Crime and Courts Bill [Lords] (Programme) ((No. 3)

Peter Bone Excerpts

Monday 18th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

What is exceptional today is the Standing Order No. 24 application being granted. On the rare occasions that that has occurred, the Leader of the House has always, in my recollection, changed the remaining timetable so that proper debate took place. I do not understand why that has not happened on this occasion.

[Mr Lansley]

The point today is that the Standing Order No. 24 application related to matters that were part of the planned debate on amendments on Report in the first three hours. In any case, if the House agrees it, the programme motion will take us two hours beyond the normal moment of interruption. I accept that as a consequence of the pressure on the time for debate today, some hon. Members may be disappointed if a particular amendment that they have sponsored or signed does not receive the amount of discussion that they had hoped.

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[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

I beg to move amendment (d), at end of paragraph 2, leave out ‘at today’s sitting’ and insert

‘in two days (in addition to the First Day already taken)’

It is normally a great privilege to follow the hon. Member for Wallasey (Ms Eagle), but this evening the opposite is the case. I am afraid that what has happened today is part of the deal that has been done to reach all-party agreement. The deal was: “Okay, if we agree to this, we won’t object to the fact that these very important amendments and new clauses won’t be discussed.” It is clear that there will now be a maximum of only 40 minutes in which to discuss some really serious issues. I fail to understand how the Leader of the House or the shadow Leader can say that there will be other methods and time to discuss them.

I have moved a manuscript amendment to the programme motion—the first time I have done so—because of the unusual circumstances. In the short time since it was prepared and we knew what was happening today, 15 right hon. and hon. Members from both sides of the House have signed it, including two former Home Secretaries and the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee.

When we were in opposition, we always used to criticise the then Government for curtailing debate on legislation, but I must say that this is the most outrageous example I have ever seen. These are really serious issues affecting extradition and vulnerable people, and to say that, effectively, they will not be discussed because of a clever way of guillotining their consideration is, to my mind, completely unacceptable.

Over 20 amendments have been selected, never mind all those that were tabled but not selected, and very many Back-Bench Members have signed them. It cannot be right to have tabled a programme motion last Thursday at 5.15 pm, after a huge row at business questions, saying that there would supposedly be plenty of time to discuss the Bill—although people had queries about that—without any knowledge that a Standing Order No. 24 application was going to be tabled and granted. I absolutely believe the Leader of the House when he says that when the Government tabled the new programme motion very late on Thursday they did not know—indeed, they could not have known—that there would be a Standing Order No. 24 application and that three hours of today’s debate would be lost.

If the Leader of the House thought that that amount of time should be available, we are going to be three hours short of it today. It would be possible, even now—I know that it is not going to happen because I have been here and seen this too often—for him to get up and say that this is a perfectly reasonable amendment to the programme motion and accept it. All the Leveson clauses would still be debated exactly as was proposed in the original programme motion; all that would happen is that the important amendments that we have lost would be debated on another day. If the Leader of the House is saying that so much legislation is rushing through this House that we have no time to find on any other days, that is hard to believe since the House of Lords has been given an extra week’s recess because we are not progressing enough business.

In May 2009, when we were in opposition, the Prime Minister-to-be made a speech called “Fixing Broken Politics”—I would recommend it to every right hon. and hon. Member—in which he made it clear that the one thing he was not going to do when he was in power was restrict debate; he was going to have open, transparent debate and allow enough time to scrutinise really important issues.

[Mr David Winnick (Walsall North) (Lab)]

Did the hon. Gentleman really believe what the then Leader of the Opposition, now Prime Minister, said? Did not those of us on the Government Benches during those years say that the programme motions that were being tabled and passed would almost certainly happen in the same way if the Conservatives won the election? I am sure that the hon. Gentleman is not so naive.

[Mr Bone]

I am very naive, because that is exactly what I believed. At that time, the hon. Gentleman would have gone through the same experience of the expenses scandal, when there was a real movement in the country for this place to change so that proper scrutiny would take place in this mother of Parliaments.

Previously, any scrutiny occurred down the corridor; we never got the chance to reach important clauses and amendments in Bills. We complained about that week in, week out. Yet here we are tonight having lost any debate whatsoever on really important clauses. Even when the situation was at its worst, under the Blair regime, I cannot remember anything being so dramatically curtailed. Why on earth could not the Leader of the House simply have said that we were going to have another day because of the Standing Order No. 24 debate? We could have extended tonight’s timetable by another three hours—that would have been sufficient—but given that that has not happened, the only way that we could, at the very last minute, come up with an acceptable, in-order amendment, was to say, “Deal with Leveson today and finish that at the time the Government suggested”, which will now be 10.44 pm, “and then move on to these important issues another day.” It is condescending to say that a few Members will be upset. It is not about a few Members being upset; these are really important issues that we should be debating as a House.

[Sir Richard Shepherd (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)]

What my hon. Friend says is true. He did not mention, but could easily have done so, that glorious sunlit day in Birmingham—perhaps he attended the party conference that year—when we were exhilarated to hear the then shadow Leader of the House give the greatest pleasure to us all when he announced that we would no longer automatically guillotine. That is the substance of the matter that has animated so many of us on the Government Back Benches. The deliberate intention not to debate things—to manipulate the order of play, so to speak, on the Floor of the House—deceives the public out there and corrupts the purpose of our being here.

[Mr Bone]

My hon. Friend puts it far better than I do. Of course, I did rejoice at that. I went into the new coalition Government with a real feeling that we were going to be different—that things would change. Tonight we are taking a huge step backwards. As I said, I cannot recall any occasion on which an SO24 application has been granted and we therefore lose X amount of business that is not then rearranged.

Some cynical people—I am probably one of them—would say that this has suited the business managers enormously, because an amendment had been tabled that they did not want to debate. If I am wrong about that, it would be very simple for the Leader of the House to accept my amendment and we will see how well the Government respond to it.

The other problem is that this debate on the programme motion eats into the time that is allowed for debate on the substantive issues. That is a trick the previous Government introduced. We said it was wrong, but it is exactly what has happened tonight. The previous Leader of the House promised that we would not automatically programme business. This is the worst abuse that I have seen since becoming a Member of this House. I urge the Leader of the House, at this late stage, to show that he is a democratic champion of this House, to stick up for Back Benchers, not for the Executive, and to accept my amendment.