Statements of Taxation

Chris Bryant Excerpts

Wednesday 25th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

rose—[Interruption.]

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I want to hear what the hon. Gentleman has to say.

[Mr Speaker]

Yes, but I want to hear the hon. Gentleman, Sir Bob.

[Chris Bryant]

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker.

I rise to oppose the Bill proposed by the hon. Member for Ipswich (Ben Gummer). He is a very charming Member of the House who has obviously made quite an impact since he arrived—although not quite so charming as to win last week’s debate in the Cambridge Union on whether the Tories have been unfairly demonised.

None the less, I say to the hon. Gentleman that there are far more important things that we should change about how expenditure is revealed to taxpayers, not least because we in this House do an extremely bad job of analysing expenditure. The Budget that we have every year is not really a budget, it is just a statement of changes to taxation. It is not a proper process whereby we start from scratch and examine every single piece of expenditure, which is what happens in every local authority in the land and in the United States of America, where there is a thorough budget process. I do not believe that there has been a vote on expenditure in this House since something like 1918. All that we do is work on the estimates, and nobody ever makes a close analysis of expenditure.

Although I am sympathetic to some of what the hon. Gentleman says about how we should explain things better to taxpayers, I believe that there are better ways to ensure that the expenditure that the House grants on behalf of the Crown is better explained to them.

My real complaint about the hon. Gentleman’s motion —it is the motion that we are debating today, not the Bill—is that it requests that

“leave be given to bring in a Bill”.

There are still 93 Bills on the Order Paper to be debated before Prorogation, and not a single one of those is scheduled for a day when the House will be sitting. Nor will his Bill be.

I simply say to hon. Members that there is a hypocrisy about how we do our legislating here. I am not saying that any individual Member is a hypocrite, simply that there is a hypocrisy about our pretending that we are actually advancing legislation. If Members want to wave the motion through, that is fine, but they need to be absolutely clear about the fact that if they had any real honesty in what they were doing, they would be calling on the Leader of the House to provide extra time to debate such Bills. Otherwise, this is nothing more than a political puff and a press release for the Daily Mail.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker.