Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Young of Cookham Excerpts

Thursday 14th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

6. What progress he has made on introducing a House business committee.

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

As I said in my answer to my hon. Friend on 19 April, we plan to honour our commitment in the programme for Government to establish a House business committee by the third year of this Parliament.

[Mr Bone]

By decentralising power and reforming Parliament, we can redistribute power away from an over-mighty Executive. The House of Commons should have power “over its own timetable.” Those are not my words; they are the words of the Prime Minister. Why is the Leader of the House dragging his feet? Surely he should be supporting our wonderful Prime Minister.

[Sir George Young]

We have not dragged our feet. As my ministerial colleague, my hon. Friend the Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr Heath), has just explained, at the first possible opportunity in this Parliament we introduced a Backbench Business Committee, which had been obstructed by the previous Administration, and we also made a commitment, which Labour never made, to introduce a House business committee by the third year. As I said in my reply to my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) in April, we propose to honour that commitment, and I reject his suggestion that we have dragged our feet.

[Natascha Engel (North East Derbyshire) (Lab)]

Will the Leader of the House guarantee that any House business committee will be entirely separate from the Backbench Business Committee?

[Sir George Young]

I am very happy to give the hon. Lady the assurance she seeks. We plan to keep the Backbench Business Committee in its current form. The committee to which my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough referred would look at Government business, and the two would work in parallel; the second would not displace the first.

[Mr Nigel Dodds (Belfast North) (DUP)]

May we have a guarantee that when the House business committee is set up there will be full and proper representation of the smaller parties in this House, and that those Members will be able to participate fully?

[Sir George Young]

I understand the concern the right hon. Gentleman expresses, and it is a concern that he also expressed when we set up the Backbench Business Committee. When the relevant proposals come forward, there will be an opportunity to take on board the representation he has just made.

[Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)]

So far, the Wright Committee proposals have been a disaster for the smaller parties—fewer places for us on Select Committees; exclusion from the Backbench Business Committee. We need an absolute guarantee that, this time around, there will be representatives of the smaller parties on the House business committee.

[Sir George Young]

The harsh reality is that the hon. Gentleman represents a minority party. He will know that the way in which Select Committees are composed represents the balance in the House, and a Select Committee would have to be very big indeed for him to have a place as of right. We have recently changed the rules for the Backbench Business Committee to give access to him which he did not have before. As I said in reply to an earlier question, we will look in the round at the proposals for a House business committee when the opportunity presents itself.

The hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross, representing the House of Commons Commission, was asked—