Submission from Rt Hon Alan Howarth CBE,
MP
I am responding to your letter to colleagues
of 8 January 2004 about the sitting hours of the Chamber.
I am certainly not averse to change, but I have
found two principal problems with the new sitting times: diary
clashes have multiplied, and we have lost much of the informal
life of the House. Again and again I have found that I have to
be in Committee when a Statement or debate occurs in the Chamber
which I particularly want to attend. Telescoping the busy life
of this place has meant, I feel, that we do less justice to our
multifarious commitments. Everybody is intensely busy during sitting
hours and the place then goes really rather dead in the evenings.
The greater opportunities that we used to have for socialising,
networking and serendipity were of real political value as well
as being a pleasure. I doubt whether there has been sufficient
compensation for this in terms of MPs "getting a life".
Most colleagues' families, I would think, are not in London. Although
we finish early enough to be able to go out to dinner or to a
film we actually finish too late to get to the start of a play
or a concert.
I would prefer, therefore, that we reverted
to the old sitting hours, certainly on Tuesdays and possibly on
Wednesdays.
I recognise, however, that we must take into
account the realities of media schedules and the recent recommendations
of Bob Phillis will need to be heeded. If Departmental Ministers
are to do televised briefings in the mornings and we are to retain
the tradition and principle that major policy announcements should
be made first to the House of Commons, it would seem to follow
that there would be a case for the House meeting at 9.30 am or
so for Ministerial Statements, or possibly for Questions and Statements.
What I think is worth exploring is whether the House could then
adjourn so as to enable Members to attend Committees, make phone
calls in office hours and so forth before resuming and finishing
at 10.00 pm.
If, in the event, we are to keep broadly to
the present hours, I wonder whether we could finish on Tuesdays
or Wednesdays at 6.00 pm as we do on Thursdays. This would enable
colleagues to have a fuller evening, whether with young children
at home or wherever else.
As to September sittings, I favour the view
that a return of the House in September should be a possibility
routinely held in reserve, but that we should not definitely sit
in September unless pressure of Government business requires it
or, of course, unless some major political event precipitates
the recall of the House as has happened all too often in recent
years. Our sitting in 2003 was, at any rate in the House of Commons,
a non-event. I also understand that it cost the House authorities,
and therefore the taxpayer, a huge amount of money because of
the disruption to refurbishment work.
January 2004
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