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Mrs. Dunwoody: I hope that my hon. Friend will not think me unduly unkind, but I have been here since 1966 and the common thread that has run through every Government, irrespective of their label, is that when Ministers are in office they do not want adequate scrutiny to be exercised, and when they leave office they suddenly become extraordinarily keen on it. I am no longer surprised at the unanimity of view, but we should occasionally remember that it is not in the interests of Back-Bench Members to pretend that only one side of the Chamber holds that view.
Mr. Soley: I am not sure that I made myself clear. I was saying that the right hon. Members for Bromley and Chislehurst and for Penrith and The Border did not argue the same case when they were Ministers as they are making now. I think that my hon. Friend's remarks support my argument.
I have a different assumption, which I had in the Modernisation Committee and which relates to my general arguments on this subject. In the past 70 years, the House of Commons failed to make the changes necessary to keep it up to date. We have all paid a high price for that. Although we are beginning to make such changes, the core of my argument--and I want to
return to Westminster Hall and the 7 o'clock finish, on which we are supposed to be focusing--is that they need to be part of a package that will not finish with today's debate. They need to be continued so that we can achieve the aims that even the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst said he wants, although obviously not while he was in government. We need to address that matter if we want to be more effective.
Mr. Soley: I will give way to the hon. Gentleman, but I want to explain why the changes are necessary to make us more effective and why they are part of a process of modernisation, and not a one-off.
Mr. Bercow: The hon. Gentleman criticises my right hon. Friends for changing their tune, but does he not accept, as he has done before, that when he wielded the weapon of parliamentary time in opposition to the previous Conservative Government, he did not argue for the wholesale reform for which he is now conveniently clamouring?
Mr. Soley: The hon. Member for Buckingham (Mr. Bercow) might have missed my saying this, but of the 18 years that I spent in opposition, the first seven or eight were spent following the great idea that time was our weapon. I have admitted several times in the Chamber recently that in those years I kept members of the Conservative Government here until the early hours of the morning. After a while, I began to realise not only that it was not working--I managed to achieve one significant change in legislation--but, more importantly, that it was bringing the House into disrepute. No one outside understood why we were legislating at 3 o'clock in the morning. No one believed that we were doing a good job of parliamentary scrutiny because one or two Members were keeping the Government here until the early hours of the morning. We did that because we believed that we would eventually cause the Government to get tired and run out of steam. All I can say is that if it takes 18 years to get a Government to run out of steam, forget it, unless the Opposition are to make the same mistake as I did, which would be great.
Mrs. Shephard: Is the hon. Gentleman confessing that he too has changed his tune?
Mr. Soley: Yes, this is not the first time that I have said that. When I was elected in 1979, I adhered to the idea that we would grind the Government down, but it was nonsense. The right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst now has that view. When I see and hear him--I do not know whether this will encourage him-- I see and hear myself. We used to do the same things late at night in the 1980s to keep the Government in the Chamber.
Mr. Forth: I am extraordinarily grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his advice and encouragement, but I will be the judge of how effective I am in discharging my duties in the House. I would be happy to sit down quietly with the hon. Gentleman, perhaps with my right hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Mr. Maclean), and discuss some of our modest
achievements that have caused delay and--ultimately--put the Government's programme at risk. It is not necessarily a matter of amendments, but about the overall package of an entire Session. I am quite satisfied that my modest work within the existing rules has been worth my effort.
Mr. Soley: I am glad the right hon. Gentleman thinks that, but he might have misunderstood me. I do not agree with what he has said or, indeed, with many of the Bills that he has objected to and tried to stop, but it does the Opposition or Parliament no good to waste time talking and talking in the belief that time is an effective weapon. My argument is that that is not the case. My great confession, which I have made so many times that I thought everyone was familiar with it, is that when I tried to do that, it did not work.
Mr. Soley: There is no evidence of it yet.
The only significant concession was given by an Environment Minister on a planning issue which meant that local authorities were given the right to insist on the plan being the first consideration in a planning application. If the right hon. Gentleman regards that as an effective way of holding a Government to account, he has a minimalist view of what that ought to be about.
Mrs. Dunwoody: If delay is not an effective weapon, why is the Queen's Speech on 6 December, and why are so many Bills mired in another place?
Mr. Soley: My hon. Friend draws attention to what some of us have known for many years, and I know that she understands this: Governments of both political parties have increasingly used the guillotine to get legislation through Parliament. We can argue whether that is good, bad or indifferent, but that is what happens. That is why I argued so strongly--I am delighted that the House agreed with me the other week--for the programming of legislation. Programming allows Opposition Members to determine the time that is spent on specific aspects of a Bill and the time of day when they are debated.
Mr. Soley: I will give way in a moment.
If my hon. Friend thinks about that, she will realise that it is a more effective weapon than giving in to a Government timetabling motion.
Mr. Campbell-Savours: My hon. Friend is selling out on the past. The matter is open to discussion, as this is a free debate. I do not accept that time is not a weapon, as I believe that it is an extremely effective one. Under the previous Government, there were occasions when we used time and won, although I accept that they were small victories. One involved the Housing Act 1980, under which council houses were sold off. By using time, we secured agreement on a Government amendment that protected certain classifications of property that were occupied by elderly people. That is an example of how time can be used to good effect.
I agree with my hon. Friend about the extent to which all business can be sensibly run throughout the night, but we should allow time for certain proceedings, even though that may be uncomfortable for the Government.
Mr. Soley: I am in danger of getting into a debate about timing, which I am trying to avoid, so I do not wish to go into that matter in great depth. However, I must respond to my hon. Friend the Member for Workington (Mr. Campbell-Savours), who is right that, in certain circumstances, time can be a weapon. I do not think that any Member doubts the central argument, but timetabling by successive Governments has made it impossible to achieve what the old theory of Parliament proposed and use time to defeat legislation. That 19th-century idea has not applied for at least 50 years. If we are going to use time, we must use it more effectively, which is where experiments such as Westminster Hall come in.
My hon. Friend the Member for Workington and I achieved changes, but the counter-argument is that they were relatively small, compared to the enormous period that we spent on them. My hon. Friend was at one with me when we spent night after night in the Chamber. However, in doing so, we brought the House into disrepute because--I am sure that he agrees--most people did not understand why we thought that it was a good idea to stay in the Chamber overnight, occasionally achieving small changes of the type that he described, but generally no change at all in the legislation. The method that we used also enabled the Government to have debates on difficult and embarrassing parts of legislation in the early hours of the morning--I accept that Governments of both parties have done that--so that they no longer had embarrassing defeats in the main part of the day.
As my hon. Friend knows, time and again in opposition we watched the Tory party try to have those debates in the early hours of the morning, so we could not get coverage. The proper programming of legislation allows the Opposition and Back Benchers to determine the time for debates. The central part of my argument is therefore that the quality of the time is more important than just having endless time for debate.
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