§ 6.—(1) Mr. Speaker shall put forthwith the Question on any Motion made by a Minister of the Crown for the appointment and quorum of a Committee to draw up Reasons.
§ (2) A Committee appointed to draw up Reasons shall report before the conclusion of the sitting at which it is appointed.
§ 7.—(1) In this paragraph "the proceedings" means proceedings on Consideration of Lords Amendments, on any further Message from the Lords on the Bill, on the appointment and quorum of a Committee to draw up Reasons and on the Report of such a Committee.
§ (2) Paragraph (1) of Standing Order No. 14 (Exempted business) shall apply to the proceedings.
§ (3) No dilatory Motion with respect to, or in the course of, the proceedings shall be made except by a member of the Government, and the Question on any such Motion shall be put forthwith.
§ (4) If the proceedings are interrupted by a Motion for the Adjournment of the House under Standing Order No. 20 (Adjournment on specific and important matter that should have urgent consideration), a period equal to the duration of the proceedings on the Motion shall be added to the period at the end of which the proceedings are to be brought to a conclusion.
§ The motion provides for a total of three hours debate both on the motion itself and on Lords amendments to the Bill. I do not intend to detain the House overlong, as I hope that there will be general agreement that we should move quickly to debating the important issues before us.
I make no apology for asking the House to agree that we should limit the debate on our consideration of these matters to three hours. The House will know that we do not introduce such motions lightly. I am especially mindful of the passionate speech made by my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr. Shepherd) in the debate on the original timetable motion moved by my right hon. and learned Friend the Leader of the House on Report on 28 March.
The House will expect me clearly to set out why we are taking this further step. The motion is being introduced in the knowledge that the Bill is not an especially sizeable piece of Government legislation—it has only 23 clauses and seven schedules. Nevertheless, it has had a great deal of time devoted to it—I believe, its fair share of time—both here and in another place. To date, it has had 50 hours of debate on the Floor of the House and in Committee, and a further 30 hours in another place. Much of that time has been well spent as it has provided opportunities for amendments to the original Bill that have been widely welcomed, especially those on the pensions provisions and on the clause dealing with income support in residential homes. We have responded to debate and consultation both here and elsewhere and we have made important changes. There will be further evidence tonight of the Government's willingness to listen to Parliament.
The Bill has had a good run and the timetable motion is being introduced in the knowledge that only a limited amount of business remains. I have no doubt that the House will wish to spend some time debating benefit entitlement for students and, perhaps, the scheme for the recovery of benefit from tort damage awards. However, 74 the bulk of the remaining amendments made to the Bill by another place are minor and technical and should not long detain us.
I emphasise that it is important for social security issues to be debated regularly and fully in Parliament. The contributions made during debates are almost invariably thoughtful and sincere, although I would not suggest for one moment that it always provides a comfortable time for Ministers or that the Government agree with everything that is said. However, it is important to remember both the limited time that we have available for the business tonight and the fact that there will be other formal occasions on which such debates will arise—for example, those that arise from the annual uprating statement and the associated orders.
I very much hope that the sensible motion for the timetabling of the business is acceptable to the House.
7.15 pm§ Mr. Michael Meacher (Oldham, West)In an understandably and desirably short introduction, the Minister referred to minor and technical changes and suggested that the remaining business could be dealt with easily within the proposed three hours. I want to set out the Opposition's reasons for believing that such a timetable is pitifully and unreasonably short.
As hon. Members are only too well aware, the Government have already guillotined the Bill's proceedings. Since then, at least four highly significant changes have been made in another place. In particular, an issue is now developing that could blow up into a serious constitutional argument between this House and another place, especially in the wake of the War Crimes Bill. I am referring to the rights of students, especially postgraduates, to retain entitlement to housing benefit unless adequate alternative compensation is made. As I shall show, that is not being provided for in the Government's proposals. The issue incenses not only the Opposition, but widespread, independent and informed opinion outside this place. It has united 21 full-time academics and 12 university vice-chancellors in another place—mostly on the Cross-Benches—in opposition to the Government. Above all, it is a vital issue affecting the basic interests of hundreds of thousands of students, yet it has never been debated in this place.
We are now being allotted a mere three hours to debate not only the timetable motion, but the 20 Lords amendments that the Government are seeking either to amend or to overturn, plus other Lords amendments. That is the same abuse of the principles of parliamentary debate as Lord Justice Purchas complained of so bitterly last week, when he excoriated the Government for what he called wholesale and unregulated powers taken by the Secretary of State over the administration of the social fund. In his judgment, he assumed that Homer nodded—in other words, that Parliament had been asleep. In fact, we were not asleep; we were simply overriden by the juggernaut of the Government's guillotine. I advise the judge—or, indeed, any other judge—that on this occasion Homer is not nodding. We are protesting with the greatest vigour at our disposal about what we might call the laughable—if it were not so objectionable—truncating of the time for debate of what is fast becoming a significant constitutional issue.
75 It is not only the manifest and blatant injustice of withdrawing the entitlement of students to housing benefit that is being squeezed into a three-hour debate; there is also the significant losses being inflicted on disabled people and the nasty little issue of the Government's proposal to deduct social security benefits from the Motor Insurers Bureau's compensation payments. That is on top of the Government's action in deducting social security benefits from compensation payments for industrial injury, so that the injured worker ends up with very little—and nothing for his pain and suffering. That matter also needs adequate time for debate.
In addition, there are the Government's highly objectionable proposals to restrict entitlement in cases of error. The McKiernon judgment laid down that the rule that limited claims to five years from the time of the industrial injury was ultra vires. The Government are now advancing the constitutionally dubious doctrine that what was ruled to be illegal shall be made retroactively legal. Furthermore, the Government are introducing a new doctrine on the backdating of claims. They propose that a successful claim shall be backdated only to the date of the commissioner's decision rather than to the actual date of the claim itself. In other words, if the Department of Social Security gets the law wrong, the new law will deem that it got it right up to the point that it was told of its error. That is manifest nonsense. Those matters, too, urgently require adequate time for debate.
There are two other aspects that are new to the Bill since it left this House. One concerns the real danger of eviction of elderly people from residential and nursing homes as a consequence of what is still a major shortfall in income support, even after the Secretary of State's concession. The other is the £10 disregard for lone parents, to give them an incentive to claim maintenance from the absent parent. A whole range of other issues arise in the 20 Lords amendments. One is equal pensionable ages for men and women in respect of money purchase schemes. That is a major issue, if ever there was one, but we may not even have time to debate it tonight.
Other matters clearly require further and proper debate, but that will be denied by the guillotine. It will preclude discussion of the many outstanding social security issues, such as the continued freezing of child benefit, and abuse of natural rights under the social fund—which is regularly the subject of judicial attack. There is also the removal of all benefit rights from 16 and 17-year-olds, and the worsening plight of homeless families. To restrict debate on all the Lords amendments to only three hours makes a mockery of the principle of adequate parliamentary debate. To do so when one group of those amendments has huge financial implications strikes at the heart of our further and higher education system, and has never previously been debated in this House is, by any standards, an outrage.
I cannot believe that every Conservative Member denies that we are justified in rejecting the guillotine with a vote. Our only reason for not doing so is that we do not intend to collude with the Government in restricting even further the time available for debate. It is wrong and unprincipled to confine debate on 20 Lords amendments to three hours. Having made our position clear, we intend 76 to concentrate debating time and the maximum number of votes on the subject of those amendments, to which we are so strongly opposed.
§ Mr. Alfred Morris (Manchester, Wythenshawe)This is another preposterous motion to guillotine debate on issues of enormous importance to people who crave our help and concern for problems that most right hon. and hon. Members have never had to face. The problems of disabled students, to which several of the Lords amendments refer, alone merit a three-hour debate in this House.
There need be no speculation about the effect of the Government's motion. It will make impossible any debate on many of the amendments and that alone is a parliamentary outrage, yet even the amendments that will be dealt with must be debated with insulting brevity in what remains of the three hours the Government are allowing for debate on the motion and the amendments as a whole. It is put to me by one severely disabled person that even some of the most dictatorial regimes across the world allow more consideration of disputes over social policy than this House will be permitted by the motion before us.
The more we try to do justice to any particular amendment this evening, the less time we shall have to debate others. That happened when our debates on Report and Third Reading on the Bill were guillotined and I want to describe briefly just one of the consequences. We had no time then—just as we shall have no opportunity this evening, despite the summary dispatch of other issues—even to discuss a provision the Government inserted into the Bill that will cheat of disablement benefit a huge number of people who have been deafened by their work or who suffer from industrial asthma.
In the case of my constituent Mr. Frank McKiernon, now aged 74 and a victim of occupational deafness, it was unanimously held by the Court of Appeal that the Government acted illegally in denying him disablement benefit. They were also refused leave to appeal to the House of Lords. The Government's reaction to the referee's decision was not one of apology but of defiance. Having been given the red card, as it were, they resolved to sit it out on the pitch and then to use force majeure to change the rule book.
The Government decided, without giving their intentions any publicity, to use this Social Security Bill to reverse Mr. McKiernon's legal victory in the Court of Appeal. The guillotining of our consideration of the Bill had helped the Government both to avoid publicity for a tactic that is bitterly resented by the disabled people affected and to duck the debate that there ought to have been, or should be now, in this House.
The Government will save more than £100 million by their action, while countless thousands of deaf people and victims of industrial asthma will have the right given to them by the Court of Appeal taken away. Warm praise is due to Peter Rosenfeld of Wythenshawe citizens advice bureau for his work on Mr. McKiernon's case. My constituent's legal adviser, Richard Poynter, to whom great credit must also go for his handling of the case, says in a scorching criticism of the Government:
For the DSS to change the law retrospectively in order to cheat a disabled old age pensioner of his court victory is an act of petty spite. Once again, the Department is putting itself above the law by changing the rules to suit itself after the 77 event rather than obey them while they are in force. Its vindictive action against Mr. McKiernon shows the Government's contempt for the rule of law.That is a grave charge against the Government, one that merits vigorous debate, but there will be no opportunity even to express a view.By their guillotine, the Government have succeeded in enacting the most odious kind of retrospective legislation, of which Lord Boyd-Carpenter, from the Conservative Benches in another place, described as "oppressive" and which everyone else who knows what is happening condemns as a shocking abuse of power.
It would be a stain on the reputation of this House for the Government to go unchallenged. Nothing more clearly shows the harm that has been done already by guillotining our consideration of the Bill and the authoritarian nature of the Governnent's further curtailment of parliamentary scrutiny of its provisions.
§ Mr. Archy Kirkwood (Roxburgh and Berwickshire)I wholly applaud the attitude taken by the official Opposition in forgoing an extensive debate on the guillotine motion, so that we can spend the valuable time remaining considering the substantive issues that are before us.
I accept that Government need to resort to a guillotine in Committee and put their proposals to the House when a Bill is first presented. Sometimes, Opposition parties collectively decide to use time as a weapon. If I were the Government, in such cases I would reluctantly resort to the guillotine—but this evening we face a very different situation. The membership of the House of Lords includes many people of high standing and of considerable expertise in particular areas. That is particularly true of their knowledge of the academic world, and many of the amendments before us have a direct bearing on our educational system and the way that students are financed. For this House to skate over decisions taken by the other place, after full consideration, is wrong and is in a completely different category from the guillotines to which Governments resort when a Bill is being considered in Committee.
I have never been behind the curtain of secrecy in any Government Department. The Minister may say that I am the better for that. Perhaps it will never happen but I live in hope. However, the Minister's Department has the benefit of social security Bills each year. This issue will not be left to languish for three or four years. We cannot anticipate what will be in the next Queen's Speech, but unless something unusual happen the Department knows that there will be an opportunity in the next Session to address these important issues within a more appropriate time scale. The Department therefore has no excuse for rushing through these provisions, which will result in ill-digested legislation.
I do not know what power Ministers have over the authorities of the House and the Leader of the House. However, social security matters are getting slightly out of hand. The courts of the land, as well as Opposition Members, are now saying with monotonous regularity that the means by which we are implementing technical changes to a very technical social security system is not good enough. The Government's ill-digested legislation 78 will lead to future problems. They will have to introduce yet more guillotines if they want future social security Bills to reach the statute book. Conservative Members should also be worried; their constituents will suffer from the effects of ill-digested legislation.
This is an issue of the House of Commons. Whatever view I may take of the contents of the Bill, the House is right to object strongly and loudly at its treatment. If we do not object, what will happen? The trend will get worse. I do not know whether it is the Department or the Leader of the House who keeps saying, "Don't worry; we'll slip this through in three hours. We did it last year and we got away with it; we had only a few court cases to clear up as a result. We've got to get our timetable through, so don't worry about that." It is a scandalous way to deal with legislation. If hon. Members did not take the opportunity to say so at this stage, it would be a great disgrace, and we should be doing a great disservice to the House of Commons.
§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Social Security (Mrs. Gillian Shephard)I shall be brief, in the interests of allowing hon. Members to debate the important amendments that have come to us from another place. However, I must repeat what my right hon. Friend the Minister for Social Security and Disabled People said at the beginning: timetable motions are not tabled lightly. The motion, however, provides us with sufficient time to consider the amendments.
The Bill has been given a fair amount of parliamentary time, both here and in another place. It will lead to changes in social security benefits for the disabled and provide greater protection for members of occupational pension schemes. The Bill includes interim measures to help lone parent families to obtain maintenance. It also makes changes to the law relating to income support and various other benefits, including national insurance contributions.
It is a short Bill; it contains 23 clauses and seven schedules. Eighty hours of debate have already been devoted to it. The hon. Member for Oldham, West (Mr. Meacher) referred to a number of social security matters, as well as to the Lords amendments. I remind him that we are debating not the Bill as a whole but the Lords amendments. He referred to the McKiernon case, as did the right hon. Member for Manchester, Wythenshawe (Mr. Morris). I remind them that Mr. McKiernon was granted an award last week, including substantial arrears.
There will be an opportunity for the House to debate a number of the detailed issues raised by the hon. Member for Oldham, West and the right hon. Member for Wythenshawe, who, I know, has a particular interest in disabled students. As long as we make progress, we shall have time adequately to consider the Lords amendments. I do not apologise for the number of Government amendments that have been brought here from the Lords for consideration. The vast majority are minor, technical changes. The House understands the complexity of the law, notably the law relating to pensions. I repeat thal we regret having to introduce a timetable motion. However, it is important for the smooth conduct of both the remaining stages of the Bill and parliamentary business as a whole. I commend it to the House.
§ Question put and agreed to.