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Mr. Peter Pike (Burnley) (Lab):
Should not the hon. Gentleman be saying that, while the motion may go through today, the Modernisation Committee should look further at it? I have always argued that we elect a five-year Parliament. I accept that there should be some restriction on the period that Bills are before us, but they should not fall at the end of a Session. We should have a logical programme of Bills being introduced steadily over the five years and going into Committee at different times, instead of having silly logjams in this House and
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then in the other House. We should have a more sensible phased Parliament. Surely in 2004 that is the way to be moving.
Mr. Heald: I support more flexibility but I do not agree that we should move to a five-year plan. The problem with the five-year plan is that it would encourage a sloppy approach. As the hon. Gentleman should know, we have enough trouble getting a list of the Bills and draft Bills for the Session at the time of the Queen's Speech. The Leader of the House, to give him full credit, has now agreed that we will have that this year, but it will be the first time that we have a full list of the Bills. Therefore, the difficulties of moving to a five-year plan would be severe.
Mr. John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): Will my hon. Friend give the House an assurance that, if the Government accept his proposition on carry-over, which I think has a lot of sense, if legislation were proposed for carry-over that Conservatives could live with, that some Government Front Benchers liked and were proposing but that did not the meet the wishes of many Labour Back Benchers, he would speak for those Labour Back Benchers and ensure that debate was not curtailed?
Mr. Heald: I do not believe in curtailing debate. I am not sure that I entirely got the full force of my right hon. Friend's remarks but I do not believe in guillotining. I do not want anything that unreasonably curtails debate.
Mr. Clifton-Brown: Is my hon. Friend aware of the difference between the procedure in carry-over and the procedure in dissolution? The procedure in dissolution is that the Opposition are consulted as to which Bills are to be allowed to go through and which are not, whereas on carry-over that discipline is lost. Therefore, the Government should reconsider the matter. There is no discipline throughout the parliamentary year to ensure that Bills are put through both Houses on time, in time for the Queen's Speech, as they used to be in the old days.
Mr. Heald: I agree with my hon. Friend. The other point is that the Leader of the House is a great one for saying that we should have at least as good procedures and rights as the other place. The other place is consulted and consent is required for carry-over. At this end, I believe that that is not the case. The Leader of the House can intervene on me if he wishes. The elected representatives in the House of Commons should have at least as good a system for scrutiny as the Lords.
Mr. Foulkes : Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Heald: I will not as I want to move on to speeches; I have been reasonably generous in giving way.
Mr. Heald:
It is appropriate that I have just one short point to make on the subject of short time limits on speeches. This experiment, which is to be welcomed, should allow for more Members to get into a debate.
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Moreover, Select Committee Chairmen should not be subjected to strict time limits if the debate in question concerns a Committee report. Chairmen such as my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield make extremely valuable contributions to the House's examination of such reports, and they should be allowed to express their views as they see fit and with a reasonable amount of time being allowed. This sensible, light-touch approach would raise the quality of debate.
Mr. Foulkes: Will the hon. Gentleman give way on the subject of short speeches?
Mr. Foulkes: I am most grateful. I could tell that the hon. Gentleman was on dodgy ground when discussing the previous subject, given that a fellow member of the shadow Cabinet interrupted him; there's a novelty for you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Does the hon. Gentleman think that those of us who regularly make short speeches should be given credit for doing so, and that if the speech in question is very short, it should not be counted against us by Mr. Speaker in deciding whether to call us again?
Mr. Heald: I would not dream of telling Mr. Speaker how to work out such matters, but I am sure that it is true that a short contribution does not debar one to quite the same extent as a very long one.
I turn finally to strangers. The question of whether to delete references to "strangers" from Standing Orders is not the most significant one, but for my part I think it a pity to lose the ceremonial aspect of this ancient tradition. This proposal is one of many in the Modernisation Committee's report on connecting Parliament with the public, and it is strange that it should be one of the first to receive the House's full attention. The suggestion that not calling members of the public strangers will improve Parliament's accessibility is surely misguided. I agree that we must not be seen to be letting the public view us at work on sufferance only, but stripping away the charm and magic of this place is entirely the wrong way to approach the problem. The last thing that we want is for Parliament's historical legacy to be gradually eroded, until it becomes just another nasty new Labour-style institution.
Although I agree with motions 3 and 6 and support the Select Committee's excellent work, I think it wrong that the Leader of the House cannot go further.
2.22 pm
Mrs. Gwyneth Dunwoody (Crewe and Nantwich) (Lab):
In democratic societies, Parliaments exist in order that differing views can be taken into an arena in which they can be debated and considered properly. How those arenas—be they Parliaments or local councils—arrange their affairs is much more important than simply producing a book of rules; it is a question of fairness, of order and of making it possible for
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everybody to take part in a proper debate. Such arrangements affect the conscious and deliberate end of particular debates.
This Parliament has, over many hundreds of years, evolved its rules because it has found that if it is manifestly unfair to any of its Members—who are then unable to express the views that they want to represent—the whole principle of government can be undermined. It is a question not just of the maintenance of order in a Parliament, but of something much more dangerous and fundamental. Elected Members who feel unable seriously to explore the real political problems of the day are not only damaged in themselves; the constituencies that they represent here are also damaged.
When we talk about the rules of order, it should not be—nor is it—a simple case of one party saying, "It is to our advantage to take these decisions", and of another party opposing for the sake of opposing, knowing full well that should the position be reversed, it would behave in the same way. I hope that today, there will be Labour Members—perhaps those who heard the Leader of the House's introductory speech—who will seriously examine the content that we are debating.
When a very large majority controls a Parliament, it is particularly important that the interests of minorities—whoever they are, and however irritating and ill informed—are not overridden, either genuinely or apparently. During 18 years of Conservative Government, we witnessed how a Government who ignore the interests of some parts of the United Kingdom—I am thinking of the specific political differences between England and Scotland—can produce such revulsion that there is an immediate need, upon a change of government, to bring in totally different laws and, indeed, a degree of devolution. Such a need was dictated largely by the political pressures that were allowed to build up because debates in the House of Commons did not reflect constituents' views sufficiently widely.
Mr. Foulkes: Will my hon. Friend give way?
Mrs. Dunwoody: I am delighted to see that my right hon. Friend has at last joined us, and he is very welcome.
Mr. Foulkes: I have listened to every word that my hon. Friend has said and I have great respect for her experience. Does she agree that it would also be wrong if the irritating and ill-informed minority to whom she refers frustrated the will of the majority?
Mrs. Dunwoody: I doubt whether there is any danger of that under a system of government that relies on the current first-past-the-post principle, of which I thoroughly approve. If my right hon. Friend—who was not here at the beginning of the debate—will forgive me for saying so, that argument is total nonsense.
In talking about these matters, it is important first to look carefully at what went before and then to examine what it is we are debating today. One suggestion is that this is simply a matter of tidying up the rules, and that there is no real political effect; that we need simply to agree to certain small changes that are in the interests of all Members, and all will be well in future. That is total,
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dangerous nonsense. These rules will affect the role of every Back Bencher. It is also true that a Cabinet Minister chaired the Modernisation Committee that initiated and took these decisions.
I have been here long enough to know that it does not really matter what the colour of the Government is; there may not be an automatic connection between the rights of Back Benchers and the Government. Indeed, it has been known for Governments of all colours to get together with Opposition Front Benchers and to agree to measures that actually remove Back Benchers' rights because they are quite happy to have order of a kind that reflects their particular narrow interests. That is the effect of programming.
Of course, we are told that we need not worry, and that we should not look back to a golden era in which everything worked perfectly. Of course there was never a golden era. No Parliament consisting of human beings will ever be perfect; if it were, something would have gone disastrously wrong. But certain methods were open to Back Benchers to delay legislation, to inspect its true content or to negotiate with the Government of the day to secure changes that were tremendously important. Whichever way one looks at it, programming does away with that.
That in itself would not be reason enough to oppose programming if it led to close examination of every part of legislation. It would be all right if one could say that every part of every Bill that has been programmed since 1997 has been considered word by word and line by line, and in such a way that our constituents had the chance to comment on it. It would not be so bad if every piece of legislation had emerged far better at the end of the process, or if the Government were so pleased that they did not need to amend their Bills. If so, I would be here today saying that programming had something to offer and that we should support it.
The reality is that it does not work like that; automatic programming has produced a lot of legislation that has not been considered in any detail and has consistently required amendment by the Government on Third Reading or in the House of Lords. When I say that Bills have been amended, I do not mean only once or twice. In some instances, Government Bills have required 400 new amendments, showing the extent of the problem that we have to deal with.
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