Submission from Mr Peter Luff MP
I am grateful to you for your letter of the
8 January 2004.
My simple view is this—being a Member
of Parliament is not a nine to five job. It is not possible to
devise hours for a Member of Parliament which make it easy to
reconcile one's life as an MP with a family.
Additionally, hours that are allegedly friendly
for those with families in London are unfriendly for those of
us who have families away from London. I would rather come to
London and work hard on my Parliamentary duties from 9.00 am in
the morning until 10.00 pm at night rather than have empty evenings,
with my wife and family elsewhere.
I have three other specific concerns about our
current arrangements:
First the existing hours make our mornings on
Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays just too crowded. If you want
to do desk work, have meetings, see constituents, make telephone
calls and so on there is an awful lot to fit in to the working
day until 11.30 am. The criticism of the House for being empty
is, as you and I know, an unreasonable one, but it is emptier
now than it needs to be because we do have to spend time at our
desks writing and signing letters as well as all the other conflicts
that exist with other committees. We do need longer mornings to
enable us to plan our days and spend more time in the Chamber.
Second and a related point, the new hours do
make it very difficult for my constituents in Worcestershire to
visit the House of Commons in the morning and then attend a Question
Time or Debate subsequently. You can't really get to London from
Worcestershire for 10.00 am without an unreasonably early start
on a coach. This is a small point but I think one that needs to
be borne in mind.
Third, Members of Parliament do need to eat—we
are after all human beings. Having major business in the House
at precisely lunchtime on a regular basis is really ridiculous.
Also many of those who wish to speak to us prefer to do so over
lunch, and I think that's a perfectly reasonable thing to want
to do. The new hours make this impossible if you wish to be a
reasonably regular attendee in the Chamber.
I didn't think there was anything wrong with
the old hours. They gave us useful mornings in which we could
plan our work and schedule of meetings and lunchtimes free for
discussion with outside interest groups. I was not an admirer
of going through the night, but ending at 10.00 pm or 10.30 pm
seems a perfectly reasonable time to me.
I think there is something to be said for trying
to engineer a reasonably early departure on Thursdays to ensure
that we can return to our constituencies. In my first Parliament
I used to have to drive back to Worcestershire early on a Friday
morning. I'm not therefore in favour of a significant change on
Thursday but I do think we need to put substantive business on
a Thursday with regular votes at 6.00 pm to ensure that Members
of Parliament do not come to regard their work in the Commons
as a three day a week job.
So you can put me down as someone who would
like to return to the old hours on Tuesdays and Wednesday but
stick with the current hours on Thursdays. I'm not simply being
reactionary and conservative—I am just trying to take a
realistic view of what our job actually entails.
February 2004
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