Business of the House

Philip Davies Excerpts

Thursday 22nd January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hague]

Generally, such questions will be referred to the Foreign Office, because the officials who work on this are in the PSVI—preventing sexual violence in conflict initiative—unit, which is part of the Foreign Office, and one of the Foreign Office Ministers has responsibility for this matter. It is also possible, however, to table questions directly to me, as Leader of the House, including at oral questions to the Leader of the House. This has happened in the past, although as we had just such a question session a couple of hours ago, the opportunity will not arise again for another few weeks. There are certainly opportunities, however, and I am happy to answer such questions in the course of business questions as well.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

May we have a debate on the answering of parliamentary questions? I have here a handy 15-page internal guide from the Ministry of Justice entitled “Parliamentary questions guidance”. It gives a list of all the people that an answer must go through before it can be signed off. They include special advisers, the head of news, the deputy head of news, press officers and, as if that were not enough, “your designated press officer”. Surely a parliamentary question should simply be responded to with a factual answer. Why does it need to go through so many spin doctors? I have no idea how many of the other Departments run this kind of operation. May we have a debate on this, or a statement from the Ministry of Justice on why it goes through this rigmarole? It is no wonder that it gets so far behind in answering our questions. If the Leader of the House will not grant us such a debate, will he intervene to stop parliamentary answers being subjected to this kind of spin?

[Mr Hague]

The fact that the answers go through so many wise people before they get to my hon. Friend probably explains why they are so good. The important thing is that they should go quickly, in a timely way, through whomever they need to go through. By the end of my time as Foreign Secretary, the Foreign Office had a 100% record of answering questions on time. That simply requires all the officials who need to examine these things to do so speedily, and I encourage other Departments to do the same.