Business of the House

Patrick Grady Excerpts

Thursday 2nd February 2023 Commons Chamber

[Penny Mordaunt]

This is an important issue for many hon. Members across the House. We recognise the importance of local bus services, which is why we have provided £60 million to help bus operators cap single fare journeys to £2 a journey at the start of the year to help with household budgets. Bus services received about £3 billion in the last financial year to support improvements, and I will ensure that the Department for Transport heard the hon. Lady’s particular local concerns.

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

The Leader of the House is due to nominate Members who can stand in for her at meetings of the new restoration and renewal board. Will those Members be delegates who share and represent her views on, say, the use of electronic voting, the House moving to meet in different places around the country and other aspects that might be described as modernisation, or will they be substitutes who will be free to express their own opinions about how things should move forward? If so, how will that help to ensure consistency in the new board’s deliberations?

[Penny Mordaunt]

I will maintain an interest in this as a member of the House of Commons Commission. I think that this is a serious job. Those Members will be able to make their own judgments, but, clearly, that body has more than my delegates on it. The shadow Leader of the House also has a delegate, and there are external experts to help form a collective judgment.

Most importantly, in the coming weeks we will be asking all Members of the House their views about the priorities. We will be ensuring that we have a solid schedule of works, which currently has not really been visible to Members of this House, and that we can be pragmatic about how we approach the R and R project, both to reduce the cost to the taxpayer and to minimise the disruption to the business that we conduct in the House.