Government Policy on the Proceedings of the House

Tom Brake Excerpts

Tuesday 10th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)]

I rise to make what Members will be pleased to hear will be a mercifully short contribution. I am afraid that I must use some of my few minutes to correct something that was said by the shadow Leader of the House; I am sure that she would like that to be done at the earliest opportunity. She said that it was the Conservatives who introduced the Backbench Business Committee, but of course it was not. It was the coalition Government, consisting of Liberal Democrats and Conservatives. That followed the work that a Labour Member of Parliament, Tony Wright, had completed, but it is unfinished business. Let me pre-empt a possible intervention from the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone), who, I know, is pressing for the establishment of a Committee to resolve the way in which business is presented in this place. I hope that the shadow Leader of the House did not mind my correcting her on that point.

I thought that the right hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) was rather generous to the Leader of the House in saying that she could not possibly answer questions about business during business questions. That is her role, and I am sure that her predecessors Andrew Lansley and William Hague, with whom I worked, would have been very happy to answer a question on the subject of the business of the House.

The Government are clearly developing an addiction to closing down debate and scrutiny, or simply disregarding the outcome of any debates. We have heard a lot about Opposition day debates, so I will not touch on those. We have heard about the Government packing Committees to their advantage. We have heard a lot about the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill, and rightly so, because of course there are Members of this place—they do not appear to be here today, with perhaps one honourable exception—who have preached at great length about the importance of parliamentary sovereignty, often repeating the same speech, but when it comes to that Bill their enthusiasm for parliamentary sovereignty appears suddenly to have evaporated and it is no longer the critical matter it used to be. We see that in the Henry VIII powers and in how much policy the Government intend to push through in secondary legislation.

I want to focus briefly on the 50 sectoral reports that the Government have commissioned on the impact of Brexit. Whether one is a remain supporter like me, or a leave supporter like the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone), I think that we all agree that it is important that the Government go public on what the impact of Brexit will be. I feel that it will be very negative, and I am sure that he thinks that it will be very positive, but at the moment we do not know because we are not allowed to see those 50 reports, which the taxpayer has paid for.

I am afraid that situation is often reflected in answers to parliamentary questions on the subject. I would have thought that by now every Department would know how many pieces of EU legislation they were going to have to transpose into domestic law through the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill process. However, if Members ask that in a parliamentary question, what answer do they get? Some Departments are willing to hazard a figure of between 800 and 1,000, as the Department for Exiting the European Union has done, but others have no idea and do not give an answer at all. I think that the Government are very scared about allowing Parliament to scrutinise the Brexit arrangements in full possession of the facts.

In conclusion, the Leader of the House has had many opportunities in this debate to clarify the Government’s position on Opposition days, but she has chosen not to do so. We are left with the rather nasty suspicion that this is a Government who care little about parliamentary conventions, less about parliamentary scrutiny and nothing at all about parliamentary sovereignty.