House of Commons Business

Debate between Charles Walker and Helen Goodman

Thursday 8th May 2014 Commons Chamber

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

I want to confine my remarks to motion 5 on programming. I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg), with whom I enjoyed serving on the Procedure Committee. I am pleased that he took us back to the 1300s, because he has shown the context in which we can understand the glacial pace at which the Leader of the House seems to want to proceed in making changes to programming.

When we are thinking about improving the processes of this House, it is really important that we understand the poor reputation that the House has at the moment and has had previously. Maybe we have turned a corner, but maybe not. It is incumbent on all of us to show that this House is responsive, effective and understands what the public expect of us.

Broadly speaking, the House has three functions, all of which have been discussed today: holding the Government to account; raising matters of general concern and supporting campaigns; and legislating. Legislating is the one thing that only we can do. The media take part in holding the Government to account, and all citizens are involved with campaigning, but legislation is the one thing that is solely our responsibility, and we should therefore do it as well as possible. It is appalling that things get on to the statute book without any debate in this Chamber, but that is what has been happening. I do not want to take part in a partisan debate on this. From my experience in this Parliament and the previous Parliament, things were not altogether as they might have been in the previous Parliament.

In my view, the efforts that the Leader of the House has made to extend the time on Report do not do the business. We need a system that works so that we are not reliant on the good will of whoever happens to hold the office of Leader of the House and be in charge of timetabling business. The basic problem is that because there is a fixed time for amendments on Report, if there are too many groups, the early groups are debated and the later groups are not debated. This creates two problems. First, sometimes amendments tabled by Her Majesty’s Opposition or by Back Benchers do not get debated at all, so new ideas and possibilities are not floated. Secondly, because of our practice of voting on all the amendments, when the Government get their legislation through, the Government amendments are put on to the statute book without any discussion. Across the House, people are appalled by this, and if the public knew about it, they too would be appalled. That is what we need to address.

The Committee that produced the major report on this House, the Wright report, was particularly concerned about the fact that Back Benchers’ opinions are not voiced. The evidence that the Procedure Committee gathered about which Government amendments are put on the statute book without debate reflects a more serious problem. In the Session that we looked at, 28 clauses were put on to the statute book without any debate in this House. That is the equivalent of a small Bill; it is quite a substantial amount of legislation. Some of the subject matter might not have been so exciting, and in some cases, had there been an opportunity, it might have taken only 10 minutes to debate, but that is not true of all of it.

The extradition provisions were not discussed in this Chamber. Whichever view one takes—whether for or against the legislation—it is absolutely clear that those provisions were highly controversial. Such was their significance that it would have been right to discuss them properly. The problem did not begin on 5 May 2010. It has been going on for some time and we need to address it.

The Clerks of the Procedure Committee came up with an excellent way of dealing with the problem. It was suggested that if amendments could be tabled earlier, the Chair would have more time to produce a schedule for the day, and that the time given for debate on Report could be divided in proportion to the number of groups of amendments so that every group could be debated. Members have always been dependent on the excellent work of the Clerks in getting into the nitty-gritty and making a reality of our vaguer aspirations, and the Procedure Committee could not have produced a report as good as its third report without their help.

I made a tactical error because, having produced that third report, which suggested a solution to the problem, I resigned from the Procedure Committee. That was obviously a mistake, because I resigned before we received the Government’s response and I was not involved in the sixth report. The resistance of the Leader of the House to the suggestion that every single group of amendments should be debated on Report takes the heart out of the matter. We have the disadvantages of tabling amendments earlier, without the advantages of being confident that every single group will be debated, which was the whole object of the report.

If we are taking the glacial approach that has been taken over seven centuries towards the issue, I am prepared to go along with the motion; we have part of what we wanted, but not all of it. I am not confident, however, that in future we will feel that all parts of every Bill will have been debated, and we will have the disadvantage of having to do everything earlier.

[Mr Charles Walker]

May I say to the hon. Lady, before she gets too depressed, that we have reached the shoulder of the mountain, but the summit remains to be conquered?

[Helen Goodman]

I am glad that the Chair of the Procedure Committee, who chairs it most ably, is showing once again his political nous in his attempts to corral us. I hope he is right and that, after this experiment, the Procedure Committee will be able to return to the matter and see whether it has achieved its purpose. If not, I hope not only that the experiment will result in a permanent change to Standing Orders, but that all of the third report’s proposals will be fully implemented.

Amendment of Standing Orders

Debate between Charles Walker and Helen Goodman

Monday 2nd December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Walker]

The Backbench Business Committee is known for its independence of thought. I rather agree with my hon. Friend, who is a stalwart of the Procedure Committee and one of its leading lights. Once again, he has made an incisive contribution.

Because we do not have all night, I am now going to make a little progress. We also propose a new Standing Order—again, resisted by the Government—allowing the Backbench Business Committee to organise its own time through a motion proposed at the commencement of one of its days of business, regulating the business that follows. Such a change would enable the Committee to make provision for decisions on a series of motions and amendments to those motions to be taken together at the end of a debate, at the normal moment of interruption or before.

I shall canter through the next part of my speech. I shall have to read it, because it is quite complex, and I would not want to make a deliberate or unnecessary mistake. Let me give two examples in which that power might have been useful. In the case of recent debates on the sitting hours of the House, the need to take a complex series of votes before the usual time of interruption required the sacrifice of an hour and a half of debating time. The debate on assisted dying, which was scheduled to last an hour and a half, had to be voluntarily stopped 20 minutes early so that the first amendment could be put and voted on, in order to allow a second vote to be taken before the 7 pm deadline. The power might also provide for a timetable for decisions to be made on a series of separate motions at fixed points, or for a day simply to be divided between two or three debates. That would be entirely convenient to the House because it would make everything reasonably predictable.

In anticipation of resistance from the Government, the Committee has proposed a fairly formidable set of constraints on the use of the power, which I shall set out now. I can see that the House is waiting with bated breath to hear about this series of protections.

First, the decision to use the power must be a unanimous decision by the Committee, made, obviously, at a quorate meeting with due notice given. Secondly, the Committee— unlike the Government—is given no power to stretch a day, except in so far as Divisions might run past the normal moment of interruption. It cannot extend the length of a sitting on Thursday. Thirdly, and most importantly, the House would be free to disagree with any proposal made by the Committee at the start of the day to which it applied. The proposal would be put without debate, but could be divided on and defeated. If the House did not like it, the House could reject it.

So there is no possibility, in a perfect world—the world that I would like to see become a reality, although it is not going to become a reality tonight—of the Backbench Business Committee’s abusing its power to force the House to make unpalatable decisions in an unpalatable way. The whole Committee, and the whole House, must want the business to which this power might be applied to be conducted in a rational and predictable way. It is not applicable to anything other than Back-Bench business: it cannot affect Government business, Opposition business, or private Members’ Bills.

I appreciate that there is resistance to this. There are many here who feel that the Government, motivated by good will, would want to ensure whenever possible that the Backbench Business Committee was able to achieve its objectives, and that there would be helpful Whips supporting them in the process. This is where I diverge slightly from the view of my opposite number, the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Natascha Engel), who chairs the Backbench Business Committee. This is a point of principle and the—slow—direction of travel at the moment is for this House to take back more powers for itself. It was the case about 110 years ago that if the Government of the day wanted to transact their business in this place, they had to come and seek our permission. Over the past 110 years we have given up successive powers through Standing Orders so now we are in the position of begging the Government for time, or relying on the good will of Government to give us that time.

This is what I suggest: I am not going to press the House to a Division tonight, so the amendments put down by the Government will carry the day, but I am convinced that the day is coming—slowly—when this House will have the courage and desire to take back some of its own power and we will have the self-confidence not to rely on the Whips to transact our business for us on those days when it is our business. I accept that there will be Government days for business, and that is fine, but I think that on those days when there is Back-Bench business—those days when it is our business, when this place comes back to us—in a few years’ time we will have the self-confidence and courage to say, “Actually, we can handle our own affairs in a grown-up, mature and successful fashion.”

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

rose—

[Mr Walker]

Before I sit down, I shall give way to the hon. Lady.

[Helen Goodman]

I am grateful to the Chairman of the Procedure Committee for giving way. Surely what we are talking about here is the House growing up and our being treated like grown-ups—being able to vote as well as debate? I therefore wonder why the Chairman of the Procedure Committee—who chairs it absolutely marvellously—is not going to press the House to a Division this evening.