James Gray
Main Page: James Gray (Conservative - North Wiltshire)Department Debates - View all James Gray's debates with the Leader of the House
(1 year ago)
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Penny Mordaunt
I completely understand the hon. Lady’s point. I know that the chief planning officer and the team at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities are always available to advise individual local authorities on such matters. I will make sure that the Secretary of State has heard her concerns and will ask the Department to contact her to set out clarity on the timetable.
James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con)
I add my warm thanks and congratulations to my right hon. Friend, the Lord President of the Council, not only for her starring performance in Westminster Abbey last Saturday but more particularly for the very modest way in which she sought to deflect the thanks and praise away from herself, and towards the thousands of other people who made the day possible, which was a very noble thing to do. As she rightly says, the 7,500 armed forces personnel who took part in the day did a great job, as did the many hundreds of people behind them, as I witnessed in Knightsbridge and Wellington barracks and elsewhere. Does she not think, therefore, that it is time for the House to reintroduce the six set day debates we always used to have to celebrate the work of our armed forces? The job of allocating such debates has now been delegated to the Backbench Business Committee and, although the Committee does a brilliant job, the net result is that there are extraordinarily few debates on the armed forces in this House. Let us get back to the days when the Government gave us Government debates, in Government time, on our magnificent armed services.
Penny Mordaunt
I thank my hon. Friend for his kind remarks. I have been looking at this matter. I know that there are key set dates on this issue, including Armed Forces Day, and on other issues, such as International Women’s Day. Of course we want to have such debates every single year, and yet it requires particular Committees to organise them. There are good reasons why we established the procedures that we have and why we lean heavily on the Backbench Business Committee, but I have been making inquiries on this front and I appreciate my hon. Friend’s suggestion.