Business of the House

George Howarth Excerpts

Thursday 9th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Sir George Young]

Having allocated seven days for consideration of the Bill, I very much hope that the House will use that time intelligently. It would of course be open to the Government, if that were the wish of the House, to ensure that we reached certain matters by including programme motions. We are reluctant to do that at this stage. We believe that the House will use the seven days intelligently and to best advantage. If there is any sign of mischief and any determined efforts to slow down progress, we will of course have to think again.

[Mr George Howarth (Knowsley) (Lab)]

The Leader of the House was uncharacteristically dismissive of the concerns of my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster Central (Ms Winterton) about the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill, which we will debate on Monday. Does he genuinely, when he is in his more reflective mode, not think that there is a very strong case for the pre-legislative scrutiny of a measure that, at the very least, is controversial and, at worst, might end up placing the fate of any given Parliament in the hands of the judiciary? Surely that cannot be right.

[Sir George Young]

I very much hope that against the background of the timetable that I have outlined, the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee will have time to complete its inquiry and report to the House on the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill. I welcome the fact that it is conducting this inquiry, and I am sure that it will inform our debate. I am committed to draft legislation. However, I hope that the right hon. Gentleman understands that at the beginning of a new Parliament, with a new Government, it is not possible, if one is to make progress, to put everything in draft, particularly when commitments have been made to do certain things by a certain time. Those political imperatives sometimes override the ambition that both he and I have to subject all Bills to draft scrutiny.