House of Lords Reform Bill
Edward Leigh Excerpts(13 years, 11 months ago)
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Sir George Young
The average length of service now is 24 or 26 years, so the proposal is an improvement.
Mr Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)
We have heard many fine speeches over the past two days, but one of the finest was made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth West (Conor Burns). Of course, I have absolutely nothing to lose personally by voting against the Government tonight, but he has. However, I assured him this morning that the French have a phrase, “Reculer pour mieux sauter”, which means, “To retreat better to leap forward”, and that is what he will do. The House always respects somebody who resigns on a point of principle, and it has always been a matter of great regret to me that I did not do it over Maastricht. I have lived to regret that, but he will not regret his decision, I assure him.
The good speeches have been those based on principle. There has been a lot of criticism of the Deputy Prime Minister, but I thought that he gave a good speech because it was based on his own principles, although I did not agree with him. He was like a young officer at the battle of the Somme, marching forward, assailed on all sides, ultimately to senseless destruction, but there was nothing wrong with what he was arguing for. I do not usually like to be party political, but the two weakest speeches came from the Opposition Front Benchers, who, like St Augustine, said that they want to stop sinning but not yet. They said that they are in favour of the Bill but have not been prepared to answer consistent questions about how much time they want for it.
On a great constitutional issue such as this, one has to be prepared to argue from first principles. I am afraid that I am a Conservative and therefore generally wish to conserve things. Certainly if something is working, I wish to conserve it. I know it is a bit of a cliché, but Lord Falkland’s dictum that when it is not necessary to change it is necessary not to change is true of the House of Lords. Basically, it works, and I do not want to change it. I start from that point of first principle and will not easily be budged from it.
What is so important about this Bill that the Government are prepared to wade through months of purgatory to try to secure it? We heard earlier that apparently the Catholic Church has abolished limbo, but it has not yet abolished purgatory, and if this Bill is allowed to continue our party will be in purgatory, as we were over Maastricht, for week after week and month after month. What is the great point of principle? When the whole country is assailed by such appalling difficulties and problems, when we know that the economy is not going anywhere, when we are constantly having to wade through blood and make cuts where we do not want to make them, what is so important about this Bill? Why have the Government, with, dare I say it, some parliamentary incompetence, placed themselves in a position whereby they have handed power to the Opposition? I criticise the Opposition, but they are only doing their job. Labour is a ruthless operation when it comes to opposition—it is much better at it than we ever are—and it is playing this very well in trying to gum up the whole works.
What about all the other Bills? Are they not important? Are we not here to try to achieve something?
Chris Huhne
Is the hon. Gentleman aware that on D-day, when we invaded France, this Parliament was discussing Rab Butler’s Education Bill? Does he not agree that Governments, on balance, should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time?
Thomas Docherty (Dunfermline and West Fife) (Lab)
The hon. Gentleman has repeatedly talked about weeks and months. May I assure Members on both sides of the House that the Opposition have made it clear that we do not intend to wreck or filibuster the Bill? This is about genuine debate, and there is no confusion as to the position that the Opposition will be adopting.
Mr Leigh
I think that that was said with a bit of irony and that the hon. Gentleman protests too much. Of course the Opposition are not going to wreck the Bill, which, at an appropriate moment, they will allow to get to the other place—after they have ensured that the country has had the unholy spectacle of our discussing, week after week, while this appalling recession is going on, an issue that, I can assure him, is of no interest whatsoever in the Dog and Duck in Scunthorpe. What on earth are we doing?
What is so wrong with the House of Lords? The point that I make continually is that whereas over the past 15 years, we in the Commons have had the collective courage to defeat the Government only 10 times, our friends in the other place have defeated the Government no fewer than 576 times. That point has been made already, but it is a powerful one.
I argue against this reform from first principles because, inevitably, the people who will be elected to the House of Lords will be politicians. When I made that point to the Deputy Prime Minister yesterday, he said that they would be a different sort of politician. What is a different sort of politician? We are all politicians and we are all ambitious. Although we deny it, we all want office. There is nothing wrong with that. Therefore, to a greater or lesser extent, we are all creatures of the Whips Office. We have to accept that. We come into politics because we have the ambition to become Ministers and to achieve something. The point has been made again and again that many people in the other place are past ambition.
Why do we want to abolish an institution that has held the Government so closely to account that, in the past 15 years, it has defeated them no fewer than 576 times? The fundamental problem is that once the House of Lords is elected, it will become the poodle of the House of Commons. The real problem is not with the primacy of the House of Commons, but that the Executive are all-powerful. It is only in the other place that there is any decent scrutiny and that the Government are occasionally defeated.
I am not only worried that the Government will have an easier ride in the reformed House of Lords; we must ask ourselves why our friends in the Liberal Democrat party are so determined to get the Bill through. It is so important to them because once it is passed, half of our legislature will be elected by proportional representation and, therefore, the Liberals will have a permanent lock on half our Parliament. It will be impossible for people such as me who want constantly to come forward with radical ideas from the right and for Labour Members who want to come forward with radical ideas from the left to wade through the dominance of the Liberal establishment in the other place. There would never have been the kind of reforms that Mrs Thatcher achieved in office under that system. Many people in this House may think that that would have been good, but I think that it would have been a great shame.
That is why this is an important Bill, why we should be discussing it up and down the country, and why we have to defeat it. We cannot just measure this argument in terms of programme motions; we have to measure it in terms of what is right for our country. What is right for our country is to retain the system of an elected House of Commons and a revising second Chamber that does an excellent job of improving legislation. We must leave it alone and defeat this Bill tonight.
Mr Dorrell
My hon. Friend repeats a point made several times in the debate, and I accept that it is a serious point. His point is about the Blair Government. My hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough quoted 576 defeats in the Lords, presumably over a slightly different time scale. However, those defeats were over individual measures in a Bill, and they often came back to be reversed by this place.
When we stand back from the matter, we see that the House of Lords cannot be said to provide the check on ill-developed, badly thought out legislation. Too often, Ministers are tempted down the road of trying to create legislative monuments for themselves. Occasionally, when I sat on the legislative committee in the Cabinet—in another existence, many years ago—we heard it argued that we needed a Bill from a particular Department to create a political centrepiece for the Government’s programme. That is not a good reason for proposing legislative change. To be effective, legislation needs to be properly thought out. It is far better seen as a rifle than a blunderbuss.
Mr Dorrell
I do not agree with my hon. Friend. Either the Bill will create a logjam—because people in the other place, with a different mandate and a more leisurely time scale, have the willingness and the capacity to create an effective check—or the other place will merely be a poodle. We can pay our money and take our choice between those two arguments. Personally, I think that the longer mandate, as well as all the other elements of the primacy of the Commons which are included in the Bill, are more likely to create an effective check on the legislative ambitions that I have mentioned. In other words, for me, the issue in the Bill is not the balance between the Lords and the Commons; it is the balance between Parliament as a whole and Whitehall. I am a strong supporter of a more effective Parliament, in order to create a more effective check on the legislative ambitions of Whitehall.
We have heard various speeches. Some have argued for a unicameralist approach. I have made it clear why I am not in favour of a unicameralist approach. I am in favour of a strong second Chamber that will create a genuine check on the legislative ambitions of Whitehall. I am persuaded that the best way of providing that is to introduce an elected element into the upper House.
Ministerial Code (Culture Secretary)
Edward Leigh Excerpts(13 years, 11 months ago)
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Mr Denham
It must, shall we say, have occurred to the Secretary of State that the Cabinet Secretary did not know of his memo. It must certainly have occurred to the Prime Minister that the Cabinet Secretary could not possibly have had the chance to consider that memo before he wrote the letter. Thus, from 22 December onwards, the Secretary of State and the Prime Minister have relied essentially on a fiction—a letter from Sir Gus O’Donnell that relied on his not knowing what had been going on between them in the memos.
Mr Denham
I need to make some progress.
What do we now know about the conduct of the Secretary of State? On 12 November 2010, he was advised not to have any external discussions on the merger and not to write to the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills about it. He was told that if he did so, it carried risks to the robustness of the decisions.
As other Members have said, there were two key parts to the memo sent to the Prime Minister. The first lets us know in no unambiguous terms of the Secretary of State’s support for the merger proceeding and his belief that if it were blocked, our media sector would suffer for years. Secondly, however, and of equal significance, it proposed a meeting between the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, the Business Secretary and the Culture Secretary himself
“to discuss the policy issues that are thrown up as a result.”
In the light of the legal advice given to the Secretary of State on 12 November, he must have known not only that sending that memo was inappropriate, but that the course of action he was proposing—a cabal of Ministers at the top of Government involving the one person who was meant to be acting in a quasi-judicial manner and who should have had no discussions and no connections with anyone else—flew in the face of the advice he had been given and was clearly acting in an entirely inappropriate manner.
Oral Answers to Questions
Edward Leigh Excerpts(14 years, 2 months ago)
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Hugh Robertson
We have regular discussions with Google on all these issues. It is better than the hon. Gentleman suggests at taking down illegal material, and those discussions will continue.
Mr Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)
T2. We, the taxpayers, have spent £9 billion on the Olympics and we are very proud of them. But everybody I talk to, including myself—I occasionally talk to myself—[Laughter.] Calm down, calm down. Will the House come to order, please? Nobody has actually got a ticket, apart from a chap I was talking to last night who had applied for £8,000-worth of tickets. He is the only person I have met recently who has got a ticket. I have raised this before with the Minister and it is a serious point. The Minister has told me in the past that he has to satisfy the corporate people because they have put in hundreds of millions of pounds, but we have put in billions of pounds. What more will he do to get tickets to ordinary people so that this becomes a people’s games?
Hugh Robertson
The problem to which my hon. Friend alludes is caused by the simple fact that 6.5 million tickets were available and 26.5 million applications were made. The fact is that demand massively outstripped supply. Some 75% of those tickets have gone to the general public, and a full breakdown will be available as soon as the next tranche of ticketing is over. The advice to him and everyone else who wishes to apply for tickets is to apply in the next tranche, which will go exclusively to those who were involved in the process earlier.
Backbench Business Committee
Edward Leigh Excerpts(14 years, 3 months ago)
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Mr Heath
As I said when responding to the debate on the original motion to set up the Backbench Business Committee, Wright is not holy writ and should not be treated as such, not least because there are internal contradictions in the Wright report, just as there are sometimes in holy writ. Therefore, the House has to take a view on what is in the best interests of its procedures. That will be for the House to decide. I simply contend that it is a strange situation where the biggest party represented in the House can override the interests and decisions of other parties in deciding who its representatives on the Committee will be. I would have thought that my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex had confidence in the ability of his own party’s procedures —I am afraid I have no specialist knowledge of them—to make a proper determination of who should serve on the Committee on its behalf.
I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex that different considerations apply to the Chair of the Committee, as he set out, which is why we propose that the Chair should continue to be elected by the whole House, with one proviso: we think that the Government should not provide the Chair, for perfectly obvious reasons. The situation is exactly analogous to that of two other Committees—the Standards and Privileges Committee and the Public Accounts Committee. There is a strong argument in favour of the Committee’s decisions not being seen as the result of some sort of internal collusion between the Government and the legislature, and I think that the clearest way of indicating that they are not is to ensure that the Chair comes from a party that is not represented in Government.
Mr Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)
So, the Deputy Leader of the House can of course give us an assurance that the Government are not seeking to change the rules now because existing members of the Committee have proved too independent.
Mr Heath
I can give that clear assurance, because I have absolute confidence that the members elected by the party groups will be every bit as independent as those elected by the whole House, and perhaps even identical in person. What I am trying to do is prevent the potential abuse of that process, which could clearly happen under the present rules. I hope that each of the parties, through their internal mechanisms, will have sufficiently robust structures in place to ensure that the Whips, if they come running to Back-Bench Members to have a particular Member elected to the Committee, will be robustly told where to go. But we shall see, because that is internal to the various parties and their internal democratic processes.
Natascha Engel
That is absolutely right. We should not throw away that important principle today. I am worried by the fact that the Government have tabled these motions. There has been inadequate time to look at them and inadequate time to explore all the different consequences arising from them. We are dealing with something that is not broken, so I do not understand why the Government want to fix it.
Mr Leigh
Apparently, some people in the Government think that under the current arrangements the Labour party can gang up to ensure that so-called troublemakers are on this Committee. Is that not to politicise the whole issue? The fact is that members of the Committee are independent. They are not troublemakers; they are independent-minded people. We should keep party politics out of this.
Natascha Engel
That goes back to my point that the Backbench Business Committee is not broken. We do not vote on party lines and the discussions we have are not on party lines. Its members are independent-minded. They are members of different political parties, but the wider issue is about how we best represent Back Benchers as a whole. We currently have a spread on the Committee, with every type of Back Bencher in today’s Parliament represented.
I urge Members to vote for the amendment that includes the minority parties as full voting members. We do not want them to be there only as a result of some kind of patronage of the Chair which allows them to attend and listen to the Committee’s words of wisdom. We want them to have full membership and full voting rights. I also urge support for the amendment tabled to allow the entire House to vote on who should represent Back Benchers on the Backbench Business Committee.
Business of the House
Edward Leigh Excerpts(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Sir George Young
The hon. Gentleman will recognise that the previous Government used private agencies in public sector organisations where that was the right way to proceed, and I am sure that he would support measures to reduce costs within HMRC and make it more efficient. My right hon. Friend the Chancellor and his team will be here on 24 January for Treasury questions, when the hon. Gentleman might have an opportunity to ask his question again.
Mr Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)
Further to the question put by my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr Cash), I asked the same question last week and the Leader of the House replied in his best insouciant manner, but I am afraid that that is not good enough. Today we will have a debate on the connecting Europe facility, which is one part of the matter, but he is denying Members the opportunity to discuss these issues, as other countries do, on the Floor of the House before the Prime Minister goes to the European summit. It is not good enough for the Leader of the House to tell us to go to the Backbench Business Committee. I have been to the Committee, but it has no time and will not give us the debate—it is down to him. This is a major issue, and the House is not overstretched. Imagine if someone had asked for a debate on German rearmament in 1930s and the then Leader of the House had said, “Oh, just go off to Westminster Hall or the Backbench Business Committee.” It is ridiculous. These are important matters that should be in a central debate.
Sir George Young
My hon. Friend draws attention to the fact that there are regular debates on Europe in the Chamber—there is one today and I have announced another for next week. If I may say so, he glosses over the whole thrust of the Wright Committee’s recommendations, which was that the Government should provide time for Government legislation and no longer control exclusively the diet of the House. The time we used to have for the debate he refers to has been handed over to the Backbench Business Committee. That empowers the House by giving it a power that has been taken from the Government. It is for the Committee to decide whether to give priority to my hon. Friend’s request or to those of other Members. I am not sure whether he has been to the Committee recently to make his request, but ultimately it must decide whether to accede to it.
Business of the House
Edward Leigh Excerpts(14 years, 5 months ago)
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Sir George Young
As I said to the hon. Member for Wallasey (Ms Eagle), the Government will give serious consideration to the votes that took place in the other place yesterday. We have asked Professor Harrington to work with Macmillan to ensure that the work-related assessments are appropriate, although it should be borne in mind that the worst cancer cases would be in support groups and would therefore not be affected. Government amendments tabled to the Bill yesterday would have protected those whose condition subsequently deteriorated. Of course we will consider the matter seriously, but as I have said, if we do not make savings by means of that part of the Bill, we may have to seek compensatory savings elsewhere.
Mr Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)
Although it is good that there is less legislation pouring through the House of Commons, we still do not have enough time to debate issues on great occasions. For instance, before the Prime Minister went off to the last European summit, all that we had was a little debate in Westminster Hall—which, admittedly, served its purpose in a way. Can the Leader of the House confirm that before the next European summit there will be a proper debate on the Floor of the House, as happens in other Parliaments, so that the Prime Minister can gauge opinion in the Chamber about his negotiating tactics?
Sir George Young
I understand my hon. Friend’s concern, but he will know that as a result of the recommendations of the Wright Committee, the time that the Government had in which to arrange such debates has been transferred to the Backbench Business Committee, as has responsibility for finding time for them, and the other debates for which the Government used to find time. It is to that Committee that my hon. Friend and others should apply, because it now has the time that the Government used to have.
General matters
Edward Leigh Excerpts(14 years, 5 months ago)
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Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes) (Con)
On the face of it, my constituency might seem well served by transport as it has an international airport, the largest dock complex in the country and 10 railway stations, including one that serves two farms and an ancient ruin, and was used by 13 passengers in 2010. But the road network needs a little improvement. The main road into the constituency is the A180, but the A160 off to Immingham dock—which, as I said, is the largest dock complex in the country—is in urgent need of an upgrade.
The last message I had from the Department for Transport said that the upgrade was included in 12 future schemes that should receive development funds, and that a decision would be taken by the end of the year. So time is running out and this is my last opportunity to lobby Ministers about the importance of the A160. Not only does it serve the existing Immingham dock, but it will serve one of the two new enterprise zones in the area, so it is clearly of vital importance.
I welcome the Government’s recent decisions to grant those enterprise zones that status, and we also gained from the announcement that the Immingham bypass would at long last go ahead, as well as the halving of the Humber bridge tolls. May I also draw Ministers’ attention to the urgent need for a direct rail service from the constituency to London? About a year ago I met Alliance Rail, which is keen to do this, and it told me that its plans were still in the system. But the byzantine procedures that they have to go through for the opportunity to run a rail service are complex beyond belief. If we are to go ahead with High Speed 2 and develop our rail network, we must put together a system that reaches decisions rather more quickly. If the Victorians had been locked into the present system, our trains would still be pulled by Stephenson’s Rocket, and the network would not have expanded as it did. There is no incentive for rail companies to provide extra services.
That is typified by the service that runs on Saturdays only from Cleethorpes to Brigg, Kirton in Lindsey and Gainsborough, and then on to Sheffield. We have a good service to Sheffield via Doncaster, but I am eager for people from Gainsborough—I can see my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr Leigh) in his place—to be able to use that service to take their families for a day out in Cleethorpes, where they can enjoy Pleasure Island and see the attractions that the “Cleethorpes in bloom” committee has organised.
Mr Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)
Mr Speaker, welcome to the Chair. Because I believe in crawling to people in authority, may I wish you a very happy and merry Christmas and thank you for your delightful Christmas card?
This is a wonderfully eclectic debate—from ponds in Devon to dictators in the Congo getting 99.8% of the vote. I want to deal, like my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers), with local issues that relate to Lincolnshire. He mentioned the extraordinary railway line that connects our two constituencies, and there are only three trains a week, which all run on Saturdays. However, there is a much more important railway line that runs from Grimsby and Cleethorpes down through Market Rasen, in my constituency, to Lincoln and then on to London. We used to have a direct service and my hon. Friend referred to resurrecting this vitally important service; but I say to him that we want it to go through Market Rasen and Lincoln, and not through Doncaster. I am sure he will be agreeable to that, and I expect the Minister to make a commitment to that effect when he winds up this debate.
What I really want to talk about in the remaining two minutes or so of my speech is an important project in Gainsborough that is in danger of closure but must not be closed. This is about the big society, which the Prime Minister was right to launch. He was right to change the emphasis from big government to families, individuals, neighbours and local people. In my constituency there is just such a big society project. It was founded in 2007 and is called YaSiG—Young and Safe in Gainsborough.
My hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) talked about the power of history and the importance of history teaching, but many people fall out of our school system and YaSiG provides for them. It provides for people between the ages of 13 and 24 who have fallen out of education and it co-ordinates a number of facilities for young people. It gives them a safe place to meet and socialise. It runs, among other things, a very successful motorcycle maintenance course, which I have visited, operating outside the classroom and providing just the sort of training opportunities that many young people need. YaSiG covers subjects as varied as sports, catering and horticulture. It emphasises building social skills, and it improves confidence and the ability to work with older people. There is no doubt that this project, which operates in one of the most deprived wards in England, Gainsborough South West, is already making a big difference.
The project was set up with money from the previous Government, under the community asset transfer programme, but it was not thought through. There were adequate funds for the capital injection but not for revenue maintenance, and the project simply cannot be sustained now. I urgently call—this should happen over the next 24 hours—on Lincolnshire county council, West Lindsey district council and the Government to co-ordinate their efforts to save this vital project. At the very least, West Lindsey district council should give the freehold to YaSiG, so that it can borrow against it, and should waive its indemnity of £45,000. If we really do believe in projects that further the big society and provide for the most deprived people in our community, we cannot let them go out of business. We should co-ordinate efforts to save them and to help our young people in the future.
Ministerial Statements
Edward Leigh Excerpts(14 years, 6 months ago)
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Mr Knight
That is a very good intervention and the hon. Gentleman underlines my point.
The Government response went on to suggest that an increase in the number of statements made and urgent questions granted means that
“there is no case for the protocol that the Committee proposes.”
I am not clear what the logic is in that response.
On enforcing the protocol, the Government repeated the assertion made in the oral and written evidence that the Procedure Committee received that the House already has a sufficient range of options to deal with cases in which statements are made outside Parliament first. The Government’s response went on to suggest that the involvement of the Standards and Privileges Committee would risk dragging that Committee into party political disputes, which they say would undermine
“the integrity of its role.”
That response does not acknowledge your role, Mr Speaker, as envisaged by the Procedure Committee, in acting as a “gatekeeper” against frivolous complaints. Under the system that we proposed, any complaint that was a mere cover for a party political row or dispute would be dealt with by you and, in my view, would never reach the Standards and Privileges Committee, which would be asked to determine only serious or complex breaches of the rules
Mr Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)
It is said that this procedure might drag the Speaker into politics, but surely there is one way the Government can ensure that that does not happen, and that is to behave in future.
House of Commons Disqualification (Amendment) Bill
Edward Leigh Excerpts(14 years, 9 months ago)
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Mr Bone
My hon. Friend has been elected to the House to be a Member of Parliament and to use her own judgment. She hits on a good point, and if I get time, I shall deal with the problem of the black art of misinformation that the Whips operate so successfully.
For a new Member of Parliament, the Whips’ threat that their career will be over if they do not vote in a certain way is enormously powerful. However, history suggests that completely the reverse is the case. Many people who have voted against the Whips on the most controversial matters are now Ministers—some are actually in the Cabinet.
Mr Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)
I think that new Members are under a misapprehension. They think that if they ever vote against the Government, they will not get into the Government. Actually, people get into the Government if they are good: if they are principled and intelligent, and crack it at the Dispatch Box, they will get in. They should be far more confident about that.
Mr Bone
My hon. Friend is absolutely correct. A yes-person who always agrees with the Whips will never be a good Minister. A person has to have independent thought to be a Minister. Some members of the Cabinet voted against the Maastricht treaty—probably the most controversial issue for the Conservative party—and it did not seem to do them any harm.
Parliament was originally intended to act as a check on the Executive, and to hold them properly to account, but with the advent of the party and such concepts as party loyalty and party manifestos, Members of Parliament who put their individual judgment to one side are increasingly frequently—more often than not—treated by the Whips as little more than sheep. They are blindly herded into Division Lobbies and told to vote a particular way on a subject that they know nothing about. Whips even have the nerve to divide the groups that they look after into flocks, because they regard them as sheep. Sadly, Christopher Hollis MP had it precisely right when he said in 1946:
“On most votes it would be simpler and more economic to keep a flock of tame sheep and from time to time to drive them through the division lobbies in the appropriate number.”
Committee on Members’ Allowances
Edward Leigh Excerpts(14 years, 11 months ago)
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Mr Heath
I am extremely grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. Let me make it absolutely clear to the House that the change in wording in no way restricts the ability of the Committee to consider the issue of allowances as it relates to the review of the operation of the Act. The Committee will be free to consider the issue of allowances and to make recommendations as it sees fit. The Government have no intention of seeking to restrict the Committee’s remit in the way that is feared.
Mr Leigh
I am grateful for what my hon. Friend has said. Of course, I have no idea what the Committee will decide, but for instance—for the sake of argument—if it were to recommend that the current expense-based system on living away should be replaced by a flat-rate allowance, would that be perfectly in order?
Mr Heath
Indeed, it can make any recommendations based on the considerations into which it has entered. It would be a very odd restriction on a Committee if it were to be told that it cannot make recommendations when it has considered a matter. Of course, such recommendations would be the end result if the Committee so chooses.
Motion 9 also brings the Committee’s terms of reference up to date. The Committee has a number of specific functions, set out in Standing Order No. 152G(1)(a) to (d), in relation to the old allowances regime that was administered by the House until the election last year. They include, for example, approving practice notes for the now-defunct fees office. Clearly, those specific powers are no longer relevant—they are, in effect, spent—and the motion provides the House with an opportunity to replace them with a more general power to consider any matter related to Members’ expenses that the House might choose to refer to it.
I sense from the interventions from the hon. Members for Windsor and for Gainsborough (Mr Leigh) that they have received some reassurance from what I have said.
Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)
I apologise, Madam Deputy Speaker, for not having been here at the outset, but I was chairing Westminster Hall and it was not possible to get a substitute as quickly as I had hoped.
I hear from my hon. Friend the Member for Windsor (Adam Afriyie) that much progress has been made during this short debate. I am certainly pleased to hear that. There is a lesson here: if the Government table motions on the Order Paper that are inconsistent with a resolution of the House agreed to as a result of a Back-Bench debate and do not discuss their reasons for tabling the motion, it creates a climate of suspicion. That climate of suspicion was confirmed yesterday, when the Committee of Selection was set up to confirm the membership of the Committee on Members’ Allowances but at the last minute did not deal with the business at hand. I understand that it has been confirmed during this debate that there will be a special meeting today of the Committee of Selection to set up the Committee so that the latter can organise itself to meet next week. I do not know whether that interpretation is correct, but I understand that that is what has been agreed.
Why did we have to go through all this? It is regrettable that this adversarial attitude has been created over an issue that everybody on both sides of the House takes very seriously—IPSA’s administration of our allowances system. Yesterday, I went on to the IPSA website to make a claim for the past month—it was my first claim for a month—and I found that four previous items that I claimed for had been sent back. I will not go into the details except to say that after more than an hour on the telephone all those matters were resolved. However, it should never have taken so long. It was a matter of process dominating common sense and reality. The person from IPSA wasted more than an hour on the telephone. I had to waste more than an hour on the telephone. There were lots of delays and as a result one member of my staff was not paid as quickly as they should have been. That is why it is important that this Committee is set up with the terms of reference that we are debating this afternoon.
Mr Leigh
My hon. Friend can be reassured because we have had a categorical reassurance from the Deputy Leader of the House that there will be absolutely no restriction on what the Committee can decide or recommend. I have the greatest faith in our Front-Bench team—as far as I am concerned, their word is their bond.
Mr Chope
I am sure that my hon. Friend is right. I hope that when the Committee of Selection meets, he will be selected as a member of the Committee, with my hon. Friend the Member for Windsor as its Chairman. With those two on the Committee, I have little doubt that it can do some effective work. However, I still do not understand why it has taken so long to set it up. It was resolved on 12 May that it should be set up, but it is now almost 12 July.
I see that quite a few members of the Treasury Bench are in their places. I hope that they will learn a lesson from this—that we should be much more open with each other about these issues instead of creating or facilitating a climate of suspicion. It is possibly only because today’s business collapsed more than two hours early that we have had the chance to have this open and frank discussion on the Floor of the House on this important issue. When the report—or reports—come back from the Committee, I hope that the Government will again be open and frank, and allow us to ensure that the recommendations are debated and carried into action. That way, there will be no need to spend even more parliamentary time trying to get the Government to do what was agreed by the Prime Minister as long ago as before last December, as I recall, when he made it clear that if something did not happen by April, he would ensure that pressure would be put on IPSA to get its act together.
All’s well that ends well—I hope. In that respect, I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Windsor for briefing me on what transpired earlier in the debate. I hope that it will be confirmed in the response to this debate that the members of the Committee will be appointed by the Committee of Selection today, so that they can get down to their work first thing next week.