Examination of Witnesses (Questions 200-217)
RT HON
MICHAEL JACK
MP, RT HON
ALAN WILLIAMS
MP, DR TONY
WRIGHT MP AND
RT HON
SIR GEORGE
YOUNG MP
18 APRIL 2007
Q200 Chairman: Colleagues, we now move
on to the next distinguished and experienced Members. Thank you
very much, Michael, Alan, Tony and Sir George, for accepting the
invitation to attend. I know you have sat through the earlier
evidence of Sir Alan Haselhurst. Sir George, you have sent us
two notes, which are very helpful, and so have you, Michael. All
four of you, as well as being experienced and distinguished Members
chair select committees as well. I will start with the Father
of the House. Do you want to make any opening remarks about how
we make the Chamber more effective and how we strengthen the role
of the backbencher?
Mr Williams: I think the suggestion
of having a list is sensible. I do not think we are ever going
to go back to the illusory days, when the House was jam-packed.
Even having come in in 1964, I can remember that as being not
the normal occasion. The important thing is that we recognise
that the major way this House works effectively in monitoring
the executive is through the committees. I will not develop more
on that at this point. As far as the individual Members are concerned,
I support what Alan said about restoring the private Member's
debate, and more use of the emergency debates. I do not see why
an emergency debate need be three hours. Three hours is a major
deterrent to granting it, as became clear.
Q201 Chairman: It is a very good
point.
Mr Williams: If the Chair had
a discretion to say it could be two hours or one hour, I would
suggest to you that this could be a very effective way of opening
up completely on emergency access. When I was in opposition and
doing the mischief job on the frontbench, I used to meet up with
the Whips in the morning, then we would work out who would put
in the private notice question and who would back it up with a
private, an emergency debate, and we would shuffle all the options.
If we were a little more relaxed about the emergency debate, that
could solve an enormous amount of problems at a stroke. I am sure
there are many occasions when the Chair would say, "yes,
this obviously merits an hour, but can I justify taking three
hours out of a whole day?"
Sir George Young: Just to pick
up what Alan was saying about the trade-off between topicality
and predictability, I just think we have to go down the topicality
route much more, just in terms of standing back and trying to
reconnect this place with the world outside. We need to be more
topical, even if it does become less predictable. In terms of
filling the Chamber, you get the Chamber full if you have a topical
statement on something; and you get more media coverage of what
is going on in the Chamber if you move towards topicality. I am
instinctively in favour of the changes that promote topicality,
even though there are some consequentials. On that theme, why
should ministers be the only people who make statements? Why should
not the chairman of a select committee, when he produces an important
report like Michael's on the RPA (Rural Payments Agency), or Tony's
on the ombudsman, or Edward Leigh on Monday on the NHS, also be
able to make a statement in the House of Commons? Why should that
be a privilege reserved to ministers? I leave that thought on
the table.
Dr Wright: One unhelpful first
comment is just a plea for a certain amount of realism in this.
You can endlessly invent good ideas, initiatives for what Parliament
might do if Parliament were other than it is. The unreality comes
from not being honest about what the place is now, and what drives
it; what is in the bloodstream of Members; what is in the career
structures of Members of Parliament. Those are the things that
make this place how it is. I think there is a gap between devising
all kinds of interesting operational scenarios and understanding
how the place is. That is why I say you cannot talk about the
role of a backbencher, for example. You can talk about roles,
in the plural. There was an interesting moment a few years ago
when I noticed that for the purpose of making a submission to
the SSRB somebody had sat down and done a job description of a
Member of Parliament. It was pure fantasy because there is no
such Member of Parliament who does the job described; they all
do different jobs, depending on their reading of the role. It
is a multiplicity of roles done differently, and there is no such
thing as "the backbencher". One of the best bits of
evidence I thought you had was the survey done by Michael Rush
and Philip Giddings. When they asked Members about the most important
parts of the job, they said the most interesting finding was the
difference made by whether a party was in government or opposition,
and gave the figures of Conservative Members in 1994 giving a
very low rating to scrutiny; but now it has gone up to 90%. Being
a backbencher on the government side and a backbencher on the
opposition side are two completely different jobs; so to talk
about "the backbencher" is absurd. My conclusion from
all that is that we need to focus on making Parliament better
at doing the job it has to do. I think that directs you to certain
other areas, some of which we are doing at the moment. I think
they are the real areas that offer some promise.
Mr Jack: I start from two points.
Does the government of the day really want to be more scrutinised
and probed? Does it accept that occasionally the Government might
lose, however you define that? Is the question of the time that
we have available in the House of Commons for all of our business
going to be looked at realistically, because I very much agree
with what Tony Wright has said. It is very easy to dream up endless
novel changes to the procedures, but you always run up against
the most precious commodity we have in the House, which is time.
One of the things that, had I thought about it, I would have included
in my own submission, was perhaps a further review of the use
of time. There is still the tendency that we have X hours for
a debate, so that is the amount we use it up. If you could do
it in X minus minutes—if we could create surplus time, what
would we use it for? My two submissions focused on a revision
of the procedure as far as statements are concerned. They recognise
that the reality of the world is that most major government announcements
are pre-leaked to the media in one way or another, and we go through
a charade: a minister goes on to the Today programme and
says: "I cannot tell you everything because I must tell the
House of Commons first"; but 95% of it has been pre-digested.
Under those circumstances, my principal submission suggested a
different way entirely of looking at statements to give people
the opportunity to go beyond simply asking a question but having
some time for a mini debate with limited amounts of time for contributions
to the backbenches but where the backbenches would be armed better
with the information by having had not just the statement but
the White Paper or other relevant documents ahead of time. The
submission I put in on select committees was far more radical,
and that effectively said that if we really are going to crank
up the ability of non-government Members of the House to truly
hold the executive to account, then under those circumstances
you may have to look at a wholly different way of channelling
business through a different type of committee structure, which
would be more in parallel with continental practice than is the
case with the House of Commons, where our committee structure
is very much ad hoc. If you had powerful select committees
that were sitting five days a week, fully resourced, probing every
piece of business going through there, then the backbenchers who
are members of that select committee would undoubtedly have a
lot more clout when it comes to holding the Government to account.
Q202 Chairman: Thank you very much
for those very interesting opening statements. On your point,
Michael about whether governments want to be more scrutinised
and probed, the answer to that is that ministers' views vary.
My own view—and I am on the record about this—is that
although it is sometimes uncomfortable, the quality of government,
as well obviously as the quality of our democracy, benefits from
having a greater degree of scrutiny. I often say to my colleagues
that it is not a zero sum between Parliament and Government, although
sometimes ministers might be forgiven for thinking that it is.
On pre-leaked statements—or briefings—although we
live in much more of a goldfish bowl outside, it is possible to
have disciplines that ensure that Parliament is the first to know
about the detail of policy. Some ministers do observe that. I
think that, frankly, government has got into bad habits. I do
not accept that these habits are unchangeable. There has been
a big change between what happened when most of us, the older
generation, came into the House, and now, which is the select
committees. They are now more powerful than people let on. They
do a very effective job, I am told by those who know, compared
with committees in the United States. They may not be so dramatic,
but they certainly do an important job, and by God, if you are
a minister and you are going before a select committee for a grilling
for two or three hours, you have to have the answers and cannot
rely on rhetorical devices because they get you absolutely nowhere.
There is this difficulty about how you link in what the select
committees are saying and reporting with the Chamber. I do not
think any of us want to get into the position of many other parliaments,
where the Chamber becomes irrelevant. There never was a golden
age—Alan, you are right. The point about the Chamber is
that it is the cockpit of the nation; the numbers in the Chamber
determine who forms a government; opinion in the Chamber can wreck
a government, and can certainly wreck a minister's career and
enhance one also. It is a really important forum. The question
we are facing is how to make it more effective, given the current
realities, not going back to some non-existent golden age. I think
it particularly applies to how you get the input from the committees.
Do you have any suggestions?
Sir George Young: Have you thought
of select committee days, when the Chamber does not sit, on the
grounds that a lot of select committee business is disruptive?
Q203 Chairman: So you would have
days on which select committees could sit.
Sir George Young: Yes.
Dr Wright: Can I again make a
plea for realism? One of the things that we all say is how important
the work of the select committees has been since 1979—and
it has. It is one of the good growth points of the institution,
and it is very hard now to imagine a parliament without the system
working. However, they are still, I think, not doing what they
might do. What was profoundly shocking for me, for example, in
the last parliament, was when our party decided that it was more
important taking on campaign roles inside the party than being
members of a select committee. In fact two members of my select
committee were removed to go and be campaign organisers or assistant
campaign organisers for different parts of the country. I mention
that because perhaps I should not have been shocked by it, but
it was a statement about the relative importance of roles. It
was a statement that it is less important to be a member of a
select committee, scrutinising government, doing that Westminster
role, than it is campaigning out in the country. From the point
of view of Members who know where careers lay, they also know
that they are going to get more brownie points, as it were, from
campaigning for their party than being scrutineers in select committees;
so it plays to the career structure. We can invent different models,
but if they are out of synch with how the place actually is, they
will get nowhere. My view is that we should build on developments
that are taking place. The idea about developing the select committees
is a good one. Perhaps we can have select committee days, with
perhaps George's idea about chairs being able to make statements.
Having votes on select committee reports is a good thing. Select
committees—we did it, uniquely, developing our own bill—it
should not only be Government that produces putative legislation.
There are a number of things we can do—getting better pre-legislative
scrutiny, post legislative scrutiny—I think the new public
bill procedure has far more to offer—although I do not know
how it is working in detail—in terms of making Parliament
matter more than some of the devices that you may be able to think
of.
Q204 Sir Nicholas Winterton: Should
there not be less legislation?
Dr Wright: I think we have all
made that speech, Sir Nicholas, have we not?
Q205 Sir Nicholas Winterton: I ask
you.
Dr Wright: I know, and it goes
down very well.
Q206 Chairman: What is the answer?
Dr Wright: I have made that speech
on Queen's Speech days, and I believe it, and I think there is
a very good case for saying we should legislate less but legislate
better. Every party has subscribed to that in theory, but no government
subscribes to it in practice.
Q207 Sir Nicholas Winterton: But
would you not agree that the only way that parliament can become
more relevant is if Parliament itself, rather than the executive,
takes more control of what goes on in the House?
Dr Wright: Yes.
Q208 Sir Nicholas Winterton: If that
is the case, how could that be achieved?
Dr Wright: Yes. I think this is
one of the arguments for trying to think about how non-legislative
time might be organised by somebody other than the usual channels.
I am not privy to these things, but I have been involved in discussions
about how we might have a business committee that was concerned
with developing that area of parliamentary business. I have ticked
a box! It is certainly worth exploring.
Mr Williams: Can I throw in one
point on something that was touched on earlier, and that is the
Thursday and Friday phenomenon? It is a logical consequence of
several things. It is natural, as has rightly been said, that
Members want to save their own seats and have to give high priority
to it; but something that now is regarded as utterly unacceptable
and used to be a way of life as far as my generation was concerned,
was pairing. With pairing, you could nip away in the week. Someone
else would not vote; you could go to a constituency engagement,
come back, and you would have your Thursday and Friday. However,
now Members are here and they are trapped. The Opposition side
think it is a great wheeze not to pair with the Government because
it makes it uncomfortable; and from the Government Whips' Office
point of view it is control-freakery and gives them an extra hold
over all their Members; but something that nobody thinks of nowadays
is that pairing would loosen the way in which Members organised
their time.
Q209 Chairman: That is a good point.
Mr Williams: The other point is—and
I am hobby-horsing now—everyone knows my views on devolution
so you have to excuse it, but this again is a logical consequence
that has not been taken into account. We talk of a decline in
attendance, but remember that for eighty of us there are large
parts of what goes on here that are irrelevant. We are not affected;
it is dealt with in the assembly; it is dealt with in parliament,
and we cannot deal with it in relation to our own constituencies.
So a huge chunk of, particularly as it happens Labour supporters
because of Scotland and Wales, are opting out of the Chamber because
the Chamber has opted them out of their constituency, a previous
constituency role; and so they want to get back to their constituencies
as quickly as they can to try and undo the damage that has been
done! You have not had to put up with the floaters, the people
who do not represent a seat; they represent an area and can go
cherry-picking all around the constituencies; so they are protecting
their backs, but eighty Members is a lot of Members to take out.
Mr Jack: Can I pick up on your
first question? One of the important things—again reflecting
something George Young said about topicality—is that at
the moment if a select committee wants to have a report debated,
we have to wait until an estimates day comes along; and then,
through Alan's good offices on the Liaison Committee, we have
to have an adjudication as to which committee wins the internal
debate within the Liaison Committee as to whose report goes forward.
That inevitably constrains the number of reports that can be debated;
but it also means a great deal of time passes between the point
of publication when it is topical, and the ability of the House
of Commons to debate it. If you said to me, "Once a month
you are going to have Fridays for debate of select committee reports,
and we will have two or three debates of X hours", that would
be very good. That then moves you, though, into the question of
status of members of select committees. I am lucky; I have what
I call a hard core of my committee, two-thirds, that are regular
attendees. They put in a huge amount of effort, but they do not
get very much status back for it, if you like. It is the chair
of the committee or sub-committee who does all the media, so that
is the glamour bit of it; but the Sherpas do not get much more
than having it on their CV that they have been on the committee.
If we therefore had more flexibility about the way we set up sub-committees,
then you could have more members of the committee in charge of
something that was going to get status when their report and their
work actually came out. The other side of the coin is that if
they also knew that there was some guarantee that they would be
part of the debate on the floor of the House of their report,
that again adds to the status of the member. The third thing is
to ensure that when the Selection Committee decides who goes on
to do other work in the House, they take into account the select
committee work that people are doing. There is a trade-off between
it. You cannot expect Members to do a standing committee and select
committee work and do it thoroughly if you are going to enhance
the probing role of select committees. It comes back, all the
time, to time management.
Q210 Mr Knight: Have any of you in
the last twelve months ever had your committee inquorate or had
to wait quite a while for a quorum to arrive? On the point about
the value of select committees, would not one way of increasing
their value perhaps be to reduce the size? Thirdly, what is your
view of our system of European scrutiny? It seems to me to be
totally ineffective. What should we do about that?
Mr Jack: "No", in answer
to your first question. Size—please do not diminish it.
With a department like Environment Food and Rural Affairs to cover—if
you want the Committee to be probing lots of different parts of
it, then give me more flexibility in the way that my Committee
operates and I will do more probing. Reducing the size reduces
my probe rate. As far as the EU scrutiny is concerned, this comes
back to a far more fundamental consideration as to what business
should go through a select committee. We do not currently have
the capacity to take away from the European scrutiny process a
blow-by-blow look at all the environmental and food legislation,
and agricultural legislation that will come out of the Commission.
If we could sit for longer and have more resources and more people,
and people could really specialise in that work—yes, we
could do it.
Q211 Chairman: Are there any other
comments?
Dr Wright: Never. Size is not
an issue. Getting the permanent commitment of members, in the
way that Michael says, is important. The rider I was going to
put to his earlier remarks, that is relevant to this is to say
that the problem with a lot of the select committee estimate day
debates that we have now is that on the whole the only people
who come are members of the select committee, so all we are doing
is talking to each other again about our report, which is a completely
useless enterprise.
Q212 Chairman: Can I say that part
of the problem about that is that when the business is announced
it is very obscure what we are going to be debating. It is an
internal argument that I have had, but I am then told, "Well,
the Liaison Committee has been rather lax in making its mind up
about what it is." If I was able to say, "this debate
is about this quite important topical issue" and I was able
to describe it, rather than saying it is a fourth report of the
X select committee—you think, "Oh, fine, I will have
a day off."
Dr Wright: If there was, for example,
a vote—
Q213 Chairman: I am suggesting both;
you have a vote but also, subject of course to colleagues and
if the government agree—having a vote is an important idea,
but also ensuring that what is presented to the House by the select
committee is understandable, topical and important.
Dr Wright: Yes.
Sir George Young: On size, can
I make a plea not to have large select committees. One of your
witnesses suggested that every backbencher should be on a select
committee. The consequent size I think would make them very difficult
to manage, if everybody wants to ask a question and you have 20
or 25 people on a select committee, and then you are trying to
get a report together. My select committee is ten, and I am very
comfortable with that.
Q214 Chairman: Alan—inquorate?
Mr Williams: No problem! All the
collective chairmen are very well behaved. The clash between tails
on seats, which is what preoccupies the Whips, and the efficacy
of the Committee is something that needs to be looked at. Michael's
Committee is something of an exception, I think. First of all,
they are very hard-working, and Michael, if he will excuse my
saying so, is a very imaginative chairman in the way he approaches
his work. When I took over the Liaison Committee I met with every
individual chairman and I put to them all that they should consider
the possibility of sub-committees as a way of widening their investigative
capability. Some committees now are larger than they need to be.
There are chairmen who complain that there are too many people
and it is taking too long. In the committee I love so much, the
Public Accounts Committee—I have been on 17 years—we
always used to operate at 12 members, and we each had 15 minutes
to question. That was your 15 minutes! However, then the Whips
decided, because statutorily we are a different committee to the
others in nature, we could have a maximum of 15 and therefore
we would have 15. Since we have had 15, we have had to drop questioning
time from 15 minutes to 10 minutes because meetings were dragging
on so long and it was unfair to witnesses. I do not think there
is any single rule on size, but I think we need to be more flexible
and not preoccupied with just meeting the Whips' whim.
Q215 Sir Peter Soulsby: Can I just
say, as one of the backbench Sherpas on Michael's Committee, I
entirely agree with him about the need for flexibility in the
way in which they work, and the establishment of a sub-committee
is an enormous advantage. I wanted to come to the evidence that
others have given us about the impact of constituency duties and
expectation of Members in general and backbench Members in particular,
and the way the expectations have changed over the years. The
amount of e-mails that Members get has grown exponentially. The
need for all parties constantly campaigning out in the constituencies
has also affected the focus. Is this inevitable? Is it reversible?
Is there a way forward other than to be overwhelmed by it?
Dr Wright: It is congruent with
an intelligent response on the part of Members to the job that
they do. It is not irrational for them to behave like this because
they can control that; that is an area where they have power and
can control. There is also direct interest. They can decide. They
are big figures in their areas and can decide how to organise
their lives and can make some real impact locally. There is no
question that the role of the Member of Parliament in the constituency
has changed out of recognition over the last generation for all
kinds of reasons. I sometimes tease my constituency party. One
of my illustrious predecessors was Jennie Lee, and there is a
lovely press cutting that stated, "Miss Lee was gracious
enough to attend the annual meeting of the Cannock Labour Party".
This is a different world. MPs now are community catalysts. I
do not underestimate the work that they do in their areas; but
it is of an order that is unrecognisable from the previous generation.
You can see why they give attention to that: it is valuable; it
provides a service to their constituency; and of course there
is an interest that comes with it. It is a reflection of some
of the difficulties of finding a secure role at Westminster.
Mr Williams: I think as well there
is the technological impact here. I grew up in Parliament under
the convention that one Member of Parliament did not deal with
another Member's constituents and problems. I think we all observed
this with our letters, but now we are flooded not with letters
but with correspondence from people we have never heard of, and
parts of the country we have never been to, and for some reason
we seem to presume that we have to answer them all. Having read
the evidence of quite a few people, it has been a brave witness
who says he ignores them all. I do not know whether there is any
practical way of modifying the convention that made life tolerable
for us to meet the conditions of the new technology; but I must
say that with the rate of expansion of incoming requests, I am
glad I have decided to retire next time.
Q216 Mrs May: The new public bill
committee procedure introduces some of the characteristics of
select committees into the public bill committees, and I wondered
if our witnesses could comment on whether they think that will
have any impact in the longer term on select committees. The second
issue is an aspect of the topicality issue. Sir Nicholas has had
his bee in his bonnet, so I am going to have mine! It is about
freeing up more time, or using more legislative time, to do more
cross-cutting debates, more debates on issues. Legislation, by
definition, tends to be departmentally based in terms of the debate;
but more debates on issues, with free votes at the end of those
debates so that there is an opportunity to get the will of Parliament
rather than just the will of party.
Mr Williams: The Liaison Committee
in its annual report made it quite clear that in our view, as
far as the Public Bill Committee is concerned, we welcome that.
I think it is an excellent innovation and will lead to better
quality of interrogation and participation by the Members. However,
in no circumstances can we accept that it should preclude the
rights of a select committee also to carry out pre-legislative
inquiry because we do it from a position of expertise very often.
This is one of the key points we made in our report. I do not
see that it should cause great difficulty as far as government
is concerned, but you can see the different nature of an ad
hoc group that is going to look over one or two days under
the chairmanship of a chair from a chairman list, who knows nothing
about the subject, as compared with an ongoing, several-day inquiry
by a specialist committee headed by somebody who has probably
been chair of the subject for a long time and with a lot of Members
who have special interest and special know-how. To run them in
tandem is excellent, but one for the other is unacceptable.
Mr Jack: As far as the Public
Bill Committee is concerned, my worry about it is that whilst
it is a very good idea to have a probing element to explore some
of the technical details of a bill, if I look at the scrutiny
we did, for example, on the draft Animal Welfare Bill in pre-legislative
terms, we worked intensively for six weeks, two or three times
a week, looking in detail at a bill that was work in progress,
which, by the time it emerged on the floor of the House, was a
much more workman-like piece of legislation. I think the Government
benefited from that kind of work. You are never going to get that
in the current arrangement. I come back to what I said at the
beginning: it is about winning and losing. When it is malleable,
it does not matter if the Government says, "Okay, we will
change that" because it is not about winning or losing a
vote in a committee. When it is for real, the Government has the
right to say, "Okay, we want our legislation, thank you very
much." Unfortunately, that process often drags on to the
statute book because the constraint of time that not every bill
is probed for every clause is bad legislation; so it comes back
to the question of how you get it right at the drafting end, at
the thinking end, before it goes forward. The other side of the
coin is that it again comes back to what you want to do with select
committees. Do you want to turn them into legislative channels,
like they do in foreign legislatures? Do you want all legislation
on agriculture, food, fishing, whatever, to come through my Committee,
with the risk that in the un-whipped structure of a select committee
the Government might lose because it might get its ideas turned
over? If you really want to give some power back to the backbenches,
if you give the select committees on an un-whipped basis the opportunity
to really get stuck in on a bill, then you could see what could
be done.
Mr Williams: The pre-legislative
area is one we have identified as one of our areas of weakness
that we want to expand, and ministers have accepted this. Unfortunately,
while I understand there are operational factors, the number of
draft bills coming forward nullifies all good intent. In our annual
report on page 79, in 2003 twelve draft bills were published out
of 36 Government bills—excellent, one in three. In 2005-06
it was three out of 58, and I think we have had four offered this
year so far. If the Government really is serious about developing
pre-legislative legislation, we accept and welcome the additional
thing they want to offer, but they should fully use the facilities
that already exist and co-operate more with the select committees
in not only providing the bills but providing them in adequate
time to be examined properly.
Dr Wright: Theresa, if I may say
so, has identified some absolutely critical issues. We all know
that the way in which we scrutinise legislation has been an embarrassment.
It is a good job people did not know what has been going on—and
we have all been parties to it; so any attempt to do that better
is a good idea. Whether or not we now have the right model I do
not know. I think there are more radical models that we might
think of, and there would be some sense in thinking about how
to fuse the select committee model with the bill scrutiny model.
It is daft that you do not build in the expertise that Parliament
has in the scrutiny of legislation in that area, as a natural
process. It is a start that you build on. Theresa's point about
more cross-cutting issues is absolutely right—we are very
bad at that. A crucial area is to have cross-party initiatives.
There is a mismatch between the kind of tribalism that we bring
to our affairs in this place—except when we meet like this
in a civilised way—and how the rest of the world operates
outside. We are seeing the beginnings of that here, but we have
to build on it, and the select committee route will help. Theresa's
last point about more free votes is a very good idea. The fact
that we do not have them reflects the tribalism. I cannot see
why, on a range of measures, for example the current one on the
Mental Health Bill, they have to be party measures. In fact the
legitimacy of the measure would be greatly improved if Parliament
was voting simply as Parliament rather than as tribal blocs.
Q217 Sir Nicholas Winterton: A brief
response from all our four witnesses—and I ask this question
positively without any disrespect to our current Chairman: do
our witnesses, who are experienced Members of this House, believe
that this Committee would be better chaired by a backbencher rather
than by a Cabinet minister? Would it not enhance the role and
the authority of a backbencher and the House as a whole?
Mr Williams: I think one has to
go by experience of what has happened. Under Robin and Jack is
following the same route—it did make great achievements.
I think it was an advantage to have this interface. My colleagues
may disagree completely with me, but I feel that if it works it
is silly to change it.
Sir George Young: I think there
is a big issue about whether Parliament should repatriate some
of the powers that have gone to the executive. This is the only
select committee that is chaired by a member of the Government,
and there is a real question as to whether that exception is justifiable.
With respect to the current Chairman, who is a good House of Commons
man, I do not think it is justifiable. The chairman's job, as
a member of the Cabinet, is to get the Government's legislative
programme through the House of Commons. The job of the Modernisation
Committee is to define the machinery by which that legislative
programme is examined. It seems to me that there is an incontrovertible
conflict of interest if you have the same person doing both jobs.
My view would be that I would merge the Procedure Committee and
the Modernisation Committee together, and I would have it chaired
by a backbench Member of Parliament.
Dr Wright: It is intellectually
indefensible but it may be practically useful, especially if we
have a reforming Leader of the House.
Mr Jack: I agree very much with
George, but I think George's premise should be predicated by the
fact that once this Committee under a different chairmanship had
come up with its ideas, that it should have the right of proposing
the amendments to the way the House operates on the floor; because
the advantage we have at the moment is that at least the current
Leader has to do something when this Committee comes to some conclusions.
Chairman: I am catholic on this. I just
say that you have two roles as Leader of the House. One role is
to represent Government's interests in Parliament, but the other
role is representing Parliament's interests to the Government.
It may be difficult but someone once said if you can't ride two
horses you should not be in the circus!
Sir Nicholas Winterton: This is not a
circus!
Chairman: My two pennyworth on this—and
at the end it is Parliament that needs to decide, and not me—is
that the voice of the Commons, excluding ministers, is strengthened
in government if you have a Leader of the House chairing this.
I thought it was an odd arrangement and it is, but it may work.
Time will tell. Thank you very much indeed for your excellent
evidence and for your attendance. We will all do our best.
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