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Mr. Darvill: I wish I knew the answer to that. My own feeling as a new hon. Member--more experienced Members may have a better way of dealing it--is that it is very difficult to balance the various demands made on my time. In an ideal world, we would be able to spend more time both in the Chamber and outside it serving our constituents.
Again, the issue is how to strike the right balance. I do not think that Parliament has the balance quite right. My constituents, and organisations in my constituency, demand my time for all types of reasons, and they may not appreciate how hon. Members' time in the House is
organised. So it is also a matter of educating people about how we organise our time. I think that reorganising our sitting times and shorter recesses might help in that process. However, I am not sure of the answer.In the past 20 or 30 years, there has been a drive for a more consumer-friendly society in which we, as hon. Members, are much more available to everyone. However, it is difficult to achieve that objective while doing the work that we have to do in the House. As I said, I do not blame Governments for that change. I think that hon. Members are responding in various ways to changes in society.
I have attended and spoken in various debates in Westminster Hall. The debates have covered a wide variety of subjects, and they have been very worth while. I disagree with the right hon. Members for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) and for Penrith and The Border (Mr. Maclean) that we would have had sufficient time in the House to have those debates. The Westminster Hall experiment has extended the list of subjects for debate, not only constituency debates initiated by one or two hon. Members, but more general debates.
The Westminster Hall debate on community legal service partnerships, for example, was held little more than one year after passage of the legislation establishing it, and it enabled hon. Members to speak from their own constituency experience about how the partnerships were working in their areas. Such a review was useful both for hon. Members and for the Minister, who took a note of the experiences described.
In a constituency debate, my hon. Friend the Member for Hamilton, South (Mr. Tynan) raised the issue of Uno plc. Various hon. Members on both sides of the House had constituents who had suffered in that case. Prior to the debate, the company liquidator held a meeting which hon. Members could attend. However, I doubt whether the meeting would have been called so urgently without the prospect of the debate. It demonstrated some of the benefits of Westminster Hall.
I support the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Workington (Mr. Campbell-Savours) on using European Standing Committee debates as a model for debates scrutinising Select Committee reports. My own view is that Select Committee reports are very important, that Select Committees need to be enhanced and reinforced, and that examination of their reports using the European Standing Committee model would enable greater scrutiny.
Mr. Campbell-Savours: I remember having a conversation with a junior Minister in the former Government in which he said, "I have been up since 4 o'clock this morning swotting up on the subject of this debate." Later, he said that such debates were the most penetrative parliamentary procedure that he knew of to hold hon. Members and Ministers to account. We therefore have it from a former Minister that that model really works as my hon. Friend and I are suggesting.
Mr. Darvill: I am a member of European Standing Committee C and participate in all its debates. The hour or so that is allowed for questions in those debates is both penetrating and worth while. I urge the Modernisation Committee to consider using that model in the consideration of Select Committee reports.
The use of such a model is particularly important because of resource accounting and budgeting, which will affect the way in which Select Committees review the Departments that they shadow. As time passes, the provision of additional information on annual accounts will make Select Committees' work more penetrating and give Select Committees and the House a powerful scrutiny role. If those reports were debated more extensively, using the procedure suggested by my hon. Friend the Member for Workington, Back Benchers would have an additional scrutiny weapon.
There is a modernisation package, but I think that we should consider further modernisation. We should certainly consider greater pre-legislative scrutiny, which could be done in Select Committees. I should also like to see improved procedures for considering private Members' legislation. I should also like changes to the parliamentary year. All those changes need to be considered; we need to modernise and improve our procedures. Although the changes that we are debating today are a part of that process, they should be only the start.
7.50 pm
Mrs. Eleanor Laing (Epping Forest): It has been suggested that time is sometimes abused in this Chamber by hon. Members who perform the equivalent of reading out the telephone directory to prolong debate. The powers that be who decided to prolong this evening's debate, whoever they are, did rather better than that. In a step forward from reading names in the telephone directory, we now have the spectacle of Labour Members reading the lengthy debates in which they have taken part in Westminster Hall. Personally, I prefer the telephone directory.
It is, however, a novelty to take part in a debate in this Chamber that has not been guillotined. Perhaps it is better, therefore, to hear the equivalent of the telephone directory being read out by Labour Members than to have our debate curtailed.
Mr. David Taylor: Will the hon. Lady give way?
Mrs. Laing: No. I will give way to almost anyone else, but the hon. Gentleman was not here during the debate, so I will not give way to him.
Conservative Members support the continuation of the experiments involving Thursday morning sittings and those in Westminster Hall, as my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Mrs. Browning) said in her opening speech. Modernisation, however, is a dangerous concept if it is not based on principle. Change for the sake of change, merely on a whim or for the sake of fashion, is not good. The principle that we ought to apply when considering changes to the way in which the parliamentary system works should be whether the changes would strengthen Parliament. If they would, they are good; if they would not, they are not good.
I should like to quote two right hon. and hon. Ladies who, although not of my political persuasion, are ladies for whom I have the greatest respect. The first is the
former Speaker of the House of Commons, the right hon. Betty Boothroyd, who said in her valedictory speech:
- Let us make a start by remembering that the function of Parliament is to hold the Executive to account . . . That is the role for which history has cast the Commons.--[Official Report, 26 July 2000; Vol. 354, c. 1114.]
Mrs. Laing: I dare say that that is true.
The other is the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody), who made some excellent points in this debate. Last month, she said:
- Parliament is one of the most important things in our democratic country. We must protect it; we must improve it. We must take back the power that others seek to take away from us.--[Official Report, 23 October 2000; Vol. 355, c. 34.]
Change to the House should not be made for the convenience of Members. If one wants to get home early and to have a convenient life, one should not become a Member of Parliament. If, however, one wants to dedicate oneself to the community that one represents, one should be a Member of Parliament.
Changes should not be made to the hours of the House to advance the role of the Palace of Westminster as an object of architectural interest or a theme park for tourists. Sometimes that seems to be happening. We welcome tourists, our constituents and others who are interested in the democratic process, but they should not take priority when we arrange our proceedings. Whenever school parties from my constituency visit the House and are taken to see proceedings in Westminster Hall, I always tell them that it is not the real Parliament. I do not want them to go away with the wrong impression or to think that the atmosphere in the hemicycle of Westminster Hall is anything like the real atmosphere of parliamentary debate. It is not.
The hon. Member for Denton and Reddish (Mr. Bennett) said that too many changes had been made without looking at what lay behind them. I entirely agree. He argued that Cabinet Ministers should be brought to Westminster Hall to respond to debates and be held to account. I would argue, however, that debates requiring an answer by a Cabinet Minister should always be held in this Chamber.
Unusually, I found myself agreeing with the hon. Member for North Cornwall (Mr. Tyler)--I do not want to worry him--in so far as he said that, in principle, we should not make changes for the convenience of hon. Members and their staff, or in order to make the House more family-friendly. He is right. We should take those factors into consideration, but they should not be our first priority.
The hon. Member for North Cornwall will be pleased that I disagree with him entirely on another point. I cannot understand his wish to take the confrontation out of politics--a wish also expressed by the hon. Member
for Lewisham, Deptford (Joan Ruddock) and many of her hon. Friends. The exploration of ideas has, from Plato and Socrates onwards, been achieved by considering one side of an argument and then another, until the whole idea has been thoroughly thrashed out.Labour Members have been talking for weeks, in this Chamber and elsewhere, about taking the confrontation out of politics, but they have not explained why, or how, that would make the political process any better. If they are afraid to argue, they do not have to do so. They can just sit down and keep quiet. However, if they wish to serve their constituents, they should be brave enough to get up and argue. Politics is a confrontational business. If it were not, we should have a one-party state. That would not serve democracy or the people of the United Kingdom. I doubt that consensus would be more likely if the hon. Member for Deptford sat next to my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Mr. Bercow). I cannot imagine such a situation lasting for more than a minute or two.
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