| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Sir George Young (North-West Hampshire) (Con):
Not for the first time, the House is indebted to the hon. Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay) for raising
a serious constitutional issue. He is right to say that over the past few years, in Government, there has been a shift in the centre of gravity of decision making from this House to the other place. That shift has been focused in the Treasury and the new Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. That raises issues of accountability, which he touched on with his normal frankness and candour.
I should like to qualify what the hon. Gentleman said about precedents. I think that I am right in saying that when my party had Cabinet Ministers in the House of Lords, there was a Cabinet Minister in the Commons who answered with them or for them. In the case of Lord Young-no relation at all-my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) was in the Cabinet and answered for the Department in the Commons. The criticism that I would make of the present Government is that they have not replicated that pattern of having Cabinet-rank Ministers in the Commons, accountable to this House.
I have a lot of sympathy with the point that the hon. Member for Thurrock raised, and we need to look at it. My only reservation, given the amount of time that the proposed Committee has already lost, is whether we can do justice to the important issue that he raises in the remaining time available to us, or whether the subject is of such importance that it deserves separate scrutiny of its own, so that it can be looked at in depth. If it is tagged on to the responsibilities already proposed, we may not be able to do the subject justice.
In my brief contribution, I want to make three points. First, we should be grateful for small mercies: just before the House rises for the recess, the Government have at last found time for a debate, so that we can get this show on the road. As the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) pointed out, it would have been perverse if a Committee set up to make better use of the time of the House could not start working because the Government had denied it the time to do so. I am glad that we are now going to look at this. As my hon. Friend the Member for North-West Cambridgeshire (Mr. Vara) said, the democracy taskforce, on which I have served, has been brimming with ideas that I hope will be fed into the new Committee.
The Deputy Leader did not really explain why we need a new Committee. We have a Select Committee on Procedure, chaired by my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Mr. Knight), and a Select Committee on Modernisation. The latter cannot be described as being overworked, because it has not met for more than a year. The terms of reference for the proposed Committee fall neatly within those of either the Procedure Committee or the Modernisation Committee. The Deputy Leader did not explain why we need a new vehicle, which has had to be constructed and assembled, causing some seven or eight weeks' delay, when we have two vehicles already on the road and ready to go. They could have started work on this process immediately. Indeed, the Procedure Committee has already looked at one of the subjects that are to be addressed by the new Committee-namely, engagement with the public and e-petitions.
My ingenious solution-which I am sorry the Government did not adopt-was to dismiss as Chairman of the Modernisation Committee the Leader of the House, who has no business being Chairman of a Select Committee of the House, and parachuting in the hon.
Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright) as its new Chairman. That would have saved everyone a lot of time, we would have benefited from his energy and ideas, and we could have started work some seven weeks ago. But that idea was not acceptable to the Government.
My last point is about the delay. We have lost about half the sitting time of the new Committee because of the delay in setting it up. There was an inelegance-to put it at its mildest-in the lack of consultation and in the delay in getting the show on the road. We are now going to have to work at double time to catch up the time that we have lost. We are also going to have to sit during the recess. The hon. Member for Cannock Chase has set a cracking pace for his Committee, in setting the agenda and convening a huge number of meetings.
The real test will be what happens to the Committee's work when it has reported. I have to say that the signals over the past seven weeks, given the difficulties we have faced getting this far, do not augur well. I hope that the Minister will give us a specific commitment that, before we rise for the Christmas recess, there will be a substantive debate in Government time, with a free vote on both sides of the House, on all the recommendations of the Committee. That would give us time to resolve the matter and get the new machinery up and running in the tail end of this Parliament. I hope that the Minister will understand that the mood of the House is one of impatience and of anxiety to make progress, and I hope that when she replies to the debate-which could happen tomorrow, given the number of Members who want to speak-she will give a very positive response to the points that I and other right hon. and hon. Members have made.
10.38 pm
Mark Fisher (Stoke-on-Trent, Central) (Lab): I congratulate the Government on at last giving us time to discuss this vital Committee. I also congratulate them and the House on setting up the Committee and on choosing an extremely good Chair, who I believe has the support of all parts of the House, and an excellent membership of people with a great deal of interest in, and experience and knowledge of, these matters.
The matters that we are giving the Committee to discuss are of historic importance, because they will correct the imbalance that has been growing since the House gave up control of its own agenda and allowed the Executive to determine the business of the House in order to break the impasse on Irish reform. For the past 120 years, we have been on a sliding slope, and over the past few years we have been mere ciphers. In my 26 years as a Member of this House, we have effectively been a rubber stamp for the Executive, and we must now assert our own distinct identity.
This is a matter not of attacking the Government, but of understanding that the role of the House is separate and distinct from that of the Government. The Government are elected to introduce a programme of legislation and to recommend taxation, and it is our job to scrutinise them-but it is our job to do so in our time, and in our way, and not at the behest of the Government.
That is why it is important not only that we set up this Committee to look at the business of the House, but that the Committee understands the definition of "the
business of the House", which includes everything for which the Government do not have a mandate, especially the nature and method of scrutiny. That is why the House must not only elect Select Committees but be in control of scrutiny. It is our job to scrutinise the Executive, not the Executive's job to tell us who should be on Committees, when they should sit or when there should be a vote.
We have allowed the Executive to dominate this House increasingly for the last 100 years. At last-thanks to this Government, thanks to the Committee chaired by my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright) and thanks, I am confident, to the work that it is going to do-we will have an opportunity to correct that imbalance and have a proper relationship between this House, which is scrutinising the Government, and the Government, who are getting on with the work of the Executive. The two should be in proper tension. I am confident that with the business Committee and the election of Select Committees and their Chairs, we will make enormous strides towards getting a proper relationship between this House and the Executive. If we do that, we will be doing something of enormous historic importance. I hope that the Committee will be set up and will report. I am confident that it will and that it will do an extremely important job.
10.42 pm
Mr. Bernard Jenkin (North Essex) (Con): I believe that the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central (Mark Fisher) is unnecessarily modest about his own role in bringing the House of Commons to this point. He is chairman of a cross-party group: we call ourselves Parliament First, and we have been agitating for Parliament to have a greater role and a greater say in its own affairs. We have a list of aspirations-"demands" would put it too strongly-to put Parliament back at the centre of our national life. The hon. Gentleman has played a welcome role in that. His warm words for the Government in bringing us to this point are all part of the consensual atmosphere that we need to generate around this proposal.
It struck me as odd that while we were attempting to set up a Committee to strengthen the House's control of its business and its Select Committee, the Government imagined that that could be achieved without debating the motion. It is, as the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) said, an irony that underlines the gulf between those in government or who aspire to government and the rest of this House.
There was a failure of imagination among those on the Treasury Bench. They thought that simply accepting the amendments and including them in the motion would obviate the need for debate, but that was to underestimate what this House thinks of itself, and, indeed, what my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope) thinks of himself. I think that he was unfairly criticised in The Guardian leading article today. His behaviour was not bizarre; it was principled. He insisted that if we were to strengthen the House, we should do it by the proper procedure and on the basis of debate.
Mr. Harper:
One thing that our hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope) has achieved is to provide an opportunity for a large number of members
of the Committee, including its Chairman, to listen and gauge the feeling of the House, which will inform the way in which they conduct the Committee. If for no other reason than that, it was surely worth having a debate in this Chamber.
Mr. Jenkin: My hon. Friend is entirely right about that point.
The importance of this moment is that it grows out of the crisis that we have all endured as a result of the publication of our expenses and allowances. That issue did not just excite public anger; it was a lightning conductor for the fury felt by many people-not just about how politics has been conducted in this country in the past 10 or 15 years, but, as the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central said, about a trend reflecting, particularly in the post-war era, the ever-increasing ascendancy of party over the individual judgment of Members of Parliament.
What is the House of Commons, or Parliament, for? Surely we exist for three fundamental purposes: to check the abuse of power by the Executive; to ensure that legislation is properly scrutinised and is fit for purpose; and to ensure that taxpayers' money is spent wisely and efficiently. In all honesty, has the House been doing a good job over the past 10, 20 or 30 years? Actually, we have been doing less and less of that job. More and more legislation goes through without being debated. Fewer and fewer Supply debates are about Supply and scrutiny of the Executive's expenditure. It has become harder and harder to check the power of the Executive, as more power has been handed over to agencies, quangos, the courts, Brussels or the European Court of Human Rights. Whatever part of the House one comes from, one can choose one's list of organisations to which power is handed over, which destroys the accountability and authority of the House.
I put it to those on the Treasury Bench, and to anyone who aspires to sit there, that there is a fundamental truth about our democracy: the weaker that Parliament becomes, the weaker the Governments who derive from Parliament become. It is an irony that respect for politics and politicians has declined as the power of the House of Commons has declined. I do not dismiss the difficulty of exercising representative democracy in a world in which 1.5 billion people are on the internet and expect their say over every issue, in what we now call the network world. The world is very different from that conceived by, say, the 1832 reformers, or by Edmund Burke, who coined the immortal phrases about representative democracy and Members exercising their judgment on behalf of their constituents in the national interest, rather than being their delegates.
Ultimately, the more complicated government and politics become, the more inevitable it is that those who devote their lives to politics and to service in Parliament will have to exercise their judgment on behalf of the 99 per cent. of the population who are far too busy leading a normal life to worry about the things that we worry about.
Mr. John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con):
Is not the deeper irony that as the process described by my hon. Friend has occurred-Parliament has become more emasculated-expectations of both Government and individual MPs have grown? Does not
that deep irony lie at the heart of this debate, and of the wider debate that has taken place over the past few weeks and months?
Mr. Jenkin: My hon. Friend makes an extremely apposite point, and I do not hold an instant answer to the problem he raises. The demands on individual Members of Parliament are less and less to conduct ourselves as national politicians in this Chamber, and more and more to act as super-ombudsmen and super-councillors-as representatives of our national Parliament in our constituencies, as opposed to representatives of our constituents' interests in Parliament. That is the context in which the Committee will have to conduct its investigations and inquiries and make its recommendations.
As result of the crisis that has occurred, we have all been humiliated-I have certainly felt humiliated. That has served as a reminder of the real purpose of each of our existences in the House. It has been telling to see exposed how ineffective we have become at performing our real task, which is to check the abuse of power, to check the legislation, and to check the expenditure of the Executive.
I feel that there is now a drive-a determination-in the House to put matters right. I do not want to raise expectations beyond what might be delivered by the Committee chaired by the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright), but I believe that, of all the reactions to the expenses and allowances crisis, this is the most significant. It may be a small first step, but it is the most significant; and the most significant step that the Committee might recommend is one that would enable us to regain control over our own business.
For most of the period since the debate about Irish rule, the only constraint on Government business has been the power of delay. Even during the 1970s and 1980s, when the guillotine began to fall more and more often on Government business in order to expedite its progress, delay was still the weapon. When, as shadow Secretary of State for Transport, I conducted the Bill that became the Transport Act 2000 through its Standing Committee, it was decided that we should delay the Bill for as long as possible on a particular point because we were so concerned about it. That kind of attrition is no longer available to the House. What is termed "modernisation"-and I think that even the most ardent advocates of modernisation would recognise that it has become a loaded term when connected with parliamentary reform-has come to mean emasculation. It has meant the withdrawal of that final sanction.
It is interesting to note that the former Leader of the House, now the Secretary of State for Justice, said during debate on the Parliamentary Standards Bill that he believed that Parliament had become more effective in recent years. He holds that belief because the number of Divisions that the Government have lost has begun to increase, despite the enormous majority that the Government have enjoyed in recent years.
Lynne Jones: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Jenkin: I will in a second.
I submit that the reason the Government are now losing Divisions is that the weapon of delay is no longer available. Whereas concessions used to be extracted through delay, the only way to force concessions now is
by defeating the Government in the Division Lobbies. That may be a healthy development and a healthy response, but I do not think that it necessarily demonstrates that the House is working more effectively than it used to. The fact that so much legislation now passes through the House without debate and has to be scrutinised at length in the other place-and even the other place has a difficult job, given the present volume of legislation-leaves a serious gap in the armoury enabling our Parliament to hold the Government to account.
Lynne Jones: The hon. Gentleman has partly answered the question that I was going to ask. He has said that delay means that the Government may give way and concessions may be extracted. I do not want to return to that scenario; I should like Members to engage fully in the debate about legislation, and then vote according to the strength of the arguments. How can we ensure that, rather than returning to an old situation, we move forward to a situation of that kind?
Mr. Jenkin: The hon. Lady has led me precisely to my next point. The task of the business Committee will not be to return us to the war of attrition represented by the ludicrous all-night sittings of Committees and the whole House, although I believe that we lose something by our determination not to engage in such action. Here we are sitting at 10.55 on a Monday night, and I see no difficulty with our sitting late on occasion when there is pressure on the timetable and no other way of conducting our business.
It strikes me as extremely frustrating when stacks of Members want to speak in a debate and the Government limit it to five hours and will not lift the 10 o'clock rule to allow more Members to speak-and indeed more Members to speak at length. There may be an advantage in limiting speeches to 12, 10, eight or six minutes in one respect, but I believe that it destroys the real purpose of this Chamber, which is to debate the issues and to allow every Member to speak and to take part in those debates.
Sir Nicholas Winterton: Is my hon. Friend aware that, when the Modernisation Committee initially put forward its proposals for programme motions, it was intended that the programme motion should be discussed at least between the usual channels before it was taken immediately after the Second Reading Division and without debate. The decency of having some consultation before the programme motion was put down was withdrawn by the Government.
Mr. Jenkin: It is interesting that my hon. Friend should remind the House of that. It shows that efforts have been made to do programming in an intelligent way. I was an Opposition spokesman on the two devolution Bills at the beginning of this Government's term of office. Our great fear was that there was going to be an arbitrary guillotine that cut off debate on vast swathes of the Bill that we wanted to discuss.
| Next Section | Index | Home Page |