Business of the House

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Thursday 26th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

Will the Leader of the House please give us the business for next week?

[The First Secretary of State and Leader of the House of Commons (Mr William Hague)]

The business for next week will be as follows:

Monday 2 March—Estimates day (2nd allotted day). There will be a debate entitled “Devolution in England: The Case for Local Government”, followed by a debate on “Towards the next Defence and Security Review: Part Two—NATO”. Further details will be given in the Official Report.

[The details are as follows: Devolution in England: The Case for Local Government, 1st Report from the Communities and Local Government Committee, HC 503, and the Government response; Towards the next Defence and Security Review Part Two: NATO, 3rd Report from the Defence Committee, HC 358, and the Government response, HC 755.]

Tuesday 3 March—Estimates day (3rd allotted day). There will be a debate on support for housing costs in the reformed welfare system, followed by a debate on children’s and adolescents’ mental health and child and adolescent mental health services. Further details will be given in the Official Report. At 7 pm, the House will be asked to agree all outstanding estimates.

[The details are as follows: Support for housing costs in the reformed welfare system, 4th Report from the Work and Pensions Committee, HC 720 of Session 2013-14; Children’s and adolescents’ mental health and CAMHS, 3rd Report from the Health Committee, HC 342, and the Government response.]

Wednesday 4 March—Proceedings on the Supply and Appropriation (Anticipations and Adjustments) Bill, followed by remaining stages of the Corporation Tax (Northern Ireland) Bill, followed by Opposition day (unallotted half-day). There will be a debate on an Opposition motion; subject to be announced.

Thursday 5 March—There will be a general debate on international women’s day, followed by a general debate on Welsh affairs. The subjects for both debates were determined by the Backbench Business Committee.

Friday 6 March—Private Members’ Bills.

The provisional business for the week commencing 9 March will include:

Monday 9 March—Remaining stages of the Armed Forces (Service Complaints and Financial Assistance) Bill [Lords], followed by consideration of Lords amendments to the Consumer Rights Bill, followed by a motion to approve a European document relating to “Commission Work Programme 2015”, followed by business to be nominated by the Backbench Business Committee.

Tuesday 10 March—Consideration of Lords amendments to the Deregulation Bill, followed by a motion to approve statutory instruments relating to counter-terrorism, followed by a motion to approve a European document relating to subsidiarity and proportionality and the Commission’s relations with national Parliaments.

Wednesday 11 March—Opposition day (19th allotted day). There will be a debate on a motion in the name of the Democratic Unionist party—subject to be announced—followed by a motion to approve a statutory instrument relating to terrorism.

Thursday 12 March—Business to be nominated by the Backbench Business Committee.

Friday 13 March—The House will not be sitting.

I should also like to inform the House that the business in Westminster Hall on 5 March will be a general debate on planning and the national planning policy framework.

[Ms Eagle]

I thank the Leader of the House.

Monday and Tuesday are estimates days, and we shall have a chance to scrutinise Government waste, but the form of the debates will allow us only to scratch the surface of those overspends. Does the Leader of the House agree that rather than three days being allocated for debate, the estimates process needs to be made much more rigorous? Will he support our plans for a yearly session of budget questions to each Department, so that Secretaries of State can be held to account directly for their spending decisions?

Yesterday my hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Glenda Jackson) described what seemed to be a worrying case of the blatant misuse of public resources for party-political purposes. After she had passed an e-mail from a concerned constituent to the Prime Minister, her constituent received a party-political reply from No. 10 featuring propaganda about the Conservative Party manifesto. Will the Leader of the House tell us whether party-political letters are being prepared at public expense and civil service neutrality is being undermined, or whether correspondence intended for the Prime Minister is being passed directly to the Conservative party? Will he tell us why this seems to be a developing theme with this Government, with millions of letters to small businesses on No. 10 headed paper filled with Tory propaganda, Government announcements conveniently located in marginal seats, the Prime Minister and Chancellor travelling the country on public money on their “long-term economic scam tour” and the unexplained 22% rise in the Government’s external communications bill just as the election is approaching? Will the Leader of the House also arrange for an urgent statement from the Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General on these disturbing developments?

Today, we have had the last set of quarterly migration figures before the election and it is clear that the Prime Minister’s pledge to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands is now in tatters. Instead of net migration’s being reduced, it is now higher than it was at the start of this Parliament and illegal immigration and exploitation are getting worse. Will the Leader of the House arrange for a statement from the Home Secretary on the huge failure in her Department?

Figures released this week show that the number of people on zero-hours contracts has soared, but in this place we have had the sorry sight of the Conservative party defending the right of its MPs to earn millions of pounds on the side. Our motion yesterday was a sensible solution to the widening gap between the rules we have in this place and the standards the public expect of us. In a democracy, when we are out of step with public opinion we must change. The Government voted against banning paid directorships and consultancies, so I want to ask the Leader of the House whether his party is ready to contemplate any form of change.

I have been reading an interview this morning with the Prime Minister in woman&home magazine. In it, he praised his wife and said that behind every great man there is a great woman. Surely he meant that behind every great man there is a very surprised woman.

I am getting a bit worried, Mr Speaker. During questions yesterday, the Prime Minister boasted of how successfully he combines his job as Prime Minister with being the Member of Parliament for West Oxfordshire. That must be easy, because the constituency of West Oxfordshire does not even exist. Last week, the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr Burrowes) knocked on the door of a local resident claiming that he was their MP, but was greeted by the wife of my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Mr Love), who pointed out that he was in fact canvassing in the wrong constituency. I do not know about second jobs, but perhaps they should pay a bit more attention to their first ones. It is of course possible that they both just had a mind blank, like the leader of the Green party, who was involved in an eco-friendly car crash at the LBC studios on Tuesday. I gather that following her interview the Green party has joined the Conservative party in campaigning to be excluded from the leaders’ debates.

Although some Government members do not seem to know quite where their constituencies are, the hon. Member for Bosworth (David Tredinnick) appears to have left his for another planet entirely. He has been formulating the new Conservative health policy and not content with wasting £3 billion on a top-down reorganisation of the NHS, he told a journal this week that the way to take the huge pressure off doctors is astrology. He claimed that it is a useful diagnostic tool, enabling us to see strengths and weaknesses via the birth chart. It is unclear whether he thinks that the Chancellor would have met his deficit reduction targets if only he had not broken that mirror.

One person losing his constituency by choice is the Leader of the House. Asked at the weekend why he was leaving Parliament, he replied, “I’ve been Foreign Secretary and I’m determined not to be Prime Minister.” If I may say so, that goes some way to explaining his time as Leader of the Opposition.

[Mr Hague]

As ever, I am grateful for the questions from the hon. Lady. It shows what a broad party we are that we welcome views from all parts of the galaxy, as she has just demonstrated. On the question of what is behind every great man, I have always thought that behind every great man is an astonished mother-in-law, so that is a further refinement of that phrase. I can assure her that the Prime Minister knows where his constituency is and it is of course in west Oxfordshire even though that might not be its name. It would be wise, of course, for all candidates from all parties to know the boundaries of their constituencies for the general election.

On the so-called car crash interview of the leader of the Green party, I think she has been taking lessons from the shadow Chancellor, who has given a series of disastrous interviews in which he has managed to fall out with his own window cleaner, quite apart from anything else. I have previously put the hon. Lady forward for her party leadership, but I really think she ought to consider being the shadow Chancellor in the coming general election campaign, because a shadow Cabinet member has said that if the shadow Chancellor

“carries on behaving like this he is not unassailable…He has complete contempt for colleagues. He’s not a team player.”

The hon. Lady is a team player and she could replace him. I think she would do a much better job than he has done. Indeed, Labour might not then need to bring back Lord Prescott to the front line of the campaign, which in any election campaign is a sure sign of desperation.