Parliamentary Reform

Natascha Engel Excerpts

Thursday 3rd February 2011 Westminster Hall

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

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Benton. I am not going to read out a speech; I have just scribbled some notes and cannot read what I have written. I thank the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) for bringing us this debate. The number of hon. Members here is testament to how important it is. She is keeping the fires of reform burning. I do not think that she needs to worry that we are at the end of reform; this is the beginning of a continuing process.

It is nice to see so many new Members in this Chamber today, because it is important to get the views and ideas of people who have come from outside, and who are much more normal than those of us who have been here a while. We must not forget that being here for even one Parliament has already made some of us accept as normal things that clearly are not, to the outside world.

As the Chair of the Backbench Business Committee I want to say that its very existence has made a real difference in terms of reforming Parliament and the difference between then and now. Two debates are being held in the Chamber that are massively oversubscribed. All the debates that we have timetabled so far in the Chamber have had speech limits. Today the limit is five minutes per speaker. I shall try to speak for 10 minutes or less; as has been said, what cannot be said in 10 minutes is not worth saying. It is worth noting that when Back Benchers take responsibility for their own time they use it wisely and well, and take an interest in what is being debated. That is something for the Government to consider. They should recognise that, through the Backbench Business Committee and Select Committees, Back Benchers are doing what we were sent here for—to hold the Executive to account better.

The hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion has single-handedly contributed to raising the status and profile of Westminster Hall. It is such a shame that we have this Chamber and underuse it, as the right hon. Member for Saffron Walden (Sir Alan Haselhurst) said. Along with the Procedure Committee, the Backbench Business Committee will be considering the use of Westminster Hall, and providing another forum for debate that is more interesting than just having an Adjournment debate with one Member and a Minister responding. This debate really shows what we can do with Westminster Hall.

[Chris Bryant]

I wonder whether my hon. Friend would consider an idea that was suggested earlier, which is having Second Reading debates of private Members’ Bills in Westminster Hall with the vote subsequently, at a fixed time, as a deferred Division in the main Chamber.

[Natascha Engel]

Absolutely. To widen that point, I want to see Westminster Hall being used as a more experimental Chamber. As the right hon. Member for Saffron Walden said, some of the experiments that were conducted in the past worked and some did not. That is what experiments are all about, to see whether or not they work, and unless we actually have a go at them we will not find out. Westminster Hall seems to be exactly the type of forum where we can conduct those experiments. I would have ministerial statements and any number of things taking place in Westminster Hall that currently we may or may not do in the main Chamber.

I want to make a very broad point before I make my one suggestion for parliamentary reform. That broad point is about being very clear what we as parliamentarians do and to make that our starting point for reform. I was with the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion when we were giving evidence to the Procedure Committee on reforming sitting hours, in a pre-inquiry seminar, and one of the points that emerged is that every MP is different. There are different parties, but MPs are also different as individuals. They have different lives, different backgrounds and different experiences that they bring to Parliament. No one way of doing things will suit everybody, but we have come quite far from there being a clear idea of what we do in Parliament. The increasing focus that we have given our constituency work, which is something that has been happening over a long period, not only undermines the work that used to be done by local councillors and local authorities—work that they should be doing—but there has been a direct correlation between the amount of time that we spend doing very local constituency casework and the amount of time that we do not spend scrutinising legislation in Parliament and holding the Executive to account. I wonder whether the Hansard Society would like to carry out some proper research into that issue. It is a very important case that we need to make.

[Mr James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con)]

The hon. Lady is making an extremely good point. Does she agree that there is a direct correlation between the increasing power of the Executive, which we have seen over the last 20 years, and the increasing quantity of time spent by Back Benchers doing stuff that should be done by somebody else in their constituencies? What we want is people here in Parliament, working hard, holding the Government to account and getting a grip of the Executive.

[Natascha Engel]

Yes. I would not like to say that we should never go back to our constituencies, but the hon. Gentleman makes an absolutely fair point.

[Fiona Mactaggart]

One thing that the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) did not speak about—unsurprisingly, because she is a one-Member party in this place—was the way that the Whips operate. One of the things that I found when I first entered Parliament was that the infantilising impact of Whips on Members of Parliament was quite damaging and it shows in some of the issues that my hon. Friend is raising. Every Member of Parliament is different. Every Member of Parliament brings different experience and represents a different type of constituency. We need to find mechanisms whereby those differences, within the context of party agreement, can effectively be aired so that we get the best legislation that we are capable of making.

[Natascha Engel]

I agree. Sometimes, however, we are in slight danger of overplaying the idea that Whips infantilise Members and sometimes we should just be big enough to stand up to them, if we have an issue.

[Mr Bone]

rose—

[Natascha Engel]

As the hon. Gentleman has frequently done.

[Mr Bone]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on making a very powerful speech. I want to bring to the attention of the House my private Member’s Bill abolishing the Whips Office. I have tabled it for a Wednesday night—7 September 2011. All things come if we wait.

[Natascha Engel]

I look forward to taking part in that debate. In fact, that brings me to the end of my general points. There is one thing that I consider would be a really good piece of parliamentary reform and it relates to Select Committees. Select Committees are the thing that we as a Parliament do really well. They are possibly the only forum where Members of Parliament, after they are elected, learn, gain in expertise and develop. It is an absolute privilege for MPs to be members of Select Committees. Being a member of a Select Committee is not open to everyone. In fact, it is only open to a minority of MPs. We have taken away the ability of Whips alone to appoint people to Select Committees and we now have elections across the House, and that has worked really well.

I do not see why the Select Committee principle cannot go much wider. Initially, I thought that every MP should be allowed to be a member of a Sub-Committee of a Select Committee that looks in greater detail at individual issues that may be cross-departmental, and that we should also have departmental co-ordinating Committees. However, I think that we should go even further and invite Members of the House of Lords to take part in that process.

We massively neglect the House of Lords. Regardless of whether we believe that Members of the Lords should be elected, or even if we do not believe that they should be there at all, there are people in the Lords who are specifically there for their expertise; indeed, it is their only reason for being in the Lords. Sometimes, we have people who are very expert in the House of Commons, but in the House of Lords there is a group of people who are expert in a certain subject. I would love to see Select Committee membership widened to include absolutely everybody.

For example, instead of a Select Committee on Energy and Climate Change, or on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, we should have a Select Committee that examines the issue of waste management and incineration. In almost every single constituency, the issue of where an incinerator is placed is a massive one. It involves planning laws, waste management and the local authority; all these different aspects of the issue need resolving.

[Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)]

Is that not the role of the all-party groups? Although I respect their lordships in the other place and there are a couple of Joint Committees, having the House of Commons shadowing Departments is the right way forward.

[Natascha Engel]

I disagree and I will develop my point very briefly, because I have already spoken for my 10 minutes. I would like to see smaller Select Committees going out into the country and taking evidence from people rather than just sitting in this place.

[Cathy Jamieson (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way, especially as I know that she wants to speed up and finish her speech. Does she agree that there is much to be learned from the example of the Scottish Parliament, particularly from its Public Petitions Committee, which can refer particular items that have been brought by members of the public to other Committees of the Parliament for them to examine in more detail? Perhaps that is something that could be looked at.

[Natascha Engel]

Absolutely. I would throw all these ideas into the pot. I simply repeat that Select Committees are the thing that works best in this place and I would love to see their role expanded, not only because they work so well and because they develop the expertise of individual MPs but because they could become a forum for us to be, as the Speaker always says, “ambassadors for Parliament”, by going out and engaging with people on individual issues that are not party political, just as Select Committees are not party political. We could go out there and really engage with individuals.

[Ann Coffey]

May I make a quick suggestion? One way that Select Committees could engage Back-Bench Members more would be to accept oral evidence from us more often.

[Natascha Engel]

Absolutely. The Backbench Business Committee is a perfect case in point. We receive oral evidence from Members every week. My hon. Friend is absolutely right to make that suggestion. In that context, I would also love to see the work of the Procedure Committee develop now that it has taken on so much extra work, especially after the Modernisation Committee was effectively merged with it. What the Procedure Committee does, in terms of parliamentary reform, is interesting to most people, not only to those in this room but across the rest of the House. I would love to see that kind of work much more widely debated and extended, and for people to be given the opportunity to participate, especially the people we represent in this place. That is my one little suggestion: looking at widening the role of Select Committees within parliamentary reform.

I really hope that this is not the end, but rather just the beginning of developing ideas on how we can reform this place to make it work better, and on how we, as individual Members, can much better represent the people out there who send us here.