Letter from the Chairman to Rt Hon Harriet
Harman QC MP, Leader of the House of Commons
You wrote to me on 23 July setting out
your views on the recent experiments allowing explanatory statements
to be tabled with amendments in public bill committees.
The comments which we have received from Members
and, via the Public Bill Office, from government departments and
Parliamentary Counsel lead us to agree with you that the procedure
has been seen as generally helpful.
The procedure clearly has resource implications,
although from the information we have received, with the exception
of Parliamentary Counsel and possibly the Office of the Editorial
Supervisor of the Vote, these do not seem to have caused problems.
Indeed we gather that government departments saw the small increase
in workload as worthwhile given the advantages they derived from
the inclusion of explanatory statements.
You asked us to consider whether there are ways
of increasing the rate of tabling by non-government members of
committees. We agree that it would be wrong to require Members
to table explanatory statements with their amendments. In our
view increased familiarity with the procedure is likely to be
the best way of increasing its take up. It is worth bearing in
mind that it has so far applied to only four bills over two Sessions.
To that end we suggest that there might be merit in printing the
explanatory statements alongside the amendments to which they
relate in the Hansard of the public bill committee. This would
both aid the reader in cases where members of the committee make
reference to the statements and increase their visibility to anyone
interested in public bill committee proceedings.
We note your suggestion that the Government
might not always table statements if the amendments have been
clearly explained in other ways. This of course is for Ministers
to decide, but it would be a matter of regret if the effect was
to reduce the public availability of such statements (as might
be the case if a letter to committee members was considered to
be an adequate substitute).
We welcome your proposal that there should be
a further period of experiment before a decision is reached on
whether the procedure should be made permanent. It will be important
that that experiment takes us significantly further forward in
terms of our experience with explanatory statements and that it
constitutes a rigorous and thorough test of the procedure. We
do not believe that another limited experiment will be able to
deliver these objectives. We therefore propose that, in the next
Session of Parliament, explanatory statements should be permitted
in respect of all public bills committed to public bill committees.
October 2008
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