Sittings of the House (20 and 23 March)

Angela Smith Excerpts

Thursday 23rd February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)]

The motion before us gives the Government the opportunity—or the right—to table the extra day’s debate required for the Budget. In tabling the motion, the Government had a clear choice: they could have extended business to Wednesday 28 March, but instead they have chosen to extend it in the preceding week, to Friday 23 March.

The first point to make about today’s motion is that it clearly illustrates the Government’s incompetent management of the business of the House, in that it was only last October—when it was absolutely known that the Budget statement would be made on Wednesday 21 March—that the recess from Tuesday 27 March was determined. The incompetence of the Government, in being unable to arrange their business in the required time for the debate on the Budget statement, is staggering. The fact that we have to be here today, debating and putting right the Government’s incompetence and their mistake in timetabling the Budget business, is staggering. However, even given the situation that they are in, the Government have not decided to put the start of the recess back by one day, but have, in effect, chosen to go for a Friday sitting.

Given the Government’s incompetence in scheduling business, there is a further question that begs to be answered. Why are they not making the more obvious choice of extending the business to Wednesday 28 March? Is it because the Prime Minister does not like being held to account in this Chamber? Is he trying to avoid Prime Minister’s questions? The evidence is crystal clear. An analysis of recent parliamentary recess dates shows that the House of Commons has risen on a Tuesday, rather than the more usual Thursday, on 63% of occasions since the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr Cameron) became Prime Minister.

[Brandon Lewis (Great Yarmouth) (Con)]

If that is really the case, how does the hon. Lady account for the fact that the present Prime Minister has spent more time at the Dispatch Box than the previous Prime Minister did?

[Angela Smith]

It has to be said that the previous Prime Minister faced up to his global leadership responsibilities in the face of the biggest recession in this country for 60 years, unlike the present Prime Minister, whose global leadership involves standing on the sidelines and walking away from negotiations. Our previous Prime Minister played his part and led the world in showing the way out of the previous crisis.

This Government’s unwillingness to be held to account is becoming more apparent by the day. First, they rushed through the Commons a number of highly controversial pieces of legislation in the early days of this Parliament, denying this Chamber the right to proper scrutiny of their provisions.

[Mr Bone]

The hon. Lady is making a fair point, but it is one that could equally have been made about the last Government. Is it the Opposition’s view that we should now get rid of programme motions?

[Angela Smith]

That is not necessarily the case. What we are discussing today is the need for competent scheduling of the business of the House, rather than last-minute motions on the Floor of the House as a result of the Government getting themselves into a hole in regard to the time they have allowed for debate.

The Bills to which I have just referred are now bogged down in the Lords, with the detested Health and Social Care Bill alone requiring more than 1,000 Government amendments so far. Furthermore, we have Ministers regularly ignoring the rights of this House over important announcements about Government policy. Many Members will recall the occasions on which it has been necessary to point out to the House that a Minister has yet again briefed the media, before briefing the House, on an important matter.

Now, we have a Prime Minister who will apparently do almost anything to avoid being held to account at PMQs. The House is therefore entitled to ask why the Prime Minister is so reluctant to account to his peers for his actions. This is, after all, the man whose self-confidence led him to say, live on air, “Bring it on!” when asked in 2009 whether he was looking forward to the general election. This is the man who wanted to “Fire up the Quattro”, and who gave voters the clear impression that he was a man who meant business and knew what he was about.

[Brandon Lewis]

Given the hon. Lady’s comments about the Prime Minister attending Prime Minister’s questions, what does that tell us about the previous Prime Minister, who spent about half as much time at PMQs as the present one?

--- Later in debate ---

[Angela Smith]

I think the hon. Gentleman asked that question only a few minutes ago—[Hon. Members: “You didn’t answer.”] The question was answered.

[Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

I am moved to suggest to my hon. Friend that one of the reasons that the previous Prime Minister felt able to leave the Wednesday Question Time to his deputy was that he trusted her.

[Angela Smith]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. That is another reason for my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) finding it impossible, on occasion, to get to the Dispatch Box. He gave global leadership in the credit crunch, and he trusted his deputy. Whether this current Prime Minister trusts his deputy is open to question.

All the evidence suggests the opposite of what we have heard, and that our Prime Minister is a leader who cannot get his facts straight and who is increasingly running scared of being held to account on the detail of his Government’s policies. With your indulgence, Mr Deputy Speaker, I will illustrate this point with examples. Let us take, for instance, what the Prime Minister claimed only the other week:

“The proportion of police officers on the front line is up”.—[Official Report, 8 February 2012; Vol. 540, c. 295.]

That is a misleading claim, if ever there was one. Of course, his reference was to the proportions of front-line officers rather than their overall numbers. Thus, where perhaps 12 front-line officers were assisted in their work by six support staff, there might now be only six front-line officers and only two support staff. The proportion would be higher, but the number of front-line officers would have been cut by 50%. In the end, the Prime Minister will not be able to continue to defend the line that front-line policing is being protected when budgets are being cut by 20%. About 16,000 police officers are likely to lose their jobs, and the Prime Minister knows that he will be called to account for that at Prime Minister’s questions.

The Prime Minister has, of course, already been called to account at the Dispatch Box by the Leader of the Opposition for his Government’s disastrous Health and Social Care Bill. Only yesterday, we witnessed in this Chamber the Prime Minister thrashing around, desperately trying to trade insults and to deploy soundbites in an attempt to deflect attention from his unpopular and unwanted top-down reorganisation of the NHS.

Two weeks earlier, just before the recess, the Prime Minister claimed at Prime Minister’s Question Time that 100,000 more patients are being treated every month. It was possible to make that claim, however, only if one compared May 2010 with November 2011. If one compares May 2010 to May 2011 and November 2010 to November 2011, one finds that the figures are, in fact, static. Equally, the Prime Minister claimed that there were 4,000 extra doctors since the election. That is true, of course, but it is not something that he can take credit for. After all, it takes between five and seven years to train a doctor and the extra numbers are therefore a legacy of the previous Labour Government.

So there we have it—a Prime Minister who knows that his cavalier approach to answering the questions posed to him by this House is under pressure, who knows that his slapdash approach to Prime Minister’s questions is being increasingly exposed, thereby revealing him and his Government as incompetent and not up to the task of taking this country through the very challenging times in which it finds itself. No wonder this Government want to avoid Prime Minister’s questions wherever possible. It is the one occasion every week when the spotlight is on everything they do, and they increasingly worry that they will be found wanting. In the interests of accountability and democracy, we oppose the motion.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Hollobone]

I am most grateful for that suggestion.

When I flagged up the issue during business questions earlier today, the Leader of the House said that the Deputy Leader of the House would provide a powerful response to my amendments during his speech. I do not know whether the Deputy Leader of the House left his notes in the Leader of the House’s office, but his contribution certainly did not constitute a powerful response to the amendments, which I found disappointing. This could have been the occasion for the establishment in the Chamber of a new doctrine, the Heath doctrine, to celebrate Her Majesty’s diamond jubilee. The Heath doctrine could have stated that whenever a sitting in Westminster Hall is cancelled for understandable reasons, the parliamentary air time must be replaced by an alternative sitting. The Deputy Leader of the House would have been applauded by Members on both sides of the House, and I am disappointed that he did not choose to grasp that chalice.

My hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough is right: there are all sorts of innovative ways in which the Government could overcome the difficulty of allocating the time. If we accept that, as the rules stand, it is up to the Government to decide what debates take place, the Government could say, for example, to the Speaker’s Office through the Table Office, “We must allocate this time, but will you invite applications from Back Benchers to fill the slot? We will then take your recommendation for filling the time appropriately.” That would have been the imaginative and innovative solution that I would expect from our two colleagues, and I am sorry that they did not think of it.

There is no shortage of potential debates in Westminster Hall. Only today, we heard 37 Back Benchers call for debates on a range of subjects: cosmetic surgery, north-east regional strategy, the Royal Bank of Scotland, drought and the national water grid, the Olympics, working tax credits, youth unemployment, music exports, Syria, international women’s day, elected mayors, design patents, directory inquiries, high streets, defence procurement, work experience schemes, unemployment in the north-east, business in the community, the Backbench Business Committee, arms exports to the middle east and north Africa, apprenticeships, local heating schemes, music licences in public places, bans on protest marches, the economy, education and manufacturing, employment law, Professor Ebdon, job clubs, small and medium-sized enterprises in retail, manufacturing, energy companies and their customers, and the efficiencies of police services. That is just the list for today; I am sure that in most weeks many further requests are made to the Leader and Deputy Leader of the House.

Representations to the Backbench Business Committee continue to flood in, too. There is a long list of outstanding issues for which it has not been possible to allocate any time, simply because the Government have not allocated the Committee sufficient time to be able to debate them. When the Backbench Business Committee was established, we were promised that it would get 35 days per Session. The gentleman’s agreement—to use a sexist phrase—was that that would, in effect, be 35 days per year. This Session lasts for two years, however, and although I am not a great mathematician, I believe that the Backbench Business Committee should therefore be allocated 70 days for the discussion of issues Back Benchers wish to raise, but today’s Order Paper reveals that it has been allocated only 53 and a half days, and we are about to go into March. It appears that we will fall well short of that 70 total, therefore. Some of these outstanding issues could be scheduled for debate in an extra day in Westminster Hall. That would go some way towards dealing with the large number of issues that have come before the Committee.

Amendments (a) and (b) are reasonable measures intended to preserve the power of this Chamber to hold the Government to account and to allow Back Benchers on both sides of the House to raise constituency interests and concerns. Even at this late stage, it is not too late for the Leader and Deputy Leader of the House to have what was called this morning a Pauline conversion and to say, “Yes, this is a good idea from the Members for Kettering and Wellingborough. We wish we had thought of it, but we’re going to be charitable because we know that these two fine gentlemen have the best interests of the House at heart. We will support amendment (a).” If they were to say that, no one would cheer them louder than my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough and me.

Amendment (c) would allow for an extra sitting day on Wednesday 28 March. That is a separate issue from the rescheduling of Westminster Hall time. It is, in part, to do with the issue raised by the hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith) about Prime Minister’s questions, but not for the reasons she suggested. I think the Prime Minister does extremely well at PMQs. It is an occasion when the great British public tune in to see Parliament at work. If we ask our constituents whether they watch any of the parliamentary television coverage, most of them will say that they do not, but most of those who say they do will watch PMQs. It is a regular half hour each week that people know is worth watching for information, news and, frankly, entertainment. The great British public look forward to Prime Minister’s questions and I think that, just on the basic level, it is a shame that the nation and the House is denied an opportunity for Prime Minister’s questions, regardless of who the Prime Minister is and of which party is in power, because it is a great British occasion. It is a shame that by having the Adjournment on the Tuesday, we do not get Prime Minister’s questions on the Wednesday.

On a partisan point, I take completely the opposite view to the hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith), because I think that the Prime Minister does extremely well at PMQs. I understand her point of view—she thinks he does particularly badly—but these differences are what makes for good debate and for the sense of occasion. I suspect that the Prime Minister enjoys Prime Minister’s questions and that he will be disappointed that he is not able to come here on that Wednesday. I suspect—this will doubtless be written down and used against me at some future point—that the Prime Minister is being given bad advice. I do not know whether it is coming from the Leader of the House or the Government Chief Whip, but someone is telling him, “Look, it would be a good idea to have the Adjournment on the Tuesday, so that you don’t have to go through all the hassle of Prime Minister’s questions on the Wednesday.” That is bad advice, wrongly given, and I suspect that the Prime Minister is disappointed that he will not have the opportunity to address the nation on that day.

On a serious level, all this does mean that the nation goes without Prime Minister’s questions for a month when it need not do so. According to the Government’s timetable, the last Prime Minister’s questions before the recess will be on Budget day, Wednesday 21 March, and the next Prime Minister’s questions will take place on the first Wednesday when Parliament comes back—Wednesday 18 April. So for almost a month the nation will be deprived of Prime Minister’s questions. Will the wheels come off the country, will the nation stop working and will everything grind to a halt? No, of course that will not happen, but there is no need to have a month between Prime Minister’s questions. We are talking about the Prime Minister of our country, and it would be a good precedent—perhaps this could be the Young doctrine—if the sign-off note before entering a recess were the Prime Minister answering questions from hon. Members in this House, to set the nation off for the recess. Would that not be a wonderful parliamentary occasion?

[Angela Smith]

The hon. Gentleman makes a strong case about PMQs. Will he acknowledge that the Prime Minister will be absent again on the week prior to 21 March because of a visit to the United States, so we will have the pleasure of the Prime Minister’s presence and responses in PMQs in only one week out of five?

[Mr Hollobone]

I did not know that, and I am most grateful for the helpful intervention. No doubt the nation will be disappointed by that. I suspect that hon. Members on both sides of the House will relish the opportunity to see how the Deputy Prime Minister performs, and that may well make for a rather more entertaining Wednesday in that particular week. I am making a genuine point when I say that there is no need to have a month’s gap in between hearing from the Prime Minister, given that we could have a new Young doctrine that says that it is important for the Prime Minister to sign off on the Session before the recess starts.