Business of the House

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Thursday 9th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

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

[The Leader of the House of Commons (Sir George Young)]

The business for the week commencing 20 February will be:

Monday 20 February—Motion relating to Iran. The subject for this debate has been nominated by the Backbench Business Committee.

Tuesday 21 February—If necessary consideration of Lords amendments, followed by a European document relating to the remuneration of European Union staff.

The Chairman of Ways and Means has named opposed private business for consideration.

Wednesday 22 February—Opposition day (un-allotted day). There will be a debate on an Opposition motion including on the publication of the NHS risk register.

Thursday 23 February—Motions relating to the draft Social Security Benefits Up-rating Order 2012, the draft Guaranteed Minimum Pensions Increase Order 2012, and the draft Pensions Act 2008 (Abolition of Protected Rights) (Consequential Amendments) (No. 2) (Amendment) Order 2012.

The provisional business for the week commencing 27 February will include:

Monday 27 February—Estimates day (4th allotted day). Details will be given in the Official Report.

[The details are as follows: Funding for the Olympics and Paralympics: Oral evidence taken before the Culture, Media and Sport Committee on 14 and 21 December 2010, HC689 i and ii, 17 May 2011, HC689-iii, 15 November 2011, HC689-iv, and 24 January 2012, HC689-v; Forensic Science Service: 7th Report from the Science and Technology Committee of session 2010-12, HC 855; Government Response – The Forensic Science Service, Cm 8215]

Colleagues will wish to be reminded that they will have the opportunity to pay individual tributes to Her Majesty the Queen on 7 March during the debate on the Humble Address, marking the 60th anniversary of her accession to the throne.

I should also like to inform the House that the business in Westminster Hall for 23 February will be:

Thursday 23 February—Debate on cycling.

For the convenience of the House, I would like to provide additional information on the parliamentary calendar. The House will return from the conference recess on Monday 15 October. In addition to the dates already announced, the House will rise at the close of play on Tuesday 13 November and return on Monday 19 November. The House will rise at the close of play on Thursday 20 December and return on Monday 7 January 2013.

As previously announced, my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer will deliver his Budget statement on Wednesday 21 March. As is usual, the Budget debate will continue for a further three days. I will bring forward a motion to allow the continuation of the Budget debate on Friday 23 March. This will also facilitate the Backbench Business Committee’s usual pre-recess Adjournment debate prior to the Easter recess on Tuesday 27 March.

The House will also want to be aware that the private Members’ Bills Fridays for the next Session will be: 6 July, 13 July, 7 September, 14 September, 19 October, 26 October, 2 November, 9 November, 30 November, 18 January 2013, 25 January, 1 February and 1 March. All these dates are contained in a revised version of the calendar, now available for Members and staff from the Vote Office.

[Ms Eagle]

I thank the Leader of the House for his statement and for announcing yet another packed week.

The Government’s legislative incompetence has reached new heights with the announcement the Leader of the House has just made of a Friday sitting for the Budget. Did Government business managers forget to schedule the time they needed to debate the Budget, or did the Chancellor not bother to inform them when he announced the date? They certainly know how to manage the legislative factory, although I note that once again, the House is rising on a Tuesday so the Prime Minister can dodge his Question Time.

Yesterday, the Government were defeated in the Lords on day one of the Report stage of the Health and Social Care Bill. In yesterday’s Financial Times a Conservative Back Bencher was quoted as saying:

“No Tory MP knows what the point of these reforms is”.

Let me reassure Conservative Members: they are not alone. No one—with the possible exception of the Health Secretary—understands the point of these reforms. However, what doctors, nurses, the royal colleges, patients’ groups—in fact, just about anyone working in or using the health service—do understand is that this disastrous Bill is damaging our NHS. As the massive increase in the number of people waiting more than 18 weeks for treatment shows, it is patients who are suffering.

The Health Secretary may have presided over the biggest legislative shambles and policy disaster in recent history, but apparently the Prime Minister still has confidence in him. I do not imagine he feels particularly reassured, given that one No. 10 insider is quoted in The Times as saying that the Health Secretary

“should be taken out and shot”.

That was followed by a story in The Daily Telegraph with a headline saying that No. 10 does not want to shoot the Health Secretary. Given that the Prime Minister cannot even get his story straight on whether or not he wants to shoot his Ministers, is it any wonder that they have made such a mess of running the NHS? Will the Government recognise reality and finally drop the Health and Social Care Bill?

Ever willing to help the Government out, the Deputy Prime Minister briefed this week that he thought about vetoing the Health and Social Care Bill, but decided against it “for the sake of coalition unity”. So there we have it: the Liberal Democrats in government—power before principle.

The Health and Social Care Bill has become the latest Government Bill to run into trouble in the Lords. Over the period of the Labour Government, when we lost about a third of whipped Divisions in the Lords, the proportion of Labour peers reached a maximum of 30%. Representation on the Government Front Bench in the Lords is already at 39%. Will the Leader of the House therefore rule out stuffing the House of Lords any further with Government peers?

The Deputy Prime Minister also said this week that he was asking Liberal Democrats “day in, day out” to vote for things they

“wouldn’t do in a month of Sundays”

if there were a majority Liberal Democrat Government. It might have escaped his notice, but we have not been voting for legislation “day in, day out” due to the Government’s shambolic mishandling of parliamentary business in this House. The few votes we have had were clearly too much for the children’s Minister, who fled London rather than going into the Division Lobby with the Conservatives to vote for the Welfare Reform Bill. Does the Leader of the House agree with his own Back Benchers who said that the children's Minister should have the courage to vote for the Government’s business, or the guts to resign?

Labour called for the RBS chief executive not to take his bonus; it happened. Labour called for the board of Network Rail not to take their bonuses; it happened. On Tuesday, Labour initiated a debate on bankers’ bonuses and not a single Cabinet Minister could be bothered to speak for the Government. The Chancellor, speaking to the Federation of Small Businesses, even seemed to think it was anti-business to be talking about executive pay at all. Had he deigned to come to this House on Tuesday, he would have realised it is actually about fairness.

Will the Leader of the House confirm that as a result of quantitative easing, every bank in the country has benefited from taxpayer funding, and does he agree that it is not fair for the bosses of all the banks that have benefited from taxpayer support to earn in one day many times more than most people in this country earn in a lifetime? Every time I have raised this matter, the right hon. Gentleman has ducked the question. Given that Barclays is due to announce its bonus round, will the Leader of the House now send an unequivocal message to banking bosses about what the Government consider fair?

I want to pay tribute to two remarkable women. Her Majesty the Queen has reigned for 60 years, and her commitment to the nation and the Commonwealth has rightly earned respect across the country and around the world. Florence Green, who died this week at the age of 110, was the last known surviving service member from world war one. Mrs Green was one of 100,000 women to serve this country in the great war. Will the Leader of the House now agree to schedule the traditional debate to mark international women’s day, so that we can pay tribute to the service of those remarkable women and many others who enhance our public life in this country?

[Sir George Young]

The Government are anxious that we should have the normal pre-Easter recess Adjournment debate, which is normally scheduled by the Backbench Business Committee, and that is why we are scheduling an additional day’s debate on the Friday after the Budget; if we did not do so, there would be a risk that that popular occasion would be squeezed out of the calendar.

The Prime Minister relishes Prime Minister’s questions—probably more than the Leader of the Opposition does. If the hon. Lady had been listening to what I said, she would have heard me announce that the House would be rising on a Thursday in December, not on a Tuesday. As for the upper House, the Labour party has more peers than any other party and if there was representation on the basis of votes at the previous general election, Labour would clearly not be entitled to that number of peers.

There are three principles in the Health and Social Care Bill: more control for patients; more power for professionals; and less bureaucracy. Those are three principles that the previous Labour Government were embarked on following when they were in power; they were establishing foundation trusts, they were promoting choice and they were promoting practice-based commissioning in the mid-2000s. We take forward that agenda. In addition, I say to the hon. Lady that it is called the “Health and Social Care Bill”—everyone agrees that social care must be linked more closely to the NHS, and the Bill promotes better financial and professional integration. As for the independent sector, I just remind her of what her manifesto said:

“We will support an active role for the independent sector working alongside the NHS in the provision of care”.

We are actually precluding the sort of arrangements that Labour promoted, whereby independent treatment centres were parachuted into the NHS with no powers for the NHS to compete.

On the point about the education Minister, the shadow Leader of the House was a Minister and she knows perfectly well that Ministers are occasionally away on ministerial business. That was the issue for my hon. Friend. If the shadow Leader of the House looks at the voting register, she will find that a large number of her colleagues did not take part in that particular vote.

On taxing the banks, the shadow Leader of the House will know that our annual levy on the banks brings in more each year than Labour’s one-off tax—that deals with that issue.

On international women’s day, that debate is one of the fixed events now allocated to the Backbench Business Committee, but I can say in response to the hon. Lady’s question that we will seek to allocate to that Committee a day so that it can hold the traditional debate on international women’s day roughly on the date when it occurs in March.