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Mrs. Cheryl Gillan (Chesham and Amersham) (Con): The Minister has just said that she wants to dispose of this motion quickly because she wants to guarantee three hours of debate on the Bill. If that is what she wanted, it would have been quite simple not to have tabled this programme motion at all. So I do not agree with her basic premise, and it would be quite remiss of me to pass up this opportunity without making some further comments. I note that she has apologised unreservedly on a particular matter, and I shall refer to that matter in the course of my remarks on the programme motion.
I believe that it was only yesterday evening that the official Opposition discovered the details of the programme motion that is on today's Order Paper. The motion limits the entire Report stage and Third Reading of the Bill to a mere three hours. If I have read it correctly, it provides 45 minutes for this debate on the programme motion. The Report stage can take up to two hours from the time this debate started at 5.25, and there will be an hour thereafter for our Third Reading debate. It is interesting to see that the Government have protected the Third Reading debate, because on another Bill recently, they completely failed to do so. They have
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obviously learned from their mistakes. I had to weigh up whether to debate this motion, thereby using up part of that precious time, and I decided that the time allotted was so meagre that I ought to make this protest, and to put on record the views of the Opposition.
There is no doubt that the programming device is the subject of a great deal of controversy. It is neither an equal nor a fair process, and it certainly enables the Government to impose a timetable irrespective of the views of the Opposition. That is, of course, if the Opposition have had an opportunity to put their views.
The report on the programming of legislation was published in July 2004. It was the product of the Procedure Committee, of which I was a member many years ago and which does sterling work.
Mr. Eric Forth (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con): Hear, hear!
Mrs. Gillan: I have support in the Chamber, and I am pleased to see the Chairman of the Procedure Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield (Sir Nicholas Winterton), in his place, because this is a serious matter that reflects the reason for my choosing to debate the programme motion in these 45 minutes. I am also pleased to see other Members who have been members of the Procedure Committee from time to time.
Page 3 of the report carries the summary and a recommendation from the Committee, which says:
"We recommend that programming motions should be decided without debate only when there is cross-party support; on other occasions the Government would, if necessary, have to justify such a motion in a one-hour debate."
That recommendation has been completely flouted, because we have only 45 minutes in which to pursue the matter of this programme motion. The report continues:
It is fair to say that during consideration of the Bill—the Minister can intervene if she disagrees—the Government received good co-operation from the Opposition. We have attempted to improve hastily drafted and inadequate legislation.
Lord Commissioner of Her Majesty's Treasury (Mr. John Heppell): No.
Mrs. Gillan: From a sedentary position, the Government Whip says, "No," but there was absolutely no problem with the programming other than when he got a bit hot under the collar when we appeared to be debating at length matters that needed closer examination.
We have tried at every stage to improve on hastily drafted and inadequate legislation. Indeed, so hastily drafted was it that the Minister herself accepted Opposition amendments—as drafted and in principle, as shown by the Government amendments on the amendment paper today—but at no stage was such extreme timetabling in the closing stages ever discussed. In fact, the opposite impression was given: if more time was required it would be given, although that is clearly not the case, as we see today.
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In Committee, we did not complete scrutiny of the Bill and all the proposed amendments, but despite that new clauses went undebated—
Mrs. Gillan: Again, the Government Whip is interfering by speaking from a sedentary position. He can intervene if he can tell me that we completed scrutiny of all the new clauses at the end of consideration in Committee. We did not complete scrutiny of the new clauses.
Mr. Henry Bellingham (North-West Norfolk) (Con): My hon. Friend may recall that I tabled an extremely important new clause on the General Medical Council and the right to strike off doctors, but there was not time to debate it. That is illustrative of the pressures that we were under.
Mrs. Gillan: My hon. Friend makes a timely intervention to highlight a pattern that is repeated by the Government on so many occasions that they are too numerous to mention. I shall refer to that later. We did not complete the scrutiny of the Bill and today's debate will be truncated by the Government's programme motion.
At the beginning of the debate on the programme motion, the Minister apologised. She did so because she has not been entirely fair and square with the Opposition on the Bill's passage. I need to ask her why I received her office's e-mail at 11.41 this morning. The e-mail says:
"I attach a copy of the letter to Cheryl which was signed in Caroline's absence regarding the Drugs Bill. It has been brought to my attention that due to an administration error it is possible that you did not receive this letter last week. It is vital that this is drawn to Cheryl's attention before Third Reading this afternoon."
Well, that is an extraordinary letter to get from a Minister's office on the day of Report and Third Reading. Attached to it was an undated seven-page letter from the Minister, signed in her absence, which purports to deal with the issues raised in Committee.
First, sending out that letter at the last minute is discourteous at the very least. Secondly, it would appear to be a way to avoid further debate, substantiated not least by the truncated timetable motion today.
I refer once again to the admirable work of the Procedure Committee:
"For report stage and third reading, we recommend that the Government should table its amendments in good time and that the House should be provided with a factual statement of which clauses and schedules were not considered in committee because of the operation of the programme; and we believe that the House will usually want to spend most of the time available on report stage rather than third reading."
Well, the amendments were not tabled in good time. In fact, I am not sure when they were tabled, but I was notified of them yesterday morning. E-mails were sent to my office last Thursday, which were inaccessible by me as Parliament was in recess and the parliamentary data and video network was down until Monday morning. Therefore the first notification that I received of those amendments was first thing on Monday morning. Given
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that those amendments were tabled so late in the day, and that the letter to which I referred was sent at the last minute, it is not possible to table further amendments on Report. Were I to wish to do so, the timetable motion would now prevent any possibility of their discussion.
Matters arise from both the last-minute letter and the amendments tabled by the Government that need exploring. Let me give as an example those relating to clause 5. I had asked about the implications of the costs of the proposed X-rays and scans, and about whether they are paid for by the police or the national health service, which we know is very pressed at the moment. The Minister's responses in her letter deal with issues in relation to medical emergencies when people are arrested, but still do not deal specifically with situations envisaged in clause 5 in which a police officer decides that there is a reason to X-ray or scan an individual. How were we to know that the answers would be inadequate, as the information only arrived just before midday today?
The timetable motion might also prevent us from reaching one of the most important amendments for which we would wish to argue—the proposed reclassification of cannabis in new clause 1. The Minister referred to that specifically in her opening speech on the programme motion debate. She was pleased that we voted on it in Committee—well, we voted on it, but we did not have an extensive debate. If she would like to refer to the Official Report of the Committee, she will see that there was a short, rushed debate, right at the end of the Committee. It was only because I stood up and asked how I could have a vote on the new clause that we managed to get one in right at the tail end of the Committee.
We believe that the Government have made a grave mistake in reclassifying cannabis as a class C drug. Our concern has been that the reclassification will be a green light to young people, which is indeed the case. If young people are more likely to try cannabis, they are more likely to become involved in the drug sub-culture. We will reclassify cannabis back to class B, and would wish to have more time to deploy those arguments and discuss them with the Minister.
This timetable inhibits debate on a subject which should be of great importance to every parent throughout the country. We know of its great importance, because although the Minister did not have time to answer questions posed properly during Committee several weeks ago until nearly midday today, she did, however, have time to send out a press release about the success of Operation Crackdown at 9.54 this morning. We therefore have a situation in which the Minister can do her press and publicity about Operation Crackdown, but she cannot be bothered to get the letter to the Opposition about points raised in Committee.
I am pleased by the results that the police are achieving in tackling class A drugs, although I must admit that, on the basis of the statistics I have, I am not sure that they were worth a press release. I understand from the press release that 17 kg of heroin were captured by the police in the first four weeks of Operation Crackdown, but having looked at the statistics I discovered that in 1999—
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