Point of Order

John Bercow Excerpts

Thursday 18th April 2013 Commons Chamber

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I would welcome your advice and guidance on a matter relating to the answering of questions by the Education Secretary. You will probably know that he has one of the poorest records in the House for doing so. I believe that he has been officially chastised for his poor failures, but sadly that appears to have had little effect. I tabled a number of named day questions to the Secretary of State on 21 March with a named day of the 26th. I received four answers on the due day, but I note that the three Ministers concerned—the Under-Secretary of State responsible for further education, skills and lifelong learning, the hon. Member for West Suffolk (Matthew Hancock); the Minister for children and families, the Under-Secretary of State for Education, the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mr Timpson); and the Minister for Schools—have demonstrated their ability to work as a team and collaborate on answers, as they all gave me exactly the same answer to four very different questions. They all said, “I will reply as soon as possible.” It is now four weeks since I tabled the questions and more than three since I received the holding replies. I received one answer today. I am sure that you will agree that it is unacceptable for Ministers to ignore questions and I would be obliged if you helped me in extracting some proper ones soon.

[Mr Speaker]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his point of order, in response to which I have a number of observations. First, the hon. Gentleman will know the importance that I, as Chair of our proceedings, attach to the delivery by Ministers of timely and substantive replies to parliamentary questions. The Leader of the House and the Deputy Leader of the House are present on the Treasury Bench and I hope that one or other of them will be good enough to make contact with the Minister, in the best tradition of Leaders of the House, to exhort rather faster progress in delivering replies generally and in replying to the hon. Gentleman in particular.

Secondly, I alert the hon. Gentleman to the fact that the Procedure Committee is monitoring the performance of Government Departments on this front, and the hon. Gentleman might wish to share with the Committee the evidence he has just reported to the House.

Lastly, I simply mention to the hon. Gentleman that I know that the Procedure Committee has been watching particularly closely of late the performance of the Department for Education in these matters. I hope that that is helpful.