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Sir George Young (North-West Hampshire) (Con) rose—
Mr. Hain: I shall give way shortly.
Carry-over has been a helpful but modest measure to increase flexibility in legislative planning, facilitating pre-legislative scrutiny. That is important: it is not a coincidence that all three Bills to be carried over in this House this Session have been published in draft for pre-legislative scrutiny.
Sir Nicholas Winterton: I am grateful to the Leader of the House for his courtesy, but he missed out a rather important sentence in our recommendation on carry-over. Although the report states that it
"increases flexibility and has the potential to lessen bottlenecks in the legislative process",
"however, we also believe that this should proceed with cross-party agreement."
That slightly changes the emphasis of the Leader of the House.
Mr. Hain: The right hon. Gentleman's contrived anger is genuinely synthetic. Carry-over normally happens by consensus. The hon. Member for Macclesfield makes a fair point.
Sir George Young: Let me press the Leader of the House a little further: will he give an assurance that, in future, the Government will carry over only with cross-party agreement?
Mr. Hain: The right hon. Gentleman knows that we must get agreement in both Houses to move forward. I want to act by consensus, but I do not want to place a block on carry-over in the Standing Orders if consensus cannot be gained. It is in the Government's interests to get consensus, which a constructive Opposition provide most of the time.
We believe that it would be timely to make the Standing Order on carry-over permanent. A few amendments are proposed to make it clear that the Order would not apply to private Members' Bills or Lords Bills, and that any programming order agreed in the first Session would continue to apply in the second.
The fifth motion amends Standing Order No. 47 on short speeches. That follows representations that I have received from the Liaison Committee, the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Procedure Committee. The Committees were concerned that if the short speeches rule were applied to a debate on a Committee report on the Floor of the House, the Chairman's ability to explain the Committee's position would be restricted. That is why it is proposed to enable the Speaker to exercise discretion over the times during a debate when the short speech limit is to apply. If he thinks fit, the Speaker will be able to exempt particular Members, such as Committee Chairmen, from the limit, or modify it in appropriate circumstances.
The sixth and final motion seeks to implement the recommendation made by the Modernisation Committee in its report on connecting Parliament with the public that the term "strangers" be no longer used in referring to visitors to the House. It amends each of the Standing Orders that refer to "strangers" or "stranger", replacing that with "the public" or "member of the public" as appropriate.
Mr. Hain: The right hon. Gentleman describes that as pathetic, but the "Oxford English Dictionary" defines a stranger as
"one who is not a member or an official of the House and is present at its debates only on sufferance".
I believe that our visitors, voters and citizens are entitled to view our debates, and that they should not be shunted into a pigeonhole labelled "Strangers". As the Modernisation Committee said,
"this is the last impression we should be wanting to give to people who exercise their democratic right to visit us."
The earliest reference to a "stranger" in the Commons Journal appears to be on 13 February 1575. Let us make 26 October 2004 the last. The history of strangers is interesting. An order passed on 8 December 1711 states,
"that no member of this House do presume to bring any stranger or strangers into this House or gallery thereof, while the House is sitting."
For a long time, members of the public were barred from scrutinising what happens in the House. Redlich's 1908 "Procedure of the House of Commons" records that during the 16th and 17th centuries, calls were repeatedly taken to ascertain whether strangers were present, primarily because of the threat of Catholic spies. Surely we can move on from those days.
Lady strangers have been subjected to particular restrictions in the past. Redlich's book states:
"Between 1778 and 1834, ladies were expressly excluded. They might, it is true, come if they be content with a view from the roof chamber over the ceiling inserted in the old St. Stephen's chapel through the ventilator, around which seats were placed."
We are considering an ancient, mediaeval—if not earlier—practice. We should get rid of it.
Ms Coffey: Does that mean that the Strangers Gallery will now be renamed the Public Gallery?
Mr. Hain: I was going on to say that the motion does not address how we refer to parts of this House: the Strangers Gallery, the Strangers Dining Room or the Strangers Bar. Of course, those are matters for Mr. Speaker, as advised by the relevant domestic Committees, which, I understand, are aware of the recommendation by the Modernisation Committee.
These motions represent a sensible package of reforms: a consolidation of experimental reforms, which have now stood the test of time and proved their worth, and some modest innovations. I hope that the House will agree to their implementation. I commend the motions to the House.
1.50 pm
Mr. Oliver Heald (North-East Hertfordshire) (Con): Some people will dismiss today's debate as marginal and insignificant and concerned only with procedural matters. They could not be more wrong. Today's debate is about accountability and about Parliament having the tools it needs to hold the Prime Minister and his Government to account. It is important that we take parliamentary procedure seriously. It is by cutting the pennies that make up the pounds that this Government have devalued the currency of Parliament.
I want to congratulate the Chairman of the Procedure Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield (Sir Nicholas Winterton), under whose guidance the Committee has a produced a fine report—its fourth report of the Session—on programming. I welcome the report's recommendations, which contain much sense and good material. I am pleased that members of the Committee took notice of some points made not just by Ministers but by others, including me and my right hon. and hon. Friends, during the evidence sessions.
Programming affects the scrutiny that this House and its Committees can exert over Government proposals.
26 Oct 2004 : Column 1319
As the Committee noted in its introduction, programming has been
"the most significant change made for some years in the way in which the House considers Bills".
Over recent years, there has been a lot of controversy over the extent to which Bills should be debated within a rigid timetable. Throughout the 1990s, we were prepared to try to reach agreement on such matters. From 1997 onwards, we agreed programme motions on an all-party basis, including 11 in the 1997–98 Session and four in each of the following Sessions. Some difficult Bills such as the Scotland and Government of Wales Bills were timetabled by agreement, even though that involved great technical difficulties, given that the Committee stages were on the Floor of the House, with many Members wishing to speak from different perspectives.
The failure of the consensual approach developed in that period resulted from the Government trying to pack Sessions with extra legislation, relying on our good will and allowing insufficient time for proper consideration. We lost patience with the system, agreed programming died and we ended up with routine guillotining. The Leader of the House says that programmes have been agreed in Committee and, on odd occasions, on the Floor of the House, but the fact is that on the overwhelming number of occasions when programme motions have been considered on the Floor of the House we have opposed them, not only because we do not think it right that the views of the Opposition should be completely disregarded and programmes imposed, but because the Government have routinely not allowed enough time for business.
I agree that a Government are entitled to get their legislation through without inordinate delay, but—
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