Ian Austin (Dudley North) (Lab)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. Last week, NHS England announced its Healthy New Towns programme. I was interested in that because seven of the 10 towns involved are in the south, none is in the midlands and, despite the links between poverty and ill health, eight are in Conservative constituencies. I wanted to find out whether organisations in the west midlands had submitted bids, and if not, why not. I asked NHS England for that information, but it refused to give me a list of those who had submitted bids to the programme. It also refused to tell me the basis on which the bids had been allocated, saying that this contained commercially sensitive information, even though all I wanted to know was the geographical areas from which bids had been received, rather than the names of the bidders themselves. I tabled four named-day parliamentary questions to the Department of Health and got the same ridiculous, contemptuous reply to each of them:
“The Department does not hold information on the applications to the Healthy New Towns programme.”
Frankly, that is unbelievable; I do not think that any sensible person could believe that answer for a minute.
First, Mr Speaker, is it in order for the Department to provide such incredible answers? Secondly, why are the Department of Health and its Ministers now routinely refusing to answer questions about lots of different NHS issues, claiming that they are the responsibility of NHS England and nothing to do with the Department itself? Is it in order for Ministers to provide such utterly contemptuous responses to Members’ questions, and for Government Departments and public bodies to refuse to provide this basic information?
Mr Speaker
Order. I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his point of order. As he knows, the Chair is not responsible for the content of ministerial answers, although there is a general understanding in this place that Ministers’ answers should be both timely and substantive. If he is dissatisfied with the paucity or the emptiness of the replies that he receives, or if he judges, simply as a matter of fact, that he has received no answer at all, the best recourse available to him is to approach the Procedure Committee, of which, as Chairman, the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker) is a distinguished ornament, and who, happily, whether by serendipity or contrivance, is present in the Chamber to hear that point of order. I trust that any exchange between them, whether in conversation or correspondence, will be fruitful.
The only other observation that I would make to the hon. Member for Dudley North (Ian Austin) is that he and I were at university together more than 30 years ago and he was a very persistent woodpecker then. Nothing that has happened in the intervening three decades has caused me to revise my opinion on that, so if people feel that they can just go on ignoring him, they are probably in for something of a rude shock, because he does not give up—he tends to go on and on and, if necessary, on. I hope that the hon. Gentleman’s palate has been satisfied, at least for today.