Information for Backbenchers on Statements

Stephen Pound Excerpts

Tuesday 20th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hollobone]

My hon. Friend makes an extremely good point, which is not unrelated to the earlier intervention by my hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin). If the parliamentary day were shifted forward, it would clearly help regarding the danger of leaking information.

What we need is some iron resolve in Ministers of the Crown that when they make important decisions, they announce them to the people’s representatives first. They face all sorts of difficulties with that, but the message should go out from us tonight that we really want them to face up to them.

[Stephen Pound (Ealing North) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman is leading us gently to the place where I think he wants to take us, but on the question of meeting earlier and earlier—apart from the inevitable logic of having the House sitting just after midnight—what on earth would he do about the Sunday papers? Saturday sittings have not occurred since the 17th century, I believe, although I am sure that the hon. Member for Louth and Horncastle (Sir Peter Tapsell) will remind me.

[Mr Hollobone]

I do not detect a huge appetite for Saturday sittings, but if the hon. Gentleman wants to make that representation, he is perfectly entitled to do so. I recognise that there is a problem with the weekend media. Are we really saying that the media are so voracious in their desire for news and so powerful that Her Majesty’s Government are unable to resist them? If so, we are saying that our democracy is pretty hopeless.

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[Alison Seabeck]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right and, if the motion is agreed to, it will be interesting to see how the Procedure Committee takes matters forward. I shall have some suggestions later in my comments as to exactly what some of the penalties might be.

[Stephen Pound]

My hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) talked about sanctions, and my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Moor View (Alison Seabeck) mentioned the case of J. H. Thomas. If I remember rightly, he was playing golf on the morning in question and made a joke about “Tee up”, which was interpreted to mean that there was going to be an additional duty on tea, which was correct. He was sued by the Thomas Lipton company because of the consequences for its shares. Does my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Moor View agree that this is all about Ministers trying to control situations, and it is the control rather than the inadvertence that is the key to the issue? Does she also have sympathy for the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda that this issue should, in fact, be referred to the Standards and Privileges Committee?

[Alison Seabeck]

I thank my hon. Friend for his, as always, incredibly well-informed comments.

[Stephen Pound]

I was there at the time.

[Alison Seabeck]

You don’t look a day over 21!

I agree that the precise nature of the sanction is an issue—and I have a proposal that may be thought of as somewhat flippant. My hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda is something of an expert, however, and I therefore think we should listen very carefully to what he has to say and to his proposals.

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[Sir George Young]

It was a serious offence before this debate and it will remain a serious offence afterwards.

The Government await with interest the recommendations of the Procedure Committee, especially in relation to the ministerial code, which has already been cited. Among other things, the code provides:

“When Parliament is in session, the most important announcements of Government policy should be made in the first instance, in Parliament.”

Since the start of this Parliament, the Government have made 20 oral statements and 189 written statements, which is an average since the Queen’s Speech of nearly three oral statements per sitting week and nearly seven written statements per sitting day. On top of that, we have answered five urgent questions. In this Parliament, there have already been a total of 214 announcements to the House over 30 sitting days, so I hope that the House accepts that as evidence that the Government take the code seriously.

Even with the best endeavours, as we have heard, leaks to the media can occur before announcements are made to the House and without the connivance of Ministers. For example, as the hon. Member for Plymouth, Moor View (Alison Seabeck) said, the whole of the 1996 Budget found its way to the Daily Mirror. The then Chancellor decided that there was nothing much that he could do about it and took his whole team to an Indian restaurant—a characteristic response from my right hon. and learned Friend the Justice Secretary. As my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering said, when things have gone wrong in this Parliament, Ministers have come to apologise.

The code says that the “most important announcements” should be made first to Parliament, but as we heard earlier, that gives rise to the question of what the most important announcements are—perhaps the Procedure Committee would like to address that point. However, it is worth pointing out that the code should not prevent Ministers from making observations or comments about policies that have already been announced, and nor should it mean that we cannot make speeches or give interviews outside the House. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills was criticised last week for comments that he made about the graduate tax in a television interview, but as I told the House last Thursday, there was no policy change because the question of a graduate tax had already been referred to Lord Browne’s review by the previous Government. In my view, my right hon. Friend was taking part in the entirely legitimate debate that is developing outside the House.

[Stephen Pound]

Not for the first time, the right hon. Gentleman is shining the light of clarity on the particular problem before us. He talked about the seven or eight written statements that are released each day and the many oral statements, but how on earth can we come to a situation in which somebody somewhere is tasked with deciding what is “the most important”? A written ministerial statement was made today on the 2013 review of the Rural Payments Agency, but I would say that that is probably not the most important—[Interruption.] I am sorry; I mean in the scale of things to be reported to the House. Will the right hon. Gentleman consider introducing a system such as colour coding under which we could have different gradations of statement, meaning that some could be laid before the House while others would have to be presented from the Dispatch Box?

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[Mark Durkan]

I accept what my hon. Friend says. However, I doubt that a new House code of accountability would be able to cover all these issues. It would have to be more like a highway code than an exhaustive and comprehensive law that was specific in all cases. On the basis of case law and application, it could improve, and then Ministers would not be able to claim that they were in any doubt about what it required.

We must also be careful, as Back Benchers who want to ensure that announcements are made in this House rather than being pre-spun to the press and elsewhere, that we do not end up complaining that too many statements are being made and we do not have enough time to spend on substantive legislative business. For another couple of months, I will carry on serving in another Chamber, and that is a common complaint there. We have too many set-piece statements that do not amount to very much and people find it hard to see anything key, important or new in them. Those three words have all been used at various times to describe the test for whether statements should be made in this House.

I sat on the Benches opposite during the last Parliament and heard many statements that did not contain much new. It might have been that the Prime Minister wanted to identify himself with a policy, but the policy itself was not new, and at times we wondered why statements were being made. While we want to press the point that statements should be made in this House rather than being presented through the media or at other set-piece events, we do not want to end up in a ridiculous situation.

The Leader of the House made some useful suggestions. We should not always have oral statements with up to an hour of questions. Often the questions become repetitive and, just as Minister’s statements are accused of spin, so too the questions and the replies can be accused of counter-spin. It cuts both ways. Are there intermediate arrangements that we could have between a written statement, which involves no questions or time for questions, and an oral statement accompanied by a lengthy opportunity for questions? My hon. Friend the Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound) referred earlier to a possible gradation of statements. As the Leader of the House suggested, if a statement were available in writing, it could then be the subject of questions without the statement being rehearsed in the House.

[Stephen Pound]

When I made that intervention, I may have unwittingly caused offence to certain Members representing rural constituencies. The point I was trying to make was that a review such as the 2013 review of the Rural Payments Agency surely is not in the same scale of immediacy as some of the other statements, such as on the implementation of the Bribery Act 2010. Does my hon. Friend accept that we could have a code of prioritisation on this, perhaps even a hierarchy of needs?

[Mark Durkan]

I fully agree with my hon. Friend, although as always the question will be: who makes the judgment, who makes the call? However, so long as people think that an honest judgment has been made and a fair call attempted, the House would be broadly satisfied. It should always be the case that, if a written statement is made without the chance for questions, there should perhaps be a business slot early in the following week in which people can, if they want to, ask questions about a statement. Perhaps there should be an opportunity for questions to be asked about all the written statements made in the previous week.

I do not understand why the House does not sit until half-past 2 on a Tuesday. I understand the argument on the Monday—that Members are travelling from constituencies and want to spend the weekend with their families in their constituencies—but I do not understand why we wait until half-past 2 on a Tuesday. There should be more early-day business, perhaps on Tuesday, and in fact one window for early-day business could be specifically for ministerial statements. That might be an opportunity for people to have a round-up of free-ranging questions about matters that were the subject of written ministerial statements the previous week, and Ministers would have to be available on that basis.

As I understand it, in the Scottish Parliament, Ministers have to be available to answer questions on a fairly free-ranging basis. We could have a special question time slot—it could be done Westminster Hall-style—in the Chamber almost as a special committee of the House, if we do not want to transgress on to other things. There are ways and means to ensure that, even if a statement is tabled in the first instance as a written statement, we can ask questions about it and hold people to account, so that the procedure of the written statement is not abused. That applies to some of the issues raised by other Members about the hours of the House and the times at which we sit.

It is important to have better advance notice of statements. Again, the Leader of the House was helpful when he said that perhaps more work could be done to ensure that there is advance notice of oral statements. I sympathise with my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) who spoke as a new Member on this point. It is bizarre that we can find in our papers all written ministerial statements, which we cannot question, for that day, but nothing about oral statements, unless we have been listening to the radio and have guessed what topics are likely to be the subject of oral statements. If we could have more advance notice, it would help us in our preparation of questions.

We need to ensure, however, that we have a good balance in what we ask of the Government, because we do not want the business of the House to become dominated by set-piece statements and questions. We also want live debates and good interaction in those debates. I appreciate why the Backbench Business Committee has singled out this issue for the first debate under its lead—it is correct in the light of recent experience and also experiences in the previous Parliament. However, with everybody making accusations, we should bear in mind one of the wisest adages I have ever heard about politics: irony in politics is just hypocrisy with panache. Hearing many of the complaints that each side of the House is making against the other about what different Governments have done reminds me of that. We need to remember that Back-Bench Members are not free from sin either.

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[Stephen Pound (Ealing North) (Lab)]

Any debate that runs the gamut from Pericles to Jimmy Thomas, those two great statesmen, has to be fascinating, but I think we are in the unusual situation of all agreeing on the problem, but none agreeing on the terms of the solution. It is part of the legend of this building that when that glorious fresh, clean and energetic Government of 1997 swept into power, we set up something called the Modernisation of the House Committee, which after a very short time was suspected of going so native that there was a move to set up a “Modernisation of that Modernisation of the House Committee Committee”! Whether that happened or not, I do not know, but change was slowly achieved.

What we need to ask ourselves is: what would be the consequence of a self-denying ordinance linked to a structural series of procedures—a protocol—on the Floor of this House? We need to realise that Ministers would immediately lose control of the agenda; they would actually lose control of news management—the one thing that Ministers hold close to their breasts and near to their hearts, the one thing that they love above all, which is to control the information grid. They would lose it.

I invite hon. Members to picture the scene, lean back and close their eyes; it is something that often happens when I am speaking, but on this occasion, they can do so with my approval. The Minister rises at 3.30 in the afternoon. She or he starts to make a statement. In simpler days, that statement would be followed by comments from the Opposition, and then, when the Liberal Democrat stood up to speak, everyone would leave. When they arrived at St Stephen’s entrance, they would find the place surrounded by the rapacious reptiles of the press, who would have been interviewing people on the Minister’s statement while the Minister was still speaking.

We need to arrive at a point at which a self-denying ordinance is accepted. I am no friend of the tradition of Cromwell, the butcher of Drogheda, and in any event he experienced a degree of failure in forcing the principle on his own people; but were we to achieve that, at some stage—be it on the “Today” programme, Nick Ferrari’s programme on LBC, or any other medium—a Minister of the Crown would have to say to an interrogator, “I cannot answer that question, because I have not made a statement to the House.”

The thought of my ever becoming a Minister is a flight of fancy too far, but were I ever to be in such a position—and I have to say that on occasion my mind has roamed in that way—and were a constituent to ask me, “What will you say tomorrow about the terms of reference for the Commission on the Funding of Care and Support?” I would have to say to that constituent, “Sorry, I cannot tell you, because I must make a statement to the House.” A lot of constituents would ask, “Who comes first, parliamentarians or the people?” That is the degree of the disconnect between us and the public at the present time. So if we are to do this, we must somehow divide the day-to-day reports, the annual reports and the regular reviews that could be placed in the Library from statements of this particular kind.

We must accept that at some stage a parliamentarian—a Minister—will do the unheard of, the unprecedented, and say to an interviewer on the radio or television, “No, I cannot answer that question.” Once that has happened, a whole new set of terms of reference—new terms of trade—will have been established, and we will be moving in a different direction. Until we have done that, there will always be the pressure—and sometimes it will be unbearable—to imply that the Minister does not know the answer to the question, when in fact the Minister is rightly saying, “I do know the answer to the question”, but it would be inappropriate and disrespectful of Parliament for that Minister to give that answer there and then.

That is why I have concluded, reluctantly, that we must consider the issue of sanctions. I rather like one idea, although I do not necessarily favour the decapitation of the entire Front Bench suggested by the bloodthirsty Member for the constituency formerly known as Kettering, but now for ever to be known as Hollobone Central. You, Mr Speaker, know more about the ways of this building than most. I cannot recall the last occasion on which a miscreant Minister was dragged to the Bar of the House. Dragged to the bar, maybe, but not to the Bar of the House. What better, what more salutary example could there be of the power of Parliament for the people—not for Parliament, but for the public, for the people—than some shivering Minister trembling at the Bar, looking around sheepishly, aware of the dreadful calumny that has been perpetrated, and excoriated by Members on all sides? Would that not be delicious?

I think we must seriously consider that option, or perhaps another. It was suggested earlier that placing someone backwards on a horse would be entirely acceptable. Indeed, listening to one of my speeches might be painful enough. However, we must accept that the problem is here for all to see. The solution is for us to define. We have some way to go tonight before we define it, and I fear that when we do define it, we cannot do so in isolation from the issue of sanctions.

This has been an extraordinary debate. Whatever happens from this day on will be different, because tonight marks a watershed. I salute the new Backbench Business Committee and its magnificently able, intellectually brilliant and gifted Chair for leading us in this direction. Things will never be the same again; but how they will be, and what they will be, is up to us tonight.