Backbench Business Committee

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown Excerpts

Tuesday 15th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Heath]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. I am not a member of the House of Commons Commission and I do not wish to tread on its toes, but what he says makes perfect sense to me and I shall ensure that that is communicated to members of the Commission.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

Is the Deputy Leader of the House aware that radical and far-reaching repairs need to take place in the basement of this place, where high pressure steam calorifiers are located right next door to very high voltage electrical cables? That is so much the case that I understand that in the previous Parliament the House of Commons Commission even considered whether there would be a need to move out of this building. Has he taken that into consideration in these proposals?

[Mr Heath]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. I can say only that the House of Commons Commission is considering this. As I say, I am not a member of that body, but I would not be putting forward this proposal today—I should remind hon. Members that it is one of the things that the Wright Committee asked us to put before the House— if we felt that there were impossible hurdles to cross this year. However, this matter may be something that we need to consider in future years.

I wish now to deal with the points made by the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone)—they were also reflected in the comments made by the hon. Member for Edinburgh North and Leith (Mark Lazarowicz)—about the important matter of private Members’ Bills. The hon. Member for Wellingborough rightly drew attention to what I had said on a previous occasion when he tabled a similar amendment. He quoted me, so may I quote myself? That is always an invidious thing to do but as he quoted me, I shall quote myself. He said that I had said that “perhaps there should” be a change in Standing Orders. I stand by that comment—perhaps such a change should be made—because I want us to do a much better job of dealing with private Members’ Bills.

We do not do a good job on these Bills at the moment and the process contains procedural hurdles that are absurd, and are seen as such by our constituents. Far too often, excellent measures that are introduced by individual Members do not make it to the statute book, despite substantial support in the House, simply because of the way the system works. I am therefore delighted that the Chair of the Procedure Committee, the right hon. Member for East Yorkshire (Mr Knight), has volunteered that his Committee will examine this as an early matter of priority. It is essential that the Committee does so and I hope that it will make proposals. I also hope that the issue of how many Fridays are made available will become redundant because we will have so improved the way we manage private Members’ legislation that Fridays are not the crucial factor in deciding whether we make progress.