Submission from Mr Dominic Grieve MP
Thank you for your letter of 8 January 2004
about sitting hours. You may find it useful if I let you know
my views.
Living as I do in London within 20 minutes of
the House of Commons (this is where my wife and children are)
I ought to have been a beneficiary of the change in hours as it
should have enabled me to spend evenings with my family. Although
I voted against the change in hours because I did not believe
that it would work in practice, I was hoping that my concerns
would be proved wrong and that the new hours would turn out to
be beneficial for me.
I am afraid that experience has confirmed that
my initial reservations were correct. My wife succinctly put it
"in the past you used to get home at 11.00 pm having had
a meal with your colleagues: but now you get home at 9.30 pm unfed".
This is because I find it impossible to leave the building after
the last vote around 7.30 pm on a Tuesday and Wednesday because
there are still meetings to attend and work to do which have been
squeezed out from other times of day by the change in hours.
Generally, my impression is that a far more
relentless timetable exists than in the past—the need to
be at the House by 9.00 am each morning has completely deprived
me of what used to be two rather precious hours when I could,
if necessary, do some other things away from the building on the
Tuesday and Wednesday.
The change in hours has already had a marked
impact on the ability to network informally with colleagues in
the building. This is reflected, as you know, in the declining
use of the dining rooms and other facilities. As one of our purposes
as Members of Parliament is to exchange views and ideas informally
with colleagues, I think this is a pity. There is also much more
pressure to go to functions away from the Commons in the evenings,
whereas in the past organisations wanting to hold meetings with
MPs were constrained to adjust them round the sitting hours and
hold them in or very close to the House.
For all these reasons, the benefits which I
had hoped from the change in hours and, in particular, more time
to spend with my family in the evenings, has proved wholly illusory.
I am most definitely not in favour of late night sittings beyond
11.00 pm but I do think that the reality of the work that we do
here means that it makes a great deal of sense for the House to
have its old sitting hours back on Tuesday and Wednesday.
I should add that the start time for standing
committees of 8.55 am which was proposed under the new rules was
deranged. It is noteworthy that on every standing committee that
I have sat on we have made an adjustment to 9.10 am or 9.15 am
to reflect the realities of taking children to school and getting
across London. This further illustrates to me how poorly thought-through
these ideas were in the first place.
January 2004
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