Business of the House

Debate between Angela Eagle and Lord Jackson of Peterborough

Thursday 4th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Ms Eagle]

I thank the Leader of the House for announcing next week’s business. We have all been watching with concern as events in Egypt unfold. There are many British nationals in the country, so will the Leader of the House ensure that Members are regularly updated on this fast-moving situation?

The Financial Services (Banking Reform) Bill returns to this place on Monday, as the right hon. Gentleman has announced. The hon. Member for Chichester (Mr Tyrie) and I asked him last week whether he would provide extra time to ensure consideration of all the necessary amendments stemming from the recommendations of the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards. I thus thank the right hon. Gentleman for responding by granting an extra half day, which will allow some extra time for this important Bill? Will he confirm that he will protect the additional time he has allocated so that we do not lose it to Government statements and find ourselves back where we started?

This Government have a woeful record on telling the media what is happening before they tell this House—in breach of the ministerial code. Yesterday, we reached a new low with the Defence Secretary’s spectacular failure to provide Members with crucial documents relating to his statement on Army reserves. You, Mr Speaker, have rightly admonished the Defence Secretary in the strongest possible terms, and today’s Order Paper says that there will be a clarification statement, but by the time I rose to speak, we had still not received it. Surely the Defence Secretary should now have the guts to come back and subject himself to the scrutiny of Members, who will finally have adequate information in front of them.

I pointed out a few weeks ago that the Education Secretary is at the bottom of the Government’s correspondence class, with a damning report from the Procedure Committee showing that eight out of 10 of his responses to MPs are answered late. This week, we have discovered why: he has been so busy composing an edict on the content of his departmental letters that he is not doing the day job. Apparently, he has demanded prose worthy of Jane Austen, George Orwell and, rather oddly, Matthew Parris. Does the Leader of the House agree that if the Education Secretary spent less time telling everyone else how to do their jobs and more time doing his, we would not have a shortage of a quarter of a million primary school places? Does he also agree that this is further proof that with this Government it is all about spin and never about substance?

The Back-Bench Bill to be presented by the hon. Member for Stockton South (James Wharton) is becoming a classic parliamentary farce. I hear that in order to keep Members here for the big day, the Prime Minister has been forced to invite his mutinous colleagues round for a barbecue tonight. While millionaire donors get kitchen suppers at No. 10, the poor Back Benchers are shoved out into the garden.

[Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)]

It will not be a pyjama party.

[Ms Eagle]

If it is a pyjama party, perhaps Rebekah Brooks should be there.

I am told that the Prime Minister will be flipping the “posh burgers”, while the Cabinet will be dishing them out. That may sound like a rare treat, but there will be trouble if members of the Cabinet do their burgers the same as they do their policy: reconstituted, undercooked and over-garnished. I certainly would not relish them.

I note that the Tory Taliban continue to fire on all cylinders. Tomorrow they will debate the introduction of a Margaret Thatcher day, and next Friday they will debate the abolition of any protection against sexual harassment in the workplace. Their alternative Queen’s Speech is so off the wall that I cannot help wondering what they will come up with next. A Bill to disfranchise all but the landed gentry, perhaps? The repeal of the Factory Acts? A Bill to confirm that the earth is indeed flat?

It is not just the Prime Minister’s Back Benchers who are out of touch. On Tuesday, Tory welfare Minister Lord Freud denied that there was any link between the rise of food banks and the Government’s benefit chaos. Since the Government’s benefit changes, there has been a sevenfold increase in visits to food banks in Wirral. They were visited by 9,000 people this year, and in most cases the reason was the benefit changes. This is a Government who have given a tax cut to their millionaire donors while plunging a third of a million more children into poverty. May we have a debate on what they can possibly mean by their increasingly ludicrous phrase “We’re all in this together”?

This week, in an attempt to seem like a man of the people, the Prime Minister told a group of Kazakh students that he aspired to be the most high-profile member of an élite club at an élite school: Harry Potter. That outraged Potter fans everywhere, and inspired The Daily Telegraph to organise a poll which concluded that he was actually more like Draco Malfoy. The Defence Secretary cannot make a statement to the House, the Education Secretary cannot answer questions, and the Chancellor cannot organise a burger stunt. Is not the reality that the Prime Minister is presiding over a Cabinet of muggles?

Charging for Access to Parliament

Debate between Angela Eagle and Lord Jackson of Peterborough

Thursday 15th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) on his persistence in getting this debate and on his passionate advocacy of the position that he has taken. However, I hope that the House will accept the amendment moved by the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (John Thurso) for the Commission to have another look at the issue.

My hon. Friend the Member for Dunfermline and West Fife (Thomas Docherty) made the profoundly true observation that we, and all our constituents, are struggling with how to prioritise difficult decisions in tough times, and this is one such example. We are not in an ideal world where perhaps all access to this building could be free, but we have to make the savings that—at the beginning of this Parliament—Mr Speaker, in his role as head of the House of Commons Commission, committed us to making.

It is also important to remember that this issue is about the Clock Tower, not about access to this building in its working sense as a Parliament. Our constituents will still have free access to see their Members of Parliament and to watch proceedings in the Chamber from the Public Gallery, as well as to visit Committees. I for one would not support the amendment if I thought that there would be any slippage in that very important principle. We need to separate the two issues, although I do understand the worries that people have.

[Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)]

I agree with some of the hon. Lady’s basic tenets, but is it not true that as a result of the opaque and antediluvian nature of the Commission and the Management Board, we are effectively held accountable for decisions over which we have had no real, effective or demonstrable say?

[Ms Eagle]

That is a very timely intervention from the hon. Gentleman as I was about to deal with that point, especially as I am a very new member of the House of Commons Commission. I have been in the House for 20 years and always thought that the way in which the House was managed was rather antediluvian and opaque, to put it kindly. I expected when I was given this job that I would dash into the Commission and everything would be revealed. I thought that I would see how the House and all of its domestic Committees worked. I have to confess that after a few months I am still rather of the hon. Gentleman’s view, and light, transparency and more debate about such matters should be organised. We need to think as a Parliament about how we can bring that about.

We are all busy. Doubtless everybody read the e-mails that were sent in 2010 about this issue, but perhaps they did not fully take them in. I therefore have much sympathy with the hon. Gentleman’s point, and we should consider how we might ventilate the serious issues that the Management Board has to deal with so that hon. Members on both sides of the House become aware of them in a more timely way. E-mails go out, but we cannot force Members to notice them or read them in detail. The system is antediluvian and lacks transparency, and we might want to think about more modern approaches.