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5.44 pm
Mr. Dale Campbell-Savours (Workington): I apologise to the House because I shall have to leave the Chamber shortly to meet a policeman, and do not want to miss the appointment. I shall therefore have to leave before the Member who follows me has retaken his or her seat.
I have much in common with the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) when it comes to House of Commons issues. If he presses a Division on his amendments on the chairmanship of Westminster Hall, I shall join him in the Aye Lobby.
That said, the right hon. Gentleman underestimates the great difficulty for many Members that arises from transport arrangements, even apart from the present and immediate problems. Our constituencies are a long way from London. Like the right hon. Gentleman, I take the view that we should spend more time in the Chamber. Members should build reputations in the Chamber, as he and several of his colleagues have over the years. I always impress on my colleagues--particularly new Members--that it is important to do that. However, they have constituency responsibilities, especially in marginal seats. We all have such responsibilities--even Conservative Members--and the volume of work increases as we approach an election.
I wish to discuss a narrow issue--the role of Westminster Hall in debating Select Committee reports. For some time, I have been conscious of a possible reform that the Select Committee on the Modernisation of the House of Commons might wish to take on board. The report on Westminster Hall notes that Select Committee reports on agriculture have been debated three times, on science and technology twice, on Northern Ireland twice, on environment, transport and the regions three times, on international development three times and on education and employment twice. That is remarkable. During my 21 years in the House, we have rarely had a chance to debate Select Committee reports.
I favour debating those reports, but we must put the value of the debates in context. My hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen)--now a Whip, and on the Front Bench at present--went on for years, as part of his own agenda for procedural reform and particularly when he came here in 1987 as a new Member, about the need to debate Select Committee reports. I agree that they should be debated, but do not believe that debating them is as important as some people believe it to be. They can be dealt with in another way, by Parliament as a whole, that would be far more effective and would give Members a greater chance to hold the Executive to account.
I speak from the experience of an aggregate 37 years on Select Committees and other Committees in the House. I spent seven years on the Procedure Committee, 10 years on the Members' interests Committee, four years on the Standards and Privileges Committee, 11 years on the Public Accounts Committee, two years on the Agriculture Committee and three years on the Security and Intelligence Committee, which is not a Select Committee but which works in a similar way. I draw attention to my experience because I have seen hundreds of reports from those Committees and have often wondered where they all went. What happens to them? What is their effect? Are they studied? When a response comes back from the Executive, who has written it? Is it a civil servant in the Department, with the Minister--under whatever Government--simply signing off the response to the Committee? I suspect that, because of pressure on Ministers, that is what happens.
I have been thinking about how we can hold the Executive to account through Select Committee reports; as has been pointed out, they are often extremely important. Westminster Hall offers such an opportunity. I draw hon. Members' attention to the procedure for European Standing Committees--I was also a member of one of those Committees for several years. Page 16 of the "Short Guide to Procedure and Practice" states:
- Normal procedure at meetings is that the Minister or Ministers make a statement and then answer questions (for up to one hour or, if the Chairman sees fit, for 1½ hours), following which the motion is debated.
That would be the best solution because, unless Ministers are prepared to give way many times when replying to debates in whatever Chamber--which can be unreasonable because they cannot get through their brief--we cannot achieve sufficient depth of accountability or the precise questioning necessary to ensure it. My proposal is for a much more specific procedure.
Mrs. Dunwoody: That procedure is extremely useful. It is only sad that the House of Commons has not used it. Often Members do not even bother to attend meetings of such Standing Committees unless they are on the Committee. On one recent occasion, only members of the Committee turned up. The procedure has not been used; that is unacceptable.
The real problem, which my hon. Friend has not highlighted, is that although there might be a motion it is unamendable, and if it is voted on at all whatever the Minister has said cannot be used to change the wording; the procedure makes that impossible. My hon. Friend's brilliant idea leaves control--as ever--in the hands of the Government.
Mr. Campbell-Savours: My hon. Friend refers specifically to the procedure in European Standing Committees. I am dealing only with part of that
procedure; I suggest not that amendable motions should be tabled, but that the procedure whereby Ministers are questioned in detail be applied to issues raised in Select Committee reports. Hon. Members would thus be better informed and Ministers would be required to answer particular questions.One occasion when that might have worked was during the inquiries of the Agriculture Committee into BSE. I was not a member of that Committee in 1990 when it produced a report on BSE that, in retrospect, proved to be remarkably accurate in its predictions. If there had been a procedure at that time whereby Ministers were held to account, on the scale of a Westminster Hall debate, about the development of BSE and the associated problems, Parliament would have been far more enlightened and the then Government might have acted far sooner. I do not make a partisan point; that could have been the result.
On many occasions, if the reports of Select Committees had been taken seriously and if there had been a procedure whereby Ministers could have been pressed, squeezed, pushed around and hassled at the Dispatch Box or wherever the debate was taking place, policy changes might have been made.
Mr. Bennett: Does my hon. Friend agree that Select Committees can already adopt such a procedure if they have any sense? If a Minister does not answer all their questions, they can require him to return and can pursue the matter. It is important for Select Committees to keep up a running battle, rather than confining themselves to a one-off report.
Mr. Campbell-Savours: My hon. Friend is correct, but Select Committees do not exercise that right.
Mr. Campbell-Savours: My hon. Friend is a remarkable Committee Chairman. She runs one of the most effective Select Committee operations in the House; she adopts such procedures, but many Select Committees do not. They do not hold the Government to account. If the wider membership of the House--over and above members of the Select Committee--had the opportunity to press the Executive in the forum provided by Westminster Hall, we should be making an extremely effective procedural change.
The right hon. Members for Bromley and Chislehurst and for Penrith and The Border (Mr. Maclean) would do well to make use of such a procedure--especially in the light of the role that they play in the House of Commons. I want the right hon. Gentlemen and other hon. Members to hold the Executive to account. The right hon. Gentlemen should not turn up their noses at a reform that might secure all their objectives.
Mr. Maclean: Of course we want to hold the Executive to account--to squeeze the Government, put pressure on them and wring things out of them, as the hon. Gentleman says. Does he agree, however, that it is impossible to do that in an Adjournment debate in Westminster Hall? One can do that only in this Chamber, with whipped votes, or through questions.
Mr. Campbell-Savours: The right hon. Gentleman is being somewhat blinkered. Will he consider my proposition? It would secure much of the territory that he wants to hold.
When we consider Select Committee reports in this place, the debate is invariably held between members of the Select Committee. When one attends such a debate in this Chamber, one finds that the chances are that members of the Committee will be called to speak--I presume that it is the same in Westminster Hall. Indeed, the debates are attended almost exclusively by the Committee members or by Members who have some peripheral interest in the subject.
That is not good enough for me. I want far wider engagement in such debates, and that will be achieved by putting Ministers in a situation where they have to answer questions for an hour or an hour and a half. We would then see the Chamber fill up and the Executive would be held to account through Select Committee reports as never before.
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