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Mr. Heald: I had not thought that I would necessarily wind up the debate, but I can assure my hon. Friend that we ought to be able to do at least as well as the proposals of the Procedure Committee to meet the needs of the House in order for it to scrutinise legislation properly. I hope he will find the manifesto proposals satisfactory when they are produced.
Sir Patrick Cormack: I trust that my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield and I will be consulted when that portion of the manifesto is drafted, just to be sure that my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hertfordshire has got it right.
This debate is important, and it is sad that more hon. Members are not present to discuss how best to hold the Government to account. Having made my points about the Procedure Committee's major report, and having fully endorsed its recommendations, let me pass briefly on to some of the other subjects that we are discussing this afternoon—I seek not only to emulate but perhaps even to better the right hon. Member for Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley in making a brief speech.
I am most grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield and his Committee for accepting my proposal, which I put to them in written and oral evidence, for a brief period during debates to provide an opportunity for spontaneous utterance. The increasing tendency for hon. Members to read their speeches is one of the things that has saddened me during my membership of this House. That tendency destroys proper debate, just as the rigorous imposition of time limits may destroy it.
I have often felt a sense of frustration—I am sure that you felt it too before you reached your elevated position, Madam Deputy Speaker—when I have sat through a debate but have not been called. Worst of all, if one sits in a debate and suddenly feels moved to make a contribution, the dice are loaded against those who have not written to the Speaker to ask to take part.
In that spirit of sympathetic and empathetic frustration, and I think particularly of newer hon. Members, I recommended to the Procedure Committee that a portion of each debate—an hour or half an hour depending on the length of the debate—should be used to allow hon. Members who have been assiduous in their attendance, but who have not necessarily written to the Speaker, to catch the Speaker's eye and make a brief contribution.
I am glad that my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield emphasised that the three minutes is the minimum time limit—on some occasions, it could be
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five, six, seven, eight or perhaps even 10 minutes. For one hour, hon. Members who have a contribution to make can make it. I am delighted that that recommendation features in the report and I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield and his colleagues. I hope that the experiment is successful—it is rightly an experiment—and that it will pass into the practice of this House.
I do not like deferred Divisions—I have voted against them in the past and will vote against them again tonight. In a spirit of honesty, however, I must say that we are having deferred Divisions today and that many hon. Members will troop through the Lobbies tonight not having heard a word of the debate, which undermines the argument.
Returning to my point about short and spontaneous speeches, the opportunity to make a short, spontaneous speech should provide a greater incentive to attend the Chamber. The most unfortunate thing about this Chamber is its progressive depopulation over the years. When I was first elected in 1970, the House was nearly always full for the winding-up speeches and the opening speeches, whatever the subject of the debate, which is not the case now.
It was always the courteous custom that hon. Members who spoke stayed for the following two speeches and came in for both winding-up speeches, unless they had another parliamentary commitment. That custom has gone away from us—courtesy has departed from the House and fewer hon. Members attend the Chamber. I hope that my proposal, which my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield endorses, will have some effect. I shall vote against deferred Divisions, because anything that encourages absence is not to be commended.
I share the view that Bills should be carried over, but only with the Opposition's consent, which is important. Some Bills are terribly important and very complex, but not necessarily contentious in a party political sense. They deserve the closest and most lengthy scrutiny, and nothing should prevent their being carried over. However, that must not become a Government's excuse for rushing through bodged legislation and then pushing it into the next Session because they have not had quite enough time to get it through in the current one.
I very much disagree with the right hon. Member for Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley, who wants only one State Opening in a Parliament. No Government are so prescient that they know what is going to happen in the next four or five years, so there is a need for an annual review and introduction of legislation for the following year.
I will say very little about short speeches. Chairmen of Select Committees should not be given an inordinate amount of time, but they need enough to explain the reports and recommendations of their Committees, and that cannot be done in eight or ten minutes.
I want to conclude by saying a few words about the final motion. One of the curses of the age is political correctness. Any institution, be it a school, a club or a university has, to some degree, its own vocabulary; and part of our vocabulary is the word "strangers". Having entertained friends and visitors in this House for almost 35 years, I have never—I say this emphatically—heard
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anyone complain about their reception. No one has felt ostracised or unwelcome; many, however, have commented to the contrary or said that they rather like the slightly quaint vocabulary that we sometimes use. They do not mind being called strangers—they do not see that as a mark of opprobrium but take it in the same spirit as those who patronise the hostelry in Carrick, Cumnock or Doon Valley that we heard about.
Sir Patrick Cormack: Of course I give way to the hon. Gentleman, because I shall have something to say about him in a minute.
Mr. Tyler: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman; I hope that he will allow me to intervene again afterwards.
I bow to the hon. Gentleman's superior quaintness, and I understand the point that he is making, but he should recognise that the proposal did not come out of thin air: it came from the Modernisation Committee, which took very careful evidence, particularly from young people, who feel that certain words are now anomalous and anachronistic. Calling those who send us here strangers is certainly an example of that.
Sir Patrick Cormack: That is part of the patronising condescension that makes people want to put Shakespeare into modern English and to abandon the Book of Common Prayer. It was all right for George III to go around talking to trees, but the hon. Gentleman goes around talking to chairs, such is his succumbing to the mood of political correctness.
All this nonsense reminds me of one of Churchill's famous quips. At the end of the war he was told that one should not call the homes that were being built in this country homes, because some of them were quite small—they should be called accommodation units. Churchill leaned back in his chair and said, "Accommodation unit, sweet accommodation unit. What rubbish." How right he was. This is an example of that rubbish. Those who come here, our constituents and others, are very welcome. This is the Parliament of those who live in this country, and it always will be. They send us here and we are answerable to them, just as the Government are answerable to us in this Chamber.
If we think that by tinkering with the word "strangers" we are helping to give the people the Parliament they deserve, we are deluding ourselves and, indeed, guilty of a massive confidence trick. Our duty in this Chamber is to have an effective Parliament that represents the people's interests and holds the Government to account. We shall serve those interests by voting freely, firmly and decisively for the Procedure Committee's recommendations and by eschewing the syntactic nonsense in motion 7.
3.54 pm
Sir George Young (North-West Hampshire) (Con):
It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Patrick Cormack), who spoke briefly and without notes—a model to us all. I propose to make the briefest speech in the debate.
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The right hon. Member for the triple-barrelled constituency of Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley (Mr. Foulkes) said that he hoped that pre-legislative scrutiny might reduce the amount of time spent in Committee. If he examines the record, he will realise that the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 was subjected to a joint Committee of both Houses but subsequently spent an inordinate time in Committee. I wonder whether the fact that the Gambling Bill has been to a joint Committee will reduce the time that it needs in Standing Committee. The jury is out on whether pre-legislative scrutiny reduces the time that is needed for the Standing Committee stage.
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