Parliamentary Procedure

HC Deb 11 July 1996 vol 281 cc627-67

[Relevant documents: Seventh report from the Procedure Committee of Session 1994–95 on Prime Minister's Questions, House of Commons Paper No. 555, first report of Session 1995–96 on Proceedings at the Start of a Parliament, House of Commons Paper No. 386, and fourth report of Session 1995–96 on Delegated Legislation, House of Commons Paper No. 152. ]

7.12 pm

The Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons (Mr. Tony Newton)

We now have a relatively rare opportunity to range widely, if perhaps somewhat introspectively, over matters of concern to many Members—matters, indeed, that affect all Members in the House. I can only hope that the debate will not attract the same degree of attention as our other introspective debate last night on a rather different subject.

I welcome the opportunity to review some of what has already been achieved in the reform of parliamentary procedure, and to look at some of the proposals for the future currently under discussion. I see from the number of my hon. Friends and Opposition Members who are present that there may be rather more of a wish to contribute to the debate than I expected at one stage, so I shall try to keep my remarks rather briefer than they might otherwise have been. So if people see me rather hastily disposing of pieces of paper during the debate, I hope that they will understand that I am doing so because of my wish to accommodate the evidently burning desire to contribute.

I shall therefore touch only briefly on some of the important reforms carried out earlier in the lifetime of the Government, including especially the introduction of the departmentally related Select Committees and the European Standing Committees that now carry out so much of our scrutiny. Both those developments have made important contributions to the reform of our procedures, especially the way in which the departmental Select Committees have established a high reputation both among hon. Members and outside the House. In my view, they have contributed significantly to improving the capacity of the House to scrutinise the work of the Government and of the Executive in general.

The most substantial changes with which I personally have been involved, together with the hon. Member for Dewsbury (Mrs. Taylor), who I understand cannot be here tonight, are the Jopling reforms, introduced in January 1995 and subsequently incorporated into our Standing Orders. Those reforms have given the House more civilised sitting hours, but at the same time they have maintained the traditional understanding that, while the Government get their business, the Opposition get their say.

The reforms have also improved the opportunities for Back Benchers to initiate debates on subjects of their choice. One important aspect of the Jopling reforms—it is a fact that I never tire of emphasising to the many people from abroad who come to see me about such matters, because it applies to our proceedings in general—is that many important elements in the package, and, indeed, in the whole way in which this place operates, are not embodied in Standing Orders at all, but in informal and voluntary agreements. I often say to people that one could read "Erskine May" from end to end, and Standing Orders from cover to cover, and still not know how the British House of Commons works, unless one had been at some stage part of the usual channels or a close observer of them.

I think that that approach, especially the voluntary timetabling of legislation, has improved the sensible scrutiny of legislation. It has certainly taken us away from the rather absurd situation that existed when I first became a Member of Parliament, in which, almost routinely, the Opposition, of which I was then part, talked endlessly about the early clauses of a Bill, which inevitably drove the Government to impose a guillotine, and the later parts of the Bill got very little discussion.

Since the Jopling reforms were introduced, we have had to use a guillotine only once—and that was in effect an agreed guillotine, imposed in exceptional circumstances to take through emergency legislation just before a recess.

We have also had considerable success in cutting down on late sittings. As the House knows, it used to be commonplace for us to rise after midnight, and often well after midnight. When I first entered the House, one took it for granted that one would probably be here until 1 or 2 o'clock in the morning three or four nights a week. That is now rare; of the 228 sittings since the Jopling reforms were introduced, only 19 have lasted beyond midnight.

The new arrangements for Fridays take greater account of Members' constituency obligations. As I have already said, the new arrangements provide for Back Benchers not only more time but what could reasonably be described as better quality time, in the form of our new Adjournment debates on Wednesday mornings. Those have almost doubled the number of debates that private Members can initiate, which also now take place at a more convenient time than on a Friday, or, worse still, in the middle of the night on the Consolidated Fund.

I am trying to keep my speech short, so I shall touch only briefly on another important set of recent developments—the procedures that have enhanced the role of the Scottish and Welsh Grand Committees. I know that there are some who tend to minimise their impact, but it is clear to me at least that they have been greatly welcomed, especially in Scotland, which so far has more experience of them. They are a worthwhile and important development in our procedures involving those parts of the United Kingdom.

Mr. Tam Dalyell (Linlithgow)

Will the Minister remind us of the costs so far of going to Dumfries, Dundee, Perth and elsewhere?

Mr. Newton

I do not have a note with me of the precise costs, but I do not consider them large compared with the gain of making Parliament, via the Scottish Grand Committee, more accessible to, and more alive for, the people of parts of the United Kingdom which, simply because of their geographical distance from London, may sometimes feel a little remote from some of our procedures here.

I acknowledge that the hon. Gentleman is a Scottish Member of Parliament and I am not, but everything I hear suggests that, however much occasional carping there has been here, the sessions in Scotland appear to have been very popular and very much welcomed by the areas to which the Grand Committee has been taken.

Mr. Nigel Spearing (Newham, South)

I hope that Scots Members will forgive me asking this question, but it is of universal importance. I understand that most debates in the Scottish Grand Committee are raised on an Adjournment motion. Is it possible to move opinion motions in those Committees? About 20 years ago, when we had regional committees upstairs, the disadvantage was that they were opinion only. However, they were allowed to reach an opinion, and not just to debate matters on the Adjournment, as I understand is the case in the Scottish Grand Committee.

Mr. Newton

The debates usually take place on Adjournment motions. There would be obvious difficulties in making any other arrangements, as the pattern of membership of Grand Committees does not reflect the party balance in the House—unlike all other Committees of the House. That clearly has to be taken into account in the working of the Committee.

I should touch briefly on another important innovation—the power under the Deregulation and Contracting Out Act 1994 to make deregulation orders. That was a pretty controversial procedural change when it was introduced, but I think it can be said—I hope not too controversially—that, with the benefit of more than a year's experience, the merits of the new procedure are more widely appreciated, and the anxieties it caused were unfounded.

I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Honiton (Sir P. Emery), the Chairman of the Procedure Committee, who played a large part in working out those procedures; and to my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Mr. Field), who has chaired the Deregulation Committee since it was established. It is quite striking that the Committee has unanimously approved every order so that it can seek the approval of the House without the need for further debate. So far, 21 orders—which would have taken significantly more time had they been presented as minor Bills—have completed all their parliamentary stages.

Before leaving this brief historical survey, I should refer to what has followed the Nolan report, although strictly speaking it cannot be regarded as a procedural change. It has certainly resulted in our putting in place—with a wide measure of agreement, despite controversy on some points—the most radical reforms of the rules governing Members' conduct for half a century or more.

The new Committee on Standards and Privileges is about to publish a draft code of conduct that the House will be invited to approve. There will also be detailed guidance on how the new rules will work in practice. The House will have an opportunity to return to the matter in due course when we debate the code; meanwhile, I should like to pay tribute to the members of the Committee on Standards and Privileges, which I chair, not least the hon. Member for Dewsbury for her constructive role in its work.

I now turn to some of the procedural issues that are currently on the table, mostly as a result of the indefatigably energetic activities of my right hon. Friend the Member for Honiton and the Procedure Committee. A report was published on Prime Minister's questions some time ago. It is easy to agree that Prime Minister's Question Time has some features that nearly everyone dislikes. The difficulty is finding a solution on which there is the slightest possibility of everyone agreeing.

The Procedure Committee made a brave attempt to find such a solution in its report on the subject, which no doubt my right hon. Friend the Member for Honiton will touch on should he catch your eye, Madam Deputy Speaker. The main proposal was that Prime Minister's questions on Thursdays should be devoted to substantive questions tabled on Wednesdays, that open questions should not be allowed, and that supplementary questions should be confined to the subject of the original question.

I wonder whether that would achieve the objective that my right hon. Friend had in mind. Hon. Members are already free to table substantive questions to the Prime Minister if they so wish, but the great majority do not. Hon. Members table open questions so that they can ask the Prime Minister a question that is topical on the day—perhaps relating to something on the lunchtime news. I very much doubt whether many hon. Members would really wish to give up that freedom and flexibility.

Mr. David Winnick (Walsall, North)

I am a member of the Procedure Committee. We did not make a firm recommendation, but asked the House to consider the possible alternatives. The question on today's Order Paper that was tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Falkirk, West (Mr. Canavan) demonstrates how important it is to allow open questions.

A fortnight ago, my hon. Friend would not have been able to predict the recent developments in Northern Ireland, but he used the opportunity provided by that question most effectively to make the remarks he did. He would have been unable to make those remarks had he been confined to the subject matter a fortnight ago, or even yesterday, when he would not have known about the developments earlier today.

Mr. Newton

Particularly by moving from a reference to a fortnight ago to a reference to yesterday, the hon. Gentleman, as a member of the Procedure Committee, is virtually underpinning the doubt that I expressed as to whether hon. Members would find that satisfactory, given the way in which they use parliamentary questions.

Although I expect my right hon. Friend to comment on this, it seems to me that the apparent distinction between an open and a substantive question is easier to state in those terms than to define. Although, in one sense, it is a substantive question to ask whether the Prime Minister will meet the Trades Union Congress or the Confederation of British Industry, it is certainly wide enough to embrace almost as much material as an entirely open question. I am a sceptic on that proposal and the many variants of it.

Sir Peter Emery (Honiton)

Rather than waiting until I make my speech, may I clear up one important point? On Prime Minister's questions, the Committee was absolutely certain of the need to retain topicality. It would be misleading to believe that, if we moved in the direction of the Committee's recommendation, a question would have to be tabled 10 days or a fortnight in advance. We recommended that a Member would go into the ballot and know 10 or 12 days before that he would be able to table a question, but he would not have to give notice of that question until noon on the Wednesday before Prime Minister's Question Time. So the degree of topicality could be enhanced.

Mr. Newton

I accept that it could be enhanced, but I feel strengthened in remaining somewhat sceptical by the point raised by the hon. Member for Walsall, North (Mr. Winnick). He specifically referred to a question asked of the Deputy Prime Minister this afternoon that might not have been possible had the hon. Member for Falkirk, West (Mr. Canavan) been required to give notice of his question by noon yesterday.

In no sense am I set in concrete against change; I am simply trying to sketch some of the reasons that lead me to be sceptical about most of the proposals so far. Many of the same points would apply to the proposal by the hon. Member for Dewsbury that there should be a 30-minute session of Prime Minister's questions once a week dealing with specific questions that had been tabled the night before.

Mr. Paul Flynn (Newport, West)

Does the Leader of the House recall the Prime Minister saying that, if he had notice of the details of questions beforehand, he would provide a more rational and constructive answer?

In my optimism, I provided the Prime Minister with the full details of a question on an important matter relating to pensions. I asked the question exactly as I had presented it—stripped of adjectives—and in an entirely unprovocative way, but sadly, the answer I received from the Prime Minister was described in an editorial in The Times as a typical civil service briefing, with a party political taunt in the tail.

Is it not the case that there is no hope of reform unless Prime Ministers can resist the temptation to make party political points at the Dispatch Box when millions of people are watching Prime Minister's Question Time?

Mr. Newton

What a nerve the hon. Gentleman has to complain about putting party political points in answers to questions! I have to put up with it from him every Thursday. Without knowing the details of the item that the hon. Gentleman has in mind, I sometimes feel that the difficulty of providing a rational and considered answer is related more to the question.

Mr. Flynn

The right hon. Gentleman has obviously forgotten the occasion—it was a rare one—when I did not make any party political points. I deliberately did not give the Prime Minister my "yah", but he gave me his "boo" in return.

Mr. Newton

That was probably because my right hon. Friend was so surprised that the hon. Gentleman had not given his "yah".

My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has made it clear that the arrangements for Prime Minister's questions are for the House to decide. I shall listen with interest to the contributions of hon. Members from both sides of the House that may be made in this debate—some of which have already been made. At this stage in the Parliament, I doubt that it would be right to make substantive proposals for change. It may, however, be a matter to which the new Parliament will want to return.

A more recent report from the Procedure Committee, on which there has so far been very little comment—I shall not be able to make a great deal tonight but certainly ought to touch on it—is on delegated legislation. As we have come to expect, the report is comprehensive and informative, and makes a large number of recommendations.

If I were to pick out the most significant, I would mention the idea of a special sifting committee to decide which negative instruments are worth debating, starting each meeting of a Standing Committee on delegated legislation with a statement by the Minister followed by questions—rather like the pattern of European scrutiny Committees—and debating statutory instruments in Committee and on the Floor of the House on amendable motions. I have no doubt that my right hon. Friend the Member for Honiton will want to set out his Committee's approach more fully on those matters.

Certainly all the ideas are interesting, although they would have very far-reaching implications for the way in which we deal with delegated legislation in the House, and would need to be considered very carefully. For the moment, therefore, I shall cautiously confine myself to welcoming the opportunity of hearing what hon. Members have to say on the matter.

As I have explained to my right hon. Friend the Member for Honiton—I hope that he has received my letter—I do not think that in this area, as with Prime Minister's questions, it would be appropriate to try to bring forward significant changes of such potential importance at this late stage of the Parliament. Again, however, it seems likely that the next Parliament, with the benefit of any views that hon. Members may express this evening, will want to consider whether there should be further change in that area.

I can be somewhat less cautious about one aspect of another recent report concerning arrangements for swearing in at the beginning of a new Parliament, when, as the Committee rightly said, there can sometimes be considerable confusion, bordering on chaos, especially on the first day. The Committee's proposal to deal with the problem is that Members should be sworn in by seniority by Parliament of first entry or, for Members with broken service, by Parliament of most recent entry. Specified times would be allotted on each day for each cohort of Members, so that they would have a much better idea than they have now of when their time would come.

I have discussed the Committee's recommendation with Madam Speaker, and she has authorised me to say that, if she is re-elected to the Chair in the next Parliament—a proposition that I am sure would command widespread acclaim—she will be content to conduct the swearing in of Members in the way the Committee has recommended. I have written to my right hon. Friend the Member for Honiton to confirm that, and I hope that he will regard it as a satisfactory outcome.

In what is a somewhat abbreviated speech, I want to expand on two important suggestions that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister made in a recent very wide-ranging speech on the constitution and making further improvements. He made the first by saying: I believe we could start by looking at the parliamentary year. The House is swamped at the turn of the year with debates on the Queen's Speech, the Budget, and the Second Reading of the bulk of the Government's major Bills … I would like to examine starting the parliamentary year in May not November, so that some of these processes can begin sooner and be spread more evenly. Under the present arrangements, we reassemble after the party conferences and spend—sometimes—a couple of weeks considering Lords' amendments, and then generally tidying up the loose ends of the old Session. Then we have a short break for Prorogation—sometimes of unpredictable duration and bearing no particular relation to school holidays or half terms, which can cause difficulty to Members with young families.

Then we have the state opening, with a lengthy and wide-ranging debate. Shortly afterwards, we have the Budget, which also gives rise to a lengthy debate. So we are into December before we start debating the main elements of the Government's programme, and January by the time the detailed examination of legislation is properly under way.

With a spring state opening, we could deal with the debate on the Loyal Address before the Whitsun recess, which is one of the more predictable features of the parliamentary calendar. After Whitsun, we would get on with Second Reading debates. By the summer recess, which I would expect to start at about the same point in July as it does now, the Standing Committees would be in full swing, and they could continue when the House reassembled in October.

The unified Budget in late November would inaugurate the second half of the Session. We would take the Finance Bill in January as now, but by then, the major Bills should have completed their passage through the House, so the large and active Standing Committee that the Finance Bill requires would meet at a time of significantly reduced pressure, on both Members' time and the House's facilities. By 5 May, which is the deadline for Royal Assent of the Finance Bill under existing legislation, the Session would be coming to an end.

The change that I am examining on behalf of my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister would give the Session a better balance and improve the House's ability to scrutinise the Finance Bill and other legislation, but without losing any of the advantages of bringing tax and spending decisions together in a unified Budget. It has the additional advantage that it could be accomplished with only minor amendments to the Standing Orders and procedures.

Incidentally, although the pattern of November to October Sessions is one with which we have all grown up, there is nothing unalterable about it. Of the past eight Parliaments, only one began in the autumn—the one in October 1974. The Sessions of all the others began some time between March and June. For much of the 19th century, the Session did not begin until after Christmas—usually in February—and used to continue through the London season, which has rather disappeared, well into August. Clearly they bothered less about grouse shooting in those days. We should not be afraid of practical changes for which a good case is made out.

I am glad for hon. Members who want to speak that this is the last part of my speech. My right hon.] Friend the Prime Minister's second point concerned the planning of legislation and the legislative programme. He said: I'd like to develop more structured planning of the legislative programme and more time for consultation. I believe this could be done by preparing each year not only detailed proposals for the Queen's Speech covering the next Session, but provisional plans for what would be in the speech for the year after that. This would give Departments the opportunity to bring forward detailed proposals including, in some cases, draft Bills, for consultation in the year before the actual legislation was brought before Parliament. We have already shown—I think that the hon. Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr (Mr. Rooker) would acknowledge it—that we are firmly committed to raising the quality of legislation, and have developed, especially in the past three years, the practice of drafting Bills well in advance and publishing them in draft form for consultation before they are due to be introduced into Parliament. The advantage, of course, is that that enables informed comment by interested parties outside Parliament on the detail and practical effect of the proposed legislation to be made, so that any shortcomings are more likely to be discovered and dealt with before the Bill is introduced, rather than by revising it as it proceeds.

Last Session, we published five Bills in advance in this way. They were all included in the current Session's legislative programme, and have all received Royal Assent. This Session, we have published draft Bills on adoption, building societies and merchant shipping, and hope to introduce them in due course when a suitable opportunity arises, although that does not guarantee that they will appear in the next Queen's Speech.

My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has now carried this approach forward by suggesting not a two-year Session—as some at first thought—but a Queen's Speech that would not only set out the Government's intended legislative proposals for the Session in question, but look ahead in a somewhat sketchy and provisional way by including an indication of what might be covered in the Government's legislative programme for the following Session. Detailed proposals—including, in some cases, draft Bills—could then be brought forward for public consultation in the way I have described.

I would not envisage that this more tentative part of the Queen's Speech would cover the entirety of the Government's programme for the Session, because it is not always possible for the Government to establish their legislative priorities as clearly as that quite so far ahead. There are always things that one had not thought of when one started that come up. But it should be possible to give a significantly greater indication of the Government's intentions than is given at present.

As my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister said, such a proposal would give significant help to Departments in properly preparing Bills by providing greater certainty. It would certainly be of great help to parliamentary counsel, who are sometimes hard-pressed in planning their work on the drafting of Bills. One point I wish to make in this context—to which many of the hon. Members in the Chamber will attach importance—is the desirability of associating Parliament, and not simply outside bodies, with the opportunities that such a proposal would provide for greater pre-legislative consultation.

Mr. Dalyell

If there were a shortage of parliamentary draftsmen—who play a vital part in the legislative process—that could create tremendous bottlenecks for the Government. We have been told that the Government are having problems in recruiting these extremely skilled people, who have the knack of doing the almost impossible in legislative terms. Is that true, or purely a rumour?

Mr. Newton

First, I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for the tribute that he has paid to parliamentary counsel. The Government—and, in that sense, the House—get an absolutely first-class service from these people, who are a somewhat insufficiently sung part of the legislative and governmental process.

To come directly to the hon. Gentleman's question, it is true that there have been pressures on parliamentary counsel's office in the past two or three years. This has been partly associated not so much with the difficulty of recruiting, as with a number of people having left for various reasons. We have undertaken recruitment in the past couple of years, although I do not have the numbers in my head.

Although people are sometimes sceptical about this, all the advice I receive suggests that it is many years before most people become fully effective as parliamentary draftsmen. If a problem leads us to have to recruit extra people, it will still be some time before those we have recruited will be able to contribute as much as if they had been in place for several years—although they will make a significant contribution.

I was saying that we want to associate Parliament fully with the opportunities for pre-legislative consultation. A more structured planning of the programme and more Bills published in advance in draft would make it possible for departmental Select Committees to contribute to the debate by taking evidence and bringing out reports. Personally, I see that as a more promising development than the use of Special Standing Committees after the publication of a Bill, for two reasons.

First, there would be more time for properly considered scrutiny, rather than the relatively compressed 28-day period in which a Special Standing Committee can act more like a Select Committee. Secondly, the practical reality is that it is inevitably easier for Ministers to respond to points emerging from such scrutiny before the Bill is published. I believe that such an approach could again bring a useful improvement in scrutiny from every point of view.

Mr. Clive Soley (Hammersmith)

That is an interesting idea, and I have heard it from the Leader of the House before, but there is a problem. Select Committees—which already have a large job to do—could not take on the work of looking at all legislation. If the Government want to do proceed in that way, they should look more readily at the proposal that other Bills be dealt with under the special Bills procedure. I need only say to him that neither the poll tax nor the Child Support Agency legislation would have reached the statute book in the form they took had they been scrutinised under that procedure.

Mr. Newton

I note what the hon. Gentleman says, and I imagine that he intends to speak in the debate. I am rather doubtful about his proposal, if, in referring to the special Bills procedures, he has in mind the Special Standing Committee procedures. Having served on such a Committee some time ago—the so-called Warnock Bill, which became the Education Act 1981—I would be more sceptical than he about how much could be achieved in the three sessions provided for during the 28-day period. That is not the same as the in-depth examination of a Select Committee, were a Committee to wish to carry out one.

The pattern of planning the legislative programme that I have sketched out would provide more time for Select Committees to do the sort of work that the hon. Member for Hammersmith would like in a planned way alongside other aspects of their work. What he said does not dent my point very much or the advantages that I see in the proposals, but I acknowledge that it is for departmental Select Committees to decide their own topics of inquiry.

Nothing would cause more resentment than me trying to tell Select Committees what to do, or the Government in any way laying down the topics that they should examine. If we go down this path, I hope that Select Committees will take an interest in pre-legislative proposals, and the Government will certainly seek to assist their inquiries in every way.

In the interests of keeping my speech fairly brief, I have cut a lot out, and I shall not attempt a great peroration. But I hope that I have made a practical contribution to the debate in this important and interesting, if sometimes rather arcane, area. I look forward to the contributions from Opposition Front Benchers and other Members.

7.46 pm

Mr. Jeff Rooker (Birmingham, Perry Barr)

We have just heard an extremely interesting and helpful speech from the Leader of the House, who has clearly given some thought to the matter. He has analysed the changes that we have made, and looked at what further changes can be made which will be useful for everyone concerned. Like him, I intend to make a brief speech—briefer that I might otherwise have done. In addition, I must apologise to the House. After I have made my speech, I cannot remain for the wind-up or many of the other speeches, and I much regret that.

The opportunity for the House to debate parliamentary reform without a set motion or a set agenda is extremely useful, and it should happen regularly—perhaps two or three times a year. It helps us to test the way in which we work and discussing the changes in ideas in this cockpit that we share daily is helpful to all concerned. Our main aim must be to ensure that when we talk about parliamentary reform—rather like constitutional reform and other matters relating to the way in which the country is governed—we do not go down the road of jargon, and we must also not refer to the mechanics of reform. At the end of any reform must be a better quality of democracy, leading to a better quality of service and life for the citizens whom we have the privilege of representing.

Our goals must be to improve the quality of legislation, make Government more accountable and Parliament more open, democratic and accessible so that it becomes an institution that people can truly trust. In doing so, we would create what I would term a really useful Parliament, which we do not have at present.

I must thank the Leader of the House, as we have asked for a general debate on parliamentary reform for several months. I must confess that we did not expect it to be held during what has become, regrettably, the black hole of the three hours from 7 pm on a Thursday, when most hon. Members are, legitimately and rightly, hot-footing it to their constituencies. Not many hon. Members will be able to contribute.

Contrary to what the Leader of the House said, I do not believe that our procedures are boring and arid. They are the key to the functioning of our democracy. We have only the one democracy and we must make it function in the interests of our citizens. We are often told that change is difficult. I have even heard colleagues say that change is impossible and I may have said that myself in earlier years. It seems to take a long time to make simple changes that could improve the contribution that hon. Members make. For example, it was 34 months after the publication of the Jopling report, on modest reforms to the sitting times of the House, before the House debated the reforms. I know that a general election intervened and I do not wish to blame anyone specifically because many discussions took place behind the scenes. But it is unacceptable to take 34 months from publication to a debate to begin to make the changes. I hope that that will not happen in the future, under Governments of either party.

Mr. Newton

The hon. Gentleman will acknowledge that changes are normally made by agreement and I certainly seek such agreement. However, the Jopling report was delayed by what I will call a strong, but silent obstacle who used to sit not far from the hon. Gentleman.

Mr. Rooker

Not every conservative with a small "c" sits on the Conservative Benches. A few months ago, I drafted a paper with some ideas for change and circulated it to colleagues, one of whom chairs a Select Committee. I dare not say who it was because he wrote back to say that he was interested in many reforms in social, economic and welfare policy, but he was not in favour of change in the House of Commons. That attitude is what we are up against and one of the difficulties is selling change to our colleagues.

Reform is about rules, because we live by the rules, but it is also about the ethos of the way we work. The new code of conduct that Members of Parliament will be expected to observe, post-Nolan, will be useful. I hope that we will see that code in written form and debate it before the summer recess.

Yesterday morning I heard my hon. Friend the Member for Dewsbury (Mrs. Taylor) give evidence to the Public Service Select Committee. We accept that we cannot dot every "i" and cross every "t" and that flexibility must be built into almost all our procedures. The Select Committee is considering issues of ministerial accountability and standards and a possible code of conduct for Ministers. It might be appropriate to take some of the issues that are covered in "Questions of Procedure for Ministers", such as Ministers' performance, functions and accountability to the House, and express them in a written resolution of the House. The House has no written rule on the performance of Ministers, because "Questions of Procedure for Ministers" is a prime ministerial document. The House should take some ownership of that issue.

We cannot write all the rules down and we must accept the spirit as well as the letter of what is written down, because the spirit is just as important. We must also make changes by consent. I freely admit that most hon. Members have great ideas for changing the way this place works, but no hon. Member, whether in the Government or on the Back Benches, can drive his or her idea through. The House must own its procedures and the House must also be given time to discuss changes. For example, early debates on the Jopling report would have been useful.

My hon. Friend the Member for Dewsbury pointed out at the Public Service Select Committee yesterday—and I do not repeat her comments out of partisanship—that the sheer fact that the same party has been in government for 17 years affects the way in which that people perceive their roles. My hon. Friend is an ex-Government whip and I describe myself as a former active Government Back Bencher. For five years I helped my Government—I hope—positively. I was the last Labour Member of Parliament to legislate on taxes for the low paid. That is a long time ago now, but I did so against the wishes of the Labour Government. The fact remains that after 17 years of one party in government, it is easy for Government Back Benchers to think that their role is only to support the Government and, in the same way, for Opposition Back Benchers to think that their role is only to oppose. A culture builds up during a time when there is no change of Government which is not conducive to the furtherance of democratic procedures. That culture makes it difficult meaningfully to question Opposition policy and Government policy or to make the Executive genuinely accountable to the House.

We could experiment with Prime Minister's questions. We do not have to treat any change as if it were written in tablets of stone. Instead, we could experiment with a weekly one-hour session for a month to see how it went. That would be a momentous change in a way, but we would know that the experiment would last only four weeks. After that, we would revert to the status quo and we would have a chance to discuss and deliberate whether the experimental approach was better for the Prime Minister, for the Leader of the Opposition, for the public outside—in whose interests everything happens—or for hon. Members.

Mr. Winnick

Does my hon. Friend agree that one argument in favour of the Wednesday meeting of the parliamentary Labour party is that it acts as a safety valve, even though on occasions not many attend? Is not the same true of Prime Minister's questions twice every week? Inevitably, events flare up nationally and internationally all the time and a single weekly session of Prime Minister's questions would lead to endless points of order and other devices on other days to try to get issues debated.

Mr. Rooker

Of course, I accept that, but events flare up on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and when the House is not sitting. We have a mechanism to deal with such eventualities, although it is not wholly satisfactory. My point is about the mechanics of Prime Minister's questions. We should experiment with change and we should show enough confidence in ourselves to use the experimental process. My hon. Friend may be right and I may, in the end, agree with him, but we could still experiment.

The Leader of the House mentioned that it is far too late to make changes in this Parliament, but the changes to the way in which new Members are sworn in will be welcome. I sincerely hope that I retain the trust of my constituents and that I will be in the next Parliament. If so, I will be called to swear in early and that will be a bonus. It is likely that a quarter of the House will be new, given the scale of retirements and possible changes in the way that the electorate will vote. I am not trying to make a party point, but we should be realists. There could be 150 brand new Members of Parliament after the next election. I regard that not as a problem but as an opportunity.

The new Parliament will be fertile ground for change. New Members will not have been sucked into our inefficient, corrupting ways—hon. Members will understand the sense in which I use the word "corrupting". They will be more amenable to doing things differently, perhaps more efficiently and in a way that is more conducive to democracy. I see the possibility of many new Members of Parliament as a prospect for change.

Mr. Spearing

rose—

Mr. Rooker

I think that I am about to be contradicted.

Mr. Spearing

Does my hon. Friend agree that often it is a question of the least worst solution? We probably owe my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall, North (Mr. Winnick) for the idea about swearing in. When my hon. Friend talks about ideas for change, is he aware that, possibly in an irregular manner, the Opposition and Government Front-Bench spokesmen connived at the disappearance of private Members' motions? If I catch your eye, Madam Deputy Speaker, I shall enlarge on the matter. That meant that no hon. Member who won the ballot could use the opportunity to debate temporary standing orders which could have produced the sorts of experiments to which my hon. Friend refers. Is that not at least one of the semi-corrupting points over which my hon. Friend skated a few moments ago?

Mr. Rooker

This place works by and large on consent. We know that if the parties on the two sides of the Chamber and the two Front-Bench teams are not in co-operating mode, the Government have considerable difficulty, whatever their majority. We know that from the problems during the Maastricht process. My hon. Friend is right. There is sometimes a degree of consent which, I accept, works against individual Members of Parliament and the way in which they may want to progress. I have no problem about debating such issues.

To finish my point about new Members, the induction process is non-existent. That is a matter which could be usefully explored between now and the general election so that when new Members arrive they do not simply sign on and find a coat hook, a desk and a telephone but are informed about the way in which this place works. Informal arrangements are made by the parties, but a process could be arranged through the authorities of the House which would be much more professional than what happens now. That is one reform that we should consider.

There is no question but that delegated legislation is a massive area for reform. Obviously, not everything can be taken on the Floor of the House, but more fruitful use of our time could be made so that issues that may be contained in one paragraph of a statutory instrument that may never be debated in the House, but which may affect the footprints of people's lives, could be vented. One good example is the prayer that we did not debate the other week on the measures on the Motability element of the disability living allowance for people in hospital. The measures affected some 40,000 people over a period. An Opposition prayer can get squeezed out. The measures were announced a year ago, but were buried away in a bigger, more important announcement of pensions and social security upratings. Yet the issue touched people's lives. It was contained in delegated legislation. That is a matter that we could look at.

The Leader of the House mentioned a considerable reform agenda. There is no time to go over all of it. To do so would cut others out of the debate. We have had a useful change in the sitting hours. I make no bones about that. The reforms have been a big success for non-London Members of Parliament, all of whom were by and large cut out of Friday Adjournment debates. We almost got to the point where we did not go into the ballot in case we came out first on a Friday on which we had constituency business. It is easy for London Members of Parliament. They can hold their surgeries on Monday mornings. Provincial Members—if I can describe us as that—have had a raw deal. The changes which included Wednesday morning sittings have been a substantial help to the overwhelming majority of Members of the House. The proof is there in Hansard.

Another reform that we ought to consider is proxy voting. It is a scandal that we have never settled the matter of proxy voting for absence due to illness or important state business abroad. We still have cases—I think that one happened one night this week—in which people are nodded through or have to be seen by the opposing Whip to be on the premises, but are too ill to walk through the Lobby. In other cases, hon. Members are brought into the yard by ambulance from hospital. That has happened in the past 12 months. It is outrageous. We are supposed to be a civilised Parliament. It is outrageous that we have not arrived at a satisfactory system of allowing Members to register their vote when they cannot vote due to illness or key state affairs and cannot be paired, for reasons which we understand. The House ought to deal with that. The time to do so is never the right time. People have their own agenda, but we do ourselves a disservice by not dealing with it.

Mr. Winnick

Will my hon. Friend give way?

Mr. Rooker

Briefly, but I will not give way after that. I have some points to make and then I want to allow other hon. Members to contribute.

Mr. Winnick

Is my hon. Friend aware that some of us, including, as the Chairman of the Procedure Committee knows, myself, raised this matter and were told that it was simply impossible for the two sides to reach agreement? One hopes that agreement will be reached. I am one of those who has been brought in. The Whips were very co-operative; they did not twist my arm. I did not come in an ambulance, but I came in on three occasions during the period when I was ill. I wondered what it would be like if I had to arrive in an ambulance.

Mr. Rooker

My hon. Friend is right. I accept that there has to be good will, but the matter should be dealt with.

I shall touch briefly on some main areas of reform. Ministerial accountability is one that goes to the heart of the matter. The insertion of the word "knowingly" in "Questions of Procedure for Ministers" must be reversed. To suggest that Ministers can unknowingly mislead the House sends the wrong signal not so much to the Minister as to—

Mr. Spearing

The civil service.

Mr. Rooker

Exactly. The Opposition are committed to changing that. That does not mean to say that from time to time Ministers will not come to the House to correct something in a written answer. I have never known a case in which either an hon. Member or a Minister has come to the House and said, "I made a mistake. I was wrong", in which the House has not willingly embraced the correction.

Sir Peter Emery

If it is done immediately.

Mr. Rooker

It has to be done at the earliest possible time, as the right hon. Gentleman says. That aspect must be dealt with.

The Select Committee on Public Service is examining the possibility of a code of conduct for Ministers. When we receive the report in due course, it may suggest a way forward. The change will have to be made with the agreement of both sides of the House. It cannot be pushed by one side or the other.

The quality of legislation needs to be improved. I do not gainsay the fact that there have been considerable changes. I have not checked the detail, but I believe that there have been more changes under the present Leader of the House than under any other Leader whom I can recall. He deserves the thanks of the House for that. Continuity in post helps in respect of the Leader of the House. We have had hon. Members in post for short periods. Not all of them were what I would call House of Commons people so they were not committed to being aware of the difficulties.

Pre-legislative scrutiny by people both inside and outside the House is fundamental. It is crucial that people outside should have an opportunity to scrutinise draft Bills. We must also get rid of the almost kneejerk hostile reaction of Ministers to any decent amendment or fresh idea. That is part of the culture of opposition and government which does not serve our democracy and law-making process well. We could perhaps have First Reading Committees to take draft Bills away and look at them. There are all kinds of ideas, but by and large we need a more mature approach.

Another aspect of the quality of legislation which is missing is systematic post-legislative review of every piece of legislation that we pass at a certain point in time after it comes into operation. That would allow us to ask some fairly simple questions. For example, has legislation achieved what Parliament intended? Does it work the way Parliament intended? I am not talking about the type of review undertaken by the Law Commission; it should be conducted according to Select Committee practice. It is only from such questions and review that we can learn lessons that may be borne in mind when legislation is drafted.

When I was still in industry and studying for a second degree, I remember that a committee was set up to review the working of the Redundancy Payments Act 1965. I remember reading at the time that it was almost unheard of for such a review to take place and almost unique for such a committee to review the workings of what was then young legislation. The review reported in about 1992, but the Act was, of course, introduced in the mid-1960s. At the moment, there is nothing systematic about such a review, but that is what we need because it would put a discipline on the House and the draftsmen. We could learn a lot from such reviews.

Time does not permit me to comment on secondary legislation; instead I shall comment on Select Committees. I freely admit that I was one of those who voted against the establishment of the departmental Select Committees in 1979. I have since said that I was wrong to do so, but at the time I did not think that they would do a good job. I also freely admit that I have never served on a departmental Select Committee, either when I was a Government Back Bencher or, since 1979, as a member of the Opposition. I have, however, served on the Public Accounts Committee and I am happy to admit that I learnt more about the machinery of Government in two years on the PAC in the late 1980s than I have learnt in 10 years as Opposition spokesman on at least three domestic policies.

The PAC is not, of course, a model for the other Select Committees. I have to say constantly to my hon. Friends that it does not operate in the same way. For a start, it never takes evidence from Ministers. It takes evidence from accounting officers only, usually civil servants, so the collective view of the Committee is that they are fair game. That means that the Government Back Benchers on that Committee do not hold back when questioning, unlike their colleagues on the departmental Select Committees who are sometimes tempted to do so. The PAC is a model, however, in the sense that it has enormous resources in the National Audit Office, which could be put to good use among other Select Committees.

Too many Select Committee reports are left on the shelf. The innovative use of a couple of our Wednesday morning sittings to discuss such reports has been extremely useful.

It is Opposition policy that the appointment of the chairperson to any quango should be ratified by Select Committees. The Opposition support the next steps process, but we believe that the appointment of chief executives to those agencies should be ratified by Select Committees. Those chief executive should have direct access to the Select Committees and should not have to go through the Secretary of State. They should produce an annual report. I accept that that changes the structure of responsibility, but accountability to Parliament for Government action would be greatly enhanced by the production of such reports and if chief executives of agencies had direct access to Select Committees, perhaps once a year. They should not just appear at the say-so of the Secretary of State.

It is possible to question people without overturning policy if those responsible for policy are not present. I have seen that happen at the PAC, which never deals with policy but just with the economy, efficiency and the effective spending of taxpayers' money. I accept that there are certain grey areas, but we must consider those suggestions which would enhance the role of Select Committees and increase the accountability of the Government to the House.

It has been argued that the Opposition should be given more assistance. I will not go into detail about that because it is something to which we will take a more positive approach when we are in Government and those in the current Government are the Opposition.

The comments of the Leader of the House about the parliamentary year were useful and interesting. Everyone has his own view. I do not believe that the consequences of the unified Budget were thought through. We never had a debate about the change because we supported what the Government proposed. It was not an issue because there had been calls for matching the Budget for tax collecting with expenditure plans. It is, however, the coalescence of the Queen's Speech followed quickly by the Budget—two great five-day debates, or sometimes longer—that has prevented Standing Committees from beginning their work. That has led to great difficulties that have been highlighted in the past three Novembers and we must address them.

I do not think the House should sit any longer than it does. The sittings of the House are governed by a certain frequency. I do not think that any recess should last longer than six weeks—that view is not shared by my hon. Friend the Member for Dewsbury (Mrs. Taylor). I would spread the rest of the weeks available throughout the year and I accept that that would require changes to be made to party conferences, state opening and the Queen's Speech. During the long recess all Back Benchers—500-plus Members—are deprived of the platform of the House. I have never understood for the life of me why written questions should not be tabled and answered during the long recess. There is no practical reason for that. We should also be able to table early-day motions during the recess. To an extent my hon. Friend the Member for Newham, South (Mr. Spearing) has already referred to the issues that may arise during a recess which would ordinarily be the subject of points of order, questions, Opposition day debates and Standing Order No. 20 applications for emergency debates. All those opportunities are lost to hon. Members during the long recess. They lose that platform and the means of seeking accountability. Sometimes things cannot be said because hon. Members have lost the privilege afforded by the Chamber. Written questions and answers and early-day motions could be published weekly throughout a recess longer than a certain period of time. I cannot understand why that cannot happen. I have made those suggestions many times and we should take them seriously.

If I do not comment on the attendance in the Chamber tonight, someone else will in tomorrow morning's press. This is an important, wide-ranging debate on the future of our democracy, because the operation of the House is fundamental to our constituents. They do not think that, however, because of our problems in terms of our efficiency, planning and the provision of good government and quality legislation. We have failed to provide a really useful Parliament for our constituents.

Consider the contrast between the attendance in the Chamber tonight as we discuss how we do our job and play our role when we carry out our functions as Members of Parliament with that for the debate on salaries. I recommend anyone to read the wonderful job description on page 22 of the second volume of the Senior Salaries Review Body report. That job description, which I have never seen written down in that way, ran to a couple of pages. We have all talked about the role of a Member of Parliament to people outside or to academics. I always conjure up the answer because there is nothing written down, and we all do the task in different ways. The contrast between that written description of our job and the scant regard for our debate tonight will be mentioned by those who comment on our affairs.

8.17 pm

Sir Peter Emery (Honiton)

I echo the compliment paid by the Opposition spokesman, the hon. Member for Birmingham, Perry Bar (Mr. Rooker), to my right hon. Friend the Lord President of the Council on the job that he has done as Leader of the House. Whether or not my right hon. Friend wanted to remain that long in that role, his length of service has been of great assistance to me and to the Procedure Committee. He has always been available and has always wanted to do whatever he could to assist the modernisation of the workings of the House. We have had more procedural acceptance from, and debate with, the current Lord President than with all the other Lord Presidents in the six years previous to my right hon. Friend's appointment.

The apparent theme of the debate is that there is a vast quantity of new ideas for the reform of Parliament. Perchance, I might be allowed to go a little further than my right hon. Friend on the alterations, streamlining and some improvements that the Procedure Committee has taken on since I became its Chairman in 1984.

It is perhaps now frequently forgotten that there never used to be a permanent Procedure Committee. Until 1984, such a Committee was appointed by the House to deal with a specific task. It was asked to undertake this, that or the other and when it had concluded the task, that signalled its demise. I made it clear that I would take on the chairmanship only if the Committee was set up for a Parliament. Consider the simple terms of reference of our Committee: That a Select Committee … be appointed to consider the practice and procedure of the House in the conduct of public business". We also have the right to call for papers and the like. We are appointed for the full period, however, and there are certain advantages, as Madam Speaker may have found. Sometimes, to avoid conflict in the House—rows, even—it is suggested that matters should be referred to the Procedure Committee. Even my right hon. Friend the Lord President of the Council has been known to sidestep when asked for his opinion, suggesting that the matter should be referred to the Committee.

The pile of Procedure Committee reports that I am now holding up—for the benefit of those who are reading the record of the debate rather than attending it, it is just over a foot high—represents only about a third of our work. It is not often appreciated that it takes time to change the House's view about certain matters. About 70 per cent. of the Jopling report rosea from earlier Procedure Committee reports.

My right hon. Friend was proud of the fact that there had only been one timetable motion in quite a long period. In our first report, produced in 1986, we suggested certain procedures to enable a Back Bencher to recommend consideration of the Committee stage of a Bill in a Select Committee, and to relax the guillotine procedure so that a Bill could be debated in its entirety. On 27 February 1986, the entire Government, less one—every Under-Secretary of State and parliamentary private secretary, and every Back Bencher—voted down, on a one-line Whip, the Procedure Committee's radical recommendation for reform of Committee stages. It took a further eight years for us to secure a recommendation along the same lines from the Jopling committee, which was not adopted for 34 months after that. That sort of timetable is involved when a change must be made in the whole climate of opinion in the House.

Initially, the proposal to limit some speeches to 10 minutes was considered unbelievable. It was decided that the experiment should last for only a year; then, because it did not seem so bad, it was retained for another year, and the system is still in place. It has taken a good deal of time not only to convince the vast majority of Members of Parliament that what we are doing is sensible, but to overcome the objections of a small minority. Reform in the House is often limited by such a minority. This is not a question of politics; it is a question of securing the agreement of most right hon. and hon. Members.

Mr. Dalyell

I remain unconvinced of the advantages of short speeches. One thing is certain: the right hon. Gentleman would not have given way to me if his speech had been limited to 10 minutes—nor would I have asked him to. The 10-minute limit truncates serious argument, kills debate and makes our proceedings mechanical.

Sir Peter Emery

The hon. Gentleman is wrong: I have given way when my speeches have been limited to 10 minutes.

Mr. Dalyell

Then the right hon. Gentleman is a saint.

Sir Peter Emery

I do not claim to be that, but the Chair is sometimes kind to an hon. Member who gives way. There is proof of that.

There have been many other reforms. I shall not go into all of them, but the establishment of the Deregulation Committee has been very important. The setting up of the Select Committee on Northern Ireland Affairs was also necessary, as was the pressure that we exerted for the continuation of the Scottish Select Committee. The Government have accepted many of the Procedure Committee's recommendations—for instance, our recommendations on budgetary reform and private Members' time. Those recommendations have led to some improvement and modernisation.

Mr. Gary Waller (Keighley)

My right hon. Friend has mentioned the time that change sometimes takes, but is not one of the strengths of the House of Commons the fact that we do not introduce change willy-nilly? There is a certain amount of stability. We consider tradition important, but we do not necessarily retain it for its own sake. We are willing to change, but the House would be poorer if we changed without devoting considerable thought to what we were doing, and sometimes experimenting with new ideas and procedures.

Sir Peter Emery

I am not in favour of revolution—no one looking at me would ever think that I was—but I have tried to be something of a reformer, and have continued to press my recommendations when I have known that they are right.

I was disappointed that my right hon. Friend the Lord President thought that there was no time for us to experiment with the suggestions involving reform of Prime Minister's Question Time and secondary legislation between now and the new Parliament. I am not sure that this would not be the best time for such experiments. In the first year of a new Parliament, there is a great deal of new legislation, but we could experiment now if it were made clear that we were doing so for only a limited time. The new Parliament could then revert to the old procedure, but could decide whether the experiment had worked. Perhaps my right hon. Friend will have second thoughts between now and October.

Hardly any hon. Member knows anything about the vast majority of secondary legislation that confronts us. I do not think that the idea of setting up a sifting Committee is unusual or radical; it would enable us to do our job more thoroughly.

Mr. Spearing

The reverse might well be true. If legislation had been dealt with by a sifting Committee, hon. Members could simply say, "Let it go." There would be no obligation for hon. Members to consult the daily parts and statutory instrument lists in case a statutory instrument affected their interests or constituencies. Surely it is up to hon. Members to scrutinise those lists, securing them from the Vote Office if necessary, and to attend Committee debates involving affirmative resolutions. Unless they look, they will not know.

Sir Peter Emery

Does the hon. Gentleman—we have both been in the House for so long that I almost want to call him my hon. Friend—really believe that many people go through those lists every Saturday? If the Committee had thought that, it would not have been nearly as concerned about the matter. A sifting Committee would not stop hon. Members doing that and making other suggestions. The concept of that being done in the name of the House seemed to the Procedure Committee to be worth examining.

The Lord President of the Council spoke about the operation of the parliamentary year. I have no doubt that, between now and the general election, my Committee will look at that. However, I can tell him that the change from February, August and October occurred in 1924 following a thorough joint Select Committee routine investigation of the practicalities and technicalities of drafting, tax raising and supply procedures. It was also in line with the views of the House of Lords. The difference nowadays is that there is a unified Budget. Much investigation would be needed before coming to a decision.

The reports are outstanding and I shall deal first with the issue of the election of the Speaker. The Committee felt that the first item on the agenda of a modern democratic Parliament should be the election of the Chairman or Speaker. It does not seem right that we have to go to another place to get permission to do that. We have to make three visits to the other place—the first to get permission; the second to have the election approved by Her Majesty; and the third for the Queen's Speech. We go backwards and forwards along the Corridor. A democratic Parliament should have the right to elect its own Speaker and I do not think that I am undermining Parliament's traditions by suggesting that that would save a little time and would put the position of the House in its proper perspective.

There was some criticism of the method of electing the Speaker and we felt that it was incorrect to have a ballot and a sort of election but that, on the whole, the procedure by which the Speaker is elected is fair and reasonable. We accept that, to some extent, it depends on the first person on whom the eye of the Father of the House alights and who is called to move the motion. Anyone else who catches his eye may move an amendment. After that the procedure went successfully at the start of this Parliament and the Committee could see no reason for changing it.

I was delighted to have confirmation that Madam Speaker thinks that the suggestions for the taking of the oath are reasonable. It was said that there might be 100 or 150 new Members and the report states that if that happened, the Whips might wish to arrange either a ballot or some other method of organising the new Members so that there was no pushing and shoving. That would mean that the person who signed the book first and who might be the Father of the House 30 years hence could be dealt with efficiently.

Delegated legislation should be subject, and be seen to be subject, to adequate parliamentary scrutiny so that people can be confident that they are not being subjected to laws that have not been properly scrutinised by Parliament. That was the basis of the report's sensible recommendations, which could be the basis of experiment for three months to see how they work. We could discover whether they ginger up Standing Committees to allow questions, and affirmative instruments could be weeded to discover those that do not need the full treatment of a Standing Committee debate. When such a debate was required, it should be possible to have an amendable motion and a debate of two and a half instead of one and a half hours. Those suggestions are reasonable, and an experiment would show whether they worked.

The seventh report, which deals with Prime Minister's Question Time, examines the issue of open-ended questions. Our proposal was for an experimental Prime Minister's Question Time period for which substantive questions would be tabled by noon on the previous day so that they would be up to date. They would dictate the type of supplementary questions and we thought that that procedure would be an improvement on the "yah-boo" that goes on at present.

I am a little confused over remarks by the Leader of the Opposition and the shadow Leader of the House. Page 43 of our report contains a letter to me dated May 1995 from the Leader of the Opposition in which he expresses some anxiety at the prospect of closed questions and suggests that there would have to be provision for the Leader of the Opposition to ask a topical question of his choice early in Prime Minister's Question Time, as at present.

Our report meets that concern. In an interview with The Independent on 12 December, the Leader of the Opposition spoke about a genuinely radical transformation of Prime Minister's Question Time from its twice-weekly 15-minute purview role of ready-made confrontational soundbites for the television networks into a cooler and longer half hour once-weekly session that would add to the sum of political knowledge. Some questions would be notified in advance, but the Leader of the Opposition would retain the ability to ask questions on the topics of the day.

On 14 May, the shadow Leader of the House, the hon. Member for Dewsbury (Mrs. Taylor), in a wide-ranging speech to Charter 88 said that the Leader of the Opposition had made to the Procedure Committee a number of suggestions for change. She said that he proposed a half-hour session and that the Prime Minister would receive overnight notice of questions which would be closed rather than open-ended and catch-all about his engagements. She said that those ideas for reform were not accepted by the Committee. We were not persuaded that a single 30-minute session was a good idea, but we agreed about closed questions. I gather that the Leader of the Opposition now agrees with that. The only issues are the right of the Leader of the Opposition to ask any question he likes and whether the session should be weekly or twice weekly.

Suggestions by the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition started us on our inquiry. Given the general feeling that reform is required and the apparent broad measure of agreement between the parties, we felt that we could proceed with at least a limited experiment on one of the suggestions before the election because it will not happen afterwards.

Mr. Dalyell

rose—

Mr. Winnick

rose—

Sir Peter Emery

I shall give way first to my colleague on the Committee and then I shall give way to the hon. Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell).

Mr. Winnick

The right hon. Gentleman is an active Chairman of our Committee. Does he agree that closed questions would not necessarily change the character of Prime Minister's Question Time? The yah-booing would go on because the most controversial topics are raised twice a week. That should be taken into account. However, hon. Members in all parts of the House should stop the ridiculous practice, which has become almost automatic, of cheering our respective leaders a minute before they enter the Chamber. It is always a minute before, never two or five minutes, to make sure that they come in at virtually the same time. That sort of nonsense could come to an end quickly if common sense were applied on both sides.

Sir Peter Emery

I am always pleased to have the hon. Gentleman on my Committee because he makes sensible observations that assist the Committee. The cheering, rather third-form like, that the House has got into is nonsense. On his other point, the proposal might alter the whole proceedings or it might not. We could tell only with an experiment and that is why I would like an experiment for a few weeks or two or three months. We would then find out. I do not know which of us is right, but no one will know unless we conduct the experiment.

Mr. Dalyell

The right hon. Gentleman will recall that, when he and I first arrived here, Hugh Gaitskell was Leader of the Opposition and it was comparatively unusual for him to intervene in Prime Minister's questions. It was an event when he did so, but the device that he used was the private notice question at 3.30, which meant that it was serious issue and there could be some follow-up. Some of us think that there is no hope of avoiding yah-boo when the Leader of the Opposition, with whatever good intentions, intervenes on the Prime Minister in the 3.15 to 3.30 slot. It is a recipe for the sort of yah-boo that, incidentally, has brought the House into such disrepute. It is part of reason why many people are so angry about what happened last night, because all they see of us are these hooligans on television on Tuesdays and Thursdays between 3.15 and 3.30. That is the impression that they get, so they say that Members of Parliament are not worth the money.

Sir Peter Emery

I agree with much of what the hon. Gentleman says. I recall when he and I came into the House. Prime Minister's Question Time was not a big event. I was a parliamentary private secretary to David Ormsby-Gore, the Minister of State at the Foreign Office. We used to have to hang around after Prime Minister's questions because the 15 minutes of Prime Minister's questions often was not taken up and we had to come back. That is unbelievable compared with what happens today.

The Leader of the Opposition came in occasionally. Then he always came in once. Then he came in twice, but now it seems to be common practice that he comes in three times. The idea of Prime Minister's questions used to be that they were for Back-Bench Members. The hon. Gentleman is right. Hugh Gaitskell used the private notice question to raise something of great importance. The press and the media noted it because it was a private notice question, he put it and the whole thing took on an importance that is not given to Prime Minister's Question Time by the media, other than the television stations, which show it as an entertainment. In America, people say, "Prime Minister's Question Time is amazing. How do you get away with it?" It is entertainment, not a serious political event, I am sorry to say.

I frequently hear or read what I consider to be especially ill-informed statements suggesting the vital need to modernise Parliament's procedures, but when one tries to question the media, in particular, on that bland statement, it is usually barren of practical suggestions or ideas. This debate has been especially useful because we have had some sensible and concrete ideas.

We hear that we must reform our working hours and make them the same as those of a business. People do not understand that most Members of Parliament arc here between 9 and 9.30. Many are here at 8 o'clock. Some green cards have been put around the Chamber by 8.15. About 30 or 40 Members are in the cafeteria having breakfast. The mail is dealt with from 9 until 10 or 10.30. From 10.30 to 1 o'clock, hon. Members are in different Committees upstairs. They are back in the Chamber at 2.30 for questions and then there is the debate, as today, until 10 o'clock. Most business people would not even consider that time scale.

One of the House's problems is that we have too many Members of Parliament. We have 650 Members. This is my view, not the Committee's view, but the concept that we could not cope with the number of constituents if there were only 450 constituencies is wrong. If there were 450 Members of Parliament, the average constituency would have 82,000 constituents, the number I have in Honiton, and any Member of Parliament can deal with that number reasonably.

Mr. Eric Martlew (Carlisle)

Does the right hon. Gentleman accept that some hon. Members represent deprived communities and that they would therefore have a much bigger work load in dealing with constituency business than him?

Sir Peter Emery

No, I do not think so, and shall I tell the hon. Gentleman why? My constituency covers Sidmouth, Budleigh Salterton and Exmouth and many retired people write me letters, come to see me and lecture me about what the Government's policy should be. I have worked in a deprived constituency. I stood for Poplar in 1951. At that time, the Member of Parliament, God rest his soul, Charlie Key was not much interested in dealing with problems as he had a safe majority, so I had to deal with many of them. A Members' work load, however, will vary with the constituency. I understand that.

On the reduction in the number of Members, as I have said before, turkeys do not vote for Christmas. The only way it could be done would be to decide to do it in 10 years' time, and to order that the next boundary change review should take place after five years. With the wastage over that period of Members who would be willing to stand down, it could be accomplished. We have increased the number of Members from, I think, 630 when I came in and it is going up again by a few after the next election. We are getting ourselves into serious trouble, which is foolish.

This Parliament has the largest membership of any Parliament in the free world. The Chinese communists' house of the people contains more members, but we have the largest number of Members in a democratic country.

On sensible ways of proceeding, only yesterday, the Committee reported, and it will present a document to the House next week, on reforming the name of the Standing Committee. People who visit the House, whether they be students or overseas visitors, always ask what a Standing Committee is. Does it stand? No of course it does not. Is it permanently there? No it is not. We suggest that the Standing Committee name should be changed to a Public Bill Committee or a Private Bill Committee, which describes what the Standing Committee does. It is only a minor and small reform, but we are trying to make this place better understood by the people outside.

On behalf of the whole of my Committee, let me say that, where there are new ideas, we welcome them. We will examine them and try to get all-party support on them. It should not be a political matter, but something on which the whole of the House can agree. The Committee will take up a number of the suggestions that I have heard today and my right hon. Friend the Lord President, if he is still in office for many years to come, will have to deal with them.

8.48 pm

Dr. Tony Wright (Cannock and Burntwood)

It is a great pleasure to follow the Chairman of the Procedure Committee. I apologise for being the only new boy to speak in the debate. The other right hon. and hon. Members who have spoken and will speak do so from experience. If my comments seem outlandish and outrageous, I hope that the House will forgive me and put them down, in part, to innocence and inexperience.

When the right hon. Member for Honiton (Sir P. Emery) spoke about the nature of this institution and working life here, I sensed that he did not quite understand the public's thoughts about the House and Members of Parliament. I related the right hon. Gentleman's description of our working day to figures that I obtained from the Library—I will not give the House the sordid evidence—on attendance at all Standing Committees and Select Committees in the three years following the 1992 general election, which do not bear any resemblance to the right hon. Gentleman's description of the average parliamentarian's working day.

The figures show that 19 per cent. of Members of Parliament—120 of them—managed to attend over that three-year period fewer than 10 sittings of a Standing or Select Committee, which is an extraordinary figure. Thirty per cent. of right hon. and hon. Members attended more than 100 sittings. There is an issue of perception. We may not believe in opinion polls but MORI's annual state of the nation poll has shown over the past five years a substantial drop in public respect for the House. When I am asked, as a new boy, what I think of the place, I tend to say that my respect for Members of Parliament as individuals has increased but that for the House as an institution has lessened.

Sir Peter Emery

Did the figures that the hon. Gentleman obtained from the Library take into account Opposition and Government Front Benchers? If not, the figures have a different bearing.

Dr. Wright

I said that I did not want to detain the House with the sordid details but I have studied the figures with care. I discounted certain categories, such as Front Benchers on both sides of the House and right hon. and hon. Members absent through illness. I could give the right hon. Gentleman an extensive list of hon. Members who, without being able to offer any extenuating circumstances, have played no great part in the life of the House over the three years in question. They include hon. Members who are loudest in their proclamations of belief in the importance of parliamentary sovereignty. Public esteem and respect for the House is declining. A few important and useful procedural reforms will not get to the heart of public disquiet. The House must understand that the public now feel that there is something fundamentally wrong.

Mr. Winnick

Although public perception of the House may be to some extent along the lines that my hon. Friend suggests, the public still come to see us, as individual Members of Parliament, when they have difficulties. In the 1930s—a time of great economic insecurity and depression, and of mass unemployment, the House was held in extremely low standing. Professor Joad and John Strachey wrote in 1931 that the House was virtually dying and no one took any interest, yet look how the House responded at the time of greatest difficulty, when the nation was in danger of being enslaved.

Dr. Wright

I accept that there are cycles, and the current cycle relates to the relationship between Parliament and the Executive—which is always in a state of flux. The relationship has moved substantially in the direction of the Government and away from Parliament. Fifteen years ago, the Procedure Committee made a famous and powerful statement about the nature of that relationship. It sounded an alarm about the loss of powers to the Executive and asked Parliament to do something. Nothing has been done and the situation has grown worse.

My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr (Mr. Rooker) referred to his famous Rooker-Wise amendment of 20 years ago. I do not believe that the present condition of the House allows for any more Rooker-Wise amendments. The balance of power has shifted and parliamentary life has altered, so the kind of Back-Bench independence required to produce substantial interventions in the legislative process no longer exists. There are many reasons. We know, for example, why Prime Minister's questions are conducted in the way that they are. Parliament has to feed the daily media battle, so there is an enormous temptation for the two combatants to do their bit of business every day.

If I may be outlandish, I do not believe that Parliament in a collective sense exists any longer exists. In its place exists a Government and Opposition engaged in an permanent election campaign in the House, lubricated by the usual channels. That explains what transpires in the House far more than any high-falutin', constitutional theory. If we are honest, most of us are in the business of climbing greasy poles, falling off greasy poles or putting more grease on the pole to make sure people do not come up behind us. That is the kind of thing that drives this place along.

Mr. Winnick

Not guilty.

Dr. Wright

Well, we have casualties from that process, who then staff Select Committee and maybe even attain glory in them. We are talking among ourselves—we know that to be true. That is the sort of thing that animates the House. Parliament in a collective sense no longer exists, which is why there is no parliamentary career structure, although there is in terms of the Front Benches. Such a career structure may be achieved eventually.

As to the growth of the payroll vote, the ludicrous situation has been reached whereby even the most junior of junior Ministers has a parliamentary private secretary. The point will soon be reached where the PPS must have a PPS. That regime saps the independence of the House.

Mr. Spearing

My hon. Friend speaks accurately of the public's perception of Parliament and of his analysis of unfortunate trends. Does he agree that perception is not the fault of the institution, nor necessarily the fault of standing orders or the way that the usual channels operate, but of the old Adam—human nature. The arena in which we find ourselves, which is so illuminated by the media, has heightened the effect—with the results that my hon. Friend partly correctly described.

Dr. Wright

That was an awesome intervention. I do not feel equipped to pronounce upon human nature. I will stick more modestly to the task that I have set myself, but I understand what my hon. Friend says.

Induction has been mentioned. I am struck by the fact that I am asked by the various organisations who bring them here to speak to parliamentarians about the procedures of the House of Commons. I am not equipped to do that, partly because I have had no induction. I am inducting Members of the Hungarian Parliament into the ways of parliamentary life when I have had no induction. That is absurd

Parliament exists in several senses. It exists as a club. Clubs are good and people enjoy them. I am beginning to enjoy this one. Parliament exists at moments of great national rejoicing or national disaster. It certainly existed this morning when we sat in Westminster Hall during that extraordinary and moving ceremony. But it has to be more than that. It must be more than a greasy pole or a club. It must have a robust independence so that it can do the sort of things that Parliaments are supposed to do—hold executives to account and scrutinise what Governments do. It needs to be able to do all the things that we think we are about, but which we do not do very well.

It was said earlier that we are here on the evening after the night before and that this is the black hole of the parliamentary day. I am here, partly because I want to participate in this debate and partly because I have an interest in a private Member's Bill which, tomorrow morning, will be massacred by the Government. It is not my Bill, but it came in the top six in the ballot. It was unopposed on Second Reading, went through the Committee stage and the Government said, more or less, that they would not block it. We consulted widely outside and it has a great deal of support. We now discover that the Government have tabled a raft of amendments that will kill the Bill, which is designed to protect whistleblowers.

It is not difficult to work out why people feel cynical about this place. We raise expectations about what Parliament can do, and then it does not do it. Only this week, a representative of an important outside organisation told me that, effectively, his organisation had given up on the House of Commons. It focused on the House of Lords because it felt that it could still make an intervention in the legislative process there and it focused on Europe because Europe mattered.

If we have reached a point at which people who matter are saying that they have given up on this place because the legislative process is so closed and because scrutiny does not work, we have gone beyond the point at which we can just make marginal changes to the time of the year at which we do things. We must get a grip on all this. We must understand that there is something wrong.

I have probably said this before—it was a formative experience—but one of my first experiences here was to be told that Government Members on an important education Bill, which became the Education Act 1993, were spending their time in Committee writing their Christmas cards. As an innocent new boy I was rather shocked by that. However, I discovered that it was routine and that if we were in Government, we would be doing the same or we would be dealing with our correspondence or slipping out until there was a Division. The textbooks say that we are engaged in scrutiny, but we are not.

If he has not already done so, I suggest that the Chairman of the Procedure Committee reads the definitive account of the poll tax saga. I will not detain the House with the relevant passage, but the authors of that detailed study of the biggest administrative disaster of modern times describe the Committee stage of the Bill as a "futile marathon".

The Committee stage of many Bills is a futile marathon. The Opposition play the game of the soundbite and delay and the Government tell their people to keep their heads down and grit their teeth so that they can get the Bill through. That is not the way that good legislation will emerge and it is not the way that effective scrutiny will happen.

There is too much legislation. One of the many ironies of the period through which we have been living is that the Government said that part of their mission was to legislate less. They have legislated more. On average, we have had 500 more pages of legislation a year than before the Government took office and, we have had 500 more pages of secondary legislation. We know why: because it is a virility contest among Ministers to get Bills into the legislative programme. We should be far more concerned with post-legislative scrutiny to ensure that legislation works. We should be reviewing it, not putting ever more legislation through the same sausage machine straight away.

We have to understand that something is wrong, that the balance between Parliament and the Executive has moved even more decisively in the wrong direction. We have to understand that there are proposals aplenty to reform legislation. Not just vacuous leader writers, but a broad range of people have looked closely at this and have a raft of proposals. I shall not detain the House, but the excellent constitution unit reviewed a great deal of parliamentary procedure and has made 30-odd proposals, all with arguments and documentation.

There was the famous Hansard Society report in 1992—the best study that has been made of the legislative process in modern times. The House did not even reflect on it or debate it, yet all the ideas that we know that we shall eventually get around to, for example pre-legislative scrutiny and Special Standing Committee procedures—all the things that we know are required to make legislation better—are available to us. We have seen a glimmer of some of it, ironically, in the Deregulation Committee, against which I, in another mode, made speeches while knowing in my heart that the way in which it would work would be an improvement on the way in which legislation is made in the House.

We are beginning to nibble at ideas that may take us somewhere, but we really must start being bold and imaginative.

Mr. Newton

The hon. Gentleman is being a bit hard on those of us who have been involved in this area. I acknowledge that the Hansard Society report has not been debated in the House, but I have looked at it carefully. I have discussed it with some of the people involved. I have attended one or two seminar-type gatherings on it. The report has had a significant influence on some of the things that I have been moving forward in the past two or three years and have spoken about tonight, which pick up some of the ideas in the report. I accept that parliamentary procedure works slowly at times, but progress is made.

Dr. Wright

I am happy to acknowledge the fact that the Leader of the House is well disposed towards many interesting ideas. I even accept that there is a theory that, by osmosis, reforms will come. I am trying to argue that things are rather more serious than that. Osmosis may not be the process by which reform must come. It must come in a more direct way.

It is not that we do not know what we should do. It is not that we do not know that something is wrong. The real problem is that we have not done it. Although we are nibbling, we are not yet serious enough about what needs to be done.

Mr. Spearing

Will my hon. Friend give way?

Dr. Wright

I would rather not, because I would like to finish. Other hon. Members also want to speak.

Last night, the House did more than it realised. It said, "We want to be taken seriously". All kinds of things flow from our decision last night. Personally, I did not support, after some agony, the money, as it were, because to be honest I could not bring myself to think that the House—this House of Scott, of Nolan, of cash-for-questions—deserved it. I wanted it to happen after the election, with a new, fresh-minded House, but that was not an option. If we say that we want to be compared with head teachers, with senior civil servants, and that we have an important role to play as Members of Parliament, that is not sustainable as an argument if we allow the House to continue in its present form.

As was said earlier, we cannot be clowns, buffoons and hooligans, while saying that we want to be taken seriously as professional legislators. Last night, the House took a step that involves an obligation that it will now have to live up to. That is the real, long-term message. If it does not do that, the wrath, contempt and cynicism that will envelop it will be far greater than anything that we have yet seen.

The House has made a promise to the people. We are possibly—who knows—entering an era when there is to be major political reform throughout our country, of which Parliament and its reform will be a part. It is a wretched misfortune that faced with the need for that, which is widely understood outside the House if not within, we as Members of Parliament respond to that issue in the way that we respond to every issue—with the old, arid adversarialism, which says, "These issues are like every other and we will convert them into the basest currency of political antagonism." It is absolutely absurd. For example, the Government end up defending the hereditary rights of peers because they feel that as reform has been proposed by another party, they have to take the contrary view.

The country is crying out for a period of sustained, consensual and sensible political reform. Part of that is a reform of the same kind—cross-party, consensual and serious—of our own institution. That is the promise that we made last night and we now have to deliver it.

9.11 pm

Mr. Christopher Gill (Ludlow)

By any token, we are having an interesting debate tonight, and I am tempted to follow up the points made by various hon. Members in their interesting speeches. However, I shall confine myself to the remarks made by my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House, before making some points of my own.

We all very much welcome the institution of European Standing Committees and the fact that we now debate European matters at sensible hours, rather than in the small hours of the night. It is a vast improvement on old times. Generally speaking, the House welcomes the reforms introduced under the Jopling proposals, although my right hon. Friend would not deny that since they were introduced, there has been a change of character and atmosphere within the precincts of Parliament.

My right hon. Friend talked about the Nolan committee, and I want to express a view on that. I very much regret the increasing reluctance of the House to make decisions that hon. Members alone should make and the loss of parliamentary sovereignty that is implicit in sub-contracting the decision-making process to outside bodies, of which Nolan and the Senior Salaries Review Body are real and topical examples.

On the question of the parliamentary calendar, I hope that my right hon. Friend will oppose longer sittings. What on earth will this place do in longer sittings if it does not introduce more and more legislation, of which we already have too much and on which I shall speak in a moment?

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Honiton (Sir P. Emery), the Chairman of the Procedure Committee, on bringing the report on delegated legislation before the House. I very much welcome the report, but I regret the omission of a letter that I wrote to my right hon. Friend earlier in the year. However, I accept that it may be my fault for not making it clear that I wanted it to be put formally to the Committee. Nevertheless, I am thankful that the Committee has considered all those matters and reported accordingly.

Sir Peter Emery

As I recall, my hon. Friend's letter was related to the European aspect of secondary legislation, which is what we are dealing with now, so it is most likely that it will be among the evidence for the second part of our consideration.

Mr. Gill

I am most grateful to my right hon. Friend, and I thank him very much.

I shall make a few brief comments on the legislative programme. I welcome the publishing of Bills in advance and I am pleased that it is now recognised that Select Committees can be used in the process of pre-legislative consultation. We must accept two things. First, the Government do not have a monopoly of wisdom, nor could they be expected to have one. Secondly, we live in an increasingly complicated society and, indeed, a complex world. The Select Committees can do nothing but good in terms of taking many of the defects out of legislation before it starts its formal parliamentary process.

I shall speak about two problems—first, regulatory overkill, and secondly, the perception of the sovereignty of the House, which I shall demonstrate is in specific instances more apparent than real.

The House must take full responsibility for the volume and complexity of legislation. There is nobody else to blame; it is entirely our responsibility. I am not making a party political point; the question is simply whether the House, and Parliament in general, is reflecting the will of the people in its exercise of the powers on loan to us from the people who elected us for the duration of our stewardship.

There is a real danger of Parliament's seeing itself, and perhaps of its being seen, as having as the sole reason for its existence the process of introducing and passing legislation. Indeed, I suspect that there are already right hon. and hon. Members who see the answer to every problem in the form of additional legislation. As I have said, we already have far too much legislation, and I suspect that some of the additional legislation that we get, and will get more of in the future, is purely a matter of political expediency—a form of yard-arm clearing.

Often, indeed in my experience almost invariably, there is no groundswell of opinion from our constituents demanding legislation on the many subjects upon which the Government feel constrained to legislate. Moreover, much of the legislation achieves quite the opposite of what was intended. I call that the law of unintended consequences. As I have said many times in the Chamber, such legislation has a disproportionate effect on the bona fide law-abiding citizen, while one suspects that those for whom the law was intended are in many ways skating by.

There is much more going on to the statute book than the Deregulation Committee can possibly hope to take off. All that amounts to a serious problem. I submit that there would be great benefit both for the party of government and for the country if we did much less, but did it much better.

In saying that, I appreciate that Ministers are heavily involved not only in the House and with their constituencies, but with the requirement to attend meetings in Brussels. That problem has been dramatically illustrated in recent weeks in connection with the beef industry. Our Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food has been obliged to spend an inordinate amount of time on the continent. Meanwhile, the implementation and execution of the 30-months plus cattle cull scheme has left a lot to be desired. The position was redeemed only by the appointment at the end of May of my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster as co-ordinator. On 25 June, the Agriculture Minister was unable to be present in the House when the Liberal Democrats moved what was effectively a motion of censure against him.

When I was first elected to the House, hon. Members told me that Parliament could do anything that it wanted. At the time, I had no reason to doubt them. To this day, some hon. Members may believe that still to be the case, but the reality is somewhat different as we increasingly discover, particularly in respect of the fishing and farming industries.

The House may dislike the common fisheries policy or the common agricultural policy; it may consider that those common policies do not represent the best interests of those two vital British industries. It may even decide that they are positively harmful or conclude that they are simply too expensive, but at the end of the day we can do nothing about it. In respect of those two specific policies, the Houses of Parliament are no longer sovereign. I say that not as a matter of opinion, but as a matter of fact. I cite in evidence the well-known Factortame case that subordinated the Merchant Shipping Act 1988 to European law as adjudicated by the European Court of Justice.

The power of decision has passed from this place to the Council of Ministers, but that is not the end of the matter. Those same Ministers are no longer accountable to the House. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the case of our hapless Agriculture Minister. Faced with the current problem in the British meat and livestock industry—listening to our European partners, the House could be forgiven for believing that it is an exclusively British problem—our Minister cannot propose an exclusively British solution, nor can the British Parliament oblige him to do so. Like a man with one arm tied behind his back, he has to tailor his remedial action to that which is permitted under the terms and conditions of the common agricultural policy.

I have little doubt that were that not the case, my right hon. and learned Friend would have brought proposals to the House for a deficiency payment scheme for the worst affected part of the cattle industry—the specialist beef producers who are producing beef under 30 months of age, which is the meat that we consume. I have no doubt that had my right hon. and learned Friend brought such a proposal to the House, the House would have supported him, but the European rules do not cater for that. Consequentially, my right hon. and learned Friend has to channel financial help to the livestock industry through the medium of the suckler cow and beef special premiums.

Twenty-five years ago, Parliament would have simply changed the law, but today the laws affecting agriculture—and of course fish—can be changed only by agreement with the other European countries. In the circumstances where the interests of the majority of the other countries might not be served by reforming the common agricultural policy or the common fisheries policy in any meaningful way, it is a triumph of hope over experience to believe that salvation lies in that direction.

I hope that the example that I have cited persuades hon. Members that, in certain respects, sovereignty no longer exists, nor am I suggesting that it has ceased to exist only in respect of agriculture and fishing. That is why an increasing number of right hon. and hon. Members are saying that at the intergovernmental conference it is a question not so much of thus far and no further, but of regaining powers that we should never have lost. That movement is widely supported by the general public and manifests itself in the support given in the House to the recent ten-minute Bill promoted by my hon. Friend the Member for Chingford (Mr. Duncan Smith). I think that that movement will grow.

I invite the House to consider the opinion of Sir Robert Megarry in the case of Manuel v. Attorney-General in 1983, when he said: as a matter of law the Courts of England recognise Parliament as being omnipotent, in all save the power to destroy its own omnipotence". In specific areas, the House has surrendered that omnipotence, and it behoves this generation of politicians to redress that travesty, for which there has never been any popular mandate. In debating the detail of parliamentary procedure, I urge the House not to lose sight of the constitutional imperative, which, of course, is the defence of parliamentary sovereignty, which belongs not to the House or its Members but to the people who have entrusted us with its safe-keeping.

9.25 pm

Mr. Paul Tyler (North Cornwall)

As a member of the Procedure Committee, I hope that the hon. Member for Ludlow (Mr. Gill) will forgive me if I return to some of the main issues that Members have been addressing.

My text is taken from Madam Speaker's intervention just before Prime Minister's questions on Tuesday. She said from the Chair: The Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition are British parliamentarians and should be respected as such, not treated as Roman gladiators."—[Official Report, 9 July 1996; Vol. 281, c. 169.] I take very seriously the points made by the hon. Member for Cannock and Burntwood (Dr. Wright) about the adversarial imperative from which we suffer in this House, which is one of the major problems and certainly makes many people outside the House so dissatisfied with the way in which we conduct our business.

It is a foolish Member who takes issue with the precise metaphor that Madam Speaker used. Viewers looking at the way in which our proceedings are handled might, however, think that there was not quite the life and death immediacy of the gladiators' colosseum. What occurs is far more like the mock gothic jousting matches—false antagonism rather than real-life exposure of issues in the cut and thrust of genuine debate—of the era in which this building was designed and constructed.

When I first came into the House in 1974, as you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, did, I was struck in the first few days by an encounter that I had with a newly elected Labour Member—Labour Members were then on the Government Benches—who asked whether I would be his pair. I had to say that I was extremely sorry that I could not. He came back an hour or two later, obviously not only horrified but bitterly disappointed that I was not prepared to act as his pair and said, "Please explain." I explained that I, as a Liberal, as I was then, had to decide on each issue on its merits. The Government had no majority, and I could not guarantee to him that I would always vote with the Opposition. In future, I believe that increasing numbers of Members, from all parties, will not automatically adopt the adversarial position, and quite right too.

I do not necessarily agree with the views of the hon. Member for Ludlow, but in some of the months of this Parliament, I suspect that he voted as often with the Opposition as he did with the Government. That is a good thing. We are not elected primarily as members of a party. We are elected to represent the public.

As the hon. Member for Cannock and Burntwood said, the House of Commons is at its lowest point in public regard. In 1991, 59 per cent. of the public thought that we were doing a reasonably good job. That figure is now down to 43 per cent.

The Procedure Committee has been looking at a number of important issues, but the time will come—it may be with a change of Government—when we all have to be a great deal more radical. I very much endorse the view expressed just an hour ago by the Chairman of the Procedure Committee, the right hon. Member for Honiton (Sir P. Emery), that this is the time for experimentation. It cannot be done when the new Government come in—even if the same Government have been re-elected, perish the thought. The likelihood is that they will have a large legislative programme, so this is the time to experiment and produce new methods of operating. The Chairman of the Committee, the right hon. Member for Honiton, certainly could not be described as a revolutionary—I would describe him as an evolutionary. He is entirely right in this respect and the Leader of the House is wrong. I hope that the House endorses that view.

The Procedure Committee has an agenda at the moment which—although it may horrify the hon. Member for Ludlow—is not dissimilar to the agenda of the President of the European Commission, who said recently that he believed that Europe should do less, but better. That should be our watchword, but it is not happening at the moment.

Mr. Gill

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Tyler

No, I am trying to be as speedy as possible. I did not interrupt the hon. Gentleman when he spoke, and other hon. Members want to speak. I do not intend to take interventions.

The decentralisation of legislation would be a major advantage to the governance of this country. It is ironic that the old command economies of the fascist states—Germany, Italy and Spain—have now effectively decentralised their legislation to a regional level. I had the benefit this afternoon of a meeting with a senator from the Australian Commonwealth Parliament, which does not understand the extraordinary degree to which our government is centralised in London. They think it is absurd for such a small country to insist on that. Decentralisation should be our second objective.

I also believe that we should be looking for greater transparency, and we must make our activities more explicable to the world outside. For example, naming our Committees in a way that makes sense to those wishing to make representations to them would be a sensible way forward.

It is also extremely important that we examine the way in which we operate as individuals. I am, obviously, not a Front Bench member. Nor do I expect to be on the Treasury Bench in the immediate future. The hon. Member for Perry Barr said that 17 years in opposition gave one a different viewpoint. I must tell him that my party has been in opposition for about 70 years, and that gives a different viewpoint again. But it is as valid a viewpoint as that of any Conservative or Labour Member. There are people in this House who do not take part in the usual channels—as they are referred to—and who believe that we must still evolve better ways of using our time individually.

For example, it would be perfectly possible to hold the Adjournment debates that presently take place on a Wednesday morning on a Monday. We all know that these debates are not well attended—hon. Members with special interests attend—and there is no vote. We could hold those debates on the Monday morning, and use the Wednesday morning for private Members' Bills when there is the possibility of maximum attendance for the votes. The way in which private Members' Bills are shuffled off to a Friday—at which point the Government can kill them off, because they a know a large number of hon. Members cannot be here—is a disgrace, and we must still deal with that issue.

I was disappointed that in her recent speech on parliamentary reform, the hon. Member for Dewsbury (Mrs. Taylor) was so weak on some of the basic issues. Listening to the hon. Members for Perry Barr and for Cannock and Burntwood made me wish that either of them had made that speech. I hope that Labour will put some of their ideas on the reform of Parliament to the Procedure Committee, as I do not see the logic in leaving them in speeches and not publishing them to allow the Procedure Committee to consider them.

My party published last month a document called "A Parliament for the People", which was produced by a group chaired by Mr. Michael Ryle—a very distinguished former servant of this House. My party is quite prepared for those proposals to be examined in the Procedure Committee. It is ironic that so many people who come to the Chamber and say how much they believe in the Select Committee procedure are not prepared to put their proposals to the Procedure Select Committee. Then I believe that we could find a greater consensus for some of the ideas than either Front Bench is prepared to accept and recognise. The old antagonistic, confrontational attitudes of those on the Front Benches must also come into the discussions.

We have several reports to consider, but two are more important than the others. The first is the issue of delegated legislation. I was glad to hear that the Leader of the House felt that the Select Committee's proposals were headed in the right direction. We should examine especially what will happen when delegated legislation comes back to the Floor of the House from the Committee that will discuss it under the proposed procedures, because it is critical that we have a full debate, with amendable motions and real votes.

The implementation of the Jopling report has taken away from the House the opportunity to decide on some important issues, including—and I agree with the hon. Member for Ludlow on this point—the emergency that has arisen from the crisis in the beef industry. So many of the related issues have been discussed and decided in the context of secondary legislation and that is a reflection on the inability of the full House to tackle a crisis of that stature.

The right hon. Member for Honiton referred to the work that the Procedure Select Committee has done on European legislation. The evidence that we have taken demonstrates all too clearly that the House's indigestion over European legislation has terrible consequences for the ultimate quality of that legislation. All too often, the original directive that arrives from Brussels is comparatively innocuous, but it is devastating by the time it has been gold-plated in Whitehall. The work that has been done by Christopher Booker and Richard North on European legislation on food and agriculture demonstrates just how devastating the result can be.

The second important issue is Prime Minister's questions. There are dinosaurs on the Back Benches of all parties. The Liberal Democrats have not got a Back Bench yet, but we will have one after the general election and, no doubt, we will also have our share of dinosaurs. To suggest that anyone profits from the ritual exchanges on Tuesdays and Thursdays, or that they could not be improved, is to fly in the face of reality and of the experience and the statements of the main participants. The Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition asked the Procedure Select Committee to consider the issue because they were so dissatisfied with what was happening. We heard evidence from two former Prime Ministers who endorsed those views. I cannot believe that it would be beyond the wit of the House to initiate a sensible experiment to see whether we can improve the situation.

Hon. Members have mentioned the problem of topicality, but that is nonsense. Prime Minister's questions happen on only about 60 days of the year and we do not have an opportunity to put topical questions to the Prime Minister on the other 300 days. Why is topicality so critical? It is far more important that we find mechanisms to put the leader of the Executive on the spot. Nobody could pretend that that now happens at 3.15 on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The least we can do, as the right hon. Member for Honiton said, is to experiment to see whether we can make some improvements.

The Select Committee's proposal may not be perfect, but it is a reasonable compromise and it has the advantage of evolution from the present situation to one that most people would approve. I make one qualification of that point. The Leader of the Opposition seemed to suggest that all other Members should be virtuous and declare their hands to obtain a real answer from the Prime Minister, but that the Leader of the Opposition—those on the Treasury Bench should consider this point because in future the Conservatives may be an Opposition party—should be given special treatment. After the next general election it is not impossible that the present governing party will split into two roughly equal parties. A third or fourth party might also be of equal size. Is it seriously suggested that if one of those parties had one more Member of Parliament, it should automatically have six open-ended questions a week, while everybody else in the House was subject to different constraints? That would be absurd and I hope that we can reconsider that point.

The whole House should have an opportunity of thinking about Prime Minister's questions. It should not be left to the vested interests of the usual channels.

In a previous debate I quoted the resolution of the House of about 1780—when I was a student of the history of parliamentary procedure I was rather more accurate about my dates—which went something like, "The power of the Crown has increased, is increasing and ought to be diminished." I believe that the power of the party has increased, is increasing and ought to be diminished. The important speech made by the hon. Member for Cannock and Burntwood leads to that conclusion.

I welcome some of the suggestions that have been made in the debate this evening. It makes very good sense to look again at the parliamentary year and I am glad that the Leader of the House is prepared to do so. An examination of our legislative programme, particularly the way in which it meshes, or does not at present, with the legislative programme of the European Parliament and of the European Commission would help us to achieve better scrutiny.

The hon. Member for Perry Barr is precisely right that we must have some mechanism for post-legislative review. The idea that we wait for a change of Government, or for a certain Act of Parliament effectively to collapse, is absurd. We must have some better way of doing it. The hon. Gentleman said that the House must own its procedures. That is absolutely true. We do not, we should not and we must not let the Executive dominate the way in which we undertake our responsibility to scrutinise their work.

The very moving occasion in Westminster Hall was referred to earlier. I thought as I listened to President Mandela that he could and did pay due regard to our Victorian ancestors, particularly William Wilberforce, who achieved huge changes in this Chamber—it has since been slightly mucked about, unfortunately, but roughly this Chamber—precisely because it was not then dominated by the confrontational two-party system that we suffer today. Of course, it is true that it was then the imperial Parliament and it had rather more power in the world, but that should be no excuse for us not to be prepared to examine again our more limited role today. Just as in the last century we were able to show that we could develop, evolve and improve our procedures so that we could be more immediately engaged with the great issues of the time, we can do so again today.

I, too, contrast tonight's slim attendance with the attendance last night. It is less, but clearly better. The outside world is hardly hanging on our every word tonight yet we are surely talking about the value that people get for their money. Is that not just as important as the money itself? I should hope so.

Parliament is as good as the media make it out to be. I regret that the written accounts of what actually happens in this place have dwindled almost to nothing since I came here in my first incarnation. The responsibility that is now laid on the broadcasting media must be greater than ever. I very much regret the fact, which has been recorded in early-day motion 1065 that the BBC is even now cutting the real-life reporting of what happens in this Chamber. There is plenty of comment, but not much factual reporting. I hope that the Government and the official Opposition will make representations on that basis.

The confidence and respect that individual Members of Parliament enjoy is probably no worse than it ever was. I often hear people in all parts of the country say that their local Member of Parliament, irrespective of party, is hard-working and conscientious and does this, that or the other. Collectively, however, our reputation is very low. The value for money that individuals give to their constituents is very great indeed, but the institution can hardly be said to be a good bargain.

9.43 pm

Mr. Nigel Spearing (Newham, South)

In the five minutes available to me, I shall endeavour to refer to the remarkable speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock and Burntwood (Dr. Wright). It is clear from the speech of the hon. Member for North Cornwall (Mr. Tyler) that the electorate do not think that the institution is good value, however much they may believe that their own Member of Parliament is good value.

My hon. Friend the Member for Cannock and Burntwood referred to a previous Select Committee report. I had the privilege to serve on the Procedure Committee for three years between 1976 and 1979. I believe that he was referring to paragraph 1.6 of the first report of the Select Committee for the 1977–78 Session—HC588–1 97/9—which states: We have approached our task not in the hope of making the job of Government more comfortable, the weapons of the Opposition more formidable, or the life of the backbencher more bearable, but with the aim of enabling the House as a whole to exercise effective control and stewardship over Ministers and the expanding bureaucracy of the modern state for which they are answerable, and to make the decisions of Parliament and Government more responsive to the wishes of the electorate. One of the problems of Parliament today is that for some years the wishes of the electorate have not been met by the Government. I would say that, of course, as a member of the Opposition, but for all sorts of reasons the problem is getting a little worse.

As I said in my intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock and Burntwood, he gave an accurate description of some of the perceptions of the institution. He finished his speech by saying that the task was simple and that a relatively few adjustments to procedure were required, including the creation of pre-legislative committees, about which I agree. By that token, he suggested that the institution would somehow be almost magically transformed. I disagree because our parliamentary institution is rather like a complicated machine that has been built up over the years, adjusted here, added to there and had certain parts taken away. It is an instrument that can be played and used well, but it can also be abused.

Our current confrontational style, which has been publicised through the media, and the temptation to our colleagues on the Front Bench to use it thus, have meant that that potentially delicate and useable machine has been abused. There is a danger that it will continue to be so.

I shall conclude by referring to an example—in a sense, a parable—that I cited in an earlier intervention, which illustrates the problem in extremis. The essence of democracy is surely the choice of the electorate to choose not only the Member but a Parliament that pursues a particular line of policy. That is why some of us on both sides of the Chamber disagree with certain treaties: they constrain that choice.

It is also important that Members have an opportunity at least to present alternatives. That is why, whatever the Friday time, the private Member Bill is so important. It allows for the introduction of legislative proposals other than those of the Executive, which would otherwise have the monopoly on legislation. That opportunity is important and fundamental.

Tonight, we have before us the Question to adjourn. We are not deciding on pay or making a decision. When a decision has to be made, for one reason or another, attendance automatically goes up. We are merely deciding whether to adjourn.

For centuries, the House has had an opportunity for private Members to introduce a motion for a debate on any topic such as drugs or something that our constituents want debated. The topic is relevant to them, which is why the link between the constituent and Parliament, the ambience, is fundamental. The opportunity for such debate is now being destroyed.

I am sorry that the Chairman of the Procedure Committee is not here because either the Committee did not protest at the time, or it connived at the elimination of the opportunity for Members to debate, and vote on, a motion of their choice. The elimination of private Members' motions was a partially invisible result of the adoption of the Jopling proposals. That deprived hon. Members of the opportunity to table motions such as the one about the decline of industry in London which I tabled when I had been in the House for two years. The opportunity for any hon. Member other than a member of the Government to table a motion based on opinion, which can be voted on, is a precious thing.

On 2 November, when the Jopling proposals were going to eliminate such opportunities, my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Mr. Bennett) and I tabled two amendments that would have enabled us to do that very thing on four occasions each year—only four out of 16 days. Our proposal was defeated by 87 votes. Funnily enough, all but two of those who opposed it—a large number did—were Conservative Members. Representatives of the Executive eliminated a fundamental democratic right, and I believe that an investigation of why that happened would answer some of the questions that my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock and Burntwood has very properly raised.

9.50 pm

Mr. Eric Martlew (Carlisle)

I apologise to my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Mr. Soley), who was not able to speak in the debate. Because procedure is a complicated subject, those who speak on it do so at length. I had prepared a lengthy speech myself, but [shall put it aside and, as one who is not an expert on procedure, make a couple of points that I believe hon. Members on both sides of the House would wish me to make.

This morning, when President Mandela addressed us, we saw Parliament at its best. Many of us never believed that such an occasion would happen, and we will treasure the memory. Last night's debate was entirely different: it may have been necessary, but it did not improve Parliament's reputation. I know that the Leader of the House hopes that the same thing will never happen again, and perhaps it never will, but we should not forget that there is always the possibility of another vote of that kind.

I wish to make two points. The first concerns Select Committees. I served on the Agriculture Select Committee for five years. It was a very good Committee and we got on very well, but there are flaws in Select Committee procedure. For instance, I sometimes worry about the amount of expert help that Committees receive and about the quality of the experts employed by them, in comparison with that of civil servants. It would be wrong to expect a Government of any persuasion to give up their majority on Select Committees, but that in itself leads to problems.

The Agriculture Select Committee produced two of the most famous Select Committee reports in recent years. One is known in shorthand as "Edwina and the eggs"; the other recommended the investigation of bovine spongiform encephalopathy. What worries me is the fact that, according to considerable evidence, when Labour Members pressed for a return to the BSE issue, the Conservative majority blocked that, apparently for political reasons. I accept that that is perfectly possible, but I feel that in such instances the minutes should be made public, so that people know that one party has prevented discussion of items that need to be investigated in reports.

As hon. Members have probably noticed, there has been a change in our voting procedures. Instead of our names being ticked off in the Lobbies, they are now crossed off. When I asked the Clerk why, I was told, "It is for the computer." However, he still had his pencil and paper. I think that we must re-examine the way in which we vote.

We have debated better use of parliamentary time. Going through the Lobby takes 15 minutes out of our debating time and often means that votes which should be held are not held because we do not want to waste time on procedure. I hope that the Chairman of the Procedure Committee will look at that. I am delighted that he has returned to the Chamber.

The Opposition want a modern democratic Parliament. The right hon. Member for Honiton (Sir P. Emery) spoke about over-representation. My view is that that is a great myth that will be used at some time to rob our constituents of the proper representation that they deserve. Even the most distinguished hon. Member can be wrong. We all read the first part of the review on parliamentary allowances and pay, but I am not sure how many hon. Members read the second part. It shows that there is a higher population—not electors—per representative in Britain than in other countries.

Of the 18 countries in the study, Britain was the fourth highest. We were behind the United States, but the USA has 51 state legislatures and when, that is taken into account, that country has a population of 32,000 per legislator. Perhaps in his calculations the right hon. Gentleman took the other place into account and, if he did, that worries me. I should not like the House to think that hon. Members do not represent enough people. However, we should represent them well.

This has been a good debate, free from rancour and I am sure that hon. Members have enjoyed it much better than Question Time. There is much to be said for Prime Minister's Question Time, but that is a personal view.

9.56 pm

Mr. Newton

I agree that this has been a most interesting debate. [Interruption.] I am reminded that I need the leave of the House to speak for a second time, but the mood of the House does not seem to be confrontational or likely to stop me speaking.

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael Morris)

Order. Even the Leader of the House always seek the House's permission.

Mr. Newton

I am grateful for your advice, Mr. Deputy Speaker, and I shall seek to adhere to it.

The debate has been rather longer on the analysis of problems than on suggested solutions. In one or two respects, the House may underestimate the extent to which matters are in its own hands. The hon. Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr (Mr. Rooker) rightly said that the House must own its own procedures. It follows from that, to some degree, that whatever procedures we have will be used to do what the House wants. I have a couple of points to make.

First, there was endless debate about Prime Minister's Question Time. There is nothing to stop any hon. Member putting down closed questions to the Prime Minister and, of course, a few do that, but not many. I suspect that some of those who have demanded reform of Prime Minister's Question Time may be among those who are pleased to get an opportunity to ask an open-ended question to try to catch the Prime Minister out, which is what it comes to, rather that debating a serious matter. If the majority of hon. Members wanted to put closed questions they could do so, but how many put such questions into the ballot? I do not know the exact number but I am willing to bet that it is not many.

Secondly, hon. Members mentioned a post-legislative review. There is a case for that and there is nothing to stop Select Committees doing it now if they choose to make it a priority for their work. The procedure is there but the issue is whether people want to use it. I have a couple of additional observations but I apologise for not having time to mention all the speeches. I disagree with the hon. Member for Carlisle (Mr. Martlew) about the way that we vote. As in many legislatures, what happens around the Chamber is often at least as important as what happens in it and the dynamics of this place depend to a great extent of the mingling of hon. Members in the Lobby, which could probably not occur in any other way at other times of the day.

I must straightforwardly say—as someone who has been a Minister for 17 years—to the hon. Member for Cannock and Burntwood (Dr. Wright), who made an engaging and thoughtful speech, that I do not recognise his picture of a Parliament that has become more and more a creature of the Government and in which Ministers do not need to worry about their own Back Benchers and about reactions in the House. That is not how it feels if one is a member of the Government.

I am genuinely not sure that, in the heated atmosphere in the run-up to a general election, experiments would either tell us much or be easy to agree because in practice every suggestion would be considered not in terms of, "Is this good for the House?", but, "How does it help or hinder our electoral chances?" That is not the time to experiment.

Mr. Deputy Speaker

Order.

Mr. Dalyell

On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Could it be registered with Madam Speaker that my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Mr. Soley) and I wanted to make short contributions, that my hon. Friend the Member for Carlisle (Mr. Martlew) was unselfish, but that long speeches by people who are unable to stay—I say it of my own Front-Bench spokesman—are unacceptable on an issue such as this?

Mr. Deputy Speaker

The Chair notes the hon. Gentleman's comments and that some speeches were of long duration.

It being Ten o'clock, the motion for the Adjournment of the House lapsed, without Question put.