Amendment of Standing Orders

Lord Beith Excerpts

Monday 2nd December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Natascha Engel (North East Derbyshire) (Lab)]

It is, as always, a pleasure to follow the Chair of the Procedure Committee, the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker), who has made some very arcane points, which were more entertaining than I could ever have imagined them to be. My disagreements with him are about bringing more powers to the House and what we do with those powers, rather than in judging what he has tabled in all good spirit against the Government’s wishes. I thank him and the Procedure Committee, and the previous Chair of the Committee, who undertook the review of the Backbench Business Committee. The Committee had been in existence for only one Session when it was reviewed and was therefore very much in its infancy. The report recognised an important truth about the Committee: it is a Select Committee in name only, and completely different from any other Committee of the House in what it does.

When the Backbench Business Committee was established, it was governed by a very basic set of Standing Orders. They said how many members there should be and the party make-up. They also said how many days Government were to allocate to us, and that we could not table any motions that affected the workings of the Committee, which was perfectly sensible. That was it—the day-to-day working and functioning of the Committee were not mentioned in Standing Orders.

When we started, there was nothing to stop the eight members of the Backbench Business Committee meeting in private session and deciding for ourselves what would be debated by our colleagues on one day every parliamentary week. Therefore, the very first founding principles we established were to ensure that any debate we scheduled came from our colleagues—came from ideas from other Back Benchers—and that we met in public so that everything we decided was open and transparent. These were very important founding principles.

We set some other founding principles, together with our excellent first Clerk, Andrew Kennon, one of which was that the Backbench Business Committee should take as many risks as possible as soon as possible, in order to see what worked and what did not. One of the risks we took, when the hon. Member for Kettering (Mr Hollobone) was a member of the Committee, was a new way of doing pre-recess Adjournment debates. That got mixed reviews and we have chopped and changed that around, but one of the more successful innovations, which is mentioned on the Order Paper, was enabling Select Committee Chairs to launch their reports on the Floor of the House. Interestingly, that did not work in quite the way we wanted it to. They used to have to do it by taking interventions from Members, without being able to stand up like Ministers and take questions from the Floor. We felt that that really required a change to the Standing Orders, and we welcome the motion on the Order Paper today in the name of the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith), who chairs the Liaison Committee.

[Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)]

I welcome the hon. Lady’s and the Government’s support for this change. It has involved some discussion and there is an element of compromise about it, but it will be a much better procedure that will enable a Chair to table a report within five days of the Committee issuing it, and to take questions, rather than going through the contrived process of interventions that we have now.

[Natascha Engel]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that intervention.

We also wanted to keep to the principle of having as few rules as possible governing the Backbench Business Committee, in order to allow Back Benchers themselves to decide what they want to do within their own allocated time. Although we congratulate the hon. Member for Broxbourne on the paragraph in his motion that deals with allowing us to meet in public and to take representations from Members—as he said, it simply formalises current practice—we disagree with the points made in the following paragraphs. The honourable exception to that is the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (John Hemming), who is a member of both the Backbench Business Committee and the Procedure Committee, and supports these changes. We are concerned that these changes impose rigorous rules on us that might have negative consequences. We have enjoyed the freedom resulting from there being no rules governing what we could and could not do.

The first point on which we really disagreed was the allocating of our time pro rata. At the moment, as the hon. Member for Broxbourne said, the Backbench Business Committee is allocated 35 days a Session. As he also pointed out, the first Session stretched to almost two calendar years. We demanded, quite vocally, that the Government extend our allocation of time pro rata, and they did. There was a slight dispute over one or two days that the Government had scheduled before we came into existence, but broadly, the arrangement worked very well.

At the moment, the 35-day allocation is a minimum; the Government are perfectly free to allocate us more than that. My worry is that if pro rata-ing is imposed, there is nothing to say that this allocation will become a fixed amount of time. By the same token, if a Session is shorter than a calendar year, there is nothing to say that the Government could not then pro rata downwards. As the Chair of the Backbench Business Committee, I would not want that to happen. Given that the arrangement only happened because of the introduction of fixed-term Parliaments, for which we were compensating, and given that we now have fixed-term Parliaments, it is highly unlikely that this situation will ever arise again. I just do not think it is worth taking the risk of an unforeseen consequence.