Business of the House

Hilary Benn Excerpts

Thursday 27th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)]

Will the Leader of the House give us the business for next week?

[The Leader of the House of Commons (Sir George Young)]

The business of the House for next week is as follows:

Monday 31 January—Second Reading of the Health and Social Care Bill.

Tuesday 1 February—Conclusion of consideration in Committee of the European Union Bill (Day 5).

Wednesday 2 February—Opposition Day [10th Allotted Day]. There will be a debate on the performance of the Business, Innovation and Skills Department followed by a debate on the future of the Public Forest Estate in England. Both debates will arise on an Opposition motion, followed by a motion to approve European documents relating to the Court of Auditors’ 2009 report.

Thursday 3 February—Motion relating to consumer credit regulation and debt management, followed by a general debate on reform of legal aid. The subjects for both debates were nominated by the Backbench Business Committee.

Friday 4 February—Private Members’ Bills.

The provisional business for the week commencing 7 February will include:

Monday 7 February—Opposition Day [un-allotted day] [half day] [first part]. There will be a half-day debate on a Scottish National party and Plaid Cymru motion.

Tuesday 8 February—Second Reading of the Education Bill.

Wednesday 9 February—Motions relating to the police grant and local government finance reports.

Thursday 10 February—Motion relating to voting by prisoners. The subject for this debate was nominated by the Backbench Business Committee.

Friday 11 February—Private Members’ Bills.

I should also like to inform the House that the business in Westminster Hall for 10 February will be:

Thursday 10 February—A debate on onshore wind energy.

[Hilary Benn]

I am grateful to the Leader of the House for his statement. Will he clarify what the rest of the business will be on 7 February, apart from the half-day Opposition debate he has just mentioned?

Last Friday, the then Member for Belfast West wrote to you, Mr Speaker, seeking to resign as a Member of Parliament, but as we know, such a letter has no effect, as the only way for a Member to resign is to apply for the Chiltern Hundreds. On Monday, the Treasury told the BBC that no such application had been received, and yet yesterday we were informed by the Prime Minister that the Chancellor of the Exchequer had appointed Mr Adams as Baron of the Manor of Northstead.

The Chancellor’s power effectively to disqualify a Member must be exercised correctly. It does not seem that in this case that long-standing precedent was followed, so can the Chancellor come to the House and tell us when he received a letter from Mr Adams applying for the Chiltern Hundreds or, if he received no such application, explain on what basis he appointed Mr Adams to the post previously mentioned, given that “Erskine May” states that those offices are

“given by the Chancellor of the Exchequer to any Member who applies for them”?

Does the Leader of the House agree that it is time we changed these ancient ways of enabling Members to step down and moved to a simple system whereby a Member can write to you, Mr Speaker, to resign?

Last week, the Leader of the House said in answer to a question that

“this Government did something that the previous Government refused to do—we set up the Backbench Business Committee”—[Official Report, 20 January 2011; Vol. 521, c. 1025.]

I gently point out to him, in the interests of accuracy, that the decision to set up that Committee was in fact taken by the House on 4 March 2010, when we were in government and Members agreed to a motion moved by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman).

Can we have a debate on the Government’s handling of the economy? Only a few weeks ago, the Chancellor assured us that the recovery was on track. On Tuesday, we discovered that growth has in fact stalled. The Chancellor blamed the snow. It is not the wrong kind of snow; it is the wrong kind of policies. That is why the outgoing director general of the CBI, Sir Richard Lambert, this week warned that the Government have no strategy for growth and criticised Ministers for being

“careless of the damage they might do to business and to job creation”

Yesterday, George Soros said that the cuts could not be implemented without pushing the economy into a recession. Is it any wonder, therefore, that families up and down the country, who are worried about their jobs, rising prices and falling incomes, are beginning to ask themselves whether this lot know what they are doing?

Can we have a debate on the shambolic way in which the counter-terrorism review has been conducted? Last Thursday, the Immigration Minister promised that the draft emergency legislation on detention would be placed in the Library of the House. It has still not appeared. Will the Leader of the House tell his colleagues that when they promise to put something in the Library, Members expect it to be available soon? It is now all too obvious that that legislation is not ready.

In opposition, the Lib Dems criticised the Labour Government’s approach to dealing with terrorism and made another of those firm pledges—a firm pledge to scrap control orders. In the past few weeks there has been a lot of bravado briefing by the Deputy Prime Minister, promising that the orders would go, yet what was announced yesterday? Control orders by another name—with curfews replaced by “overnight residence requirements”. Liberty is very unhappy this morning, saying that control orders have been “retained and rebranded”. Why has that happened? Because the Government have rightly recognised that there is a threat to the public from which we need to be protected, and the responsibility that comes from being in government has finally dawned even on the Deputy Prime Minister.

Following the release of the extraordinary photographs showing the dismantling of the £4 billion fleet of Nimrod long-range reconnaissance and surveillance aircraft, which will then apparently be sliced up in an industrial shredder, can we have a statement from the Secretary of State for Defence on the letter that the six former defence chiefs have sent today, describing the decision to destroy the aircraft as “perverse” and warning that it will create

“a massive gap in British security”

Finally, can we have a debate on the machinery of government? Because it is pretty clear, from what has been going on this week, that this Government are not actually very good at governing.

[Sir George Young]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his points. The business for the week after next is always provisional and changes are made, so at this stage I cannot announce the business for the second half of that Monday, but it is unlikely to be Government legislation.

On the substantive issue the right hon. Gentleman raises about Gerry Adams, as the right hon. Gentleman said, Gerry Adams wrote on 20 January making it absolutely clear that he wanted to relinquish his seat and stand in the Irish general election. As Gerry Adams should have known, a Member of Parliament may not resign; there are no means by which a Member may vacate his or her seat during the lifetime of a Parliament, other than by death, disqualification or expulsion. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, therefore, in line with long-standing precedent granted Mr Adams the office of profit under the Crown of steward and bailiff of the Manor of Northstead, so we delivered Mr Gerry Adams to the required destination, although he may have used a vehicle and a route that was not of his choosing.

Yesterday, Mr Speaker, you informed the House that, owing to that appointment, Gerry Adams was thereby disqualified from membership of the House by virtue of section 1 of the House of Commons Disqualification Act 1975. You also stated:

“The Chancellor of the Exchequer has exercised his responsibilities”;

and:

“He has done so in an entirely orderly way.”—[Official Report, 26 January 2011; Vol. 522, c. 405.]

During the subsequent exchanges, Members raised the hypothetical possibility of a future Chancellor appointing a Member without a firm application for a relevant post from that Member. I find it inconceivable that such a situation would occur; it is a matter of constitutional principle that a Chancellor does not act without an unambiguous request from a Member to relinquish his or her seat. In this case, that request was a letter of resignation. In addition, there is a protection in the form of provision in the 1975 Act for a Member not to accept any office that would lead to his or her disqualification. I have to say in response to the right hon. Gentleman’s final point on the matter that this law on resignation from the House has served us well for 260 years—and the Government have no plans to change it.

On the right hon. Gentleman’s next point, I am amazed that he raises the issue of the Backbench Business Committee. The Parliamentary Secretary, Office of the Leader of the House of Commons, my hon. Friend the Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr Heath), and I consistently raised the previous Government’s failure to enact the establishment of such a Committee, but my predecessor as Leader of the House refused to bring forward the relevant motions, so it was indeed this Government who established the Backbench Business Committee. I am surprised that the right hon. Gentleman ventures into that territory.

On the economy, if only the right hon. Gentleman’s party had bequeathed to the coalition what we bequeathed to Labour in 1997, we would not face the problems that we face today. We bequeathed a golden inheritance: fast growth, falling unemployment and decreasing inflation. Let us compare that with what Labour left behind: a trillion pounds of debt for the first time ever, the largest deficit in the G20 and in our peacetime history, and the deepest and longest recession in the G20. He quoted Richard Lambert, who also said that

“the tax and spending policies of the last Government created a substantial structural deficit…That’s what made substantial spending cuts inevitable, irrespective of who won the last election.”

He went on to say that

“public finances in the UK are in a mess, to a degree that threatens our long-term economic stability.”

On counter-terrorism, the Home Secretary made a statement yesterday, as the right hon. Gentleman knows, and answered some of the questions that he has raised. The Government will subject draft emergency legislation on 28-day pre-charge detention to pre-legislative scrutiny. That is currently being drafted and will be deposited in the Library of the House shortly. I was here when my hon. Friend the Minister for Immigration made the statement last week. He did not give a specific time when the draft legislation would go into the Library. We will set out the suggested approach for the scrutiny when the draft Bill has been completed, although that is, of course, a matter for the House.

The decision to cancel the Nimrod project was not taken lightly by Ministers and service chiefs. It is a consequence of the £38 billion deficit in the defence budget that we inherited from the outgoing Government. The project was nine years late and involved a cost increase of 300%. None of the nine aircraft was operational, only one was fully constructed and that one had not passed its flight tests. The cancellation will save £2 billion over 10 years. Since the Nimrod MR2 was taken out of service by the previous Government in March last year, the impact has been mitigated by the use of other military assets, including Type 22 frigates, Merlin anti-submarine helicopters and Hercules C-130 aircraft, and by working with allies and partners where appropriate.