Business of the House

Hilary Benn Excerpts

Thursday 28th April 2011 Commons Chamber

[Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)]

May I ask the Leader of the House to give us the forthcoming business?

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

The business for the week commending 2 May will be:

Monday 2 May—The House will not be sitting.

Tuesday 3 May—Consideration in Committee of the Finance (No.3) Bill (day 1).

Wednesday 4 May—Consideration in Committee of the Finance (No.3) Bill (day 2).

Thursday 5 May—General debate on social housing in London. The business has been nominated by the Backbench Business Committee.

The provisional business for the week commencing 9 May will include:

Monday 9 May—Opposition day [unallotted day] [half day]. There will be a half-day debate on an Opposition motion, subject to be announced, followed by a motion to approve an instruction relating to the Welfare Reform Bill, followed by a motion to approve a European document relating to trafficking.

Tuesday 10 May—Second Reading of the Energy Bill [Lords].

Wednesday 11 May—Consideration in Committee and remaining stages of the Armed Forces Bill.

Thursday 12 May—Business nominated by the Backbench Business Committee.

Friday 13 May—Private Members’ Bills.

I should also like to inform the House that the business in Westminster Hall for Thursday 5, 12 and 19 May will be:

Thursday 5 May—A general debate in which Members may raise any issue. This debate, nominated by the Backbench Business Committee, will follow a similar pattern to the pre-recess Adjournment debates in which Members were able to raise any issue. Members are advised to consult the Order Paper to seek information on how to provide advance notice of the subject they intend to raise. The debate will be responded to by the Deputy Leader of the House.

Thursday 12 May—Subject to be nominated by the Backbench Business Committee.

Thursday 19 May—A debate on the Severn crossings toll, followed by a debate on the constitutional implications for Wales of the Government’s proposals for constitutional reform.

Finally, I am sure that the whole House will want to wish Prince William and Kate Middleton the very best for tomorrow and a long and happy life together.

[Hilary Benn]

I am grateful to the Leader of the House for that reply. On behalf of the Opposition, I join him in sending best wishes to the happy couple for tomorrow.

Members welcomed Tuesday’s statement from the Foreign Secretary on Libya and the wider middle east, including the very disturbing developments in Syria, which I am sure those on both sides of the House will wish to condemn. I trust that we will continue to be kept informed.

Will the Leader of the House tell us when he will announce final sitting dates up to the next Queen’s Speech and on what date it will be held? Will he tell us when he expects the Health and Social Care Bill to return to the House following the current pause? As the Public Accounts Committee warned this week that there is no plan to deal with the risks being taken with the health service, and virtually everyone at the Royal College of Nursing conference expressed no confidence in the Secretary of State for Health, even this Government must realise that they have a very big problem on their hands. Mind you, Mr Speaker, the nurses were only taking their lead from the Prime Minister, who lost confidence in the right hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr Lansley) quite some time ago. The Health Secretary must be desperately hoping that his famous mantra,

“no decisions about me without me”,

will apply to his own career prospects.

Will the Leader of the House clarify the comments of the Deputy Prime Minister at this week’s listening event on the NHS reforms? He is reported as having said:

“We will make changes, we’ll make significant and substantive changes to the legislation which at the moment is—if you like—it’s suspended in the House of Commons”.

Will the Leader of the House tell us how long this suspension will last, whether there will be an oral statement on the outcome of the listening exercise before Report and when the Prime Minister will finally admit, as the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions has now done publicly, that NHS waiting times are rising as a result of these botched plans?

Talking of which, when can we expect a statement from the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills on university tuition fees, given that for some reason he did not take part in yesterday’s debate? The Government’s promise to students and parents could not have been clearer: fees of £9,000 would be charged only in exceptional circumstances. Now we know that that was another broken promise. Of the 80 universities that have so far revealed their plans, more than two thirds propose to charge the £9,000 maximum fee for some or all of their courses. Such is the incompetence of the Government that it seems never to have occurred to them that that would happen, so as well as qualified applicants losing out on university places this year, in future years universities are likely to face either more reductions in funding or fewer places for students as the Government desperately try to balance the books. When are we going to see the long-promised White Paper on higher education? Does its continued absence not prove the folly of pushing through a policy on fees before having determined a policy on higher education?

May we have a debate on Government policy on placements in Whitehall for those who would not normally get the opportunity to work there? I ask, of course, because a number of Liberal Democrats who have been given work experience as Government Ministers seem to be very unhappy about the way in which they are being treated. Tuesday’s edition of The Times reported that they are being frozen out of decisions within their Departments. One Lib Dem Minister was quoted as saying that he has “no idea” what his boss is doing, a Tory member of the Government has described his Lib Dem colleagues as “yapping dogs” and the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change has threatened to sue fellow members of the Cabinet. I think the deputy leader of the Lib Dems got it right recently when he admitted:

“The coalition…is not a love affair, or a marriage or even a meeting of minds.”

Whatever it is, it is going horribly wrong.

I wonder whether the Leader of the House could suggest to the Prime Minister, notwithstanding his well-publicised concerns, that he might in this particular case consider taking out a super-injunction to prevent any more of these unseemly revelations and so protect this relationship from further public embarrassment. While he is at it, the Prime Minister could also seek one to cover the news this week that someone is making a musical about the Deputy Prime Minister. I would not wish that breach of privacy on anyone, least of all the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr Clegg).

[Sir George Young]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his questions. The fact that over six months he has not really pressed me on the forthcoming business shows, I think, a general level of satisfaction with the way in which the Government are conducting the business of the House.

On the serious issue of keeping the House in the picture, the right hon. Gentleman generously recognised that on Tuesday we had a statement from the Foreign Secretary. On the last day before the recess we found Government time for a debate on north Africa and the middle east. Next Tuesday is Foreign Office questions, and I can assure the right hon. Gentleman that we will want to keep the House in the picture on the disturbing position in north Africa and the middle east.

The dates that the right hon. Gentleman asked for will be given in due course, although it may be some time before we announce the date of the end of the Session. I seem to remember asking my predecessor for the dates of the Easter recess right up until the February before, so for him to press me on the date of the possible Dissolution next spring is perhaps just a little premature.

On the Health and Social Care Bill, the right hon. Gentleman will have seen that we are not planning to have its remaining stages within the next two weeks. There will be adequate time for the House to reflect on any amendments. May I say to him that the building blocks for that Bill were in position under the previous Government—foundation trusts, practice-based commission, patient choice and use of the private sector?

The right hon. Gentleman then asked a number of questions that were also asked in yesterday’s half-day Opposition day debate on higher education. The issues raised by the Opposition spokesman in that debate were replied to by the Minister for Universities and Science, my right hon. Friend the Member for Havant (Mr Willetts), and it seems to me entirely appropriate that he should deal with that issue.

On waiting times, I do not know whether the right hon. Gentleman has had an opportunity to look at the 2010 annual report from the Department of Health, but it makes it absolutely clear that for admitted patients,

“The median time waited has been relatively stable around 8 weeks since March 2008, but is subject to seasonality with previous years showing increases in average waiting times in the early part of the calendar year.”

Likewise, for non-admitted patients,

“The median time waited has been relatively stable around 4 weeks since March 2008, but is subject to seasonality with previous years showing increases in average waiting times in the early part of the calendar year.”

The statistics published a fortnight ago for the period up to February confirm that position.

Concerning the coalition, we have a coalition Government with two parties, and it is my view that there is more cohesion in government between those two parties than there was in the previous one-party Government when the two previous Prime Ministers were at war with each other.

I was interested to hear what the shadow Leader of the House was up to during the Easter recess. Like many of us, he was campaigning for local government elections, and I see from the Lincolnshire Echo that he was in Lincoln on 22 April. I am not sure what he was wearing, but the report said:

“The Rt Hon Hilary Benn MP visited the city to support Labour’s local election candidates. She joined Birchwood candidate and local campaigner Rosanne Kirk”.