Financial Services Bill (Programme) (No. 3)

Chris Leslie Excerpts

Monday 23rd April 2012 Commons Chamber

[Chris Leslie (Nottingham East) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am surprised that the Minister has moved the programme motion formally, given that today—day one of what is supposedly two days for Report and the remaining stages of this Bill—we have five hours of debate in which to cover 59 amendments. Even if there are no Divisions in the House, that leaves barely five minutes for each item.

This Bill is an extremely important piece of legislation. It reforms some of the most important financial institutions in this country, including the Bank of England, creating new financial regulators and dealing with consumer finance, business finance and all those key issues. It has 103 clauses and 21 schedules, yet this programme motion gives us a derisory amount of time. We supposedly have two days, but we will in fact have one and a half days on Report. The second day is not a full day, but a half day, with three hours for the remaining proceedings. Do not let us forget that today we have five clauses to cover in the space of five hours, and we will have 97 clauses to consider in three hours on day two, whenever that is scheduled. That is barely even paying lip service to proper scrutiny. When the Bill gets to the other place, their noble Lordships will have to look seriously at whether there has been proper accountability for the provisions that are before us.

We also had insufficient time upstairs in Committee, where 20 clauses went undebated. That is because the Government have consistently allocated insufficient time for this legislation. When the previous Administration took the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 through the House in 1999-2000, 35 sittings were given in Committee. However, less than half that number were given to scrutinise this Bill in Committee upstairs—we had only 16 sittings in total—so it is no wonder that clauses went undebated.

This is a parody of a programme motion. It leaves massively insufficient time. I do not wish to waste any more of it, but this motion has to be opposed. I hope that my hon. Friends will join me in protesting against this lack of accountability, call on their noble Lords to spend more time scrutinising the Bill properly and vote against this programme motion.