Points of Order

Paula Sherriff Excerpts

Wednesday 27th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Paula Sherriff (Dewsbury) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. [Interruption.]

[Mr Speaker]

We will come to the hon. Lady’s point of order, but I should like to be able to hear it, and I should like there to be an attentive atmosphere for her benefit, mine, and that of the House.

[Mr Speaker]

The hon. Member for Southend West (Sir David Amess) has no cause for concern. He has never been forgotten before, and he will not be forgotten now. We are storing him up.

[Paula Sherriff]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. At Cabinet Office questions before the recess, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster stated in response to a question from my hon. Friend the Member for Batley and Spen (Jo Cox) that Kirklees Council had

“£200 million in useable and unused reserves”—[Official Report, 9 December 2015; Vol. 603, c. 979.]

and concluded that the problems that we reported were facing our constituents were, therefore, “not real ones”. I have now had it confirmed, not just by officers of the local authority, that its unused reserves are nowhere remotely close to that figure. Even including reserves that are already allocated and not useable, the figure is nowhere near £200 million. Through a written answer, the Minister with responsibility for local government, the hon. Member for Nuneaton (Mr Jones), has confirmed that according to the Government’s own figures Kirklees Council had less than a fifth of that amount in unallocated financial reserves at the end of the last financial year. May I ask you, Mr Speaker, what recourse there is for Members when a Minister has, even if unintentionally, misled this House on a matter that so seriously affects our constituents?

[Mr Speaker]

The short answer to the hon. Lady’s question is that every Member of this House, including Ministers, must take responsibility for the veracity or otherwise of what he or she says. If somebody thinks the House has been inadvertently misled by a Member, the Member is responsible for correcting the record. That is the first point. The second point is that the recourse available to the hon. Lady lies in the Order Paper and the advice proffered by the Table Office. What I mean by that is that persistence pays, and if the hon. Lady thinks she has a good point, she should repeat it. She will have heard me make the observation that repetition is not a novel phenomenon in the House of Commons, and if she wants to keep making her point, she can take advice from the welter of sagacious and experienced colleagues around her as to how best to do so; most of them are very practised at the art, as I am sure the hon. Lady will be, too.