Letter from Chris Bryant MP, Deputy Leader
of the House of Commons (P 10, 2008-09)
Thank you for your letter of 15 October
to Harriet Harman. 1 have been asked to reply.
I agree with your suggestion that the way forward
is to conduct a further trial involving all bills in the current
Session. This will be the only way to gauge accurately the resource
implications of the process. However, I believe that we should
have some idea from the outset of what the measure of success
or failure will be.
The production of explanatory statements has
significant resource implications. For Parliamentary Counsel,
it is additional work that is usually carried out when they are
up against a tight deadline for the tabling of amendments. For
the Public Bill Office, there is the additional vetting process,
and the House must also bear the additional printing cost. This
inevitably consumes resources, mostly in the form of officials'
time, which would otherwise be devoted to other aspects of the
legislative process. There is some danger that it might compromise
the first-rate service that Ministers receive from Parliamentary
Counsel and that the House receives from the PBO. This is not
something that can easily be addressed by the deployment of additional
staff, as the drafting and vetting of the amendment and statement
go hand-in-hand and need to be carried out by the same person.
We would therefore want to be absolutely confident
that the extent to which resources were diverted from the core
tasks of drafting, tabling, processing and printing amendments
was proportionate to the benefits achieved. This means that we
also need to see clear evidence of benefit. This might be, for
example, if the greater use of the process by back-bench Members
enabled Ministers to give fuller responses in debates in committee,
or if there were other evidence that Members found the Government
statements more useful than other forms of briefing which the
Government might supply to them or other services which the PBO
might provide.
I also think we need to be able to bring the
trial swiftly to an end if there is evidence that it is causing
acute problems in the offices concerned.
I would not like this to become too formal an
exercise. Hard outcome measures are difficult to come by and any
appraisal of the process will depend to a large extent on the
judgement of public bill committee members.
But I think we should be clear that this is
a test of the costs and benefits of the process and we should
be prepared to conclude, if that is where the evidence points,
that the necessary resources could be of more use to Members if
they were deployed in other ways.
I am copying this letter to the Chairman of
Ways and Means, the Clerk of Legislation and First Parliamentary
Counsel.
December 2008
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