UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

HOUSE OF COMMONS

ORAL REPRESENTATIONS

TAKEN BEFORE THE

BACKBENCH BUSINESS COMMITTEE

BACKBENCH DEBATES

TUESDAY 8 NOVEMBER 2011

GUY OPPERMAN, CHRIS WHITE AND GORDON BIRTWISTLE

JESSE NORMAN AND MR AIDAN BURLEY

MR FRANK FIELD

JOHN HEMMING

Evidence heard in Public

Questions 1 - 34

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Backbench Business Committee

on Tuesday 8 November 2011

Members present:

Mr Peter Bone (Chair)

Jane Ellison

John Hemming

Mr Philip Hollobone

Mr George Mudie

Guy Opperman, Chris White and Gordon Birtwistle made representations.

Q1 Chair: Good afternoon everyone. The first thing to say is that we have no time to allocate. Back-Bench business time is allocated by the Government, and they have not given us any new time to allocate. We will be listening to representations, but we do not know as yet when they may be able to be debated. I am sure you have been briefed, but we are looking for debates that have cross-party support, as well as for details about the number of Members who would be interested and whether there are differences between the parties.

Guy Opperman: May I thank the Committee for hearing us? We are a cross-party group. As you will see, Barry Sheerman cannot, sadly, be with us today. However, we are acting very much with the support of all three main parties, and we are certain that we could get support from the nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales. We accept and understand that your time is exceptionally limited. We will all make a presentation for two minutes or three minutes maximum. You have the brief form that we have submitted, and you have had a chance to see it.

Our attempt to get a debate is supported by all the all-party groups on manufacturing, design and skills, and it has been canvassed with them. They are all-party groups, and they are very supportive. Obviously, Barry and Chris are co-chairmen of the all-party group on manufacturing. We consider that manufacturing is fundamental to the future prosperity of this country. It is relevant to each and every MP in every constituency in the country.

We accept that there have been two small debates in the 18 months of this Parliament, but there has been no substantial debate. We have had a small debate in Westminster Hall, followed by another debate there, but there has been nothing in the past six months, and there has been nothing of any substance. All of us accept and agree that SMEs and manufacturing are probably the cornerstone of the economy’s recovery today.

Let me briefly touch on location and timing. I have been to this Committee for the past three weeks, and all people who come here obviously think they need as much time as possible in the grandest scenario they can possibly get. However, we think three hours would give ourselves and a sufficient number of Members from across the parties enough time to put our case to the Government and to air the issue. We accept entirely that there are problems on time and where we can be heard, but we would prefer it to be the main Chamber. That is fundamentally important. If that means a delay until the beginning of next year, so be it, and we can work behind the scenes to make the cases and the points that we wish to make. But if it is Westminster Hall or nothing, at the end of the day we have to accept Westminster Hall or nothing.

We want this to be all-party. We have some diary issues and the only two days that we can do before Christmas when all the four key people can be present-and the Minister, to be fair-would be 24 November or 1 December if it were a Thursday you were giving us. Failing that, in January all diaries are clear and, in an ideal world, we would take January in the main Chamber.

Gordon Birtwistle: As has been said, all parliamentarians believe that the rebalancing of the economy is critical. Not very long ago, the manufacturing contribution to GDP was more than 20%. Now it is languishing in single figures or just over 10%. I believe, as I think does everyone in the House, that the only way we will get out of the mess that we are in is to start making things again, selling things again and getting the balance of payments into a positive position rather than the desperate and negative position that it is in at the moment.

There are really good companies in this country that are making some of the best products in the world. I believe that we need to expand that, and they need the support and commitment of the Government to help where they can. I know that funding is limited, but we certainly can offer some support. It is critical to get manufacturing going again to rebalance the economy away from the somewhat dubious finance and service sectors that have left us in the mess that we are in now.

I represent a manufacturing town; 40% of the GDP of Burnley is in manufacturing. We are fortunate at the moment that we are not suffering like other parts of the country, because the aerospace industry, the oil industry and the nuclear industry are very busy, hence the factories in Burnley are busy. Our big problem is the lack of skills, which hopefully can be brought into the debate on manufacturing. We need to upskill people to do the jobs of the future rather than carrying on as we are and training people to do the jobs of the past.

Q2 Chair: I don’t want to cut you off, Gordon. I am old enough to remember when the balance of trade was the main news item.

Gordon Birtwistle: I remember it well. The plan collapsed when they announced we had gone £1 million in the red.

Chris White: I echo both my colleagues’ comments, but I want to add that, when I came to the House last year, it was a surprise to realise that there was not an all-party group for manufacturing, although there was for everything else under the sun. I was delighted that, with Barry Sheerman, we were able to give rebirth to the manufacturing group. We had an exhibition this year when about 70 Members turned up, and we already have something in the region of 240-plus Members signing up for next year. What has not been said is that the issue affects every constituency, not least when we are looking at Jubilee year and Olympics year when the eyes of the world will be on this country. It would be a very good opportunity to raise the profile of manufacturing in the House and to show what we can do through all Members and all parties in Parliament.

Q3 Mr Hollobone: I congratulate you on your presentation. As the Chairman has explained, the Committee’s difficult task is to fit a quart into a pint pot. Under the arrangements by which the Committee was established, the Government was to give it 35 days a year, but as we have a two-year Session we will not get 70 days. We will probably get 35 days plus nine, so between now and the end of March we are talking about possibly another nine main Chamber days, and there may be some days in Westminster Hall. We do not even have two years’ worth of debates. With all the excellent bids coming forward, the Committee has a difficult to task to schedule what should take place.

Congratulations of your presentation. You have ticked all the boxes. It is topical, and it is important that the debate be held. Crucially, you have cross-party support, which is an important factor for the Committee. You have also done the right thing. You do not have a motion. If a debate had a motion attached to it, we would usually see if we could put it into the main Chamber, and that gives you more of a chance of the debate being held in Westminster Hall.

There is possibly another route, simply because we don’t have all the time that we would like to have, and were you to approach the Liaison Committee and ask the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills whether it could bid for one of the three-hour slots in Westminster Hall on Thursday under its remit, you might have a chance to have this debate if we are unable to meet your request. Certainly, for my part, I think you have ticked all the boxes, and congratulations on coming here today.

Q4 John Hemming: Manufacturing is obviously an important issue to my constituents with skilled jobs and the like, but we do face the fact that we do not have any time. There is then that question of the balance between Westminster Hall and the main Chamber. What we tend to do with the main Chamber is look for a motion and a motion that means something rather than just noting something. Do you have a motion?

Gordon Birtwistle: We could soon come up with one.

Guy Opperman: The difficulty with that is that we would have to go away and work on a particular motion that all the cross-party group felt was a fair and equable approach at this stage to be discussed and put as a motion. We are trying not to make this particularly political, for obvious reasons, because we want to try to stimulate the debate, put our case to the Minister and hear the positive and the negative views. You talk about cross-party agreement. It is patently obvious-although we may represent three different parties-that there will be differing views as to how we should solve this problem. The reason we have not put a motion down is because we felt that that would limit the debate. I accept that normally one would do that in relation to a main Chamber debate, but we still felt that there was an ability to have a main Chamber debate on such an issue, which is so cross-party and so important that it could be debated without necessarily a motion at the end of it.

Q5 Chair: We do not have to have a motion. Our problem is, as Mr Hollobone said, the lack of time.

Q6 Jane Ellison: My apologies to the Committee for being late. The Chairman has said what I was going to say. It is not universally the case that we have to have a motion. There are some issues which we felt had not been debated for a very long time and which needed a proper airing in the Chamber. We gave a day for an immigration debate. We gave time for a debate on food security and famine in the horn of Africa. You have obviously been making a case for why this is a subject that has not been debated in itself, rather than necessarily as part of a wider economic debate. The question is time, as colleagues have said. I would not want you to think that you have to go away and come up with a motion as the only way of getting Chamber time. It is just that you are getting realistic advice from colleagues about which venue becomes available usually more readily.

Guy Opperman: We want a debate but if we went for the spring it would be well over two years since the main Chamber debated this. It was well before the previous election. We have certainly checked all the way back to this election and I cannot find any other debate that has taken place on this issue in the main Chamber prior to the election. If you told us you would give us three hours in the main Chamber in February, we would accept that gratefully.

Chair: Thank you very much for your presentation.

Jesse Norman and Aidan Burley made representations.

Jesse Norman: I thank the Committee for allowing us to speak to this subject. The proposal is to have a three-hour debate in Westminster Hall on public sector funding of trade union officials. This is a known contentious issue, and I freely acknowledge that; the point, however, is not to provoke contention but to try to put the issue to rest, having examined it in a proper democratic forum. I say this as someone who is deeply sympathetic, as all Members will know, to trade unions and feels that there may well be a very strong case for them to be funded by the public sector, but it is one that should be properly evaluated and discussed.

This is a cross-party pitch. It is not a pitch with support from the Labour party, and I realise that that will create concern in this Committee. It was discussed in an Adjournment debate and the principal reason why it has been brought to you is that some 70 Members from several parties attended that debate and wished to speak, but it was obviously not the forum in which they could do so.

Q7 Chair: One thing we do, and we are very careful as a Committee to do, is look for cross-party interest and divisions within parties. We are certainly not here to put on party political debates. That is one thing we are absolutely not here for.

Q8 Mr Hollobone: That is a powerful point.

Personally speaking, I absolutely agree 100% with you. I do not believe there should be public funding for trade union officials in this way and if there were a motion to that effect, I would support it. One of the key principles of this Committee, however, is that when Back Benchers make presentations and argue the case for parliamentary time, they do so with an element of cross-party support. Yours is an interesting test case for us to talk about afterwards, because I am not sure that we have ever had such a strong presentation from one side of the Chamber, if you like, without anybody from the other side. I am not quite sure how we are going to deal with that.

Jesse Norman: I take your point, but I stress that we have support among the Liberal Democrats and the Ulster Unionists, and I have no doubt that other smaller parties could be represented. We obviously do not have support from the Labour party and I recognise that. it is noticeable that the Committee has not flinched from having debates and putting motions that have had the effect of greatly embarrassing the Government; that is the other side of the argument. The idea is not, in this case, to try and embarrass anyone. It is simply that there is a kind of parity-of-reasoning argument that says one should not flinch from important issues being debated, even where there is, in advance, known to be some contention about them.

Q9 Mr Hollobone: I appreciate your candour, but the purpose of this Committee is not to embarrass the Government. What it does is table time for debate that would not otherwise take place, because the Government would not facilitate it or because Members have not been able to secure a debate through other means. All the issues that have been debated in time allocated by this Committee have enjoyed an element of cross-party support, whether or not they are embarrassing for the Government.

What I would say is that other routes are open to you. I appreciate you saying that 70 Members attended Mr Burley’s excellent debate, and of course 70 Members were not able to take part in the half-hour debate. You have the option of a one-and-a-half hour debate in Westminster Hall, were a number of you to ask for that. An alternative is to make a bid to the Leader of the House himself to see if he would allow you parliamentary time.

Mr Burley: I echo the point about the time. Having held the Adjournment debate, it was clear that there were Members on both sides of the House, and I point out to the Committee that of those 70 MPs who rather unusually turned up for a half-hour Adjournment debate, about 40 were Labour. One would suspect that, even though they are not on our application form today, there would be many Labour MPs who would wish to come to a three-hour Adjournment debate and defend the payment of trade unions.

Jesse Norman: From my point of view, that would be perfectly proper and important. That is the point of it.

Q10 Mr Hollobone: That is an important point, because we have had presentations before from Back Benchers who have had Members from other parties with them who disagreed with the premise being put forward, but supported the need for a debate. Were you to come back with Labour Back Benchers who want this issue debated, even though they disagree with your point of view, that would strengthen your case before the Committee.

Q11 Chair: I should have asked for the record whether either Member here is a PPS.

Mr Burley: I am, yes, which is why I have not proposed it.

Q12 Jane Ellison: You have responded to one of the questions I was going to ask: among those 70 Members, was there cross-party interest? We say that we are not party political, and we are trying not to put on debates that are purely party political, but the fact that the parties may broadly divide against each other is not a problem for us. We have had debates where people have said, "We think it is important that this is debated, but we have diametrically opposite views." Given that there was such strong interest, I would have thought that you would find it reasonably straightforward to go away and get people to sign up and say that they want three hours to have a ding-dong about this and have the issue out. You do not have to agree on the outcome; you just have to agree that you want more time to explore the issue and to have a proper debate.

Frankly, we have put on the odd debate that the Government Front Bench has not wanted, but we have also put on the odd debate that the Opposition Front Bench has not wanted. That is an equally legitimate reason for this Committee. That does not bother us. Go away and get people to make the case that it is an important debate, even though you come at it from different angles and you need three hours to tease it out, where half an hour would not do.

Q13 Chair: Following on from that, we quite often ask people who come for the first presentation to come back again with additional supporting Members. If you can come back again with Labour party Members, that would help enormously. They do not have to agree with you-ideally, they do not agree with you.

Jesse Norman: That point has been well made.

Q14 John Hemming: I refer hon. Members to my declaration of interest as a member of a trade union. You know which one.

The same point applies. There has to be demand from all parts of the House for the debate, even if people do not agree on their conclusions. It may be that that demand could come in a form later. It might be better in a later meeting, because we do not have any time anyway at the moment. We have not yet decided whether we are meeting next week. The likelihood is that time will not be allocatable for a couple of weeks anyway.

Jesse Norman: I am grateful to the Committee for giving us a hearing. Is it the case that the Committee will be prepared to give it some further consideration if we come back?

Q15 Chair: Yes. Can I just say that on the list of names who have given their support to this includes five Government PPSs? We would like to see more from the Government side who were not PPSs.

Jesse Norman: We can do that. That is no problem at all. This has had nothing to do with the Government, so I would be happy to take those people out. I am sure that they would not mind stepping back.

Mr Burley: Can I ask one question? If there is perhaps a structural weakness in getting cross-party support for a motion, for example in this case, where perhaps Labour MPs do not want this issue to be aired and do not want people to know that this practice exists and are therefore reluctant to sign up-similarly, some MPs have said that they would give their support to the motion, but do not want to be targeted in a future general election campaign by union money against them by being seen to go against the unions-is there anything that we can about that if we are unable to get the cross-party support from those with rather narrow political interests?

Q16 Chair: Those MPs ought to have a bit of backbone, stick up for what they believe in and stop worrying about what other people might think.

Q17 Mr Hollobone: If you are going down the route of thinking about a motion, you are getting into the territory of whether this should be debated in the main Chamber. As we have tried to explain today, we do not have much time to allocate. Obviously, it is entirely up to you, but your bid at the moment is for three hours in Westminster Hall and that is your strongest card, because once you start bidding for Chamber time your chances go down.

Jesse Norman: May I ask a question? Do you and perhaps other members of the Committee take the point that there is a risk that topics of important public debate might be closed down simply by an unwillingness to entertain such a debate and by a requirement that it be on a cross-party basis?

Q18 Mr Hollobone: I would have thought that there will be, for example, strong-minded Opposition Back Benchers who feel very strongly about this issue on the other side of the coin and who, frankly, would relish a ding-dong about this for three hours in Westminster Hall. With some careful canvassing on your part, you could come forward with a list of powerful names, and we could have a really good debate in Westminster Hall.

Jesse Norman: That is very helpful. I am grateful.

Q19 Mr Mudie: The alternative that I don’t think you have picked up, Jesse, is the one suggested by the Chairman. If you put in for an hour-and-a-half-a long-debate in Westminster Hall, and if you have 70 names and they all put in at the same time, you have a very good chance of that being selected for debate, which would give you part of the time. It meets Aidan’s point that when you had the Adjournment debate, Labour Members came in to argue the case; I am sure they would come in for an hour-and-a-half debate, without necessarily calling for it.

Jesse Norman: That is also very helpful, George. Thank you very much indeed.

Q20 Chair: In fact, in that sort of system, if 70 people put in for a debate, sometimes the Speaker will turn that into a three-hour debate.

Q21 John Hemming: Additionally, obviously this is an issue that concerns certain Ministers as well, as well, so the Government can look at the issue in Government time, and that, in a sense, is not what we are for. If it is a Government issue and is done in Government time, we should not then try to do it as well.

Chair: Thank you for that. We look forward to seeing you again.

Mr Frank Field made representations

Mr Field: Chairman, thank you for giving me this opportunity. I apologise that my co-chairman is not with me. He is mortified not to be able to break engagements to be here. I am only too happy to serve under your chairmanship, but I think his mortification will be a little less for knowing the Chairman of this Committee was not actually sitting today.

We are asking for a day’s debate on immigration. We know that you have given us a day’s debate in the past. We do not wish to have the debate immediately. We wish to have it probably early in the new year, when the Government will have announced a raft of policy proposals, which we think will be relevant. I am here today to ask now to log a date with the Committee because, as part of re-establishing our standing with the public, the House established the e-petitions system. For six days we have had an e-petition on the web and-before the week is out-we have crossed the 100,000 mark, which I would have thought suggested that this was a major concern for the public.

I hope that the motion we have to put before you is one that the Government would not feel that they had to steal-both the motion and the time-and whip people on for the following reasons. First, giving us the debate when we were newly established as a cross-party group allowed the House of Commons to begin to establish a view about immigration that reflected the views in the country as a whole. The role of Parliament, we believe, is to ensure that the debates take place on the Floor of the House of Commons, not in the streets outside. One of our weaknesses before was that the House and Governments of both parties were reluctant to see the issue debated in an open and rational manner. Because of that success, I believe that the House is in a very good position to try to shape the next stage of Government policy on how one does not willingly agree that our population should be grown by immigration, and that we should be taking all the steps that we can to prevent the population rising to 70 million by the date the Government estimate it will unless we change our immigration policy.

The case is: could we please put down a marker for the new year? Could we again ask for this time on the Floor of the House of Commons? Will you again support both the public and the cross-party group of Members, who want the issue debated rationally and carefully, so that the House can not only again establish a bridgehead that this is a proper issue to debate, but can really feel that it is helping to shape Government policy?

Q22 Chair: This is the, "No to 70 million" petition?

Mr Field: It is, yes, and we have a motion to that effect.

Q23 Chair: We have received notification from the Leader of the House that it has passed 100,000. A copy of it has been sent to the Chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee and placed in the Library. It might be a bit early, but do you have a motion that you want the Committee to consider?

Mr Field: I do.

Q24 Chair: Okay, could you read it for the record?

Mr Field: "We call upon the Government to take all necessary steps to get immigration down to a level that will stabilise our population as close to the present level as possible."

Q25 Chair: That has one advantage over some of the motions we have heard in that it is very short and succinct, which is very welcome.

Q26 Mr Hollobone: It is clearly a very powerful expression of popular opinion that so many people have signed the petition in such a short space of time. Congratulations are in order to yourself, Nicholas Soames and all those who have signed the petition. I think that it would be quite wrong of the House not to grant a debate in response to that. I also think that it is very important that the motion that you have just read out reflects word for word the petition that more than 100,000 people have signed.

You have asked for a full-day debate, and given the speed and size of the public response, I struggle to think that the issue could be debated in less time than that. It would seem to me that it needs a full day, with a votable motion at the end. Basically, you are asking for one of the nine Chamber days that we are likely to be granted by the Government between now and the end of March.

Mr Field: I am indeed, but not until the new year, when the Government have laid out their strategy.

Q27 Chair: That is helpful because it is possible that we will not have any time until the new year.

Q28 Jane Ellison: If I understand this, although you have given us an indication of what the motion would be, you want to continue to keep that under review in order to be able to respond to emerging policy. Do you have an idea in your own mind about when the ideal time would be?

Mr Field: We know that Governments always find it difficult to keep to their own timetables. They have promised that their major proposals would be out before Christmas. I am sure of what Mr Hollobone said-that the numbers signing the petition are going to grow between now and when we have a debate, if we are successful in getting one. Both the growing petition and the possibility of this Committee granting us a whole day’s debate will, I hope, concentrate the Government’s mind that the issue is one that they have to confront.

Q29 Jane Ellison: It is worth saying for the record that we are still getting used to the new system of e-petitions. This is an important issue, whether or not we have an e-petition. As you quite rightly say, the speed at which the e-petition reached 100,000 is very strong supporting evidence, but to my mind, if you had come here without an existing e-petition, the case that this is an important issue that Parliament should debate regularly and at the right time would be strong anyway. I wanted to put that on the record.

Q30 Chair: Jane makes a good point. The petition, whether it is handwritten or an e-petition, is only a back-up to a presentation from Members. On that point, because we are not rushed on this, the Clerk will send you a form so that we can put some names and dot some i’s on it. We will undoubtedly come back to this in the next few weeks. Thank you.

We have one more pitch, which is from Mr Hemming.

John Hemming made representations.

John Hemming: I raised the issue of another e-petition because of the timing situation-the fact we are so short of time. I understand that there will be a debate on extradition on 24 November. The petition relating to Babar Ahmad involves another case where everything that has happened has happened in the UK, yet there is an attempt to extradite him to the USA to prosecute him, and it seems logical to prosecute him here. What I ask the Committee to consider in my absence, when it comes to that point, is whether that can be added to the debate on 24 November.

Q31 Jane Ellison: I am fairly sure, from memory, that the supporting documentation in making a case for the debate on extradition cited the Babar Ahmad case as one of those they wanted to address. I should have thought that that was in the minds of the applicants at that time.

John Hemming: Standing Orders require that if we are going to consider e-petitions, someone has to present it; therefore I am presenting it.

Q32 Chair: Just for the record, we have received a letter from the Leader of the House to confirm that the petition has gone over 100,000. He has copied it to the Chair of the Select Committee on Home Affairs and placed a copy in the Library.

Q33 Mr Hollobone: Do you agree that it would be sensible to "tag" the e-petition to the debate taking place in Westminster Hall, so that there is a direct reference to the e-petition when extradition is debated?

John Hemming: That would be very good.

Q34 Mr Hollobone: Do you share my disappointment at some of the e-mails that some of us have started to receive from those in favour of the issue being debated criticising the Backbench Business Committee for scheduling a debate in Westminster Hall and not in the main Chamber, given that you, Mr Hemming, know, as all of us on the Committee do, how little time we have to schedule things in the Chamber? This Committee has been very quick to allocate time to the debate, given the representations received.

John Hemming: As a member of the Committee, I know that the Committee has no time to allocate at the moment. Westminster Hall is covered by article 9 of the Bill of Rights, which means that it is exactly the same as the main Chamber from a legal perspective. Anyone considering that to be of lower status does not understand how it works.

I was pleased when the Committee gave me a debate earlier this year in Westminster Hall that resulted in a major and national public debate about a lot of issues and appeared on the front pages of various newspapers. This was an issue that was not raised in the main Chamber-it was all debated in Westminster Hall. It is a mistake to consider Westminster Hall as second-rate.

Chair: Thank you very much, Mr Hemming. We will now enter private session.