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Mr. Bercow: Does my right hon. Friend agree that, judging by previous debates, the Government did not need to be especially wise to anticipate that substantial debate would be needed--certainly on the Freedom of Information Bill? As they could have foreseen that some months ago, would it not have been judicious to consider a recall of Parliament in September to facilitate that proper debate for which my right hon. Friend rightly asks?

Mr. Forth: As ever, I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I did not necessarily want to review the year to date in detail, but the Government passed up many opportunities to use the time of the House to examine legislation properly. Fridays have come and gone. Business has

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finished early and prematurely. The three-month summer recess came and went. None of those opportunities were taken by the Government to allow us to examine legislation.

My hon. Friend knows the answer to the question: the Government have so mismanaged their legislative programme this year that they have put themselves in the position of having to meet artificially imposed time deadlines. They passed up many opportunities--indeed, because of their mismanagement, many opportunities were not even available to them.

Mr. Maclean: Surely one of the best examples of the Government's complete mismanagement of time was when they gave time to a private Member's Bill to outlaw the sale of hamburgers in the royal parks. They gave that Bill time in the Chamber and imposed a guillotine. Debate on the measure on the Floor of the House took about two days, which could better have been devoted to important measures such as the Freedom of Information Bill.

Mr. Forth: My right hon. Friend and I could reminisce at some length about the Government's odd priorities. One of these days, someone will no doubt write a paper on the subject--examining this Session and musing about why the Government chose to spend inordinate amounts of parliamentary time on what can only be described as relatively minor matters, while having the gall and arrogance to tell the House that this week, which is artificially deemed to be the final week of the Session, only a certain amount of time will be allocated to deal with such major measures as the Freedom of Information Bill and the Countryside and Rights of Way Bill.

Before I enter into the substance of my remarks, I shall consider briefly some of the provisions of the motion. No one has yet done so, and it would be worth spending a little time on them. My eye lit on paragraph 3, which is headed "Subsequent stages". Sub-paragraph 3(1) states:

The Speaker shall put forthwith the Question on any Motion made by a Minister of the Crown for the consideration forthwith of any further Message from the Lords on either of the Bills.

However, sub-paragraph 3(2) states--crucially--

The proceedings on any further Message from the Lords shall, if not previously concluded, be brought to a conclusion one hour after their commencement.

The Government are thus imposing on us in the further stages of consideration--if measures go from this to another place and, perhaps, return--an arbitrary limit of one hour. So things are worse than we thought. Not only are we being limited to the magic hour of midnight tonight for the consideration of the Freedom of Information Bill, and to 10 o'clock tomorrow for the Countryside and Rights of Way Bill--on which, incidentally, we still do not know the groupings, the selection or anything else, which leaves us in a rather difficult position--but under paragraph 3(2), the Government tell us that there will be a limit of one hour on subsequent discussion.

I regret to say many Members regard the Reasons Committee as a trivial, automatic mechanism contained in the motion, but it is nothing of the kind. The Reasons Committee is an important element of our deliberations and it requires, as the motion reminds us, a

Motion made by a Minister of the Crown for the appointment, nomination and quorum of a Committee to draw up Reasons.

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So far as I can see--subject to correction by any Member, or, indeed, any Minister--the motion states:


The Speaker shall put forthwith the Question on any Motion.

So the House will not even be given an opportunity to debate the Government's mandate for the appointment, nomination or quorum of the Reasons Committee. That is another matter that is being swept aside. We are supposed to assume that the Government--omniscient and omnipotent as they now regard themselves--can impose the Reasons Committee on the House without giving us an opportunity for debate, although there will be an opportunity to vote.

Mr. Hawkins: Will my right hon. Friend consider whether one of the reasons why the Government are behaving in a draconian and anti-democratic way may be related to the fact that there was such a substantial rebellion on the Government Benches when the Freedom of Information Bill was first introduced, when about 37 Labour Members were unwilling to support the Minister?

Mr. Forth: Tempted though I am, I do not want to intrude unnecessarily into the Government's grief, but it is true that they may be structuring such rigid timetables because they do not want to provide too much time for Labour Members to express their dissent. That is at least a possibility; I put it no stronger than that.

To finish the point about the Reasons Committee, paragraph 6(2) of the motion states:

Proceedings in the Committee shall, if not previously concluded, be brought to a conclusion 30 minutes after their commencement.

That is yet another way in which, almost surreptitiously, the Government are assuming that all the normal mechanisms that have become available to the House over centuries, which we have developed to discharge our duties and responsibilities properly, are being swept aside with the casual arrogance that has become the hallmark of the Government.

The Government are not content with their gigantic majority in the House, nor with destroying the independent element of another place and replacing it with what have become known, rather disrespectfully, as Tony's cronies. Never mind all that; hidden in paragraph 6(2), we find that in the discharge of its duties, the deliberations of the Reasons Committee--an important, if small part of our proceedings--will be timetabled to 30 minutes.

The motion contains several smaller, but equally draconian, restrictions on the time that will be available for the House to discharge its duties properly. I shall now begin to consider the structure of the timetable for the Bills themselves. As has been said many times, there are about 120 Lords amendments to the Freedom of Information Bill. The way things are heading, by my calculation, the House will probably have only about three and a half hours in which to consider all the 120 amendments. That would be bad enough, even if it were not for the content of some of the groupings that the Government have made.

I understand that at this stage in proceedings, rather unusually, it is Ministers who determine the grouping of amendments, not the Chairman of Ways and Means, as is

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usual. That in itself makes the procedure somewhat unusual, because we normally look to the impartiality of the Chair to give us some protection, through the even- handed selection of amendments and their grouping. However, as if the Government did not have enough advantages, as if they were not taking enough powers to themselves, and as if they were not restricting Back Benchers on both sides of the House sufficiently, they can also group the amendments for their own convenience. Given that fact, and given what we know of the selection of amendments to the Freedom of Information Bill, we shall have completely inadequate time to debate some very important matters.

The item that is lucky enough to appear early on the selection list--the subject of public interest and exemptions--may receive reasonable scrutiny and consideration. Knowing that there is rightly a great deal of interest in that matter on both sides of the House, I suspect that it will be debated at some length and considered properly, and I should not be surprised if the House were to divide as well. If that is the case, all subsequent business will be put at risk--and we should not imagine that any of it is trivial. I should have thought that some of the later items--fees for disclosure, special provisions, public interest and so on--in the Freedom of Information Bill will attract a great deal of attention, not just in the House but outside.

Mr. Bercow: My right hon. Friend has helpfully explained the sort of subjects that we will be obliged to address in our truncated debates. Is he aware that our present understanding is that the Home Secretary intends to deal with the sixth and eighth categories of amendments? Does he not think it just conceivable that the right hon. Gentleman has opted to deal with categories six and eight in the fervent hope that the eloquence of the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Tony Wright), among others, will prevent those matters from being reached? Would not that be an undemocratic disgrace of the first order?

Mr. Forth: Much though I respect the Secretary of State, I am not anxious for us to engineer the business so that he makes some sort of dramatic appearance at a late stage to seek either to impress or to depress us--I am not sure which. I am much more interested in the implications of what my hon. Friend says. If we look at the groups of amendments to the Freedom of Information Bill as the Government have imposed them on us, we see that the first group is very important, and may rightly occupy some time in deliberation, and, no doubt, Division, but the others are by no means trivial.

There are very important provisions on Wales and Northern Ireland and important matters bearing on the relationship between the parts of the United Kingdom and on the implications of the Bill for the very different Administrations that we now have in those different parts of the United Kingdom. I should have thought that there would, rightly, be a lot of interest in such matters among those with a knowledge of, and an interest in, the relative roles in our constitutional affairs of the Assemblies in Wales and Northern Ireland, as covered by that group of amendments.

There is a group that catches my eye. As soon as I see the words "drafting and minor", I am almost certain that the amendments will cover important, controversial and

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difficult matters that the Government wish to conceal. It is an old trick, but we understand it fully. I should not be surprised if we were to spend an unusual amount of time on that group, because we shall want to winkle out what the Government want to conceal by giving it that rather bland title.

The phrase "Historical records and the Public Record Office" sounds innocuous, does it not? However, that group contains all sorts of implications that should be considered. Another group of amendments is entitled, "Advice and assistance to persons making requests for information". The Government probably think that we can rush through all those amendments and accept them on the nod, but I should have thought that that is far from the case. Although I have gone only halfway down the selection list, I need go no further, because I have not yet even begun to deal with the Countryside and Rights of Way Bill.

It is clear, to me anyway, that substantial matters have to be dealt with, but there is a pathetically short time for the House to consider them properly. As if that were not difficult enough, when I came into the debate, I still did not know how the amendments to the Countryside and Rights of Way Bill would be grouped. The groupings may have been promulgated since--although I doubt it--but I do not know how many amendments the House will be able to consider tomorrow. Tomorrow's Order Paper already contains notice of a ten-minute Bill. Although the debate on such a Bill can take as little as 10 minutes, proceedings on it can take half an hour if there is opposition to it and a Division. That happened last week.

One of my hon. Friends said that he had reason to believe that there would be a statement tomorrow on a rural White Paper. The Home Secretary was rather shy when he was asked about that earlier, but there is at least the possibility of such a statement.

We already face the possibility that we may not commence our consideration of the Countryside and Rights of Way Bill until 5 o'clock tomorrow afternoon, yet in the motion, the Government tell us that they expect deliberations on it to be completed by 10 o'clock. We might have only five hours to debate 280 amendments. It does not take a mathematical genius or a rocket scientist to divide one figure by the other and to come up with the answer that the time that the Government suggest we should have for the debate is lamentably and scandalously small and inadequate.

It could be argued that, as is our custom, the amendments will be divided into groups, but we do not know the groupings yet. In other words, the Government are asking us to sign a blank cheque by asking us to agree to the motion and the time limits in it. We know how many amendments to the Bill have come from another place, but we know nothing of how they will be grouped or the structure of the debate that will be suggested to us. That is entirely unsatisfactory.

We can consider the motion from the perspective of an overview of the legislative year and try to fit it into that, or we can look at it upwards from our position as humble parliamentary ants on the Opposition Back Benches--mere cogs in the great machine of parliamentary consideration. However, from every angle, the motion before us is entirely unsatisfactory. It is typical of the Government's approach to the House of Commons.

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