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Mr. David Marshall (Glasgow, Shettleston): The right hon. Gentleman is being selective in his choice of Bills. Does he recall, for example, the Transport Bill 1985? Because of the guillotine imposed by Conservative Ministers at the time, many important clauses and schedules—particularly on pensions—were never debated at all. Is not the present timetabling method much better and fairer than the guillotine?
Mr. Forth: The short answer to the hon. Gentleman is no. He and I could wander together down memory lane,
and I would be happy to do so. However, if we were to examine the entrails of that Bill and look into the amount of time taken by the then Opposition in the Standing Committee and what particular issues were discussed, I suspect that it would considerably weaken the hon. Gentleman's point. At the moment I cannot remember the Bill in detail, but I would not mind betting that he and his hon. Friends probably spent the first sitting or two debating the timetable motion—no doubt with reference to grandmothers, tea cakes, holidays, the weather and all the other subjects so much beloved by the Opposition at the time.
Mr. Marshall: I have to agree in part with the right hon. Gentleman's point. That may have been true of some hon. Members, but others on our side of the House did not like that method of operation because it prevented us from getting to the meat of the Bill. The present timetabling process is, I believe, fairer.
Mr. Forth: That should have been a matter for the hon. Gentleman to sort out with his hon. Friends. I shall leave it to my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills—his work has brought this problem out—to make the point more forcibly than I could that any attempt to argue that we are getting more effective scrutiny of Bills under the present system of arbitrary timetabling before a Committee even embarks on its work than under the old system cannot be sustained. The truth is that, under the current system, very substantial parts of large and important Bills are not being addressed by the Standing Committees at all because of the arbitrary nature of the guillotining that takes place, as I have said, before the Committee starts its work. I cannot make the point often enough that under the old system the Committee was allowed to start its deliberations and it was the Opposition—back then, as now, Government Back Benchers said very little—who were allowed to decide which clauses were debated and at what rate of progress. I cannot help it if the hon. Member for Glasgow, Shettleston (Mr. Marshall) and his hon. Friends fell out over it. I cannot help it if the hon. Gentleman sat there mute, waiting for his favourite clause to come up, while his hon. Friends were occupying endless time talking about irrelevancies. That is the hon. Gentleman's problem. If he and his hon. Friends wasted time, that is not for me to explain.
Mr. Richard Shepherd (Aldridge-Brownhills): One crucial difference is that under the old arrangements to which my right hon. Friend refers, the Opposition had at least an opportunity to present arguments as to why a guillotine might have been inappropriate. We had a three-hour debate on the guillotine. If my right hon. Friend looks through the list in the report, he will see that the guillotine was often not applied until a breakdown of business in the Committee took place.
Mr. Forth: That is indeed the case and I am grateful to my hon. Friend for pointing it out. A subsidiary but important matter is how far one had the opportunity to debate the guillotining in itself—an opportunity that the Government have all but done away with. That was an important part of the procedure at the time, which is sadly no longer the case.
Let us move on to paragraph 13 of the report, which states:
- "The Government will inevitably get its legislation"—
- "subject to the agreement of the House."
For the Government or the Committee—they are the same thing, effectively—to have the gall and the impudence to say that the Government will inevitably get their legislation gives the game away and shows the Government's attitude to the parliamentary process. I hope that the Government will not inevitably get their legislation, if only because they are trying to stuff too much legislation through the parliamentary process. They can easily get their legislation through the House of Commons because of the mechanism that we are discussing—the programming of Bills—but happily still in the House of Lords, where the Government do not have a majority and cannot control the timetable, they will not inevitably get their legislation. Indeed, they may have to give up some of it—parts of Bills or Bills in their entirety. So even that statement, which gives the lie to the Government's attitude to the parliamentary process, happily is not true.
Mr. Woolas: The picture painted by the right hon. Gentleman suggests to the public and to the House that the Government are not allowing time. Will he consider two comparative statistics? In the 1991–92 Session, the House considered 17 Bills, to which 295 hours were devoted in Standing Committee. Ten years later, in the 2000–01 Session, again the House considered 17 Bills, which took up 301 hours in Standing Committee. Do those statistics not show that what the right hon. Gentleman is arguing is simply not true?
Mr. Forth: No, of course not. That shows the superficial nature of the Minister's understanding of the way the House works. Without looking at the Bills in great detail—their size, complexity and how controversial or otherwise they are—one cannot make a judgment. The raw figures tell us nothing, but my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills will tell us something.
Mr. Shepherd: Yes. We must remember that the first period cited by the Minister was the run-up to the 1992 general election, and in the arrangements between the Whips Offices—the "usual channels", as they were called—a huge number of deals were done to expedite business to clear the decks for the general election that was to follow.
Mr. Forth: Which I personally regret. I would much rather the Opposition of the day had prevented that
process from happening, regardless who was in government. It is true that when we were in government, we were allowed to get away with murder by slack opposition, which I hope will not happen again.I move on to paragraph 19, in which there is something that I agree with. There is not much that I agree with in the report, but in fairness I thought I had better identify one or two paragraphs with which I could agree. Paragraph 19 states:
- "There is a danger that, where programme orders specify unnecessarily short timetables, or where time is badly allocated within the overall limits set out in the original programme order, programming will be seen as only a convenience for the Government, allowing it to get legislation through the House in a hurry."
Paragraph 25 goes on to state:
- "The purpose of programming is to enhance the House's scrutiny of bills, not to curtail legitimate debate."
I say that with some confidence because it is half hinted at, or half admitted, in the report that the Government believe that at the time of Second Reading—the in-principle debate on a Bill—they can foretell how much time a Standing Committee will require to consider a Bill. That indicates that they have no wish to allow the Committee to deliberate properly or even to decide how much time it should take. Before the process even starts, the Government say, "We think the Bill should take three weeks." How can they possibly know that about Bills with a large number of clauses and schedules and many complexities?
Until the Standing Committee is constituted and the legitimate outside interest groups make their input to the process, the Government cannot know how long proper scrutiny or consideration of a Bill will take. Yet the whole philosophy of programming set out in the report and in the motions before us rest on that very assumption. It is that to which I take such exception.
Paragraph 25 goes on to claim that the process is of benefit
- "to the Opposition, which is assured of having adequate time".
Then we come to the phrase in paragraph 28 that the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody) picked up in her intervention:
- "It is important for all sides to recognise that programming is here to stay".
I hope I can give an undertaking from the Dispatch Box that we would seek to reverse that. In any case, in a strict parliamentary sense, that statement is not and cannot be true, because each Parliament, happily, decides its own arrangements for procedures and Standing Orders. The assertion in paragraph 28 is invalid and untrue.
In paragraph 30 the report deals with timing and makes the valid comment that
- "points raised during the second reading debate may be taken into account when decisions are taken about how to allocate time to each part of the bill."
I shall leave it to my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills to tell the House the thrust of his excellent minority report. Suffice to say that I agree with the point that he made and the direction in which he wanted to take the Committee, and I regret that the Committee did not feel that it could support his minority report.
It should be obvious by now that I shall not vote for the motions. They seek to apply to future Sessions of Parliament arrangements that have turned out to be completely unsatisfactory. I regret that that is the attitude of Ministers and the Government to our parliamentary proceedings. If one wanted to see any proof of how easy life has been made for the Government, one has only to look at the fact that the Leader of the House can now predict the calendar for an entire year ahead.
One has only to look at the reduced number of sittings. The Leader of the House keeps telling us, because it is what his script tells him, that the House is not sitting fewer days or hours than it did. That is not so. We used to sit on Fridays, regularly and routinely. Fridays have all gone except, happily, for the 13 private Member's Bill Fridays, to which I look forward so much
and in which I seek to participate as much as possible. Sadly, the other Fridays during which the House used to sit have all disappeared. Where did they go? They have all gone, to be replaced by nothing at all, as far as I can tell.
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