§ Mr. SpeakerI wish to make a statement.
During the past six weeks I have been trying to deal with Questions in the way recommended by the Procedure Committee on Question Hour. I thought that the House might now like a progress report.
In the first month of this Session, 756 Oral Questions received Oral Answers in this House. This compares with an average of about 550 for the first month of the previous 10 Sessions or so and represents an increase of approximately one-third more Questions answered in the hour. I believe that this is good for hon. Members who have taken the trouble to put down Questions, and that it enables Questions to be reached instead of being postponed and so widens the scope of Question Hour.
I do, however, appreciate that some hon. Members may have reservations about the increased momentum of Ques- 1614 tion Hour and may fear lest the opportunity to probe the activities of the Executive should suffer in the process. This probing is one of the main purposes of Question Hour and it would be quite wrong if it were ever frustrated. But to these hon. Members I would point out that we are achieving not fewer but slightly more supplementary questions in total than we were before. For example, 987 supplementary questions were asked in the first month of this Session as compared with 956 in the first month of the 1962 Session. Moreover, recently, with occasional exceptions, supplementaries have become so much shorter that I have been able to call still more hon. Members for supplementaries and yet get through about 50 Questions a day.
Fifty Questions a day seems to be about the average to aim at and, subject to any instructions which the House may give me, I would propose to try to reach that figure but not to try to improve on it. The figure should, of course, be regarded as an average. There are days when there are more Questions than usual of broad policy and high importance and on such Questions it is proper to allow more supplementaries than usual. I hope that so far the Chair has not clamped down on any such Questions and that I have let the House get its teeth into any big issue when it clearly wishes to do so, but this naturally reduces the total number of Questions reached on such a day.
On the other hand, there are days when a large Department attracts some 70 or 80 Questions mostly of a local nature. On such days I would regard it as important to get as far down the list as possible.
All this must be a matter of judgment —often of snap decision although, I hope, never of snappy decision—and a matter for diligent attention on the part of the Chair. I am all too conscious of the fact that the Chair will err from time to time.
Perhaps I might again emphasise that the key to sustaining our progress—if the House agrees with me that it is, indeed, progress—lies almost entirely in brevity in questioning and answering. I do not suggest that supplementaries should be much, if at all, shorter than most of them are now. But I am afraid that hon. Members who occasionally ask long supplementaries must continue to expect intervention from the Chair in the interests of others who have questions which 1615 they hope will be reached; for it is all too easy for the momentum to slacken, as I have myself found on occasions in the past month. It is the very gradualness of the slipping back which provides the danger, and it was this, I think, that caught the House unawares in the postwar years. Now that we know where the danger lies, the task has been made much easier for me than for my predecessors.
Behind what we have achieved so far is a great deal of research, preparation and statistical analysis each morning by the Second Clerk-Assistant, Mr. Barlas, to whom I am deeply indebted and grateful. But if the House believes, as I do—and I think it does—that Question Hour has become more effective, fruitful and more wide-ranging, providing more opportunities for Front and Back Bench, for both Government and Opposition, to do what they have come to Parliament to do, the real credit is due to the very willing cooperation of the whole House during the past Session. The only discipline worth while is self-discipline, and I believe that we have achieved this together.