Information for Backbenchers on Statements

John Hemming Excerpts

Tuesday 20th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[John Hemming (Birmingham, Yardley) (LD)]

Thank you, Mr Speaker; I make that about 10 minutes.

What is interesting about the current situation is that if the Procedure Committee comes up with proposals for change, it will not have to beg the Government for time to have them debated but can simply pass them to the Backbench Business Committee so that it can table a substantive resolution to change the rules of Parliament. That system, which most representative bodies have, is a key change.

The Leader of the House was entirely right not to recreate the Modernisation Committee, not least because it was the wrong process: Parliament, not the Government, should run Parliament. I was on the Modernisation Committee. I like these procedural matters, and I happen to be on both the Backbench Business Committee and the Procedure Committee, not because I am a glutton for punishment so much as because procedure is the key way of enabling us to do things.

My memory may not be entirely right, but I believe that the last time the Modernisation Committee met was some time in late 2008. The Opposition’s view was that at that point Parliament was modern, so there was no reason for the Committee to continue meeting, and it ceased some time before the general election. However, we are now in a situation in which Parliament can assert itself to take power on behalf of the electorate. That is the key change. We are the voice of the people, and it is our job to do that.

Other changes will come through. One matter that the Procedure Committee considered in the previous Parliament was what we do when the Government fail to answer a written parliamentary question. Under the previous system we could either ask it again, which did not generally work very well, or put in a freedom of information request. That was an absurd situation, and the Procedure Committee decided to establish a process whereby hon. Members could go to that Committee and say, “This question has been inadequately answered.” I hope that we will consider that matter as the second item on the agenda, because I agree with the right hon. Member for East Yorkshire (Mr Knight) that Parliament has to reassert itself.

I would go a bit further than that. We need to recognise that according to article 13 of the basic constitutional law of the UK, the Bill of Rights, Parliament is here to redress all grievances. That means that we are here to speak on behalf of our citizens wherever problems exist, whether they be in this country or around the world, in the judicial system or in the Executive. Over time we might move more towards the separation of powers, or we might simply stay as we are, but it is crucial for Parliament to assert itself as the voice of the people, and in doing so, bring Parliament closer to the people.

That requires relatively nuisance-like people such as me to do things that are perhaps not exactly what our party would like us to do—especially with mine in a coalition Government—and to raise embarrassing matters. That actually strengthens the whole process of government, because when we ask difficult questions it may mean that civil servants are empowered to say to the Government, “Well, actually, this isn’t necessarily something that you should do. Perhaps if you do it slightly differently, that will be a better way of running the country.”

I have often described the way in which we run this country as like driving a car and trying to avoid a car crash by looking in the rear view mirror at the car crash that happened two years ago. Many times when things go wrong in this country there is complete quiet. Then, after a year, a lot of people make a bit of noise but nothing happens. After a bit longer even more people make a noise and there is an inquiry, which finds that there was a real disaster some years before. Parliament needs to get more upstream in that process, so that problems are raised in Parliament as they arise and the Government answer, giving the truth about what is happening.

One thing that shocked me when I came to the House from Birmingham city council was how out of date the information to which parliamentarians had access was. Even as an opposition member of the city council I was used to knowing—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. It is always a pleasure to listen to the hon. Gentleman, but I must ask him to focus on the terms of the motion, specifically the question of information on Government statements and ministerial accountability to the House for statements made.

[John Hemming]

Thank you, Mr Speaker

This is about questions and information. The reality is that we are now moving towards improving how the House holds the Government to account. Like the right hon. Member for East Yorkshire, I should avoid going into too many details on the possibilities, because I still hope to be on the Procedure Committee—if it is ever set up. If the Opposition are interested in matters of procedure and if they cannot find Labour Members to sit on that Committee, why cannot the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart), who is a musician, replace another musician and former Labour Member who was defeated at the election? We need to constitute the Procedure Committee.

[Sir Peter Soulsby]

I had the pleasure of serving with the hon. Gentleman on both the Modernisation Committee and the Procedure Committee, and I share his frustration that the latter has not yet been established. Given the importance of the matter before us, does he agree that it is vital that that Committee be established, and up and running, before the summer recess?

[John Hemming]

That is crucial. If the Labour party cannot find someone in its midst to sit on that Committee, it should approach the minority parties. I am sure that a minority party Member would like to do so. The minority parties often complain that they are unable to sit on Select Committees.

[Mr Knight]

I cannot vouch for this 100%, but I heard a rumour that the Committee of Selection might determine the membership of the Procedure Committee tomorrow.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Hemming]

That is excellent news. If the House is to refer something to the Procedure Committee, it would help if that Committee existed. That brings me to the point made by the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann), which is that this matter requires detailed consideration—we cannot simply pass a resolution and sort everything out.

We need to identify the details and a protocol, and Ministers need guidance on what is sufficiently important to warrant this or that process. We need guidance on when information should be released and made available to the outside world and hon. Members via e-mail or the Vote Office. I do not know exactly how long it takes for information that is placed in the Library to be put on the website. Many important issues need to be considered, as we saw in connection with the Building Schools for the Future announcement, when questions were asked about when information ought to have been released. Such questions must be dealt with in great detail.

If Ministers do not wish to follow the guidance, we must think about sanctions. Obviously, we have the power under our inherent jurisdiction over contempt of Parliament to refer Ministers to the Standards and Privileges Committee. Many strange sentences have been passed for such contempt in the past, such as sitting on a horse backwards or getting locked up in Big Ben. We need not necessarily go that far, but we need some form of sanction. We need to look at all the processes that ensure that the House can operate as the voice of the people.

I have come roughly to the end of my 10 minutes. As a member of the Backbench Business Committee and a former member of the Procedure Committee, I am very pleased to see this first substantive motion. It has been driven by Back Benchers to ensure that Parliament asserts itself without having to say, “Pretty please” to the Government.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Williamson]

My hon. Friend makes a particularly cogent point. That would certainly be a valuable way forward.

I know that all new Governments have a political agenda and want to get their legislation on to the statute book, but I have been struck by the breakneck speed at which the new Administration are seemingly determined to railroad legislation through the House. Perhaps that is one reason why there have been so many leaks to the media. The House is not being given sufficient time to scrutinise legislation. This is a cross-party point; I have heard hon. Members on the Government Benches express similar concerns. The Academies Bill is a case in point: there are significant reservations on the Opposition side, but there are also reservations on the Government side and it is regrettable that measures are being railroaded through by the new Administration despite those concerns.

A cross-party consensus on finding a better way forward seems to have emerged. How long has this Parliament been sitting now? I have been elected for about 10 weeks and I do not know how many times you have been called on, Mr Speaker, through various points of order, to admonish Ministers for making statements before coming to the House. That simply cannot go on; it just is not good enough. We have to find a better way of doing business in the Chamber. I hope that we can find cross-party consensus on that, and I hope that Ministers will take this issue more seriously than they have hitherto. I hope also that they will take the possibilities on board, particularly given the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan) about giving embargoes legal force and changing the civil service code.

[John Hemming]

I understand that Select Committees frequently issue their reports under embargoes and obviously it is a contempt of Parliament to publish them prior to the embargo. How does the hon. Gentleman think the Opposition would perceive a situation in which the Government issued something under embargo, thereby constraining them from commenting on it?

[Chris Williamson]

Clearly, Opposition Members would have to pay cognisance to that. If we were to adopt the embargo approach, there would need to be discipline on both sides of the House. If we are to acknowledge that Parliament is paramount and that we should get statements before they go to the media, a degree of discipline would be required on both sides. I believe that there is a way forward.

[John Hemming]

Is the hon. Gentleman suggesting that the embargo would rest merely within Parliament, which is, in a sense, what currently happens with statements, or that documents could be issued to the media with an embargo on them?

[Chris Williamson]

Such details would need to be worked out. That might be a way forward, but could we trust the media with an embargo? I am not sure. We would need to consider the issues, work out the detail and find an appropriate way forward by which Parliament would not feel that it was being held in contempt on occasion by the way in which Ministers conduct themselves. As I have said, the strong cross-party consensus on this matter means that the will is definitely there. I simply hope that Ministers will take our concerns on board and that the House can find a better way of doing business so that we do not have the problems that we have seen far too much of in the short time that I have been a Member of the House.

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Derby North (Chris Williamson), who made some interesting points. In some respects, I wish that he had been here in the previous Parliament, because his frustration would have been extreme.

I have been very impressed by all the speeches made by new Back Benchers. It is a great tribute to them and a safeguard that this Parliament really will be the home of democracy. It would be wrong not to acknowledge your presence here tonight, Mr Speaker, for the whole debate, thus giving it added impetus. That is much appreciated, as is the fact that the Leader of the House has stayed here for the whole debate, as has the shadow Leader of the House, who, in one of the most helpful comments, praised my hon. Friend the Member for Hollobone Central for introducing it. I always regard him as my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering (Mr Hollobone), and he introduced the debate in absolutely the right style and manner. In years to come, people will look back to his speech as a reference on this very important matter.

My right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Mr Knight) has also stayed here for the whole debate. Of course, we hope, as the Backbench Business Committee, that we will kick the football to him to look at when his new Committee is formed. While I am praising hon. Members who have spoken previously, it would be wrong of me not to mention my hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire (Glyn Davies). We go back a very long way from my time in Wales. I am pleased to see him in the House, and he will be an active and able Member.

Probably the last hon. Member to speak tonight will be the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Natascha Engel), the new Chairman of the Backbench Business Committee. She has got off to an absolutely flying start, and I should like formally to congratulate her on what she has done so far.

It is a great privilege to speak in the first debate to be held by the Backbench Business Committee on what is an historic night. For the first time, it has been left to Back Benchers in Parliament, not the Executive or Opposition Front Benchers, to decide what should be debated in the House on a substantive motion. The hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) may yet still divide the House, which would be even better, because we would know the number of hon. Members who support the other view to that taken by the Committee.

The motion that we have chosen to debate goes to the heart of readjusting the balance of power between the Executive and Parliament. I want to declare that I will be equally rude to Labour Front Benchers and the Labour Government and to the Conservatives. I will blame them both in equal measure, so there is no partisanship in that.

Under the last Labour Administration, power was increasingly removed from Back Benchers and instead handed to an arrogant, dismissive and control-freak Government. That started under the Blair Administration, with his concentration on public relations and presentation, and got worse under the Brown Administration, when the need to control every minute detail was the rule of the day. As a result of that and other recent events, public opinion of Parliament is at an all-time low. Something clearly needs to be changed.

The big question for the House is whether anything has changed with the new Government. Are they any less interested in PR, presentation and spin? At the very best, the jury is still considering its verdict. I say that partly because I will be highly critical of the Government’s failure to put Parliament first in certain respects—in particular, leaking information to the press and other media in advance of announcing it in Parliament—but on the plus side, we have two extraordinary parliamentarians in the Leader of the House and the Deputy Leader of the House, who believe in putting Parliament first and have demonstrated that not only by their statements, but by their actions. It is also quite clear that the Prime Minister believes in making the Executive more accountable to Parliament and increasing the role of Back Benchers. Clearly, the decision to set up the Backbench Business Committee was a prime indication of the Government’s support for Parliament.

There are other areas in which the Government have put Parliament first. The Prime Minister made the remarkably self-confident decision to give up the right to choose the date of the next general election, which removes a massive advantage for the Government. Equally, his decision to allow Government Back Benchers—I am delighted that the Chief Whip is on the Front Bench to hear this—to table amendments when scrutinising the details of a Bill in Committee and then to vote in the way in which they think fit, rather than according to the party line, will empower Back Benchers enormously. That will no doubt occasionally lead to the Government losing a vote, but that should be regarded as a victory for Parliament, not a defeat for the Government.

The Government have also supported reform of the Select Committee system, meaning that the Chairs are elected by the whole House rather than appointed by the Whips. Equally, the Government’s desire not to programme Bills is a significant advance. Back Benchers will now be able to question the detail of Bills, whereas whole sections of Bills were not discussed during the last Parliament because of programme orders. However, there has been some backsliding on that commitment.

The motion sets out that the most important Government policy announcements should be made to Parliament first, not leaked to the media in advance while Back Benchers are left completely in the dark, because otherwise how are we supposed to ask the most searching questions and properly represent our constituents? It is embarrassing and wholly unacceptable if the local radio station rings up to ask, “What do you think about the statement?” when I did not even know that there would be such a statement and it then tells me what is in the statement so that I can comment. Of course, that has happened under not only this Government, but the previous Government. It makes a mockery of the legislative process when the Press Gallery is packed for relatively unimportant and therefore unleaked announcements, but entirely empty for the most important statements.

There was an exception to that under the previous Government because the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) had a tendency not to leak statements. I remember one occasion on which his statement was not leaked in advance, and the House and the Press Gallery were packed. Actually, the statement was on a Government U-turn, but that showed what could happen if statements were not leaked.

We have heard about the history of Chancellors being fired for leaks and people teeing up on the golf course suddenly to find that they were fired, but I will not go over that. We have also heard many references to your statements, Mr Speaker, on the fact that Parliament must hear statements on important policy first. I remember that the previous Speaker was sometimes so red in the face with rage that Ministers had leaked in advance that I thought that his blood pressure would go through the roof. However, he did not have the success that you have had, Mr Speaker, at getting Ministers to the Dispatch Box to apologise. It was to the great credit of the Home Secretary and the Education Secretary that they did so, but that shows part of the problem, as several hon. Members have said, because however grovelling the apology is, it is not enough to stop the leaking—it continues.

I have spoken to several Ministers and ex-Ministers. They did not want to go on record this evening, but they explained the thought process behind leaking information. It is partly to ensure that the press comments on the particularly juicy bits that Ministers want to get into the media, but it is also because of the news cycle. Ministers want to get information out for the weekend papers and radio programmes, so they leak it then. On the day of the announcement, they ensure that the statement is again leaked. Then, they appear in the television studios and give interviews on it. It was very hard for previous Labour Ministers to deny that they had leaked a statement when I had seen them on the television discussing it several hours earlier. Finally, they get the benefit of the statement and the comment afterwards, and, until we find a solution—a threat, if the House likes—in order to stop them doing that, it will not end.

I have been very taken by some ideas tonight. The idea from the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) of stringing them from the roof was quite novel, but I think that we are against capital punishment. The idea from the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (John Hemming), who is sitting by the Bar of the House, had some attraction as well. I do not know whether the Mayor of London has entered into this debate, but he had Parliament square cleaned last night so that none of the tents and protesters is now there. That large open space is now available, and it was suggested to me that, if we put a large stocks there and the Speaker said that a Minister had to stay in them for several days, that would—I fear, at an instance—stop the leaking. However, I then remembered that it would be against European Union law—although that is another reason why we should go ahead with the idea.

[John Hemming]

It is against the European convention on human rights, which is to do with the Council of Europe, not the European Council.

[Mr Bone]

The hon. Gentleman is quite right, but I did not want the truth to get in the way of my having a go at the European Union.

Earlier, we commented on how the matter was taken more seriously in the past, and the better way forward is to refer it to the Procedure Committee. However, I should like to suggest some more practical measures on how we might deal with Ministers who continue to leak.

First, if the Procedure Committee or another Committee thinks that a Minister or their Department had leaked, that Minister should have to go and see the relevant Select Committee. If the Department leaks again, perhaps, Mr Speaker, you could demand that the Minister make a statement. If they leak again, perhaps we could have a yellow-card system. I think that I read somewhere in a newspaper about a yellow and red-card system that had much merit. So, with a yellow card the Minister would be on their last warning, and then they might have a red card, meaning that they would have to resign as a Minister forthwith. That, I hope, would really end the leaking. If we had such a system, or if the Procedure Committee had an ultimate sanction, that would stop the leaks. That is what the debate is about. It relates to a serious proposal to put this mother of Parliaments at the heart of democracy, and until we stop such abuse of Parliament we will never really do our job of scrutinising the Executive.