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Mr. Keith Darvill (Upminster): The hon. Member for Buckingham (Mr. Bercow) said that I was not in the Chamber at the start of the debate. May I assure the right hon. Gentleman that I was?
Mr. Maclean: I think that that may be so. Perhaps my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Mr. Bercow) was incorrectly advised on that matter. I may be wrong as well.
The hon. Member for Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush suggested that if we work in this place late at night, turn up and debate things on a Friday, work as late as 10 o'clock on a Thursday night and try to hold the Government to account by means of long debates, we will bring the House into disrepute. Instead, we gave ourselves one of the longest summer recesses in history. If we shorten our working hours, if we are not here on Thursday evenings, if most Members are hardly ever here on a Friday and if we increase our parliamentary allowances, will these factors somehow bring new respect from members of the public? Will they think that we are undertaking our duties more assiduously? If that is one of the best arguments that the hon. Gentleman can advance for proceeding with the experiment, his arguments are feeble.
I have heard many Labour Members saying that what is before us is only part of the process and that there is much more reform and modernisation to come. Not one of them has dared to tell the House what in his or her view the further steps will be.
Mr. Maclean: That is apart from my neighbour, the hon. Member for Workington (Mr. Campbell-Savours). He elaborated on one important change, but one that the Government will not touch with a barge pole. The suggestion that the Government will routinely subject junior Ministers, the poor lambs, to intense scrutiny in Westminster Hall or anywhere else, of the minutiae of Select Committee reports along the same lines as hybrid Committees along the Committee Corridor where there is an hour of questioning before set-piece speeches begin, is rather fanciful. Nevertheless, it is an idea. It is the only idea that I have heard today that if implemented would make the House more effective and Members more effective.
Mr. Forth: Would my right hon. Friend like to speculate on the direction he believes that further modernisation moves might take? Does he agree that it is more than likely that any further so-called modernisation will make life easier for the Government and give Members the opportunity to spend less time in this place while enjoying their increased allowances?
Mr. Maclean: My right hon. Friend is right. He makes the same point as the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody). During the period that she and I have been in the House under all Governments, we have seen them want to ignore the control of Parliament. Parliament and all Oppositions have always been forced to give way to the demands of the Government of the day that they should get through their business more easily with the minimum amount of scrutiny. We have seen a rather exponential twist of the screw in the past few years. The proposals for modernisation take away tremendous powers from individual Members, and they will not make us more effective.
The word "effective" is the most over-used term that I have heard during the debate. Labour Member after Labour Member and Liberal Members have claimed that somehow yet more Adjournment debates in Westminster Hall have held the Executive to account or made us more effective. We are told that Ministers have been subjected to intense scrutiny. Where have these Members been? Can anyone produce a Minister of whatever party who has ever been put under intense scrutiny in an Adjournment debate? Has a Minister ever been held to account in an Adjournment debate?
I suspect that Ministers now do what I did on occasions when I was to respond to an Adjournment debate late at night. I would say to my civil servants, "I think that I have got the gist of this. I have a speech with which I am happy. Don't bother turning up because it is so late at night. You lot go home. We don't need you."
Of course, civil servants say, "But Minister, we need to be there, in case there are questions that you cannot answer." Let us not pretend that in Adjournment debates Ministers are put under such intense scrutiny that they
need their civil servants beside them, passing them messages all the time. If there are difficult questions to answer and they are not covered by the brief, or by the parts headed "Lines to take", "If pressed" or "Don't reveal this at any cost", the Minister simply promises to write to the hon. Member.The hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich made the same point: Adjournment debates end with the Minister winding up, and in those circumstances, there is no way that he can be put under intense scrutiny or pressure.
Mr. Ian Stewart (Eccles): I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. Does he accept that some of us who have held an Adjournment debate in Westminster Hall, with Ministers in front of us--for example, in the debate on the vaccine damage payments scheme--had a success? Ministers have been subjected to scrutiny and pressure, and that issue was settled amicably.
Mr. Maclean: The hon. Member for Eccles has only just come into the Chamber. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst said, in your dreams. Not your dreams, Madam Deputy Speaker, but the hon. Gentleman's dreams.
By their very nature, Adjournment debates cannot put the Government under any scrutiny whatever.
Mr. Tyler: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Maclean: I will give way to the hon. Gentleman in a moment, although he did not give way to me, as I recall. However, I do not mind giving way, if the hon. Gentleman wants to pad out the debate and help the Labour party avoid his own debate in prime time tonight.
The Government cannot be put under rigorous scrutiny in Adjournment debates. That is possible only at Question Time or in debates on Opposition motions on the Floor of the House. Upstairs, in Standing Committees and in the new Procedure Committee, the Government and Ministers can be held to account in some ways.
Mr. Tyler: I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman, but he should not judge everybody else by his own experience. I recall him answering an Adjournment debate that I had launched in the Chamber at 7 o'clock in the morning. Everything that he has just said is perfectly true--his answer was totally inadequate. I put that on record. However, had that Adjournment debate taken place with a number of other hon. Members present in Westminster Hall under the present arrangements, he would have been put on the spot.
The right hon. Gentleman clearly has not attended a debate in Westminster Hall. The atmosphere there is entirely different, and the opportunities to extract information there are much greater. I challenge him to tell us what he has achieved in this Parliament through his type of opposition.
Mr. Maclean: To answer the last point first, an awful lot of letters from the hon. Gentleman's Liberal friends, begging me to let their useless Bills through. It must have
been humiliating for the hon. Gentlemen who wrote, pleading that their Bills were so vital, and arguing that my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst and I were the only ones in the House blocking such vital legislation.In answer to the hon. Gentleman's question, that may be one example of what one has achieved. He may not like it and others may not like it, but at least on some of those measures, our opposition forced the Government to deal with Bills in Government time--in prime time. I do not have the ear of the business managers, and it was not my decision to deal with the hamburgers in the parks Bill--a private Member's Bill of minuscule importance--in prime time as part of the Government's programme, apparently because my right hon. Friend and I had made a few observations about it. I will not be sidetracked by the Liberal party into going down that route.
Westminster Hall diminishes the importance and status of the Chamber. We all know that the main business that takes place in Westminster Hall is Adjournment debates. That has certain merit. As my right hon. Friend the Member for South-West Norfolk (Mrs. Shephard), said, it allows us to raise constituency issues. It gives us an outlet for constituency issues.
That may be a legitimate aim in itself, but when we apply for an Adjournment debate in Westminster Hall, tell the press about it, have a little press release prepared, go back to our local, parochial press and say, "I'm making a very important speech in Westminster Hall and here it is", let us not pretend, as parliamentarians, that that issue is of national importance. Let us not pretend that we are holding the Government to account, or that we are wringing Ministers' necks till they squeak or squeal. Of course we are not. We are making a point for the media back home in our own patch, which we hope will ultimately get us votes and appeal to our own electorate, our own party or local people.
That is not to diminish some of the issues raised. Some of the issues that hon. Members have raised on Adjournment debates are extremely important to one constituent or to a large number of constituents. Some hon. Members raise international issues in an Adjournment debate, which may be important to many people in overseas countries or to a number of hon. Members.
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