§ Mr. Michael English (Nottingham, West)I think, Mr. Speaker, you will agree that it is a matter of order whether the truth is told to the House. If it is not, it becomes a contempt of the House, and such a proposition on a totally different issue may come before us shortly.
Possibly through inadvertence—I do not accuse him of lying—the Minister of Trade may not have been entirely aware that in this Parliament the Cabinet considered the very issue involved in a general sense. The Expenditure Committee in the last Parliament and the Treasury and Civil Service Committee in this Parliament have both suggested that we should adopt United States law. If I may digress for a moment—[HON. MEMBERS: "No".]—
§ Mr. SpeakerOrder. I am wondering when the hon. Gentleman will raise a point of order on which I can rule. His disagreement over the substance of a reply is not my concern. However, if he wishes to raise a point of order relating to our Standing Orders, I shall gladly try to rule on it.
§ Mr. EnglishI accept your point, Mr. Speaker. The point at issue is that in the United States it is a criminal offence for any person to have personal dealings—which I accept that the Secretary of State did not do in this case—or to—
§ Mr. SpeakerOrder. It is quite clear that the hon. Gentleman is pursuing an argument. He was not called for a question to the Minister and he must not pursue it through a point of order. Unless he can demonstrate within his opening sentence that it is a point of order on which I can rule, I should ask him to resume his seat.
§ Mr. EnglishWhy did not the Cabinet Minister advise the Minister that he should have pointed out—
§ Mr. SpeakerOrder. It is quite clear that this is not a point of order for me.
§ Mr. Tony Benn (Bristol, South-East)On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. I rise to seek your guidance and help on a matter of which I have given you prior notice, relating to the matter that has been before the House, but not on the decision specifically relating to Charter Consolidated and Anderson Strathclyde.
The issue that I wish to put to you is as follows. Yesterday in the House, the Prime Minister said that the Secretary of State behaved quite properly in handing his responsibility to the Minister of State. That is a matter of record. But on 20 March 1980, the Prime Minister, in a written answer to my right hon. Friend the Member for Battersea, North (Mr. Jay), quoted the rules of procedure for Ministers, which I and my hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw) quoted, to the effect that where there is a conflict of interest the Minister should divest himself of his holding, even if it is a minority holding.
In giving the answer on 20 March 1980, the Prime Minister referred to Sir John Hunt's memorandum in March 1975 to the Royal Commission on standards of conduct in public life, and those same words appeared in that document. They are also the same words that are in the rules of procedure for Ministers, which are issued to every Government by the Prime Minister of the day, and of which, as a member of the Labour Government, I received a copy. The words are identical in that case, but 966 the rules cover matters well beyond private shareholdings. They also cover the requirement that the Law Officers should be consulted in any matters of doubt.
The point that I wish to raise is to allow the House to be fully acquainted with the rules of procedure for Ministers. I sought an opportunity today to lay those rules of procedure before the House, because they are matters of considerable public interest and follow from one Government to another. The learned Clerk quite properly told me that only Ministers are allowed to table papers, and that Back-Bench Members are not allowed to do so.
I then went to the Library of the House, and I was told by the Librarian that the House of Commons Library manual states that Mr. Speaker has ruled that papers may be deposited in the Library only by a Minister of the Crown. So the position is that this very important document, which bears directly on the matter that we are discussing, although in the possession of an hon. Member, cannot be either placed on the Table of the House or deposited in the Library.
This situation involves an important matter of public interest. Therefore, I ask you, Mr. Speaker—not immediately, because this is a major question—to allow me to place the procedure document in the Library of the House; to allow all hon. Members to use the Library to acquaint their fellow Members of documents of relevance of the same kind; and also to ask the Prime Minister to table the full procedure for Ministers, in that on 20 March 1980 she published a part but not the whole of a document. In those circumstances, the Minister should place the entire document on the Table of the House, in accordance with "Erskine May".
§ Mr. Tom McNally (Stockport, South)Further to that point of order, Mr. Speaker.
§ Mr. SpeakerOrder, I shall answer the point of order.
§ Mr. McNallyrose—
§ Mr. SpeakerOrder. I am quite sure that the hon. Member for Stockport, South (Mr. McNally) will not be able to help me very much.
The question raised by the right hon. Member for Bristol, South-East (Mr. Benn) is one that I can rule on today. I need not take time, because I have had a chance of knowing what the right hon. Gentleman said to the Clerk's Department. He gave the Clerk's Department notice, and that Department told me that he was likely to raise a point of order this afternoon.
The rules which govern the holding of shares and directorships by Ministers as such, in so far as they differ from our rules here that the House has laid down about our interests as Members of this House, are a matter for the Government, not for me. They may well differ from Government to Government. It is not for me to rule what rules a Prime Minister may lay down for members of the Administration. I have no power to rule upon them, nor have I any desire to rule upon them, nor have I any power to direct the Government to produce any information that they may not already have produced.
§ Mr. BennI appreciate, Mr. Speaker, your being ready to give an immediate answer, but may I put it to you that the matter is rather more complex than was implied by the advice that you received, in this sense? It has long been an established principle of the House, set out in successive volumes of "Erskine May", that if a Minister cites a part 967 of a document, the whole document should be tabled. It has been established without question that on 20 March 1980 the Prime Minister cited a part of a document known as the rules of procedure for Ministers, but not the whole document. In those circumstances, "Erskine May" is quite clear that the whole document is to be tabled.
The second point is that you did not deal with the request that I made that the full document relating to a previous Administration—the two are the same—should be able to be deposited in the Library of the House. I cannot see why Ministers should have special access to the House of Commons Library, which belongs to the House as a whole.
§ Mr. SpeakerThat rule has endured for a very long time, long before I became Speaker of this House, and I have changed nothing in that regard. Secondly—
§ Mr. McNallyrose—
§ Mr. SpeakerOrder. I am on my feet. Is the hon. Gentleman blind? He knows the rules of the House.
If the Prime Minister referred to a document in 1980, it is not for me to rule at the end of 1982 that that document should be placed on the Table of the House. I can rule now that that request should have been made a long time ago, on the day when the reference was made to it, or certainly on the following day. I should not be asked, nearly three years afterwards, to rule that because of a remark in Hansard, after all that time, I should change the rules, or that I should call on the Prime Minister to lay the document.
§ Mr. McNallyOn a point of order, Mr. Speaker—this is like a ball of wool that will run along unravelling—would it not be better if you were to use your wise counsel to suggest to the Prime Minister that she comes to the House and makes a statement?
§ Mr. SpeakerIt is not for me to make any such suggestion.
§ Mr. Jack Straw (Blackburn)Further to the point of order raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Bristol South-East (Mr. Benn), Mr. Speaker. May I, with respect, say that the fact that a rule has been in existence for a very long time is often a good reason for changing it, as opposed to sticking to it. An important issue has been raised by my right hon. Friend, whether the Government should be forced to table a document, and, separately, whether right hon. and hon. Members of this House who have documents should themselves be able to make them available for inspection by other hon. Members by depositing them in the Library, which is the Library of this House and not of the Government. I respectfully ask you to consider this matter further, and to make a further statement either tomorrow or when we resume after Christmas.
§ Mr. Bob Cryer (Keighley)Further to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. I should like to raise an additional point about the ruling that you have just made, which I hope will not be regarded as a hard and fast ruling for all time—to the effect that if some information is given that is part of a document, the whole of the document must be requested either the same day or within a few days. In this case, as you will be well aware, the document is not a published document. Therefore it can be some 968 considerable time before the extent of the document becomes known, and thus a request can be made. The pressure of circumstances may give rise to right hon. and hon. Members other than the recipient of a written answer seeking out the further information and realising that the answer is only part of a document. Therefore, it would be helpful to the House which you represent, Mr. Speaker—as opposed to the Government, who are only a part of the House—if you could re-examine your remarks to allow much greater latitude when it is requested that documents be placed on the Table of the House.
§ Mr. BennMay I now seek your guidance on the general question, Mr. Speaker? I have in my possession, as has every Minister and former Minister, a copy of the rules of procedure issued by successive Prime Ministers to successive Governments. Those rules of procedure are specific. They develop from one Government to another and include many paragraphs dealing with this and other matters. It is highly relevant to the immediate matter about the rules governing ministerial conduct that the House will be discussing in the new year.
The purpose of my request, Mr. Speaker, is to ask you whether you can help me as to how I can put the document, to which I have referred, in the hands of the House. If the ruling about the Library was not yours, it may very well have been in relation to different matters of Members wishing to leave papers for general circulation. I am dealing with a specific matter of specific public interest. I ask you, Mr. Speaker, please not to rule on that now but to consider the matter more carefully and allow private representations to be made upon the matter.
§ Mr. EnglishFurther to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. My point was simple. There are many precedents showing that Cabinet Minister's statements to the House are treated in a different way from those of junior Ministers. I do not need to tell you, Mr. Speaker, that there are many precedents in that regard and I ask you to consider whether this question can be answered by anyone less than a Cabinet Minister.
§ Sir Anthony Meyer (Flint, West)On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. You will have listened for 20 minutes, as will the rest of the House, to the EC questions and heard how flat, weary, stale and unprofitable the discussions were. I know that this is not a matter on which you can rule, but as there are Government business managers present, may I once again put in a plea that that slot should be abolished?
§ Mr. SpeakerI have listened carefully to the point of order raised by the right hon. Member for Bristol, South-East (Mr. Benn) and other hon. Members. I gave a great deal of thought to the matter before I came into the House. Only if I found that I were wrong—I do not think that I shall—would I consider it necessary to make any further statement to the House. That is extremely unlikely in view of the research that I have already done.
With regard to the point of order on EC questions raised by the hon. Member for Flint, West (Sir A. Meyer), he will realise that that is not a matter for me.
§ Mr. SpeakerI shall hear one more hon. Member and then I hope that we shall be able to proceed with the business of the day.
§ Dr. M. S. Miller (East Kilbride)Further to the point of order, Mr. Speaker, about which you said that nearly three years had elapsed since the original submission of part of a paper to the Library, may I ask what difference two and a half, or three, years make? If the decision was right then, is it not right now?
§ Mr. SpeakerI have nothing to add to what I have already said.