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Mr. Banks: Is not that exactly what the House of peers is doing at the moment? How can the will of this House be fulfilled if the House of Lords continually blocks it? Surely the hon. Gentleman, as a House of Commons man, should defend our procedures.

Mr. Heald: Yes, we should defence our procedures, but the Bill is not a case for a strict guillotine or the Parliament Act.

Mr. Hogg: My hon. Friend sets out the arguments for not invoking the Parliament Act, but a further consideration exists. Parliamentary majorities should not be used to suppress the rights of minorities. The House of Lords has an important role in safeguarding those rights. It was doing its duty and we should not override it.

Mr. Heald: Yes, and it is also right that the Government should not use their Executive power to effect that sort of oppression of a minority.

The Government have not known their own mind about the Bill. For the past seven long years, they have started and checked, jinked and dived and been up hill and down dale. At the end of seven years and after wasting seven months of the Session, they say that the Bill is so important that it must be tackled now. According to newspaper reports, the Government would even be prepared to sacrifice three significant Bills—the Pensions Bill, the Children Bill and the Civil Contingencies Bill—to secure the measure. What a shocking sense of priorities that displays.

The Pensions Bill is designed to help protect the pensions of millions; the Civil Contingencies Bill is our long-delayed response to the events of 9/11; and the Children Bill deals with the needs of some of our most vulnerable children. I do not agree with some aspects of those measures, but I have no doubt that their subject matter is far more important than hunting.

Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab): The hon. Gentleman's assertions about the use of the Parliament Act in the past are untrue. The age of consent was not an urgent constitutional issue that required the use of the Parliament Act. That also applies to the War Crimes Bill, for which the Conservative Government used the Parliament Act. People advance the belief that we should not use the Parliament Act when there is a free vote. I believe that we should be able to use it in the case of a free vote because that reflects the unfettered will of the House, unconstrained by any Whip.
 
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Mr. Heald: The hon. Gentleman is simply wrong. I want to consider urgency, because the current circumstances do not warrant the use of the Parliament Act. The hon. Gentleman mentioned the War Crimes Bill. Ministers at the time said that that was urgent because the victims and witnesses were old and might die before they could give evidence. In the case of the European Parliamentary Elections Bill, it was said that no time could be lost because the new election system had to be introduced by a specific date. When the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Bill was considered, the Government claimed that the need to respond to a decision by the European Court of Human Rights meant that there could be no delay.

Sir Patrick Cormack : Does my hon. Friend accept that several of us were deeply unhappy about the use of the Parliament Act in all those cases? Several Conservative Members voted against the War Crimes Bill and believed that that was an improper use of the Parliament Act. If that constituted improper use, surely that is magnified 100 times in the current circumstances.

Mr. Heald: My hon. Friend makes an important point. He cherishes the important principles on which the House operates its conventions. He is right that we should be sparing indeed in our use of the Parliament Act.

Miss Anne McIntosh (Vale of York) (Con): Does my hon. Friend agree that, if the Minister for Rural Affairs and Local Environmental Quality had spent more time on his so-called concern about cruelty by allowing pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill in the same way as the Government are allowing such scrutiny of the Animal Welfare Bill, or even enabling that measure to consider aspects of hunting, shooting and fishing, we would have been spared any resort to the Parliament Act?

Mr. Heald: My hon. Friend makes a fair point. Of course, the Minister does not support the Bill in its current form. The Bill that he supported was considered last year but he was ambushed on Report. That is why we are here now.

Alun Michael: Will the hon. Gentleman confirm for the benefit of the hon. Member for Vale of York (Miss McIntosh) that the previous Bill was considered in Committee at great length? Almost every argument that could be made was discussed. The House has spent an enormous amount of time on the Bill. Rather than rushing to resort to the provocation of the Parliament Act, the Government have been slow to do so because we did not want to do it. Will he therefore join me in urging the other place to engage properly with the Bill when we send it on instead of rejecting the will of the House of Commons?

Mr. Heald: Let us get to the nub of the question of urgency. How can we say that this Bill is as urgent as the other Bills on which the Parliament Acts were used, when the Government themselves say, "Oh, we don't need to implement it for two years"? The sense of urgency that has existed on other occasions does not exist here.
 
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The contention that the Parliament Act can be used because the other place is clearly engaged in blocking the Bill also needs to be examined. The Hunting Bill that was introduced in the 2000–01 Session proposed three options: a ban, self-regulation and a statutory hunt licensing authority. This House voted for a ban; the other place voted for regulation. Far from the Government taking the view—and pursuing the matter vigorously—that this House was right and that the House of Lords was frustrating matters, the Minister introduced a Bill that provided for a regulatory approach. He therefore agreed with the broad thrust of what the other place was saying. It was hardly surprising that, when new clause 11—which would effectively ban hunting—was added to the Bill at the very last moment on Report last year, Members in the other place took the view that they did. They had been encouraged to take that view by what the Minister had said in this place. We should also not forget that the Bill had only two days in Committee in the other place before it ran out of time.

All previous Bills passed under the Parliament Act have reached the ping-pong stage between the two Houses at least once. The basic parliamentary principle should be that the other place has either spent an inordinate time dealing with a Bill, or that it has returned it to the Commons in amended form, signifying an impasse. On this Bill, the Government initially agreed with the approach of the other place and introduced a Bill of a regulatory nature, which was ambushed on Report. They then gave up after only two days in Committee in the Lords. Far from the shilly-shallying being at the other end of this building, the blame lies fairly and squarely with the Government.

Gregory Barker (Bexhill and Battle) (Con): Is it not worth remembering that, when Labour Members talk about the will of Parliament, they are actually talking about the will of a minority of Members of this House? I was a teller when the last vote was taken on this issue, and fewer than half the Members of the House of Commons voted for a ban; the other Members voted against one, absented themselves or abstained. To try to pretend that there is a great well of support in this Chamber for a ban is downright nonsense. It would be impossible to form a Government with the number of Members who voted for a ban, and that is an excellent reason for their bigoted views to be frustrated in the revising Chamber.

Mr. Heald: I do not know whether you, Mr. Speaker, heard the "Today" programme this morning. A journalist from The Guardian was explaining that this issue had nothing to do with animal welfare, and that it represented the last knockings of the class war. Having heard the views of the hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner), who could disagree with that?

Lembit Öpik: Is the hon. Gentleman as concerned as I am that the Bill that we have here does not seem to be the Bill that the Minister and the Prime Minister seemed minded to support? Does he agree that a serious concern about this procedure is that a Bill that evidently does not have the unanimous support of the Government is now
 
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going to be pushed through—with all the holes that it has—without our having had the opportunity to discuss it in Committee in the lower House?

Mr. Heald: The hon. Gentleman has played a huge part in these proceedings—[Interruption.] No, it is true that he has. He has played a very constructive part. He is right: how can the Government table a motion involving the massive Executive powers of the guillotine and the Parliament Acts, when they themselves have said that the Bill is unworkable and unenforceable? It is quite wrong for a Government to behave in this way with this sort of Bill.

The Parliament Acts provide that a Bill sent from this House must take the same form, but this will be the first time that a Bill has been so different from the one that was originally presented that the necessary detailed provisions have not been properly debated.

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