Sittings of the House

Ann Coffey Excerpts

Wednesday 11th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jack Straw (Blackburn) (Lab)]

I shall stick to five minutes for my speech, Mr Speaker.

I am grateful to the right hon. Member for East Yorkshire (Mr Knight) for the work he and other members of the Procedure Committee have done. I have no nostalgia for the old hours at all. Sitting into the small hours and going on until 11.30 pm was absurd. I also strongly support what my right hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Dame Joan Ruddock) said about Friday sittings. We should not move private Members’ business to a separate ghetto after normal business. There should, for example, be 13 days allocated to private Member’s Bills in the normal sitting week, which the business of the House committee that would be formed would allocate according to need, and there should be proper knives coming down for that business, as with any other business.

We would be in grave error if we moved to a 7 o’clock finish on a Tuesday, however. We tried that, based on the 2001 Modernisation Committee report, and it was found not to be workable. In the words of one of my hon. Friends—who is not known as a neanderthal—in the Tea Room earlier, it was a “nightmare to operate.”

[Ann Coffey (Stockport) (Lab)]

When it came to the vote, 225 voted to retain the early hours and 292 voted against, so 225 Members of the 2001-05 Parliament thought the hours did work.

[Mr Straw]

My hon. Friend makes my point. The vote was decisively lost—[Interruption.] It was lost.