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27 Jan 2003 : Column 677—continued
Select Committees
10.33 pm
The Parliamentary Secretary, Privy Council Office (Mr. Ben Bradshaw): I beg to move,
- That—
(1) Standing Order No. 152 (Select Committees related to Government departments) be amended as follows:
In the Table
Item 7, column 2, leave out from 'Office;' to 'and administration' in line 7 of that item;
After item 8 insert—
| 'Lord Chancellor's Department | Lord Chancellor's Department (including the work of staff provided for the administrative work of courts and tribunals, but excluding consideration of individual cases and appointments) | 11'; |
- and
(2) the Order of 5th November 2001 relating to Liaison Committee (Membership) be amended as follows: Paragraph (2), after 'International Development' insert 'Lord Chancellor's Department'.
10.34 pm
Mr. Eric Forth (Bromley and Chislehurst): That is all very well, but I think that the motion deserves more attention from the House than that. Of course, a case can be made for an additional Select Committee—I am sure that hon. Members will agree that the work of our Select Committees is of great importance—but it should not be so straightforward. Setting up a new Select Committee is not merely an administrative whim, but something of importance to the House and the taxpayer—a point that I shall touch on in a moment.
The case for setting up the Committee is relatively straightforward. One has only to glance at the list of ministerial responsibilities to appreciate the extent of those of the Lord Chancellor's Department. They cover matters as diverse as the constitution, criminal justice and the courts. When we talk about courts, we immediately involve our constituents. Although the Lord Chancellor, who presides over the Department, is a Member of the other place, he has responsibilities that bear directly on the constituents of all hon. Members.
I was surprised that the Electoral Commission was listed as one of the responsibilities of the Lord Chancellor's Department. Why the Lord Chancellor, magnificent though he undoubtedly is, should preside over the Electoral Commission, which deals with elections and is, one would think, our responsibility, is a subject on which we might want to dwell, perhaps not now but on another occasion. Perhaps that could the first subject that the Select Committee considers.
Perhaps even more surprisingly, the Department is responsible for party funding. The responsibilities of the Lord Chancellor and his Department cover a remarkably wide range of activities, many of which are of direct interest to hon. Members and our constituents.
Mr. Desmond Swayne (New Forest, West): It is not so surprising that the Department is responsible for party
funding. My right hon. Friend will recall that the Lord Chancellor has been intimately involved with that subject.
Mr. Forth: I hope that my hon. Friend will expand on that in the debate, for which, unusually, we have unlimited time. There is therefore ample opportunity for hon. Members to examine such aspects of the Lord Chancellor's responsibilities in detail.
There is adequate rationale for the House to try to become involved through a Select Committee in the Lord Chancellor's Department. However, the remit is even wider, because the motion contains a teasing reference. In describing matters that the Select Committee covers, it refers to
- "Lord Chancellor's Department (including the work of staff provided for the administrative work of courts and tribunals, but excluding consideration of individual cases and appointments)".
Mr. Julian Brazier (Canterbury): My right hon. Friend eloquently outlines the destruction of the local basis of much of our business. The decision, which the Select Committee will doubtless examine early, to centralise all the staff who are currently employed by local magistrates courts committees will take the vital filter for advice to our local magistrates service away from the committees and hand it over to a central bureaucracy.
Mr. Forth: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making point. It shows that, for all the Government's rhetoric and spin about decentralisation and local responsibility, the reality is different. My hon. Friend gives a classic example. Huge and growing central bureaucracies are being created and they are reaching out with their tentacles to every aspect of local life and our local communities. The worst aspect of all is that the Lord Chancellor will be at the head of one of those gigantic bureaucracies. That is another clear-cut case of why we in the House should have a Select Committee to examine the proceedings of the Lord Chancellor's Department.
Peter Bottomley (Worthing, West): My right hon. Friend will have seen on page 38 of the list of ministerial responsibilities, the Law Officers' Department—that of the Attorney-General and the Solicitor-General. Will my right hon. Friend invite the Minister to say whether the responsibilities of that Department are to be scrutinised by this Select Committee, another Select Committee or no Select Committee at all?
Mr. Forth: I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I hope that the Minister might seek to catch your eye, Madam
Deputy Speaker, and, with the leave of the House, respond to the debate, as he was obviously reluctant—embarrassed, probably—to go into too much detail about why the proposal has been introduced. I hope that, through your good graces, he might answer the question that my hon. Friend has just put. There is a genuine question whether there is a Select Committee covering the Law Officers' Department, although I shall make a few comments on the desirability of increasing the number of Select Committees per se.In passing, I utter a word of warning to the House. In this case there is, as I have suggested, ample justification for the new Select Committee. However, we voted last year to pay Select Committee Chairmen—I support that, and I think I am right in saying that the matter is with the Senior Salaries Review Body, which will, I expect, report to the Leader of the House in the foreseeable future—so taxpayers might be forgiven a touch of cynicism if they were to think, although I hope that none would, that we are in the business of increasing the number of Select Committees in order to increase the number of chairmanships in order to pay ourselves or some of our lucky colleagues higher salaries. That, of course, would not and could not be the case, but it might just flit across the odd taxpayer's mind, hanging as they are on every word of the debate.
Mr. Swayne: Given the breadth of responsibilities that the Committee will encompass, has my right hon. Friend given some thought to the large number of travel opportunities that could arise?
Mr. Forth: I was just about to come to that point. I am probably giving away a trade secret in saying this, so I shall lower my voice in the hope that it does not travel too far: recently, there has been a request for an increase in the Select Committee travel budget. One reason given for that is that we are increasing the number of such Committees. The logic, I suppose, is in some ways inexorable—more Committees, more need for travel. One begins to see a picture building up of a House of Commons voting itself more Select Committees with more Members wanting to travel more to more countries around the world for more fact finding.
I would have thought that those colleagues who are familiar with e-matters know that people can surf to their heart's delight, chat in ghastly rooms and do all sorts of other e-things and that that virtually eliminates the need for Select Committee travel. But not at all. Even those colleagues who are cyber freaks, familiar with the e-world, seem still to feel the need to travel extensively to do their fact finding, but that is a matter for another day.
Mr. George Osborne (Tatton): A visit to the Lord Chancellor's apartment so that its members may see how public money was spent on the wallpaper would be a relatively cheap travel opportunity for the Select Committee. Given that the Leader of the House is such a good friend of the Lord Chancellor, he could arrange it.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Sylvia Heal): Order. The scope of the debate does not extend as far as the hon. Gentleman might wish.
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