Backbench Business Committee

Baroness Primarolo Excerpts

Tuesday 15th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Natascha Engel]

rose—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. May I say to the hon. Lady that the amendment that the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) is encouraging her to discuss has not been selected? May I also say that I am letting the debate run, but the interventions are getting a little long now, so could we keep them sharply related to the debate?

[Natascha Engel]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. The amendment was not selected, and that is a great shame. However, it will at least be a marker, and something to campaign on in future. I will discuss that with my hon. Friend later.

On the reason that we seek to establish a Back-Bench business committee, the idea that we should bring things out into the open, and whether those meetings should be in public or in private, the first motion states that the Back-Bench committee

“shall be a select committee”.

On the whole, Select Committees—I think that this is mentioned in “Erskine May”—have public meetings. That is part of the point of Select Committees. They are not just bodies of scrutiny; they are also bodies of public engagement. Although deals will be done, our starting point has to be that we want to be open, transparent and accessible to the public. I take my hon. Friend’s point but our starting point has to be openness.

I want to ask a few specific questions about the way in which the Back-Bench committee will work. I have written them down. I will read them out and pass them over behind the Speaker’s Chair so that the Minister does not have to take copious notes. Given that the Back-Bench business committee is going to be a Select Committee, does that mean that members of the public will not be excluded from the meetings? It is not mentioned either way in the motions. Does it mean that members of the public can attend those meetings, or are they excluded from the meetings of the committee?

The same goes for MPs who are not members of the Back-Bench committee. Will they be allowed to attend even the private meetings of the committee? Will they be there during its deliberations? What will the committee’s party political make-up be? Has there been an arrangement that we do not know about yet on the allocation of the different memberships? If so, what will they be? How many of the seats will be allocated to the smaller parties and to Independents?

Can a chair of another Select Committee stand to be elected either as the chair of the Back-Bench committee or as one of its members? Whatever the answer to that is, I would love to know who made the decision, because the amendment in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Andrew Miller) was not selected. I will pass those questions over via the back of the Chair. I thank hon. Members for their attention.