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Mr. Forth: I am grateful to the Leader of the House for that statement, and particularly for the news about the Praesidium, which I am sure excited us all hugely.

Today being Thursday—[Hon. Members: "Well spotted"]. I see that I have woken up some hon. Members.

Today being Thursday, we have of course had departmental questions from 11.30 am to 12.30 pm, and now we shall have business questions for however long you deem appropriate, Mr. Speaker. Then a statement is to follow.

By my calculations, that means that for the legislative business before us, a very important Bill to which we are supposed to give our full legislative attention as a House of Commons, we shall have about three and a half hours to consider the seven groups of amendments that you have selected, Mr. Speaker. The arithmeticians among us will readily calculate that that is about 30 minutes per group. That is the amount of time the Government have seen fit to allow the House to do its job of scrutinising legislation—30 minutes for each group of amendments to a Bill for the entire House to give its attention, including all speeches and all consideration. That is the result of the so-called modernisation process, whereby to get Members out of this building as quickly as possible on Thursdays, we are now reduced to that sort of business.

If the Leader of the House will not turn back the clock—that is a bit much to expect at this stage—can we have protected time for our legislative duties? That is all I ask, given that we must have statements from Ministers and so on. Surely, it is more important that we do our job as a legislature than that we all go home early on Thursdays. Therefore, I ask the Leader of the House to give this matter his urgent attention, and I hope that he will give us an undertaking about protected time for legislation.

Yesterday, as reported at column 322 of Hansard, my hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Mr. Pickles) pointed out that a written ministerial statement by the Deputy Prime Minister has been sneaked out on the very important subject of reduced right-to-buy discounts—something that affects all Members of Parliament and their constituents—yet, to date, we have no opportunity to question the Deputy Prime Minister. We are left with the written ministerial statement and, so far, nothing else. Is that how we shall conduct our business in future? Is the Deputy Prime Minister afraid of the House? Is he ashamed of what he said in his written ministerial statement?

Why is the Deputy Prime Minister allowed to hide behind the written ministerial statement procedure and not come to the House to say what he wants to do and be questioned by Members of Parliament on behalf of their constituents? That is the missing piece in all this. I do not want to hear the Leader of the House say, "Oh well, written ministerial statements are better than the old planted questions", which were their predecessors. I want him to tell us when the Deputy Prime Minister will come to the House to answer for his policies, instead of hiding behind that sordid little parliamentary device.

You will recall, Mr. Speaker, that during business questions on 16 January, duly recorded at columns 819 and 820 of Hansard, I raised the matter of the Secretary of State for Defence having somehow allowed to get out

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into the public domain the matter of Fylingdales on which he was going to make a statement the following day.

On 20 January, my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Mr. Knight)—who is in his place beside me—returned to this issue and said with regard to the Secretary of State for Defence that the statement on troop deployment

"was widely trailed in the Sunday newspapers and in today's media. This appears to be a recurring pattern with the current Secretary of State."

As reported in the same column of Hansard, one of your Deputies, Mr. Speaker, said:

"Mr. Speaker is well aware of the matters to which he has referred, and is deeply concerned about them. I understand that he intends to take them up with the Ministers concerned." —[Official Report, 20 January 2003; Vol. 398, c. 47.]

That was bad enough, but on 22 January—yesterday—my right hon. Friend the Member for Fylde (Mr. Jack) was again obliged to raise a point of order with you, Mr. Speaker, in which he said that

"on the BBC News website, there was a headline saying "University Funding Shake-up Unveiled."

So what the Secretary of State for Education and Skills was going to say in the House was widely known in the media before he came here. You, Mr. Speaker, said:

"I share the right hon. Gentleman's concern about this matter. He has written to me; I shall investigate and report back to the House." —[Official Report, 22 January 2003; Vol. 398, c. 320.]

The Leader of the House shares with you, Mr. Speaker, a responsibility for guardianship of the role of the House of Commons vis-à-vis Ministers, but we are now witnessing casual, serial disregard of the role of the House by Secretaries of State. I should like to hear from the Leader of the House what is he going to do—along, I hope, with you, Mr. Speaker—to force Secretaries of State to drop that practice, to have proper regard to parliamentary process and to come to the House to allow Members of Parliament to hear matters before the rest of the world hears about them.

Mr. Cook: I think that I can begin by agreeing with the right hon. Gentleman that this is Thursday—everything else is rather more conditional than that.

First, we rise at 6 o'clock on Thursdays because the House voted for that, and I remind the right hon. Gentleman that it did so by the largest majority for any of the propositions on which the House voted on that day. I would totally deprecate any suggestion that Thursday therefore becomes some kind of second-class day; it is a full day of parliamentary time. It is very important to demonstrate to the world that we are taking business on Thursdays in the same way as we do on any other sitting day at Westminster.

On the statement on the right to buy, I cannot but rise to the right hon. Gentleman's claim that this is a sordid device. It is vastly more transparent and open than the system of planted questions that it replaced and which was used extensively by the right hon. Gentleman and his colleagues in the 18 years when they were in office. It has always been the case that at times Government statements will be made in written form in Hansard rather than orally from the Dispatch Box. As for yesterday, when the written statement was made, there was a full, major oral statement on higher education in

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the House. It is simply not possible for me to arrange for every Government statement to be done orally from the Dispatch Box. If it were, I would have the right hon. Gentleman complaining that we did not have enough time to scrutinise legislation properly. I am pleased to inform the right hon. Gentleman that the Deputy Prime Minister answers questions in the House next Wednesday and will be happy to answer questions on the right to buy or any other issue. As a result of the changes and modernisation, which the right hon. Gentleman constantly deprecates, it is now possible for Members, having seen that written statement, to table an oral question on that subject in time for the exchanges next week.

On the issue of press speculation before oral statements in the House, the reports in the press that preceded the statement on troop deployments did not in any way reflect the full nature of the statement. Many were quite wrong. None was accurate about my right hon. Friend's statement. The statement on the BBC website about the forthcoming higher education statement was wildly wrong. I cannot stop the BBC and newspapers speculating about what might be said in Parliament. We live in a free country with a free press. I was gratified when I tuned in to the "Today" programme on the day of the higher education statement to hear it lament that it had been unable to get a Minister to come and comment on the forthcoming statement. I welcome that. It shows that Ministers fully understand the importance of speaking to this House before the media.

Mr. Paul Tyler (North Cornwall): May I support the request for a debate on the forced sale of rented accommodation at a substantial discount in areas such as the south-west? It has caused untold misery to those seeking affordable housing. It is a proper request and I am delighted that the Conservatives would wish to expose their absurdity in that particular matter.

Will the Leader of the House take the opportunity now or at least before the debate announced for 4 February to reiterate the Government's position on the reform of the House of Lords? I do not know whether in his busy morning he had an opportunity of to read the speech—I suppose it was a speech, but it was actually an extraordinarily bloodcurdling diatribe—from the Lord Chancellor. Yesterday in the other place the Lord Chancellor referred to an imaginary centre of gravity. It is the centre of gravity which the Leader of the House is constantly urging us to reach. On a number of occasions during that extraordinary speech the Lord Chancellor made peculiar references to the issue of hybridity. For example, he referred to

"my mission in this debate to save us from the parliamentary disaster of hybridity."—[Official Report, 22 January 2003; Vol. 643, c. 831W.]

He then made some other references to that. Does the Leader of the House accept that in making this extraordinary statement the Lord Chancellor has not only ignored the mandate of the Labour Party at two successive general elections, but torn up the White Paper to which he put his own name and which advocated hybridity and mixed membership, and ignored the advice of the royal commission set up by the Government, the Public Administration Select Committee of this House and the report of the Joint

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Committee of both Houses which, in theory at least, his House was debating yesterday as we did on Tuesday? Can the Leader of the House now give us an absolute guarantee that the Members of the other place, who after all have a lot of self-interest in this matter, will not be allowed a veto—that the turkeys will not be allowed to vote against Christmas?

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