost was nothing like £1 million. I cannot remember the exact figure, but it was several thousand pounds. I am certain that the money would be recouped if the room were used to its fullest potential outside parliamentary hours, as I described.
Mr. Forth: We are now in the business of hiring out rooms. This is degenerating into farce. I will not fall out with the hon. Lady over a few thousand pounds of taxpayers' money. I would not mind betting that, when the facilities for the disabled have been accounted for, and when the room has been moved around to suit her hon. Friends--to make it more Euro-friendly, or whatever they have in mind--the bill will be nudging £1 million. However, the hon. Lady suggests that that is okay because we are now going to become a glorified village hall and hire ourselves out, no doubt by the hour. I do not know
whether the room is high enough to accommodate badminton, but I would believe almost anything at this stage. It just will not do.We must set aside the irrelevances--the press releases and regional television, the various horseshoe shapes and whether constituents can get a seat--and concentrate on the real problem: the fact that Westminster Hall is siphoning business away from this Chamber and purporting to be a rival or parallel to it.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Mr. Maclean) and I tabled the amendments because of the peculiarity of having two categories of Deputy Speaker: the proper ones, who have a role that is not only distinguished but places certain constraints on them, in that they cannot sign early-day motions or participate in debates, and a new category of people who are also, confusingly, called Deputy Speakers, but who are free to continue to do those things. What is worse, that spuriously gives Westminster Hall, by implication, the same status as this Chamber.
Calling the Chairman in Westminster Hall a Deputy Speaker may confuse people and lead them to believe that it has the same status as this Chamber. That is wrong and threatens to undermine the proper nature and status of the role of Deputy Speaker. The amendments would deal with the matter by redesignating those who preside over Westminster Hall as Chairmen, unless you or one of your colleagues were presiding, Mr. Deputy Speaker, in which case your title would continue properly to be used. That would clear up the confusion and make a proper distinction between Deputy Speakers and members of the Chairmen's Panel, as well as clarifying the relationship between this Chamber and the sideshow that is Westminster Hall.
Mr. Bercow: Westminster Hall is truly soulless and uninspiring in equal measure. One of the evils that accompanies being an Opposition Front-Bench spokesman is that one is sometimes called on to represent one's party there. My right hon. Friend is missing nothing by not going there, as it is an easy get-out for Ministers, enabling them to pat Back Benchers on the head.
Mr. Forth: I am not sure why Opposition spokesmen feel obliged to go near the place at all. If our betters judge that it is somehow important, that is a matter for my hon. Friend to sort out with them. Personally, I have never seen any point in spokesmen such as him, with his serious responsibilities, wasting their time there. Perhaps he will revisit the matter with our hon. Friends to see whether something can be done about it.
I am especially worried about the way in which business is designated appropriate for Westminster Hall. We have heard that the usual channels, in all their majesty and wisdom, decide not what will be uncontroversial--the Leader of the House helpfully sorted us out on that--but what will not be subject to votes and can therefore be taken in Westminster Hall. I object to that. Whoever these usual channels are, they have no right to speak on my behalf. I will decide what is controversial or should be subject to a vote. That is a freedom that, as a Member of Parliament, I hope to exercise this evening, not once but several times. If I can find another colleague who feels as
I do, we have the right to divide the House to establish its opinion in the Lobbies. For the usual channels to say that they have judged a matter not to be sufficiently important for a vote and to sideline it to Westminster Hall, where the cosy discussion that the hon. Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Joan Ruddock) mentioned earlier--full of harmony and consensus--can take place, is not good enough. That illustrates the danger of having somewhere other than the Chamber where such matters can be dealt with, courtesy of the usual channels. I find that quite unacceptable.One thing that has come out of today's debate which I strongly welcome was the reiteration of the Leader of the House that as far as the Government are concerned there can be no question that Westminster Hall will be used for a legislative purpose. When this idea was first mooted, we were told that it was modelled on the equivalent Chamber in Australia. I have had the privilege of going to Canberra; I visited the Chamber there, and sat through some of its proceedings. They were legislating in the alternative Chamber. My great fear has always been that the Government had that in mind for Westminster Hall. I am grateful to the Leader of the House for having given us the categorical reassurance that the Government will not use Westminster Hall for any legislative purpose whatever. That has reassured me considerably.
The motion says that when it is proposed that a matter be dealt with in Westminster Hall, it should be decided forthwith. I am always rather nervous about such things--I feel easier if there is at least some possibility of even a brief debate in the House before a matter can be resolved. Yet, again, there is the implication that these matters can be dealt with easily and readily, and that we do not have to bother very much about the debate. Our betters have made the decision, so ordinary Members will not have a say.
If the House and Members had wanted Westminster Hall to be taken more seriously, I would have preferred the quorum to be set at a somewhat higher figure than is proposed. A quorum of three suggests that issues in Westminster Hall can be adequately debated with only three Members present. I know, before anyone says it, that in this Chamber there are routinely only three Members present in an Adjournment debate--the Minister, the Government Whip and the Member who has secured the debate. [Interruption.] The occupant of the Chair, of course, Mr. Deputy Speaker, makes four. However, I make a distinction between the tradition of Adjournment debates in the Chamber at the end of business and the issues that it is argued are appropriate to be dealt with in Westminster Hall. If there is a real difference of kind and of substance, it should surely be reflected in the quorum. Suffice it to say that the amendments dealing with those points, in the names of my right hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border and myself, have not been selected, and I obviously do not query that. Nevertheless I believe that those proposals are unfortunate and hope that they may be reconsidered.
All in all, I believe that the experiment has been a failure. It has succeeded only in showing that the Westminster Hall phenomenon is unnecessary and otiose; it has been expensive and could be dispensed with without anyone's really noticing. If it is merely a vehicle for the better press releasing of colleagues' constituency matters, I should have thought that we could find a less expensive
way of doing it. Colleagues could go into the little new facility just off Central Lobby and speak to a camera trained on them. If the regional media are so keen on seeing a Member of Parliament saying something of interest to their region, that would be one way of doing it. It would cost almost nothing, inconvenience almost no one and we could hire out Westminster Hall for badminton whenever we wanted.There are alternatives. This is not the only option open to us. We can go back to where we were. We can, in fact, provide more time for business in this Chamber if we are of a mind to do so, rather than arguing on the basis of convenience for Members and the subjugation of Members' duties here in the Chamber to those elsewhere. That will be worth while.
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