House of Lords Reform Bill

Lord Young of Cookham Excerpts

Monday 9th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Sadiq Khan]

It will be for others to draw what conclusions they want to from those crocodile tears.

As the Leader of the House has returned to the Chamber, it is worth reminding ourselves of what the Conservatives believe about programme motions. He has said that

“today I can announce that we will abolish the practice of automatically guillotining Government Bills and give Parliament back the time it needs to make real improvements to the law.”

The manifesto on which he stood—the Conservative manifesto, not the Liberal Democrats one—stated that they would allow

“MPs the time to scrutinise law effectively”.

That is the point that we have been trying to make. Both coalition parties are clearly on the same page as Labour. The Bill before us today should be allowed to be fully debated and there should be no guillotining of debate by the Government.

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

I am very grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. It is indeed the case that since 2010 we have tried to develop a consensual approach to the programming of legislation and on many constitutional Bills against which his party has voted on Second Reading, they have agreed to the programme motion. That has happened because we have had a sensible dialogue. I very much regret that, on this Bill, it has not been possible to have that dialogue and reach agreement.

[Sadiq Khan]

As somebody who was involved in the boundary changes Bill, I can say that that was not the case.