Commons Sitting of 18 January 2000

Preamble
The House met at half-past Two o'clock
PRAYERS
[MADAM SPEAKER in the Chair]
PRIVATE BUSINESS

  UNITED REFORMED CHURCH BILL [Lords]
  Read the Third time, and passed.
  CITY OF LONDON (WARD ELECTIONS) BILL (By Order)
  Order for further consideration, as amended, read.
  To be considered on Monday 24 January at Seven o'clock.

Oral Answers to Questions
  FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH AFFAIRS
  The Secretary of State was asked—
  FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH AFFAIRS

    Turkey
    Mr. Ben Chapman: If he will make a statement on Turkey's EU candidature status. [R][104187]
    Minister of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Mr. Keith Vaz): We welcome the Helsinki European Council's decision that Turkey is a candidate for EU accession. Turkey is an important partner for Britain and the EU, a NATO ally which provided vital support in the Gulf and Kosovo crises, and a major market for UK exporters. The UK has been working hard for a more constructive relationship between the EU and Turkey. We have now secured that. Turkey will enjoy all the benefits of other candidates, including financial assistance. For its part, Turkey must meet the same criteria for accession as other candidates. In particular, it will need to improve its record on human rights and protection of minorities before accession negotiations can begin.
    Mr. Chapman: Does my hon. Friend agree that Turkey's candidature status represents a historical juncture for Turkey and the EU? Does he also agree that this valued ally and important geo-political country will now face both challenges and opportunities, and that it will have to deal sensitively with both internal issues and external perceptions? Will he join me in welcoming Mr. Ecevit's decision to await the views of the European Court of Human Rights before referring the case of Abdullah Ocalan to his Parliament?
    Mr. Vaz: I pay tribute to the work that my hon. Friend does as chairman of the British-Turkey parliamentary
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    group, which has been helpful in cementing relationships between our countries. He is right to say that this is a historic moment for Turkey. We were delighted that it achieved candidate status without conditions. He is also right that it is important that Turkey considers its human rights record. The decisions to refer the case of Mr. Ocalan to the European Court of Human Rights and to suspend the death penalty are welcome, and we hope that the Turkish Government will respect the court's decision.
    Mr. Tony Baldry: What positive help do the Government intend to give Turkey to help with the reforms necessary for accession negotiations to begin?
    Mr. Vaz: Turkey will get all the support that it needs, as will all applicant candidates. At the moment, we give 375 million euros through the European Union's NEDA programme. We also intend to ensure that we help Turkey to prioritise the various difficulties that it will face in the future, so that it can begin its negotiations as soon as it meets the Copenhagen criteria on political and economic issues.
    Mr. Jeremy Corbyn: The Minister will be well aware that many people are deeply concerned about the news of Turkey's candidature, given the Turkish occupation of northern Cyprus, the abuse of human rights in Turkey and the situation of the Kurdish people. Will he assure the House that the British Government will spend no further money on the Ilusu dam project until a full environmental impact assessment has been made of the entire project and consideration has been given to the effects on the villagers in the area and on the Kurdish people whose land is about to be flooded for the benefit of big business—apparently supported by several western Governments?
    Mr. Vaz: I know of my hon. Friend's interest in those matters. He is a passionate supporter of the Kurdish people and he will know that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry has made it clear that he is minded to grant export credit to Balfour Beatty, provided that various assurances—such as those my hon. Friend mentioned—are met. When those assurances are forthcoming, I am sure that my right hon. Friend will make the right decision.

    EU Intergovernmental Conference
    Mr. Nigel Waterson: If he will make a statement on the Government's proposals for the next European Union intergovernmental conference. [104189]
    Mr. Laurence Robertson: If he will make a statement on the plans to extend qualified majority voting at the intergovernmental conference. [104199]
    The Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Mr. Robin Cook): The Government argued successfully at Helsinki for an IGC focused on enlargement with a target of completion by the end of the year. I outlined the Government's objectives in detail to the House on 1 December. We place particular importance on securing a shift in the weighting of votes within the Council of Ministers to reflect more fairly the

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    population of the larger countries such as ourselves. The Government believe that key matters of national interest are better resolved by unanimity, but where majority voting may help to overcome obstacles to reform it could be in Britain's interest to support it.
    Enlargement may nearly double the number of member states of the European Union. All Members of the House who support enlargement will want the IGC to reach agreement enabling Europe to open its doors to the new democracies of central and eastern Europe.
    Mr. Waterson: I am grateful for that answer. Will the Foreign Secretary confirm precisely the areas in which he intends to sign up to qualified majority voting where it does not apply at the moment? Why cannot he embrace the Conservative vision of a more flexible and outward-looking Europe, which is in tune with the views of the great majority of the British people?
    Mr. Cook: If I were to embrace the Conservative vision, I should find myself in opposition, as that vision was rejected by the British people at the last election.
    As I have said often before, and am happy to repeat to the House today, there are matters that we consider to be off limits for majority voting. They include border controls, defence, taxation, social security, own resources matters, and treaty amendments. There may well be other occasions when it could be in our interests to secure majority voting—such as reform of the European Court of Justice, for example. Other member states appear before the court much more often than Britain does, so it could well be in our interests to establish procedures that will enable us to get justice faster against other member states.
    Mr. Robertson: Is not the alternative to extending qualified majority voting for the European Union to engage in fewer matters and to interfere in fewer areas of our national life? Does the Secretary of State recall that the previous Labour Government promised that the British Minister would always have a veto, and that it was only on that basis that the British people ever agreed to be members of the European Union in the first place?
    Mr. Cook: Actually, the rate at which directives are issued from Brussels has slackened off since the height of the single market, when the Conservative party was in office. In that period, the then Conservative Government agreed the extension of majority voting in 42 different articles of European Union affairs—the largest expansion in the use of majority voting in the EU's history.
    I have no quarrel with that, as the previous Conservative Government were right to act in that way. Any rational member state would have agreed to do so. However, I am not sure that the hon. Gentleman will be persuaded by what I have said, judging by the speech that he made last year, in which he asked whether the European Union was the new Soviet Union. The answer that he appeared to give to that question was yes.
    Ann Clwyd: Does my right hon. Friend agree that arms sales should be a matter for qualified majority voting in the European Union? It appears that the EU's decision to lift the embargo on arms sales to Indonesia was not unanimous. Would not that be a proper
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    subject for discussion at the next inter-governmental conference, especially as it is known that the military in Indonesia are still responsible for human rights abuses in many provinces, such as Aceh, Irian Jaya and the Spice islands? In addition, British-made equipment has been used in the Moluccas in the past two weeks. Is not the matter of arms sales a proper subject for discussion and for qualified majority voting?
    Mr. Cook: I have just told the House that we would not accept majority voting in defence matters. I should be in some difficulty if I were to accept an obligation to abide by an arms embargo on the basis of a majority vote. The arms embargo on Indonesia was introduced on British recommendation and with our strong support. At the time, major atrocities were being committed in East Timor and Jakarta had not respected the outcome of the referendum in East Timor. Both problems have been remedied. East Timor is currently administered by the United Nations, and the United Nations' mandated force guarantees peace there. In addition, the new Government in Indonesia have accepted that East Timor must become an independent state.
    I welcome the democratic process that has resulted in a new democratic presence in Indonesia. I welcome especially the changes that have been made to bring the army under control, and the appointment of Indonesia's first-ever civilian minister of defence. Nevertheless, we made it clear last week in Brussels that we want the lifting of the embargo to remain under continual review. In the event of a return to the sort of disturbances that occurred in East Timor, we would want the embargo to be reimposed.
    Dr. Phyllis Starkey: Will my right hon. Friend confirm that the extension of qualified majority voting could be to our advantage in connection with a number of issues to do with Gibraltar? At present, Spain is blocking the extension to Gibraltar of a number of measures that apply to the rest of the United Kingdom.
    Given that Conservative Members generally like to present themselves as great defenders of Gibraltar, is my right hon. Friend surprised that, in this instance, they refuse to support a measure that would be greatly to the advantage of Gibraltarians?
    Mr. Cook: I am very glad that my hon. Friend was able to get the second part of her question in. She gives a perfectly good example of how majority voting can be in our interest. The problem with the veto that has occurred on some occasions has been to do not with the issue being voted on, but with the linkage made by one member state to another issue that has nothing at all to do with the matter under consideration.
    Mr. Archie Norman: Further to the question raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Eastbourne (Mr. Waterson), does the Secretary of State remember that, last December, he failed to distance himself from the Labour MEPs who voted in favour of putting flexibility on the intergovernmental conference agenda? Will the right hon. Gentleman now distance himself from Simon Murphy, the third Labour leader of the MEPs in the last year and a so-called "Blairite", who voted in favour of a resolution extending qualified

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    majority voting to certain aspects of taxation? Last month, Mr. Murphy voted in favour of a resolution deploring the "lack of political vision" displayed by leaders at Helsinki, of whom the Prime Minister is presumably one, and complaining that the IGC agenda was "inadequate". Alternatively, does the right hon. Gentleman agree with me that it is yet another example of Labour keeping quiet in Britain but voting in favour of deeper integration in Brussels?
    Mr. Cook: I have been plain to the House, and I have been plain everywhere in Britain, on what our objectives at the IGC will be. I have stated those objectives again today, and they are not changed by any debate in the European Parliament. However, I am happy to share common cause with parties in developing a constructive engagement in Europe with Simon Hughes and the other Labour MEPs—[HON. MEMBERS: "Simon Murphy"]—him as well—on that point.
    The hon. Gentleman should explain to the House why six Tory MEPs have now formed common cause with the UK Independence party, which is committed to withdrawal from the European Union. Is he content to have people in his party and standing for his party committed to a platform of withdrawal from the European Union?
    Mr. Ben Bradshaw: Will the Foreign Secretary confirm that the two biggest expansions of qualified majority voting in the European Union took place under the regimes of Mrs. Thatcher and the right hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Major)? Does he agree that it is intellectually dishonest to claim that one supports the expansion of the European Union while refusing to countenance an expansion in qualified majority voting?
    Mr. Cook: My hon. Friend goes to the heart of the point. If we could retain the British veto while everybody else lost theirs, it might be a fair trade-off. Conservative Members are campaigning not only to keep a British veto on everything but to keep a Belgian, a Dutch and a German veto and, after enlargement, to keep a Slovak veto and a Cyprus veto as well. In those circumstances, it may be difficult to get through some decisions that are very important to Britain's national interests.
    Dr. Vincent Cable: May I congratulate the Foreign Secretary on his recent interventions on Europe, particularly with regard to monetary union? Will he endorse the conclusion of the former Chancellor, the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke), that in its first year of operation, the euro was a considerable success and that we should be part of the system soon?
    Mr. Cook: Congratulations from any quarters are always welcome and happily received. However, I repeat that the Government's position is well known: we will decide whether to join the European single currency on the basis of the tests of economic conditions and whether joining would be in the interests of the British people. The Conservative party has said that, even if it was in Britain's economic interests, it would not join, nor would it agree, as we would, that the British people should decide for
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    themselves. The Conservative party would deny the British people a referendum. With that sharp contrast in mind, I am happy to fight the next election on that issue.

    Pakistan
    Mr. Geraint Davies: If he will make a statement on progress towards restoring a democratic Government in Pakistan. [104190]
    The Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Mr. Robin Cook): We continue to press General Musharraf for progress towards the restoration of democracy. Last week, Sir Charles Guthrie, Chief of Defence Staff, took a strong message from the Prime Minister to the military regime seeking a route-map to the restoration of democracy. We look to General Musharraf to fulfil his commitment to prepare Pakistan for a civilian, democratic Government.
    Mr. Davies: Is my right hon. Friend aware that many in the Pakistani community, particularly in Croydon, are fairly happy about the military coup in Pakistan, which they regard as a necessary condition of getting rid of bad governance and bringing about stability? They also welcome the announcement by the new regime of local government elections. Will my right hon. Friend join me in welcoming that announcement and, given Britain's wealth of experience in local government, will he give an idea of the support that we might give to enable successful, democratic and blossoming local government in Pakistan?
    Mr. Cook: We have already said that we are willing to provide technical assistance to help Pakistan return to a credible and fair form of democracy. It would be welcome if General Musharraf proceeded with his commitment to local democracy, and the Government would be happy to consider any bona fide request for help. At the same time, however, and while we do not call for the restoration of the status quo in the form of the Sharif Government, we cannot condone a military coup. That would not be welcome to our many friends around the world who are determined to retain civilian democratic government.
    Mr. Douglas Hogg: Will the Foreign Secretary make it clear to the Government of Pakistan that any attempt to bring the former Prime Minister to trial will be viewed with great suspicion and dismay? When the matter is next discussed by Commonwealth heads of Government, will the right hon. Gentleman make the point to some of them—for example, Mr. Mugabe of Zimbabwe—that if they put their own houses in order, they would have much more plausibility on this matter?
    Mr. Cook: We would all deplore a show trial of the former Prime Minister. Mr. Sharif and others are, of course, covered by the law, and they can therefore be fairly brought to court if they have committed a bona fide breach of the law. The circumstances around the abandonment of the first attempt at a trial of Mr. Sharif were of some concern, and we shall continue to press

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    Mr. Musharraf's Government fully to recognise the rights of the former Prime Minister and the others on trial with him.
    Mr. Peter L. Pike: We all want a return to democracy in Pakistan as soon as possible, and the previous Government of Pakistan were not acceptable and had many failings. What steps has General Musharraf announced to ensure a return to normality? What support can we give to ensure that that objective is achieved as quickly as possible?
    Mr. Cook: We very much welcome General Musharraf's repeated commitments to a return to democracy and his specific commitment to local elections. We await with keen anticipation the details of how and when those commitments will be fulfilled. General Sir Charles Guthrie went to Pakistan last week and pressed the Government to produce both a route to democracy and a date by which we might expect some of the announced measures to occur. We await the return of democracy, both on the map and the calendar, and I hope that General Musharraf will meet his own commitment in the near future.
    Mr. Menzies Campbell: May I undertake to pass on the Foreign Secretary's invitation to my hon. Friend the Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Mr. Hughes)? Do we not need real and credible evidence of measurable progress in the restoration of democratic government to Pakistan and in the recognition of human rights before there can be any question of our raising the suspension of arms sales to that country? Should not similar principles lie behind our relations with other countries, particularly East Timor? What evidence is there of the achievement of stability, democratic government and universal recognition of human rights in that country?
    Mr. Cook: East Timor is entirely administered by the United Nations and a security force is present to ensure that stability is maintained. If the right hon. and learned Gentleman intended to refer to Indonesia, I am happy to respond in that spirit. There has been progress towards a democratic Government in that country, including election of the first democratically chosen president and appointment of the first human rights minister, who, because of what he has said in the past on human rights, has some credibility. The Indonesian Cabinet is also a genuine attempt at achieving a better balance of representation across Indonesia.
    It is early days yet, and we shall continue closely to review the situation. In Brussels last week, we made it clear that if there were a return to the kind of episodes seen in East Timor, there would be a case for reconsidering the arms embargo. I stress that it is not the case, as has been suggested, that there are no limits on arms sales to Indonesia. As before, any sale will be judged fully against our criteria, and we approved only £2 million worth of licences for new equipment last year.
    Mr. Ann Cryer: When my right hon. Friend holds discussions with the Pakistani Government on the return to democracy in that country, will he also
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    have a word about the human rights of women, especially in regard to last year's Amnesty International report on so-called "honour killings"?
    Mr. Cook: My hon. Friend makes an important point. We have reflected on the honour killings in several representations that we made to Pakistan under its previous regime, and for some time. It will continue to be a major issue of concern in our dealings with that country.
    Mr. Crispin Blunt: Is not the sad truth that, whether Pakistan's Government have been military or democratic, it has been one of the most corrupt countries in the world? It has been linked, as a state sponsor, to terrorism in Kashmir; it is a source of the drugs trade, as well as being a route for the hard drugs trade in this country; it has co-operated with North Korea on missile and nuclear technology; and it has been prey to Islamic extremism.
    Set against that, the coming or going of a military Government in Pakistan is perhaps less important than it would be elsewhere. Should not the policy of our Government be more determined by those very serious factors, which affect our interests as well as those of our partners and allies, before we deal with the nature of the Government of Pakistan? Surely, those fundamental problems of Pakistan must be sorted out first.
    Mr. Cook: The hon. Gentleman raises a number of very important issues, which are indeed of concern to the Government. However, in many cases, the conduct of the Pakistan military has been much at the forefront of matters of concern. A military regime is not more likely to address those concerns than were past Governments.
    As for the visit last week, I report to the hon. Gentleman and to the House that we did make a particular point of including in our message that we expect Pakistan to abide by its international obligations to fight international terrorism. We shall watch events closely in the coming months.

    Drugs Trade
    Mr. Frank Roy: What action his Department has taken to combat the drugs trade, with particular reference to Latin America. [104191]
    Mr. Paul Goggins: What recent discussion he has had with the US Government with regard to the drugs trade involving Colombia. [104197]
    The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Mr. Keith Vaz): The Foreign Office co-ordinates the United Kingdom's international counter-drugs activities. We attach importance to the effective engagement of all Departments and agencies concerned—including the intelligence agencies—in combating the drugs trade. During the financial year 1998–99, the Foreign Office spent £5.9 million on projects in support of the UK drugs strategy. On 5 January, we announced a contribution of £2.286 million towards projects under the

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    United Nations international drug control programme concerning Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, Afghanistan, Bulgaria, Romania and Macedonia.
    Mr. Roy: I thank my hon. Friend for that reply. Does he agree that banks should do everything in their power to reveal where the criminal elements—the drugs barons of Latin America and, indeed, throughout the world—stow their criminal money? Will he support moves to ensure that off-shore tax havens are far more transparent?
    Mr. Vaz: I agree with my hon. Friend. I assure him that the UK, in all dealings and discussions with our colleagues abroad, ensures that the issue is raised. We believe that there should be transparency and international co-operation, and that those who profit from illegal trafficking of drugs ought to be exposed. That is why we are leading members of the global programme on trafficking and of the financial action task force on money laundering. We believe that that is the only way to combat the hiding of the proceeds of crime.
    Mr. Goggins: Last Tuesday, President Clinton announced a $1.3 billion aid programme for Colombia—most of it military aid. Although effective action on drugs is essential, does my hon. Friend agree that military aid alone is not enough? Will he encourage the United States to work with the Colombian Government to strengthen human rights in Colombia, and to secure the peace that alone can defeat the drugs barons whose filthy money currently funds the civil war in that country?
    Mr. Vaz: I know of my hon. Friend's interest in these matters and that he visited Colombia last year. He is absolutely right. We should give as much support as possible to the Government of President Pastrana. We are giving support: we are giving advice and assistance on conflict prevention and helping the Colombians to deal with those who traffic in drugs. We shall continue that support on our own, and also bilaterally with other countries that share our view.
    Sir Sydney Chapman: On reflection, does the Minister agree that it was a mistake to cut the role of the Royal Navy's West Indies guardship in the Caribbean, especially remembering that only last November the crew of HMS Northumberland was responsible for recovering cocaine with a street value of £135 million? Would not restoring the guardship for the full 12 months of the year be a cost-effective way of playing our part in tackling drug trafficking?
    Mr. Vaz: There are many ways in which we play a part in ensuring that drug trafficking is kept under control—for example, in preventing the inflow of drugs to this country. Last year, Customs and Excise seized 2,800 kg of cocaine. This is not just a matter for the Foreign Office. We need to work with all the agencies involved in this country and abroad to ensure that the practice is dealt with as effectively as possible.
    Rev. Martin Smyth: I appreciate the work that is being done to try to combat the pernicious traffic in drugs. What success has been achieved in the
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    banking world or with other Governments in curbing numbered bank accounts, which create one of the great difficulties in tracking drug traffickers?
    Mr. Vaz: The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. That problem goes to the root of what we need to do on the various bodies, such as the global programme on money laundering, on which we sit. We need to ensure that there is transparency and accountability. The only way that we can achieve that is to work with financial institutions and other countries to ensure that that happens.

    HIV-AIDS
    Mr. Russell Brown: If he will raise the issue of HIV-AIDS in the developing world at the next G8 summit in Japan. [104192]
    Mr. Neil Gerrard: What plans he has to ensure that the G8 summit in Japan will discus the impact that HIV-AIDS is having on the developing world. [104196]
    The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Mr. Peter Hain): Health and, in particular, HIV-AIDS is one of the issues on which we place priority for this year's G8 summit at Okinawa. We are working with the Japanese presidency and G8 partners to get it high on the agenda.
    Mr. Brown: I am sure that my hon. Friend would agree that, across the African continent, there is a wide variation in the way in which different Governments tackle the issue of HIV and AIDS. For example, in Uganda, some excellent work is going on. However, in other countries, there is serious concern that the money that should have gone into HIV and AIDS programmes is being diverted into other areas. Will my hon. Friend ensure that the good practice that is being seen in certain countries is promoted in others, especially in countries where we suspect that Governments are not taking the issue as seriously as we would hope?
    Mr. Hain: Yes, I shall certainly do that. My hon. Friend raises an excellent point. In Uganda, I visited at Entebbe a health centre financed in part by the British Government that is helping to drive forward an excellent programme. Its importance compared with other countries in Africa is that the Ugandan President has put himself at the head of the campaign. As a result of imaginative measures, such as pop songs, condom distribution, billboards and other initiatives, the rate of infection in Uganda is at last slowing. That is certainly not the case elsewhere in Africa.
    Mr. Gerrard: May I welcome the lead that the Government have given, the money that has been committed over the next three years and, especially, the £14 million that has been given to the international AIDS vaccine initiative? Will my hon. Friend encourage other G8 countries to take similar action, so that we have a common approach that recognises the devastating economic impact of HIV as well as the health aspects? Will he also raise at the summit the question of how we ensure that, in the future, people in developing countries have access to new treatments and that we do not have a

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    repetition of the problems that were faced in South Africa last year, when pharmaceutical companies tried to stop the compulsory licensing of drugs by the South African Government?
    Mr. Hain: Again, my hon. Friend makes excellent points with which I agree. I stress his point about the economic impact of AIDS. In Zimbabwe, for example, one in four adults is infected. That is hitting not just ordinary people, but those right at the top of the country and it will have a devastating effect on the country's future professional life and economic expertise.
    That is why the Prime Minister's initiative at the Commonwealth Heads of Government conference last November, to which my hon. Friend referred indirectly, and Vice-President Gore's initiative last week when he called for war on AIDS at the United Nations security conference, are so much to be welcomed.
    Mr. Nicholas Soames: Does the hon. Gentleman agree that, while the important matter of HIV-AIDS will be dealt with at the G8 conference as a discrete matter, the G8 should take care also to recognise the many other serious diseases by which poorer countries in particular are afflicted? Does he agree that the G8, which must on occasion be one of the smuggest gatherings that the world could ever see, has a duty to recognise that prosperity and health are the only ways in which some poorer countries will struggle out of the serious position in which they find themselves?
    Mr. Hain: The hon. Gentleman makes such a convincing case that he should perhaps cross the Floor, as some of his colleagues have done. I agree that epidemics, such as malaria in some parts of Africa, are a bigger challenge than AIDS and should be high on the G8 agenda, and that the G8 should take its responsibilities seriously, not least because, ultimately, widespread epidemics in the developing world threaten our security, environmental and health interests in the west.
    Dr. Jenny Tonge: Does the Minister agree that conflict and civil war are great factors in the spread of HIV and AIDS, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa? When will he do something about the activities of arms brokers which fuel those wars and continue the agony in Africa?
    Mr. Hain: Again, the hon. Lady makes a point that I agree with. We have taken a series of initiatives—for example, we have pressed the Ukrainian Government to tackle their arms dealers to ensure that they stop supplying areas of conflict in Africa, including Angola in the form of supplies to UNITA. We need to keep pressing that case, and our policy is in complete contrast to that of the Conservative Government, who seemed to want to encourage the sale of arms to just about everybody in sight.

    Kashmir
    Kali Mountford: What recent representations he has received concerning Indian policy towards Kashmir. [104193]
    The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Mr. Peter Hain): We have received many letters and representations, and we take every opportunity to urge a just and lasting solution to Kashmir. Only last week, my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary met his Indian counterpart and, during my visit to India in November, I also raised the matter at the highest level. We shall continue to press both India and Pakistan.
    Kali Mountford: Is it not correct that people in Kashmir are suffering greatly because of cross-border terrorism and that the tension is increased by the presence of troops? Is it not now time, notwithstanding the problems with the Pakistani Government, to reiterate the Foreign Secretary's call on the Pakistani and Indian Governments to return to dialogue before the conflict worsens?
    Mr. Hain: Yes, it is. We want the Lahore process to be resumed as soon as possible, and it would be in the interests of the leadership in both Delhi and Islamabad to do so. I agree strongly with my hon. Friend that Pakistani cross-border terrorism is proving to be an enormous threat to the stability of Kashmir. We look to General Musharraf, as the Chief of the Defence Staff told him on his visit last week, to make sure that, under his regime, such terrorism stops. We particularly look to General Musharraf, who is widely seen as the author of the Kargil incident last year, to ensure that nothing like that ever happens again.
    Mr. Michael Colvin: Is there any sign, perhaps in the Minister's talks in India or the Foreign Secretary's visits, that the parties concerned are prepared to meet under the provisions of the Simla agreement to discuss the future of Kashmir? If they were to do so, would the United Kingdom be prepared to chair such a conference, bearing in mind that it was our premature withdrawal from India—six months early—which denied the people of Kashmir the plebiscite on their future, and has led to the difficulties, which have existed now for over half a century?
    Mr. Hain: We have made it clear that we stand ready to help in the resolution of the Kashmiri conflict, provided that India and Pakistan jointly ask us to do so. Our role would depend on their invitation. In any case, it is essential, notwithstanding the recent tensions between the two countries, that they start talking because, over Kargil in particular, there was a danger of a massive conflict erupting. Given that both countries are nuclear powers, that could have been extremely dangerous.

    Africa (Conflict Resolution)
    Ms Joan Ryan: What recent discussions he has had with the United States over conflict resolution in Africa. [104194]
    The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Mr. Peter Hain): In Washington and New York last month, I had discussions with members of the United States Administration, including the Assistant Secretary

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    for Africa, Susan Rice, and the American ambassador to the United Nations, Richard Holbrooke. Topics included Angola, Sierra Leone and the Great Lakes.
    Ms Ryan: I thank my hon. Friend for that reply. Having had such meetings, he must be aware that private companies, private individuals and other countries are breaking United Nations sanctions by supplying fuel and other goods to Angola, as we have heard already, thus helping to perpetuate a war that is causing much devastation and misery. That is unacceptable. Will my hon. Friend tell the House what the Government will be doing about this situation?
    Mr. Hain: I agree with my hon. Friend. It is vital that private individuals and companies engaged in breaking the law by deliberately breaching UN sanctions on UNITA are stopped. I can inform the House that we are referring to the UN sanctions committee today, and its expert panels, the details of three such individuals, which we hope they will be able to follow up.
    It is widely known in the region that Jacques "Kiki" Lemaire flies in diesel fuel, landing on UNITA airstrips in a Boeing 707 or Caravelle aircraft. Tony Teixeira has been supplying diesel fuel to UNITA, again flying it in by plane. Victor Bout, who runs an air transport company, has flown in arms to UNITA. It is also believed that Bout owns or charters an Ilyushin 76 aircraft, which was impounded in Zambia en route to Angola last year.
    Mr. Bowen Wells: Why did the Minister not include Sudan on the list of those countries which he discussed with his United States counterparts last week? What steps do the Government propose to take in trying to resolve the appalling conditions in southern Sudan and to resolve the civil war there? The population is literally starving to death and HIV-AIDS is rampant. Surely this must be the year that the Government determine to take an initiative, and to make a real effort, to try to solve the problem.
    Mr. Hain: I did indeed discuss Sudan, along with many other African countries, with the United States Administration. The hon. Gentleman is right to say that it is vital that the civil conflict or war is resolved early. We are supporting the EGAD process, and we are in discussions with the Egyptians on their initiative, to ensure that we make every effort to end an unremitting conflict that has so devastated Sudan.
    Mr. Bruce Grocott: Does my hon. Friend agree that there is always a risk that a long-standing, long-running tragedy, such as the war in Angola, can often be forgotten or overlooked when flashpoints occur elsewhere? The origins of the war in Angola were closely related to the evils of apartheid in South Africa, which have now thankfully been brought to an end. With my hon. Friend's special knowledge of South Africa, will he ensure that, in his conversations with his counterparts in the United States and elsewhere, he will not allow the conflict in Angola, which has continued for more than a
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    generation, to slip in any way on the international agenda? We owe it to all to bring the suffering in that country to an end.
    Mr. Hain: I shall certainly be discussing the matter with the South African Government when I visit that country at the end of the month. I give high priority, as surely the whole House should, to ensuring that the dreadful conflict, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people and which has been fomented by Jonas Savimbi's UNITA, is ended quickly. Countries in Europe and the United States and countries in Africa, especially those neighbouring Angola, can bring the conflict to an end if there is the will to do so. With fuel and arms being flown in, sanctions are being breached almost daily. If UN sanctions are to mean anything, they must bite. Britain is determined that they should do so.
    Mr. Cheryl Gillan: The Minister, with his great knowledge of Africa, will know that increasingly sinister alliances are being attracted. For example, the Congo is buying Scud missiles from Iran and President Kabila is having his troops trained by the North Koreans. In the United Kingdom, the smuggling of missile components to Libya that would extend the range of their missiles has been discovered.
    In the light of the escalating threat from Africa, what discussions has the Minister had with the Americans about the positioning of a missile defence shield in Europe? As the United States carries out its anti-ballistic missile tests over the Pacific today, does he agree that we should be increasing our support and co-operation with the United States, in the interests of our own security?
    Mr. Hain: I admire the hon. Lady's ingenuity in extending the question. We are in regular dialogue with our colleagues in Washington and elsewhere in the US about our commitment, as a Labour Government, to nuclear disarmament and to making sure that we rid the world of the threat to global security posed by weapons of mass destruction. We will continue to pursue that dialogue to ensure that our objectives are achieved.

    Cuba
    Dr. Ian Gibson: What recent discussions he has had with the Cuban Government. [104195]
    The Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Mr. Robin Cook): I met my Cuban counterpart, Felipe Perez Roque, in the margins of the Rio summit in June, the first such formal meeting since the 1950s. At that meeting and at others, we have raised our concern over human rights in Cuba. However, it remains our strong view that we are more likely to make progress on human rights and other issues of mutual concern through dialogue than through blockade.
    Dr. Gibson: Does my right hon. Friend agree that we have much to learn from Cuba—high literacy rates, a health service that apparently works the whole year round, and a successful bio-technology industry? When he is next in the State Department in Washington, will he urge

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    the Americans to remove their blockade of the Cuban people and lift the economic and travel sanctions against them?
    Mr. Cook: There are opportunities for us to co-operate to our mutual benefit. One such example is the agreement to develop the vaccine against meningitis between SmithKline Beecham and the Finlay institute in Cuba. I welcome such co-operation to the mutual benefit of our two countries and our two peoples.
    May I say to my hon. Friend that Cuba also has a lot to learn from the rest of the world? I endorse the view that we are likely to make progress if Cuba becomes more open to the world, and the world becomes more open to Cuba.
    Mr. Desmond Swayne: Does the Secretary of State agree with Human Rights Watch in its report last year, which observed that Cuba has developed a highly efficient machinery of repression? Under the terms of our ethical foreign policy, why are we engaging with Cuba in a way in which we are not prepared to engage, for example, with Burma?
    Mr. Cook: I have always made it clear that we are more likely to make progress if we are prepared to deal with regimes about which we have concern, where there is a possibility of engaging in genuine and sincere dialogue. I have great difficulty in sitting down with members of the military regime in charge of Burma, not only because of its extensive ethnic cleansing of large parts of Burma, and not only because of the fact that at one time it had 200 elected Members of Parliament locked up, but because of its plain connivance and complicity in the heroin trade from Burma, to which it is a major contributor.
    In the case of Cuba, I did raise with the Foreign Minister of Cuba a number of the issues of concern to Human Rights Watch and the rest of us, in particular the trial of four people for doing nothing other than calling for national elections.
    Mr. Andrew Mackinlay: In my right hon. Friend's communication with the Cuban Government, has he made it clear that Her Majesty's Government support the principle that the little boy who is now in Honda should be returned to his natural father, and that we are making representations to the United States in support of that view?
    Mr. Cook: That is entirely a matter for the immigration authorities of the United States and its bilateral relations with Cuba. With respect to my hon. Friend, I will not run my neck into that noose.

    Yugoslavia
    Mr. David Heath: What assessment he has made of the effectiveness of the sanctions currently applied to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. [104200]
    The Minister for Europe (Mr. Keith Vaz): The EU sanctions regime is a crucial part of the EU's strategy to encourage democratic reform in the Federal Republic of
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    Yugoslavia. The United Kingdom continues to oppose any easing of the regime while the current Government are in power in Belgrade, and we fully support the humanitarian exemptions to the regime and the exemptions for Kosovo and Montenegro.
    Mr. Heath: Does the Minister recognise that many of us who wholeheartedly supported the intervention in Kosovo nevertheless have grave reservations about the present sanctions regime against Yugoslavia? Is it not possible to make the sanctions regime more effective and less counterproductive or, better still, to find alternative ways of encouraging the Government of Yugoslavia towards better government? Lastly, will the Minister make sure that there is no hindrance or bar to humanitarian aid for a population that has already suffered enough from Milosevic and his antics?
    Mr. Vaz: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for the constructive way in which he asked his question. We have no quarrel with the people of Serbia, only with Milosevic. The sanctions regime is important to ensure that his regime understands that his behaviour is cruel. Of course we are providing humanitarian aid—the European Union contributed 62 million euros last year through its humanitarian office in Belgrade. We shall continue to provide that aid, but we shall not allow Milosevic to get away with his behaviour. Sanctions will continue, and will be monitored at every opportunity.
    Mr. Tam Dalyell: Are not sanctions idiotic and counterproductive? Do not they strengthen Milosevic as they strengthened Saddam Hussein?
    Mr. Vaz: No. I supported sanctions against South Africa, and I fully support sanctions against Serbia.
    Mr. John Maples: One part of the Yugoslav Republic suffers from a particular form of sanctions. In June, the Foreign Secretary stated:
    "we are determined … to create a multi-ethnic Kosovo … we will not tolerate … ethnic cleansing".—[Official Report, 17 June 1999; Vol. 333, c. 585.]
    Does the Minister realise that the murder of Serbs, Bosniaks and gypsies is a daily occurrence, that more than 120,000 Serbs have been driven out of Kosovo and that the gypsy population has left en masse? Is that the multi-ethnic Kosovo that the Foreign Secretary had in mind and for which NATO fought a war?
    Mr. Vaz: United Nations forces in Kosovo are ensuring that no ethnic cleansing occurs. If it does, they will ensure that those responsible are brought to justice. That is the way to tackle the problem.
    Mr. Maples: I know that the subject is not as familiar to the Minister as it is to the Foreign Secretary, but that is one of the most complacent answers that has been given the House. Nearly the whole Serb population has been driven out of Kosovo. Is not the problem sheer incompetence? Of the 6,000 police requested by the United Nations mission in Kosovo, only 1,800 are in place. The Serb enclave in Mitrovica is in danger of

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    leading to the partition of Kosovo. Only 50,000 of the 120,000 ruined houses have been made habitable for the winter. No progress has been made in establishing a civil society. The stability pact has led to nothing and promised money has not been forthcoming. Our armed forces may have won the war, but the Foreign Secretary is losing the peace.
    Mr. Vaz: The Foreign Secretary deserves enormous credit for his actions on the issue that we are considering. The hon. Gentleman should be ashamed of himself. Half of KFOR's time in Kosovo is spent protecting 5 per cent, of the population. The hon. Gentleman should support efforts in Kosovo, and not try to undermine them.

    Argentina
    Laura Moffatt: If he will make a statement on the United Kingdom's relations with the Government of Argentina. [104201]
    The Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Mr. Robin Cook): We have good relations with Argentina. Former President Menem's visit to Britain assisted the process of reconciliation and paved the way for last July's agreement, which resolved communications with the Falkland Islands and co-operation on fishing in the south Atlantic. I have invited the new Government's Foreign Minister to visit Britain, and I hope to meet him next week in the margins of an international conference.
    Laura Moffatt: I welcome my right hon. Friend's statement about better relations with Argentina and I share his views. However, on a visit last month to the Falkland Islanders, I became acutely aware of the sensitivities that surround those British people. Will the Foreign Secretary assure them and me that no decisions on the future of the Falkland Islands will be taken without full consultation with them or without their full approval?
    Mr. Cook: I am happy to assure the House that the Falkland Islands are a British overseas territory and will remain so as long as the Falkland Islanders wish to remain British. We will not undertake any agreement in relation to Argentina without the full involvement of the Falkland Islanders. The decision that was made last July followed a long period of talks in which Falkland Island councillors took a full part and witnessed the agreement. I congratulate them on their courage and vision in looking forward to the future of the Falkland Islands.
    Mr. Owen Paterson: The master of a yacht registered in the Falklands recently received a letter from the port authorities in Ushuaia stating that boats registered in the Falklands are banned from Argentine ports. Has the Foreign Secretary taken that case up with the Argentine Government?
    Mr. Cook: We have taken up the case of the Golden Fleece and understand that we are nearing a point at which the matter can be resolved in a way that will not result in a recurrence of that incident.

    UN Peacekeeping Missions
    Mr. Michael Portillo: If he will make a statement on the future of the UK's contribution to United Nations peacekeeping missions. [104203]
    The Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Mr. Robin Cook): We are strongly committed to UN peacekeeping and Britain will continue to play a leading role in its support. Along with France, we were the first permanent members of the Security Council to sign a memorandum of understanding on the forces that we could make available to the UN if required. More than 500 UK personnel are on UN-led peacekeeping missions, in addition to the 7,000 personnel on UN-mandated missions in Bosnia and Kosovo. The whole House can take pride in the contribution that those service men and women are making to peace and stability in the countries where they serve.
    Mr. Portillo: Leaving aside practical and political considerations and focusing entirely on ethics, is there a reason to intervene in Kosovo but not in Chechnya?
    Mr. Cook: We intervened in Kosovo to halt and reverse a major ethnic cleansing, and the 850,000 people who were refugees last Easter are back in their homes. In the case of Chechnya, we have repeatedly made it clear to Russia that we deplore the military action that it is taking against civilians and I honestly do not understand why the right hon. Gentleman finds anything amusing in what is happening there. We have supported the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe missions to try to find a political way forward and have already intervened by making sure that we withhold the financial support available from the European Union. I shall continue to take every possible responsible and realistic step to bring home that message to Russia. If he wants us to engage Russia in a military war, he should be honest in saying so. He would find little support, either in the House or in the country outside.
    Mr. Tony Benn: Did the Foreign Secretary have the opportunity—if not, will he take one— to see the television programme broadcast on Sunday night by Jonathan Dimbleby in which it was revealed that there is widespread intimidation of Serbs in Kosovo and ethnic cleansing on a massive scale and that the KLA, whose members were described by my right hon. Friend and the American Secretary of State as "terrorists" a year ago, is in a dominant position in Kosovo? Is he altogether satisfied that the same criteria of humanitarian assistance might not be applied to relieve the pressure there and on the Yugoslav people, who have suffered so much from the NATO bombing?
    Mr. Cook: We are very willing to provide humanitarian assistance to Serbia wherever we can find an interlocutor with whom we can work. That is why we have created the energy for democracy scheme to provide fuel to municipalities under opposition control, but President Milosevic held up those trucks for a long time when they reached the borders of Serbia. In the case of Kosovo, as my hon. Friend the Minister for Europe has said, KFOR spends 50 per cent, of its time protecting the

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    Serbian 5 per cent. of the population. It will continue to provide their protection and we shall continue to do everything that we can to build that multi-ethnic Kosovo. I say to my right hon. Friend that I do not accept that the KLA is in a dominant position. We shall continue to work, both in NATO and with UNMIK, to make sure that hardliners and the KLA are clear that we want a Kosovo ruled by the ballot box, not the gun.
    Mr. Edward Leigh: It is all very well to say that KFOR is spending 50 per cent. of its time defending the Serbian minority in Kosovo but, although the UN has been criticised in respect of its role, we are not helping those people. The Serb community in Pristina is down to negligible proportions, Serb monasteries are
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    being desecrated as soon as troops leave them and the only safe Serbs are those who are protected by their own people and herded into safe havens. The policy is not working, the whole basis of the war has gone wrong, one exodus has been replaced by another and the reply from the Minister for Europe was wholly complacent. We have to do something to protect those people.
    Mr. Cook: If I may say so, devoting half KFOR's time to protecting those people is doing something. Some sense of proportion must be retained. I know that the hon. Gentleman was not keen on our intervention in Kosovo but, as a result of it, we have seen the most successful return of refugees—850,000—in post-war history. If we had not intervened, those people would still be leading a miserable existence in tents in Macedonia and Albania.

Points of Order
3.30 pm
Mr. Tony Benn: On a point of order, Madam Speaker. I have given private notice of this point of order both to you and to the hon. Member for North Antrim (Rev. Ian Paisley), to whom it refers.
Yesterday, I received a letter from someone in Northern Ireland, who had received it from the hon. Member for North Antrim. It described the new education Minister as "a terrorist".
Whatever the merits of strong feeling in the House, we try to contain our feelings within the normal courtesies of language. Although those words were not used in the House—had they been, Madam Speaker, I am sure that you would have rebuked the hon. Member who used them—they were conveyed in a House of Commons envelope, paid for by the state, and related to a Member who is also an education Minister.
I do not want to make too much of this, Madam Speaker, but I wonder whether you feel able to say anything at this point about the use of language. Terrorism is a criminal offence, and to use such language at a time when the peace process is developing in Northern Ireland might merit the Chair's consideration.
Dr. Julian Lewis: Further to that point of order, Madam Speaker.
Madam Speaker: Is it related to the earlier point of order?
Dr. Lewis: Yes, Madam Speaker. Can you tell us whether you have received any notification from the Serjeant at Arms or the security advisers of the House that, if two members of Sinn Fein are to be offered facilities in the House, there will be arrangements in future for Members' cars not just to be checked for bombs on the way into the car park, but to be checked for such devices on the way out of it?
Madam Speaker: I never discuss security arrangements across the Floor of the House.
Let me respond to what was said by the right hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr. Benn), who, with his customary courtesy, gave me notice of his point of order. I am afraid that the circumstances that he describes—
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those involving private correspondence between a Member and his or her constituents—do not call for a ruling from the Chair. I cannot intervene in correspondence between a Member and a constituent.
Mr. Charles Wardle (Bexhill and Battle): On a point of order, Madam Speaker. I have written to you about it, and have sent a copy to the hon. Member for Hastings and Rye (Mr. Foster).
During Prime Minister's questions last Wednesday, the hon. Gentleman began by praising the staff of the Conquest hospital. That is not in dispute, but the hon. Gentleman then told the House:
"no one in need has been turned away".—[Official Report, 12 January 2000; Vol. 342, c. 275.]
On Friday, I checked with the chief executive of the Hastings and Rother NHS trust, who told me that all elective surgery at the Conquest had been stopped for 10 days by then. More than 100 of the hon. Gentleman's constituents, and my constituents, with appointments in January for surgery that they need have been turned away. As of yesterday, elective surgery was still suspended, so yet more people are being turned away.
Are you able to advise hand-wringing Government Back Benchers that if they wish to be bullied by their Whips and Alastair Campbell that is a matter for them, but if they are to peddle downright untruths at Prime Minister's Question Time to make the Prime Minister look more effective—[Interruption.]
Madam Speaker: Order. I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for sending me a long letter about this matter, but I must again make a point that I made earlier in the week. What the hon. Gentleman has said is not a point of order, but a matter of argument. If he feels that the matter needs to be corrected, there are ways and means of doing precisely that in the House, and putting it on record.
Back Benchers in the House of Commons have greater opportunities than members of any other democratic Parliament. They have opportunities to raise matters in Adjournment debates, and through all sorts of other methods. I advise hon. Members that if they have an argument with each other because of the catchment area involved, that is not a matter for a point of order, or for the Chair; it is a matter to be corrected by means of a normal Adjournment debate, an early-day motion or some other method. The Chair should not be involved in squabbles—and that is what this is—between Members on either side of the House.

Immigration (Port of Entry) (Amendment)
3.35 pm
Mr. Julian Brazier: I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to amend entry requirements at air and sea ports to provide three channels of entry, one for European Union citizens, one for subjects of Her Majesty and Her successors and one for others; and for connected purposes.
I seek to introduce the measure to draw attention to an old injustice. I am grateful for the support that I have received on it from hon. Members on both sides. The countries of the inner Commonwealth, those who recognise Queen Elizabeth as their head of state, are, on the whole, those with the closest ties of kinship with this country. A high proportion of the population of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and many Caribbean countries have close relatives in this country.
The present immigration arrangements at our airports baldly reflect the law. What used to be the old British channel has been replaced by the British and EU channel, while everyone else is funnelled through the second—the "others"—channel. That reflects the legal reality of the EU, but there is more to life than legal and economic relationships.
In that frightening moment in 1940 after France had fallen, when Winston Churchill said that civilisation itself lay in the balance, this country did not stand alone. Those countries stood with us. We owe them a colossal debt. For example, a higher proportion of Australians and New Zealanders died in the two world wars than British citizens. Montgomery said that the fighting spirit of the Australian 9th division was an example to the whole 8th army.
Today, many men and women who were comrades of those who died are still alive. As one Canadian journalist put it to me, his father-in-law fought all the way through the second world war as a pilot, yet he will have to go through the "others" channel if he visits this country, while the Luftwaffe pilot, bless his heart—I mean him no ill—would come through the home channel for British and EU citizens. The Commonwealth division also fought with great distinction in Korea.
That may seem like ancient history, but it occurred within the lifetimes of some hon. Members who are currently in the House. Much more recently, Australia and Canada were among the first countries to declare their support in both the 1990 Gulf war and the 1998 Gulf crisis. In the Falklands war, New Zealand lent us one of its warships. Whatever one may think of the Kosovo operation, New Zealand was the only country outside NATO to provide troops in support, while Canada provided the fourth largest number of pilots flying missions.
Every time the ties of blood, language, loyalty and affection are raised in the House, people talk about changes in economic relationships. There has indeed been quite a big change in economic relationships: for example, those with New Zealand have changed since the butter agreement was phased out, which had an adverse affect on its economy. The same point could be made about many Caribbean countries as regards the Commonwealth sugar agreement; but Canada and Australia own a much bigger part of this country's industry than do most of our
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EU partners. We are the second biggest investor in both those countries. Surely, however, there is far more to life than economics. When the chips are down, again and again, we have found that shared ties of blood, values and heritage count for more.
We enjoy the same legal system. Indeed, many Caribbean countries are still plugged into our legal system. We all speak the same language, except the important French-speaking community in Quebec; but what is arguably one of its most important symbols, the Vingt Douze regiment, selected the Queen as its honorary colonel-in-chief.
I remember, some years ago, making my way through a huge crowd of holidaymakers in Cairns—it is now a favourite holiday spot for surfers—and seeing, in a prominent place, a war memorial that, if I remember rightly, started with the words,
"From this distant outpost the following gave their lives…".
I asked myself what made those men and women from Cairns—people such as my great-uncle, who came over from Perth, or like a cousin from Canada, who was in a Scottish-Canadian regiment—come such a long way to share in a cause that they could so easily have shirked. I realised that the ties of kinship and values do matter.
I am not proposing a great legal change to the rights of entry, but only suggesting that, as a gesture of welcome, we should establish a third channel in our principal airports, so that residents of countries that recognise the Queen as head of state have a fast channel of their own. Given the sacrifices of so many Indian soldiers in two world wars—my grandfather served in the Indian army in the first world war—I should love to extend provision of such a channel to the Commonwealth generally, but doing so would create very considerable problems both with asylum legislation and with the difficult position of certain countries vis-a-vis the Commonwealth, including Pakistan. For the moment, therefore, I am arguing only for countries that recognise our Queen as head of state.
All those generations ago, Benjamin Disraeli said that symbols play such a big role in the imagination of our people, and that the monarchy was the most important of those symbols. As they come to our airports and seaports, let us give a warm welcome to citizens of countries that share that pre-eminent symbol, with all that it represents, by giving them an entry channel of their own.
I am grateful for the support that I have received from both sides of the House in promoting the Bill. I now ask the House to support it.
Question put and agreed to.
Bill ordered to be brought in by Mr. Julian Brazier, Mr. Charles Wardle, Mr. Ken Maginnis, Mr. Joe Ashton, Sir Teddy Taylor, Mr. Gerald Bermingham, Mrs. Ann Winterton, Mr. Crispin Blunt, Mr. Owen Paterson and Mr. Andrew Robathan.

Immigration (Port of Entry) (Amendment)
  IMMIGRATION (PORT OF ENTRY) (AMENDMENT)
  Mr. Julian Brazier accordingly presented a Bill to amend entry requirements at air and sea ports to provide three channels of entry, one for European Union citizens, one for subjects of Her Majesty and Her successors and one for others; and for connected purposes: And the same was read the First time; and ordered to be read a Second time on Friday 4 February, and to be printed [Bill 47].
Opposition Day
[3RD ALLOTTED DAY]
Opposition Day

  Health Care
  Madam Speaker: I have selected the amendment in the name of the Prime Minister.
  3.43 pm
  Dr. Liam Fox: I beg to move,
  That this House applauds the dedication and commitment of National Health Service staff whose tireless efforts alone have kept the Service going throughout the present crisis; deplores the Government's inadequate preparation for predicted winter pressures and Ministers' complacency and continual unwillingness to accept responsibility for their failures, including withholding information and misuse of statistics; notes the catalogue of mismanagement of the National Health Service by the Government, including the distortion of clinical priorities, reduced patient access to specialist care and its flawed cancer initiative; regrets the Prime Minister's assertion that there is no alternative to the Government's existing strategy; and calls on the Government to abandon ideology, put the well-being of patients before political dogma and create a health care system fit for the 21st century with a strengthened National Health Service at its centre.
  On Saturday, at my constituency surgery, Mrs. Jones, from Portishead, came to see me. She told me that, since last July, although suffering from a serious illness, she has had a liver biopsy cancelled four times. That is serious enough; however, all the time Mrs. Jones has been waiting for her treatment, minor procedures have been performed in the same hospital. It is a classic example of priorities being distorted.
  My hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Mr. Viggers) has been campaigning for a woman who has already waited 13 months, and may have to wait up to 17 months, for a triple heart bypass operation at Southampton General hospital. When she saw her general practitioner in December, 1998, she was informed that the wait would be about nine months. Last November, the wait was extended to between one year and 15 months. Now the woman has been told that, because of the winter crisis, the wait might be extended again.
  In Staffordshire, Duncan Sheppard, a financial adviser, has had to remortgage his home for £12,000, to pay for a quadruple heart bypass. Mr. Sheppard had the operation at the private Priory hospital, in Birmingham, after being told that he would have to wait 14 months for the operation at the NHS Good Hope hospital. His wife said:
  "We are just so lucky, because we were later told he only had weeks to live. We are very pleased we took this option."
  That is—the option of remortgaging his home to pay for health care.
  Perhaps the most worrying case was brought to my attention yesterday from North East Anglia health authority area. A man writes:
  "My wife was left on a trolley for eight hours in dire need of urgent treatment for her asthma. She was left passed out for 20 minutes before a nurse came. The consultant said she needed a bed, but there were none available. She was sent home, where she collapsed. I called an ambulance. It took half an hour to arrive. She is now lying in ITU. The consultant says she may be brain damaged. I have two children and they may not now have a mother. This is disgraceful. It cannot be allowed to continue. Mr. Blair needs to do something."
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  Those are not typical cases of what happens in our health care system, but neither, sadly, are they isolated examples. All hon. Members are getting an increasing post bag of sad cases in which our health care provision is failing our constituents. Just before the election the Prime Minister told voters that they had 24 hours to save the NHS, but three years into his term in government, people are asking what has gone wrong. The people to whom he made promises feel angry, frightened and, above all, betrayed. How right Lord Winston was when he said:
  "We have made health care unsatisfactory for a lot of people".
  What an understatement that was.
  What has been the response of the Secretary of State and his Ministers? In the midst of the current flu epidemic, then flu outbreak, then bronchitis outbreak, we discovered that the health care system of the world's fifth biggest economy can be brought to its knees by something cyclical, predictable and common. The Secretary of State's view is that the NHS is coping very well. The cases that I have mentioned and the hundreds of others that any Member of Parliament could cite show that it is not. The Government are guilty of complacency.
  Mr. Bob Blizzard rose—
  Dr. Fox: I shall give way in a moment. The NHS is only running at all thanks to the herculean efforts of its staff, to whom we all give the greatest credit. The Government's management tools for running the health service, when they are not just being complacent, are bullying and the withholding of information. I shall give examples. I caution the hon. Gentleman to remember that before he makes his intervention.
  Mr. Blizzard: The hon. Gentleman is not prepared to believe the Prime Minister when he says that hospitals are managing the crisis. I wonder whether he will accept information from my local hospital. I telephoned the James Paget Healthcare NHS trust this morning and was told that the hospital was managing very well. The management are also pleased that they have just started work on a £700,000 refurbishment of the accident and emergency department and are looking forward to the £80,000 that they are going to get to treat cancer patients.
  The hon. Gentleman uses anecdotes. My local hospital is managing very well. It started routine operations again last week, despite taking people from other areas in its intensive care units.
  Dr. Fox: The hon. Gentleman says that his local hospital has restarted routine operations. We must ask why they had been stopped if the system was coping so well. The hon. Gentleman should be very grateful if his local hospital is coping well, because that is not the experience of many Members of Parliament.
  The Government employ various means of running the national health service, including bullying. The experience of Lord Winston last week was interesting. Let us look at what he said and how he was treated by the Government. He said:
  "The NHS is just deteriorating because we blame everything on the previous Government."

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  We know that. Not a single Minister will take responsibility for their own failures. Lord Winston said of the appalling treatment of his 83-year-old mother:
  "It is normal. The terrifying thing is that we accept it."
  We do not accept it. That is why we are having this debate. He also said:
  "There is a lot wrong with the health service and no one is prepared to say so. I shouldn't really be saying these things to you now."
  What sort of attitude is that? In a free Parliament, no member of either House should have to worry about what they are saying for fear of bullying.
  Mr. Andrew Love: The hon. Gentleman has quoted a number of Labour Members. Let me quote his speech to the Tory party conference, where he said:
  "I think what we are proposing will revolutionise private insurance in the way we revolutionised pensions in the 1980s."
  Following the statements at the weekend on the current issues before the health service, will the hon. Gentleman now come clean? The Tories state that they want an alternative, non-ideological strategy. What will that strategy be—private health insurance?
  Dr. Fox: I would urge the Labour Whips to try to give the interventions to their Back Benchers in a form that they can at least read. I will come to the explanation that the hon. Gentleman seeks later. It will be available in a monosyllabic form for Labour Back Benchers later on.
  Lord Winston was so cowed after his comments because he could see what was coming. In the twilight world of new Labour spin, the dark shadow of Alastair Campbell was fast approaching. It seems that the Prime Minister's press secretary is better able to gain retractions and recantings from heretics than the inquisition ever was. The result of the grand inquisitor's intervention on this occasion was, incredibly, that Lord Winston—having made an impassioned plea for improvements in the NHS and having pointed out the deficiencies that exist— suddenly told us that he meant no criticism of the Government in any way at all. Remarkable—but it was sad to see a man of such integrity treated so shabbily by the Government's ruthless propaganda machine.
  Mr. Geraint Davies: Over the weekend, the Prime Minister essentially promised billions extra for the health service, through guaranteeing real increases in expenditure towards the EU average. Could the hon. Gentleman match that pledge, given that he acknowledges that there is a need for more money? Or does he acknowledge that his tax guarantee will mean the inevitable privatisation of the health service?
  Dr. Fox: We are now told that it was a pledge from the Prime Minister to raise spending to the EU average within five years. I look forward to the Secretary of State confirming that that was a pledge. I look forward to hearing which programmes from the public spending review will be sacrificed to make up the vague billions that the Prime Minister promised. That will be an interesting passage of the Secretary of State's speech.
  Several hon. Members rose—
  Dr. Fox: I have given way several times. I shall do so again, but not for the moment.
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  We must look at the way the Government run the health service. The culture of this Government is that if information is inconvenient, deny it, corrupt it or change it—even better, withhold it. We know that the bed availability and occupancy report, which is normally published in October, has been sitting on the Secretary of State's desk. Why, we wonder? Is it because it may be slightly more critical than the Government's own report card, issued in the summer? Perhaps it is unlikely to boost the standing of the most unpopular member of the Cabinet, although I notice—to be fair—that the Secretary of State is also the least known member of the Cabinet. Goodness knows what will happen when he is better known.
  Is the report being withheld because beds are being lost all the time under a Government who pretend that the trend is in exactly the opposite direction? I look forward to the Minister promising the immediate publication of the report.
  If withholding information does not work, the Government can try deceptions, half-truths and smokescreens. Let me give two examples. The Intensive Care Society recently asked about the number of extra intensive care beds that the Government claimed to have created. They were told by the Department of Health that the figure was 100. Then the line changed. No.10 said that there were 100 critical care beds. Then the line changed again. The Prime Minister told Sir David Frost that perhaps about one third were intensive care beds. The answer seems to be different every time the question is asked.
  The Secretary of State sent me a letter on 6 January which said that 100 extra intensive care beds had been made available this year. The Secretary of State gave an answer which was factually incorrect. He looks at the letter, which he may well not remember signing. It does say that it was approved by the Secretary of State, and signed in his absence. The information changes from day to day. It is tidal, it comes and goes. There is no such thing as truth under this Government, merely convenience and inconvenience.
  Caroline Flint: Some tit-for-tat fun always takes place in these debates, but there is a serious point that goes to the heart of the discussion of our national health service—how it should be funded. I ask the hon. Gentleman point blank: does he or does he not support compulsory health insurance to fund the NHS, and does he recognise the great inequalities that that would create?
  Dr. Fox: I shall come in some detail to how we intend the service to be funded. However, I do not regard watching the health service deteriorate as tit-for-tat fun. The hon. Lady may do so, and she may regard the litany of failures as entertaining, but I do not find it so.
  Mr. David Wilshire: My hon. Friend's comments about the claims for the number of intensive care beds changing almost daily may be more prophetic than he realises, because the Government are considering plans to close four intensive care beds in Ashford hospital in my constituency.
  Dr. Fox: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that point. The Department of Health will doubtless issue a press

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  release claiming that the number of intensive care beds in that hospital has increased, because there is no such thing as truth or lies in this Government's culture. The information released is what suits them.
  Mr. Julian Brazier: Will my hon. Friend comment on the proposed closure of the accident and emergency and intensive care units in my local hospital? In answer to questions about the new configuration for hospitals in my area—which will include a 15 per cent. cut in beds—we were told, "We cannot give details because there is no robust medical plan in place yet."
  Dr. Fox: That does not surprise me at all. I know that my hon. Friend has campaigned long and hard about intensive care beds and he may wish to raise that issue with the Secretary of State when he makes his speech. It would be interesting to know what plans he has for health care in my hon. Friend's area.
  Jean Corston rose—
  Dr. Fox: I shall give way shortly. Yesterday, in what was billed as a great boost and a propaganda coup for the Government, the pay awards for NHS staff were brought forward in a panic measure after the Prime Minister's speech at the weekend. However, the Government failed to understand that NHS staff would spot immediately that the awards were unfunded. This morning, The Guardian said that NHS services would be squeezed and The Mirror said, graphically:
  "Brilliant! But how will nurses be paid?"
  The pay award issue goes to the heart of how the Government run our health care. Lord Winston said:
  "I think we've been quite deceitful about it. We haven't told the truth and I'm afraid there will come a time when it will be impossible to disguise the inequality of the health service from the general population."
  Those are damning words from one of our leading health experts who is also a notable ally of the Prime Minister.
  Of all the factors that prevent us from having a meaningful debate on health care, one of the most obstructive is the Government's dogmatic approach to the independent sector. The private sector tells us that, if there had been earlier consultation before the winter flu outbreak, it would have been able to make more beds available for the NHS when it was overstretched. It is the Labour party's dogmatic hatred of the independent sector that makes the Government incapable of any meaningful negotiation with it in the interests of patients.
  Jean Corston: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
  Dr. Fox: The hon. Lady must not jump up and down like a demented meerkat. I shall give way in a moment.
  The Prime Minister's press secretary, who now doubles as prime ministerial stand-in and as a Treasury spokesman, intervened in the debate today. The Press Association reported:
  "Blair rules out tax breaks for private health insurance".
  However, it was his press secretary who said:
  "We don't have an ideological hatred of the private sector, it's just that we don't see it as a solution to the problems of the NHS."
  Dr. Stephen Ladyman: The hon. Gentleman mentioned the pay awards and I can tell him
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  that the nurses will get their pay rise from the biggest boost in spending on the NHS in its history, which this Government have delivered. However, the Conservatives' guarantee to cut taxes, even in a recession, means that if they were in power they would have guaranteed to cut spending on the health service and hand it over entirely to the private sector.
  Dr. Fox: That is a bizarre intervention. The hon. Gentleman suggests that health expenditure cannot be increased at the same time as taxes are cut. He does so just two months before the Government cut taxes by 1p to compensate for the stealth taxes that they have already imposed. That is a ridiculous argument.
  No one begrudges the nurses' and junior doctors' pay rise, which they thoroughly deserve. However, allocations to health authorities and spending plans were already complete before those fully accepted—but not fully funded—pay rises were announced. So some cuts will have to be made in the allocations for the patient programmes already planned by health trusts and health authorities. The hon. Member for South Thanet (Dr. Ladyman) is grinning, but it is not funny for the people whose services will be squeezed and cut.
  Jean Corston: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
  Dr. Fox: Very well, if only so that I can get some peace.
  Jean Corston: I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way, however reluctantly. The Avon health authority provides hospital services for people in my constituency and the hon. Gentleman's. It said today that, despite an average daily increase of 14 per cent. in emergency admissions during the flu epidemic, no health trust had had to refuse emergency admissions. It also said that, although some routine surgery had had to be cancelled, plans were in hand to cut waiting times. Does not that show that the health service for our constituents has responded magnificently to a once-in-a-decade epidemic? Does it not also throw into stark relief the hon. Gentleman's assertion to the Tory party conference that the NHS could only ever provide a second-rate service?
  Dr. Fox: The hon. Lady was doing quite well for the first four or five minutes of her intervention. I was going to welcome what she was saying, and I am grateful that her constituents and mine live in the area of a health authority that has coped reasonably well.
  However, the hon. Lady said that this epidemic has been the worst in a decade. In reality, it is probably only the fourth worst outbreak in 10 years, and it is not so different from other outbreaks. In any case, why should routine surgery have to be cancelled? Outbreaks of flu in our health care system happen in most years, so why should we be grateful that emergency admissions have not been stopped? The hon. Lady's remarks reveal an almost incredible complacency.
  The Secretary of State is second to none in his dislike of independent health care. I have a letter from the former chairman of the St. Helier health trust, describing what happened on Thursday 26 March 1998 at the Department of Health building at Elephant and Castle. He and his

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  colleagues were to be lectured on their obligations by the then Secretary of State for Health, the right hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras (Mr. Dobson). However, because the right hon. Gentleman was late, the present Secretary of State gave the lecture. The letter states that the Secretary of State admonished the audience to deliver the Government's promise on waiting lists. The letter adds:
  "During questions, someone (I think, but cannot be sure, that it was Dr. Tudor Thomas, the Chief Executive of Epsom Healthcare NHS Trust) referred to a satisfactory arrangement his Trust had with a local private hospital."
  The present Secretary of State was described as "furious". The letter states that he
  "told us all that he would 'come down like a ton of bricks' on anyone who had anything to do with the private sector."
  The letter went on:
  "I was sitting next to Sir William Rous (sadly deceased) chairman of Kingston Hospital NHS Trust, and he was as incensed as I was at the dogmatic and nonsensical attitude."
  That dogmatic and nonsensical attitude persists to this day at the heart of the Department of Health.
  The real reason for today's debate is that matters need not be as they are. Up and down the country, doctors, nurses, other health care professionals and voters do not want the NHS to be used as a political football in future. [Interruption.] The mechanism for delivering health care in this country need be no more controversial than it is in other developed countries. That is entirely possible.
  Today, my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition and I made an offer to the Government and to the Liberal Democrat party. Three things can be done to remove the national health service from this febrile political atmosphere. First, we offer the NHS a guarantee. It needs long-term stable financing and less political interference. We believe that there should be increased NHS funding year on year in real terms. We believe that there should be improved NHS management, allowing hospitals to get on with the job of treating patients, and no privatisation—instead, as now, there should be a continued commitment to publicly funded health care, free at the point of delivery.
  Secondly, the NHS should give patients a guarantee. [Interruption.] This is a serious debate; it requires something more than the primary school outing that is being held on the Government Back Benches.
  Patients should have a guaranteed waiting time, determined by the clinical priorities of doctors, not the political priorities of spin doctors. There should be an agreement that if the NHS cannot meet the guarantee, independent health care resources should be used. What matters is when patients are treated, not where they are treated or what sector they are treated by.
  Overall, our health service requires more resources. We need to increase our expenditure in the NHS—the state-funded sector—and in the private sector. There should be no ideological block to partnership with independent health care providers. I mentioned how the crisis in the health service could have been averted had we used the independent sector better. However, there should be no punishment through the taxation system for those who take out independent health care provision, and we should review the tax treatment of health care costs
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  on companies and individuals. We should create the opportunity to expand total health spending in both the public and personal sectors to reach more quickly the level spent on health by our major European partners.
  We believe that a mixed provision in health care will enable us to reach the health outcomes of our European partners, but far more quickly than the target set by the Prime Minister. The dogma of the Labour party, however, prevents us from doing so.
  Dr. Howard Stoate: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way. He is right to say that the NHS is under great stress. He is also right that the health service does not have enough beds, doctors or nurses. Could he therefore tell the House why his Government cut the number of beds by 40,000 and the number of nurse training places by 2,000 a year, which is what got us into this mess in the first place?
  Dr. Fox: The number of doctors in the health service was higher at the end of our term of office than at the beginning—as was the number of nurses. I should have thought that that was record enough. As for nurse training places, I know that the hon. Gentleman knows that the number of nurse training places had already increased for the two years before the Conservatives left office, a trend that is happily being followed by the current Government.
  Before we can entertain a proper, mature health debate, we have to accept three basic facts. First, the NHS cannot do everything at a time when medical science is expanding faster than our ability to fund it. Secondly, we no longer have the best health care system in the world— we used to, but we have fallen behind. Thirdly, the NHS has failed as a welfare model, because the poorest in our society have not only the poorest access to health care but the worst health outcomes. That must be addressed.
  The Labour party is in a panic over the one issue that it arrogantly and complacently believed was its own. The Secretary of State was undermined by the Prime Minister over the number of intensive care beds. He was in the dark about the Prime Minister's announcement about funding on the David Frost programme. The Secretary of State is no doubt being lined up as the fall guy by the propaganda machine for when the trust ratings fall further.
  Before No. 10 starts briefing that the Secretary of State is going to run as mayor of Darlington, and before he plumbs new depths of unpopularity, he has one chance to safeguard and protect his future and that of the NHS. He should drop the dogma, the soundbites and the deception, and should join us in creating a health care system fit for Britain in the 21st century.
  4.10 pm
  The Secretary of State for Health (Mr. Alan Milburn): I beg to move, To leave out from "House" to the end of the Question, and to add instead thereof:
  "applauds the dedication and commitment of National Health Service staff for their tireless efforts at all times and in particular during the millennium holiday period and the current severe outbreak of flu; welcomes the Government's acceptance of the recommendations of National Health Service Pay Review bodies in full and without staging for the second year, in stark contrast to the practice of the previous administration; notes that, between 20th December and last weekend, there were 350,000 999 calls, over 800,000 attendances at Accident and Emergency departments and there have been over 250,000 emergency admissions; recognises

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  the vital role in meeting these pressures played by the unprecedented level of planning for the winter, covering health and social services and the extension of NHS Direct to two-thirds of England; welcomes the measures already taken by this Government to increase the capacity of the National Health Service, including increased provision of critical care beds, the modernisation of Accident and Emergency departments, the biggest ever National Health Service hospital building programme, the employment of additional doctors and the recruitment of more nurses, the cuts in in-patient waiting lists, the extra investment to modernise cancer, coronary and mental health services and the commitment to increased investment in and modernisation of the National Health Service; and rejects the Opposition's proposals to privatise the National Health Service."
  May I say first that we already have a good mayor in Darlington?
  Today's debate is not only about the state of the national health service. As the hon. Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox) said, it is about the future of health care itself. There are no closed minds in the Government when it comes to radical reform of the NHS. That is precisely what we have been doing for the past two and a half years. The Labour Government made the private finance initiative work in the NHS, and will continue to do so. [Interruption.] The Conservative Whip may scoff, but as a consequence of the PFI, 16 new hospitals are being built, some in parts of the country that had been waiting for decades.
  Several hon. Members rose—
  Mr. Milburn: I shall give way to the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton (Mr. Duncan), because he, too, is a radical.
  Mr. Alan Duncan: The Secretary of State says that there are no closed minds on the Labour Benches. Will he therefore dissociate himself from the comments made by the hon. Member for Wakefield (Mr. Hinchliffe), the Chairman of the Select Committee on Health, who said:
  "All private medicine is immoral. I hope all private medicine withers and dies."
  Mr. Milburn: The hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for Woodspring have raised the matter of private medicine several times, and are starting to be—
  Mr. Michael Portillo: Answer the question.
  Mr. Milburn: The right hon. Gentleman seems to have a hearing problem. I know that he returned to the House only recently, but if he bears with me, he will hear the answer. The Conservative party is beginning to act as if it were the political wing of the private health insurance movement. Let me make it absolutely clear that no matter how serious the challenges facing the NHS—I readily admit that there are many—a private alternative is not the right remedy for Britain.
  Modernisation and the investment that goes with it are the only means by which our health care system can serve the whole nation. No one pretends that there are no problems in the NHS, or that all patients are receiving the care that we all wish them to have. If we thought that nothing was wrong, we would not be working hard to put matters right.
  Miss Anne McIntosh: Does the Secretary of State regret the Government's early decision
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  to abolish tax deductibility on private health care insurance for the over-60s? Will he move rapidly to reinstate it?
  Mr. Milburn: No, I do not regret that decision. Anyone who reads Lord Lawson's memoirs will gain an interesting insight into the debate that took place between him, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the then Prime Minister, Lady Thatcher, about private health care insurance. In fact, tax relief on private health insurance meant that the number of elderly people who took it out barely moved for seven years. When we abolished it, we put £140 million to much better effect by cutting value added tax on fuel.
  Dr. Fox: Why, when all other socialist Governments in Europe see private medical insurance as a supplement augmenting state spending, do our Government, isolated among commentators in the United Kingdom and Europe, believe that it must be an alternative?
  Mr. Milburn: It would be an interesting development in the Conservative party if the hon. Gentleman was advocating foisting on the British people the German or French models. The Government do not support that development for reasons to which I shall come shortly. [Interruption.] It is not about dogma or ideology but about what works best for Britain.
  Nobody pretends that there are no problems in the national health service. The difference between the Labour Government and the previous Conservative Government is that we recognise the problems, and— what is more—we are taking action to tackle them. As I made absolutely clear in my statement to the House eight days ago, the NHS has been under severe pressure this winter. The doctors, nurses and other staff of the health service have done a brilliant job during the past few weeks—the hon. Member for Woodspring is quite right about that. However, to listen to the hon. Gentleman and some of his hon. Friends—and, indeed, some of the more hysterical parts of the media—one would think that the health service had simply ground to a halt. It has not. During the past four weeks alone, there have been more than 350,000 999 calls; almost 820,000 attendances at casualty departments and more than 250,000 emergency admissions to hospitals.
  The Conservatives accuse us of mismanaging the NHS this winter. That is not what health service managers are saying. The NHS Confederation describes health service planning for this winter as "excellent" and "unprecedented". Doctors' leaders agree. Dr. Ian Bogle, the chairman of the British Medical Association, said that
  "thanks to the high level of planning across the country the NHS is coping."
  The hon. Member for Woodspring has been quoting doctors. Let me quote from a letter that I received today from 20 senior clinicians throughout the country—a letter, incidentally, that The Times refused to publish. [Interruption.] All of a sudden, Conservative Members are keen to listen to doctors' leaders—let them listen to what those doctors have to say. The letter stated:
  "To suggest as some commentators have done that the NHS is offering 'third world care' or that the health service failed to prepare adequately for the pressures of winter is incorrect … the Government's policy is moving the NHS in the right direction. The NHS represents the fairest and most effective way of delivering

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  health care. The British people are right to press for it to be properly funded and modernised. To dismantle it would be a disaster we would live to regret."
  The letter was from clinicians in London, Birmingham, Cheltenham, north Tyneside and other parts of the country.
  Sir Raymond Whitney: As we are comparing letters from doctors, will the right hon. Gentleman comment on the letter, dated 15 January, from five consultants at Wycombe hospital that asks him formally to take responsibility for the rundown state of intensive care in this country?
  Mr. Milburn: It is undoubtedly true that there has been particular pressure on intensive care beds, despite the fact that we provided extra beds this winter. It is not true, as the hon. Member for Woodspring alleges, that those critical care beds do not exist. They do exist; throughout the country, there are extra intensive care beds and extra high-dependency beds.
  Mr. Brazier: What does the Secretary of State say to people in east Kent who face the loss of the accident and emergency unit at the Kent and Canterbury hospital, and a 16 per cent, fall in total bed numbers over the next three or four years?
  Mr. Milburn: I shall come to bed numbers in the next sentence or two. However, I point out to the hon. Gentleman and to his Front-Bench colleagues that, every time today's Tories talk about health care, there is an epidemic—an epidemic of hypocrisy and an outbreak of selective amnesia. Nowhere is that more evident than on bed numbers. We shall take no lectures on beds from the hon. Member for Canterbury (Mr. Brazier), from his Front-Bench colleagues or from the Conservative party.
  The Conservatives cut 40,000 beds from our hospitals during their last 10 years in office. That is why we set up the national beds inquiry—
  Mr. Philip Hammond: What about the beds inquiry?
  Mr. Milburn: I will give the hon. Gentleman the answer, if he will remain patient for a moment or two. I shall publish the results of that national inquiry within the next few weeks. It will make the case for an increase in bed numbers. It will end two decades of orthodoxy and ideology that declared that beds were bad. Modernising the health service means expanding health services.
  Dr. Fox rose—
  Mr. Milburn: I shall give way to the hon. Gentleman for the last time.
  Dr. Fox: I am extremely grateful to the Secretary of State. As I referred to his letter of 6 January, and as it would be extremely unfortunately to have the Secretary of State or his Department's officials accused of either misinformation or disinformation when the Prime Minister said that there would be 30 extra intensive care
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  beds and the Secretary of State said that there would be 100, will the Secretary of State assure the House that he will publish where those 100 beds are?
  Mr. Milburn: I can give the hon. Gentleman some of the details today if that is helpful. There are extra beds at St. Mary's in London; extra beds in Norfolk and Norwich hospital; extra beds in Leicester general; extra beds in Warrington hospital and extra beds in the Royal Victoria infirmary in Newcastle. They are all extra intensive care beds. [HON. MEMBERS: "HOW many?"] Conservative Members ask "How many?" There will be two at St. Mary's; two at Norfolk and Norwich; one at Leicester general; two at the Royal Victoria infirmary and one extra intensive care bed at Warrington hospital. The hon. Member for Woodspring asked for a full list. He will get a full list when we publish it.
  Mr. John Bercow rose—
  Mr. Milburn: I will give way to the hon. Gentleman in a moment or two, because I always like giving way to him. For the moment, however, I ask him to calm down.
  It is the same story when it comes to nurse training: the same amnesia and the same hypocrisy from the Conservative party. The Conservatives say that we have left the NHS short of nurses, but it was the Conservative Government who cut the number of nurse training places by almost 4,000. It is this Government who are increasing the number of nurses, and of nurses in training, with 5,000 more nurses returning to the NHS; 4,500 more training places; and 14,000 more applicants for courses. Just today, the first 140 nurse-consultant posts have been established in all parts of the country.
  Mr. Cheryl Gillan: Will the Secretary of State give way?
  Mr. Milburn: No, I will not. I have given way several times. I might give way in a moment or two if the hon. Lady will just calm down.
  Let us not forget, either, the two largest real-terms increases in pay that nurses have received in almost a decade and a half. They have been paid in full—and unlike under the Conservative party—without any staging. They are fair pay rises so that we get more doctors and more nurses into the health service and make it more worth their while to stay in it too. Expanding the staff of the health service is the way that we will expand services to patients.
  That is one of the differences that the Labour Government are making to the state of the national health service, and I shall tell—
  Several hon. Members rose—
  Madam Speaker: Order. The Secretary of State is not giving way for the moment. Members should know better than to continue to try to intervene.
  Mr. Milburn: The hon. Member for Woodspring, and the Conservative party generally, are very keen to talk

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  about mismanagement. Let us talk about it, then. Mismanagement is when one wastes £30 million on legal and consultancy fees for private finance initiative—
  Mr. Gillan rose—
  Madam Speaker: Order. Let me just get this straight. Is the Secretary of State giving way to the hon. Lady?
  Mr. Milburn: No.
  Madam Speaker: Thank you. The hon. Lady must resume her seat.
  Mr. Milburn: I have given way several times to Conservative Members and I deeply regret the fact that I have. If the hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan) is patient, I might give way to her at the end of my speech.
  Mismanagement is wasting £30 million on legal and consultancy fees for private finance initiative hospital schemes that one could not even get off the ground. Good management is building 16 new hospitals worth £1.3 billion as part of the biggest hospital building programme that the health service has ever seen. That is the difference between this Government's management of the health service and the Conservative Government's mismanagement of it.
  The Opposition motion deplores mismanagement. I deplore it too. That is precisely why we have abolished the internal market that the Conservatives created—an insane competition between hospitals that fragmented services and wasted millions. That is why we have ended two-tier care and that is why we are well on the way to moving £1 billion out of NHS bureaucracy and into front-line patient care.
  Mismanagement is when a Government, in the name of free-market ideology, turn a blind eye to poor hospital standards and second-rate performance. Good management is when a Government have the courage to establish for the first time an independent inspectorate and a systematic dismantling of the lottery of care. Mismanagement is when in-patient waiting lists rise by 400,000. Good management is when they fall by 87,000. Mismanagement is when a Government leave office with investment in new NHS building, plant and equipment at a 10-year low. Good management is when that investment is at an all-time high. There is more investment in cancer and in GP surgeries, and 150 casualty departments are already being modernised.
  Mismanagement is when cancer and cardiac services— the services that deal with our country's biggest killers— are left neglected and under-invested for decades. Good management is when more money is being invested, more doctors are being trained and more operations are being performed. That is the difference that the Labour Government have started to make. More hospitals are being built; more nurses are being recruited; more doctors are being trained and more patients are being treated.
  Mr. Bercow: In the light of what the Secretary of State has said, what does he have to say to my constituent, Colonel Bruce Owen from Marsh Gibbon in Buckingham—[Laughter.] It is not a laughing matter for him. He suffered a heart attack on 7 July last year,
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  eventually saw a consultant surgeon at Harefield hospital in the middle of November and was told that he would have to wait at least 12 months for the triple bypass surgery that he requires. Will the right hon. Gentleman tell my constituent and the House why that individual, who has saved and who has contributed to this society throughout the 60 years of his life, should have to spend £13,000 of his hard-earned savings on the treatment of which the inadequate health service is currently depriving him?
  Mr. Milburn: The hon. Gentleman raises an important constituency case. I say to him that of course we always regret circumstances in which patients do not get the care that they deserve from the national health service. Let me say to him, however, that it is fatuous to pretend that problems in cardiac services began on 1 May 1997. It is fatuous to pretend that problems in cancer services began on that date. The truth is that for decades the previous Government failed adequately to invest in cancer and cardiac services. They left those services under-invested, under-doctored and under-nursed. That is why we have made those services our top priority for modernisation.
  Mr. Blizzard: Has my right hon. Friend noticed that, while Conservative Member after Conservative Member has risen to point out some deficiency in the NHS, all that the Conservative Front-Bench spokesman could offer has been privatisation, privatisation and privatisation? He could not offer the new public resources that the Government are investing because his Front-Bench colleagues described those resources as "reckless".
  Mr. Milburn: As ever, my hon. Friend makes an extremely telling point. [Laughter.] Conservative Members are laughing now, but they will not be laughing in a moment or two because I am about to turn to that very matter.
  We are making progress. The NHS is modernising and changing. There are new services, but there are also severe capacity problems. As my hon. Friend the Member for Dartford (Dr. Stoate) said in an earlier intervention, we need more doctors, more nurses and better services. Sadly, that takes time. It takes three or four years to train a nurse and double that to train a doctor, and it takes more money.
  In the past 20 years NHS funding has grown by just 3 per cent. a year. That is the real legacy of the Conservative party. From last April, this Government have raised those levels of investment by a further 50 per cent. There is more money this year; there will be more money next year and more money the year after, but that is just the start. We know that we lag behind the rest of the European Union on health spending. We are determined to close the gap. As the Prime Minister said—
  Mr. Gillan rose—
  Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Alan Haselhurst): Order. I am sorry to interrupt the Secretary of State. The right hon. Gentleman is clearly not giving way and the hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan) must resume her seat.
  Mr. Milburn: As my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister said on Sunday, if we can get real-terms

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  increases in funding of 5 per cent. a year, we shall get up to the European level. Our ambition is to have a health service that is doing more than coping. We want an NHS that is growing and modernising.
  Mr. Mike Hancock: If the Secretary of State genuinely believes what he has told the House this afternoon, why is it that the majority of people outside the House do not have the same confidence in the NHS and do not share his confidence in the Government's ability to protect it? I take the right hon. Gentleman back to his point about intensive or critical care beds. He said that there are 100 new beds, but he has been able to identify only eight of them. Where are the other 92?
  Mr. Milburn: I shall deal with the hon. Gentleman's last point first. I shall publish the figures on intensive and high dependency beds in due course.
  The hon. Gentleman talks about lack of public confidence. Of course there are problems with the NHS. Everybody understands that. The Government are addressing them, but there is a fundamental political debate taking place between the Government and the Opposition about the way in which health resources can grow in future. There are two very different futures on offer.
  Everybody knows that we need to spend more money on the NHS, except the members of today's Conservative party. Only the Conservative party could argue that the Government have gone soft on public spending on class sizes and waiting lists. Only the Conservative party could impose on itself the straitjacket of the tax guarantee, which would mean less investment in public services such as the NHS and more investment in the Conservative party's priorities, including top-rate tax cuts for the privileged few.
  It is no wonder that the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Major), said what he did about the tax guarantee. He said:
  "To say that you are going to reduce the proportion of taxes to GDP in all circumstances is mad. You simply"—
  [Interruption.] That is what the right hon. Gentleman said. I note that Conservative Members are not laughing now. Their former Prime Minister said that that was mad. He then said:
  "You simply don't unless you make swingeing cuts in the Health Service."
  Those were the words of the last Conservative Prime Minister.
  The simple truth is that we are spending more on the Health Service and Conservatives want to spend less.
  Mr. Christopher Gill rose—
  Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order.
  Mr. Milburn: In the process, they want to force more people to go private.
  Dr. Fox: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
  Mr. Milburn rose—
  Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. Did I hear the hon. Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox) say, "On a point of order"?
  Dr. Fox: I made the position extremely clear when I spoke. I do not wish the Secretary of State unintentionally to mislead the House. I made it clear to the right hon. Gentleman that our policy—
  Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The hon. Gentleman has been here long enough to know that that is a point of debate and not a point of order.
  Mr. Milburn: I know that it is a narrow judgment call, but if the question is whether I trust most the hon. Gentleman or the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Huntingdon, I will go with the former Prime Minister.
  The Conservatives want to force more people to go private. The hon. Member for Woodspring calls his patients' guarantee a Trojan Horse. I think that that was the phrase he used. We are beginning to see what lies within that horse.
  The hon. Gentleman could not have been more explicit in his interview with The Sunday Times only two days ago. He boasted:
  "Philosophically, we have moved on".
  That is, moved on from the NHS. He added:
  "Insurance companies could cover conditions that are not high-tech or expensive, like hip and knee replacements and hernia and cataract operations."
  Now we know the first set of treatments that the Tories' patients' guarantee would surgically remove from the NHS. Every year—
  Dr. Fox: Will the Secretary of State give way?
  Mr. Milburn: Oh no. I shall give way at the end.
  Every year a third of a million people have hip, knee, hernia and cataract operations on the NHS. Under the patients guarantee, those 300,000 people would be denied NHS care because the hon. Gentleman thinks that their condition is too trivial. Instead, they will have to pay privately for treatment that they now receive free.
  The average cost to the NHS of a hip replacement operation is £3,755. In the case of a knee replacement, the bill rises to £5,157. However, the cost of the operation is only half the picture. If those operations are beyond the pale of the NHS, who pays the bill for the initial consultant referral? The patient pays. Who pays the bill for the pre-operative out-patient assessment? The patient pays. Who pays the bill for community physiotherapy? The patient pays. Who pays the bill for the district nurse visit to remove sutures? The patient pays.
  Who pays the bill for the follow-up at six weeks? The patient pays. Who pays at six months? The patient pays. Who pays at 12 months? The patient pays. Time and again, the Conservative guarantee is that the patient pays.
  Dr. Fox: Sadly for the Secretary of State, I write the Conservative health policy, not him. He can make up as

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  much of it as he fancies in his little fantasy world. We intend that patients will get a maximum guaranteed waiting time. Many of the procedures that he mentions are carried out at present through many different independent schemes, including through trade union schemes.
  Mr. Milburn: Is the article right?
  Dr. Fox: No, it is not right.
  Every single time any of those procedures are carried out in the independent sector, it reduces the waiting list in the national health service. The problem is that the Secretary of State is so blinded by his own dogma that he wants to put politics before patients.
  Mr. Milburn: I look forward to the retraction in The Sunday Times. I presume that even now there is a letter winging its way. Is that right or is it wrong?
  Dr. Fox: The Secretary of State is trying to create yet another smokescreen with yet another example of what the Labour party does best—half-truth, misinformation and disinformation. We have made it clear in this debate that we believe in increasing spending on the NHS year on year in real terms. We believe in encouraging as many people as possible to take up independent provision, because that increases the total capacity of health care in this country. It is a shame that the Secretary of State is so intellectually sterile that he cannot accept the argument, as can other socialists in Europe and every commentator in the United Kingdom.
  Mr. Milburn: I look forward to reading the letter. The hon. Gentleman did not convince his own side, let alone the House.
  Let us have a debate about the merits of private health insurance. I am happy to engage in such a debate. The patients who would be forced to pay private health insurance under the patient guarantee and the tax guarantee are precisely those who could least afford to do so.
  Two thirds of patients in hospital are elderly people. Together, the very young and the very old are the biggest consumers of health care in our country, but they are the very people who would be priced out of the health insurance market. The very people who need most care, and the very ones who are most at health risk, are they very people who would be least able to get it.
  The second reason why private health insurance is the wrong answer is that it would divert hundreds of millions of pounds that should be spent on the NHS into a huge cash handout in tax reliefs and subsidies.
  Mr. Bernard Jenkin indicated dissent.
  Mr. Milburn: There seems to be some dispute on the Opposition Front Bench. The hon. Member for Woodspring was urging me to reinstate private health insurance subsidies. The hon. Member for North Essex (Mr. Jenkin) indicates that that is wrong. Which is it? Is the hon. Member for Woodspring right? I presume he is.
  Dr. Fox: I was urging the Secretary of State not to extend national insurance contributions to employers to punish them for giving private health care to their
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  employees, which is enjoyed by a large number of employees in the United Kingdom, many of whom are trade unionists.
  Mr. Milburn: The hon. Gentleman should keep digging because he is doing a good job for us. Today's Conservative party, like that of the 1990s, wants to give a huge cash handout in tax reliefs and subsidies for private medical insurance. Much of that would go to people who already have private medical insurance. The hon. Gentleman quoted the Daily Mail, which reported today that the costs of subsidising employers would be £368 million. That is before a single extra person signs up to an extra health insurance policy. That £368 million from the national health service budget is the equivalent of 1,050 intensive care beds or 16,000 nurses. Yet Conservative Members have the gall to claim that their policy is about expanding access to health care. It would be money down the drain.
  It is fatuous to pretend, as the hon. Member for Woodspring does, that more private health care would lift the burden from the health service. It would impose an extra burden.
  Mr. Edward Leigh: Will the Secretary of State give way?
  Mr. Milburn: No. There is no reserve army of unemployed oncologists or cardiac surgeons waiting for a private call to arms.
  Mr. Leigh: Will the Secretary of State give way?
  Mr. Milburn: No. An expanded private sector would mean a contraction of the public sector, which would face higher costs with fewer staff. It would mean a brain drain from the NHS. The Conservatives' proposals on private health insurance are wrong. They affect the wrong people at the wrong cost and have the wrong effect.
  Private health insurance, the knee-jerk reaction of the Conservative party, could not provide an efficient or fair health care system. It would take the United Kingdom back to an era when access to health care depended not on clinical need, but on ability to pay. That is not the future for health care in our country. The Government reject the idea that the NHS should be a residual safety net service for the poor, which will inevitably become a poorer service. We reject that not on ideological grounds but because it simply would not work.
  Dr. Stoate: How would the private insurance sector respond to people who have chronic conditions such as diabetes or rheumatoid arthritis, or those who have chronic health problems, most of which are excluded from the majority of health insurance programmes?
  Mr. Milburn: My hon. Friend, who is a general practitioner, makes a good, telling point. He knows that the private insurance sector would be incapable of insuring the people whose health is most at risk. That is why Conservative arguments are so fatuous. We do not oppose them on ideological grounds [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh!"] We do not. We oppose them because they would not work. There are two possible futures for health care in our country: privatisation with the Conservatives and

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  modernisation with Labour. We have the courage of our convictions. We believe in a comprehensive, modernised and well-resourced NHS, which provides care that is based on need, not ability to pay. We believe in a truly national health service, which is worthy of the name. The people of our country expect that. Tax relief for private health care is not an answer to the challenges of the health service. The answer is a rising level of resources for the NHS, funded through general taxation, in a way that the people can understand and in which they can have confidence. That is the way forward for the modern, 21st-century health service that our nation needs.
  The NHS is one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century; it must now undergo one of the greatest modernisations of the 21st century. No matter how much Conservative Members rant and rave, we will not yield one inch to the privatisers of our nation's health. We stand firm for the NHS—not as it is, but as the modern health service that it could be. The nation now knows the choice that it faces—between those who want to privatise the NHS and those who want to modernise it. The nation should know that we will deliver a modern NHS—a new NHS fit to face the challenges of the new millennium.
  4.45 pm
  Mr. Nick Harvey: As we have this debate, the Government have been under fire over the national health service, in the media and politically, for getting on for three weeks. It is hard to think of any occasion since 1 May 1997 on which their spin doctors have so lost control of the agenda that they have found themselves under fire on a domestic policy issue for three weeks solid, but this is largely a mess of their own making. Listening to the hon. Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox), who introduced the debate on behalf of the Conservative party, one could have been forgiven for thinking that all those problems had miraculously started on 1 May 1997. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth.
  The 18 years of Conservative misrule led to a great many of the problems. It is not the present Government's fault that they inherited a mess, but it is their fault that in three years they have not made more progress in putting some of that mess right. They played the health issue up strongly at the general election, saying that they alone could save the NHS, but what they have done since— certainly in terms of investment in the NHS—has not even kept up with the year-on-year funding increases made by the Conservatives. The changes that they have made, which the Secretary of State described as radical modernisation, have been over-hyped, although some have started down useful tracks. The recent flu crisis, outbreak or wave—whatever hon. Members care to call it; regrettably, I have sampled it from a patient's perspective—validated the warnings given by health managers, doctors, nurses and others about the pressure that the NHS was under. It took the recent outbreak to show the situation in its true light.
  Mr. Bercow: Does the hon. Gentleman support the hon. Member for Wakefield (Mr. Hinchliffe) who denounced all who work in the independent health care sector, using a word that begins with "b" and ends with "s", or does he agree that that outrageous attribution in
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  The Health Service Journal was a profound insult, both to people working in the independent sector and, indeed, to children born out of wedlock?
  Mr. Harvey: The hon. Member for Wakefield (Mr. Hinchliffe) must speak for himself, but we regard the private sector and the private health insurance industry as perfectly legitimate parts of the health service. If it is possible for them to grow and play a bigger part we are perfectly happy for them to do so, but we cannot conceive of any circumstances in which taxpayer funds should be used to enable that to happen.
  The hon. Member for Woodspring introduced the debate in an entertaining knockabout style and with his usual good humour, but I was rather puzzled that, halfway through, he suddenly launched an initiative to stop the NHS being a political football and called for all-party talks on the issue. We have not had an encouraging start, as his speech made precisely that of the NHS. However, if it is possible to get some all-party dialogue going on health, if we are to break certain taboos and accept, for example, that rationing exists, and if we are to debate what the health service can or cannot do and how it is to be funded, we are ready to take part.
  I shall look back to the proposals by which the Government invited the nation to measure their performance at the general election. They pledged that they would bring down waiting lists by 100,000 and maintain that they are making progress towards that figure. They have made progress in bringing down in-patient waiting lists, but unfortunately that has been more than outweighed by an increase in out-patient waiting lists from 295,000 at the time of the general election to 513,000 now. The number of people, and the time for which they are waiting, have grown.
  The folly of all this is demonstrated by the fact that, according to any health service professional to whom one speaks, the waiting list pledge itself was completely misguided, has caused a distortion of clinical priorities in the vast majority of hospitals, and is not the best measure of the progress that the Government are making in the health service.
  Mr. Leigh: The hon. Gentleman mentioned cross-party consensus, and then talked about waiting lists. Will he at least accept—so that we can secure as big a majority as possible for this view—that the NHS is helped, and in no way harmed, if people relieve pressure on it by taking out private health insurance?
  Mr. Harvey: I hope that I made it clear that that was my view in my response to the hon. Member for Buckingham (Mr. Bercow). There is certainly no harm done—indeed, it is welcome—if the private sector can play a part in relieving pressure on the NHS. If people choose to take out private insurance, that is entirely a matter for them and a positive development.
  We believe that the private sector could have a growing role in undertaking work commissioned by the NHS, and there is no reason why the reverse should not happen from time to time. The private sector occasionally needs to fall back on the services of the NHS—[HON. MEMBERS:

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  "Frequently."] Yes, frequently—not least in the case of intensive care, which is one of the aspects on which people have focused over the past couple of weeks.
  Dr. Jenny Tonge: Does my hon. Friend agree that the private sector should also play a part in the training of nurses and doctors, and contribute financially?
  Mr. Harvey: Absolutely. It would be good to see the private sector taking a practical role in training. The idea of private sector contribution to the cost of that is also good in principle, but it is difficult to see how such a charging mechanism would be organised, and we do not know how much it would raise. If a way could be found to make it work, there is no good reason why we should not give it a try.
  The Government have established a National Institute for Clinical Excellence to test the clinical effectiveness— and cost-effectiveness—of drugs. That too is a good idea in principle, but we have major misgivings about the remit, especially as it has been changed by means of a statutory instrument. That has brought into play considerations of affordability, which we consider to be properly in the domain of the Secretary of State and the political community. We think that it is for them to decide what the nation can afford.
  There is a world of difference between cost-effectiveness and affordability. Something can be extremely cost-effective, but very expensive. It is entirely right to establish a panel of experts to decide what is cost-effective, but affordability must ultimately be a political decision. When it comes to deciding what the nation can afford, the buck must stop with Ministers.
  Funding is a major issue that has interested the nation of late. The Government have not been as candid as they should have been about the extra funds that they have invested since coming to office. For the first two years, they stuck to the Conservatives' spending plans. Goodness knows why; I do not for a moment imagine that, in the unlikely event of the Conservatives' having returned to office, they would have stuck to those plans themselves. The Government, however, set themselves an austerity programme, stuck to the Conservatives' targets, and embarked this year on the first of the three years of spending covered by the comprehensive spending review.
  If the Government manage to complete those three years and to spend all that has been promised for the NHS, at the end of the full five years they will just about have spent, year on year, more than the Conservative year-on-year increases. If there is a general election after only four years, however, they will not even have achieved that, and their year-on-year increases will not even be as great as those of the Conservatives.
  I am glad that, over the last couple of weeks, public attention has turned to the proportion of our national income that we spend on the health service. I am pleased that everyone seems to agree that it should increase. We do not keep up with our European competitors, but, more shockingly, we do not even keep up with America. Many people regard the state-funded health system in America as an emergency back-up, a safety net, a last chance if all else fails. Legion are the stories, probably apocryphal, of people in America who are found at the roadside after accidents and who, unless they have a credit card,
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  or insurance policy, will not be taken in and cared for, yet the Americans spend 6.5 per cent. of their gross domestic product on that emergency, last-resort, back-stop system. We are floundering at a figure that is variously estimated at between 5.5 and 5.8 per cent. of our GDP, so we must do better.
  Dr. Stoate: I note the hon. Gentleman's point that the Americans spend about 6.5 per cent. of their GDP on their publicly funded system, but does he agree that they get extraordinarily bad value for money in that 45 million Americans have no health care cover of any sort, that one quarter of all bankruptcies in America are due to unpaid health bills and that health outcomes are, in many ways, disappointing, particularly for the richest country in the world?
  Mr. Harvey: I agree. The Americans do not get particularly good value out of either their public or private systems. In total, they spend 14 per cent. of their GDP on the health system. At its best, it is very good, but, overall, I am not sure that it is all that remarkable.
  What was remarkable was the Prime Minister's pledge yesterday that the Government would get spending up to the EU average in the course of five days—[Interruption.] In five years; I beg the House's pardon. What he promised was remarkable enough. Whether he is any more likely to attain it over five years than over five days, I do not know. Certainly, some of his arithmetic seemed highly dubious. Whether he was supposed to say that, was on message and had been cleared to say it, I do not know. It may have been like his fox-hunting pledge, which he gave when under a bit of pressure at Question Time, but it smacked of a back-of-a-fag-packet calculation.
  If the Prime Minister thinks that putting a mere £2 billion a year in over the next five or six years will get us up to the European average, he could not be more wrong, or is he counting these things in the way that the Chancellor of the Exchequer does? The Chancellor would have us believe that, if we put in £3 billion in the first year, another £3 billion in the second year and another £3 billion in the third year, it makes a glorious total of £18 billion.
  Mr. Eric Martlew: The hon. Gentleman referred to the Prime Minister's promise. Can we have an assurance that the Liberal Democrats support that promise?
  Mr. Harvey: We do. We wish the Prime Minister well in his efforts to achieve that. If it comes to votes to get the funds in place to do it, he can rely on our support. However, I am still sceptical as to whether he will achieve it.
  Dr. Peter Brand: Did my hon. Friend notice that, towards the end of the Secretary of State's speech, he refused to take interventions? The one matter of substance in his speech was the undertaking to increase spending by 5 per cent.—per cent. of what he did not define. Might it be helpful if my hon. Friend explored what the baseline of the 5 per cent. is and accepted an intervention from the Secretary of State to see whether he could answer that question?
  Mr. Harvey: My hon. Friend makes a good point. I was hoping that the Secretary of State might have cast

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  a little more light on the Prime Minister's commitment. I think that the Secretary of State said that there would be an increase of 5 per cent. in real terms. Does that mean 5 per cent. over and on top of normal NHS inflation— that is to say, over and on top of anything that we have heard about to date in any comprehensive spending review? Will the comprehensive spending review that we expect in July factor that all in on top?
  When the Prime Minister says that he will put in £2 billion a year, does he mean that he will put in £2 billion in the first year, continue that into the second year, adding £4 billion in that year, and continue that into the following year, adding another £2 billion, making £6 billion in that year? If so, he had only to consult the Chancellor, who could have explained that that adds up to £42 billion. If they put in £42 billion, they might begin to get somewhere near the European average in five years.
  Dr. Stoate: Will the hon. Gentleman clarify the Liberal Democrat policy? Does he subscribe to the view of the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Dr. Brand), who said on a television programme on which he appeared with me last week that he would be happy for income tax to rise by anything up to 10p in the pound over the next 10 years to pay for Liberal Democrat promises? Is that Liberal Democrat policy?
  Mr. Harvey: The hon. Gentleman misquotes my hon. Friend, who said that, if we were to reach the European average, the necessary investment would be equivalent to that rate. He was not necessarily advocating such an increase or saying that we could reach the average overnight. However, it will take massive investment to reach.
  It would not make sense to reach the average at once, as the principal investment that we have to make is in staff and personnel, who take time to train. As the Prime Minister said, it takes three or four years to train a nurse. However, if he had recognised that three years ago and started a drive to recruit more nurses, they would have been coming on stream this summer and in post to help cope with any influenza epidemic that might occur next winter.
  Mr. John Burnett: I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend and neighbour for giving way. He is making a powerful point: there is great need for staff and personnel. I draw his attention to the case of one of my constituents—Mrs. Hopkins, of Germansweek—who visited my advice surgery last weekend. She is suffering from frequent bouts of fainting and giddiness, for which her general practitioner referred her to a consultant. The Royal Devon and Exeter Healthcare NHS trust has written to her to say that, although she will have an appointment, she will have to wait 140 weeks. Does my hon. Friend agree that such delays are caused by failure properly to fund the NHS and are an utterly unacceptable national disgrace?
  Mr. Harvey: I can only agree with my hon. Friend that it is absolutely disgraceful that anyone should have to wait 140 weeks—almost three years—simply to see a consultant. Goodness knows how many weeks after seeing a consultant one would have to wait for any
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  operation that the consultant might think necessary. The case that he describes is about the worst that I have heard, and underlines the fact that, whatever progress is being made on in-patient figures is more than counterbalanced by the extra time that people are waiting on out-patient lists. As he says, it is an absolute disgrace.
  In recent years, there has been a staggering decrease in the number of nurses working in the NHS. In 1987, there were 514,600 nurses and midwives working in the NHS; today, there are only 373,000. It is incredible that there should have been such a decrease in only 12 or 13 years. Currently, 15,000 nursing vacancies are being advertised, and we are struggling to fill them.
  A great deal more will have to be done than yesterday's pay increase—welcome though that was—to turn the nursing profession into something that people are attracted to at the start of their career and will stay with loyally throughout their working lives as they try to build careers. Year after year, many pay increases will be required. Better still, if we are to make necessary progress in recruiting nurses, there should be a complete re-evaluation of our views on the nursing profession and of the value that we place on it both in the NHS and in society overall.
  On how pay rises will be paid for, it has been noted that health authorities were given their budgets for the coming year just before Christmas. The Minister has made it clear that the rises will have to be paid for out of those budgets.
  Kali Mountford: Given the hon. Gentleman's comments on nurses and the length and cost of nurse training, will he congratulate the Government and nurses on the number of nurses who have chosen to return to the profession? They are ready to be on the job on the very day of their return.
  Mr. Harvey: I am delighted that some nurses have been attracted back to the job, and of course I congratulate the Government on any nurses whom they have managed to lure back or recruit to the profession. Last year, the Government increased pay for those who are on the starting levels in the nursing profession, and that was a useful start. This year, Ministers are beginning to deal with various anomalies. However, there is much further to go before the nursing profession will look sufficiently attractive to persuade people to spend an entire career in it.
  How will the pay rises be funded? The increases in authority budgets that were announced before Christmas mean that there is enough cash to fund the pay rises, but if they are to be fully funded from those budgets, something else has to give. Will it be progress on waiting lists or the Government's modernisation agenda? Whatever the authorities and trusts sacrifice to fund the pay increases, the result will be slower progress on improving the health service in the way that we all want and more cases of the kind that my hon. Friend the Member for Torridge and West Devon (Mr. Burnett) mentioned.
  Dr. Brand: Will not the health authorities that received the lowest uplift in their funding for next year find it particularly difficult to pay the salary increases? They will have to make cuts in services rather than just failing to advance them.
  Mr. Harvey: My hon. Friend is right to point out that there are great inequalities between different health

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  authorities around the country. I am glad that there is a review of the formulae and I hope that the difficulties faced by rural health authorities in particular will be better recognised. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland use formulae that recognise those difficulties better than the English system.
  On top of the difficulties with nursing that we have already dealt with, the Government are spending an increasing amount on agency nurses to make up for the shortfall in NHS nurses. Between 1991 and 1998, spending on agency nurses doubled to £216 million. In the past year, that figure has increased by more than 25 per cent. It now costs the taxpayer more than £273 million to bring in private sector agency nurses, most of whom have been trained in the NHS, to cover NHS vacancies that would not exist if we were paying our nurses properly and recruiting adequate numbers into the profession. That is not good value for the taxpayer.
  The Conservatives have been talking up the benefits and advantages of the private health sector and private insurance. I have made it clear that we think that there should be a mixed economy and that both sectors can play a useful role, but they seem to imagine that it is possible to engineer a massive increase in the number of people taking up private health insurance. There is a competitive market for private health insurance. I am sure that other hon. Members, like me, receive direct mail fliers from health insurance companies almost every week touting their wares and policies.
  There is no reason why there should be a big increase in take-up unless there is a policy to engineer one. There are three possibilities: it might be made compulsory to take out private insurance, there might be a tax incentive, or the NHS might be run down to such a pitiful state that people would be bound to take out private insurance because they would regard it as the only way to get any health cover. If the Conservatives want a financial inducement, we shall oppose them head-on. There is no justification for taxpayer funds that could otherwise be spent on the NHS to bring about the improvements that people want being diverted to induce people who can afford, or are on the verge of being able to afford, private health insurance.
  We know from last year's Budget that there is to be another 1p reduction in income tax from April. We have conducted opinion polling on that, as have some newspapers. The results show that the public do not want a 1p tax cut to be put ahead of getting extra investment into the health service. Nearly 80 per cent. would rather have the money spent on the health service now than on a 1p tax cut in April.
  Our call to the Government—who made promises at the general election and have done so over the past three years, with the Prime Minister making more promises the other day—is that they should get on with carrying out those promises and achieve the target of reaching European average spending. Only then, having achieved that for all to see, should they imagine that taxpayers want to enjoy the dividend of a tax cut. They are putting the wrong value on those matters, and they do not understand what people want. If they do not wake up to that soon, there will be a huge price to pay.
  5.10 pm
  Mr. David Hinchliffe: I welcome the opportunity of today's debate. We are all aware of the difficulties facing the NHS. It is important that we discuss them, and that we contrast the Government's attitudes in terms of policy with those of the Opposition.
  At the outset, I should make clear that I am the constituency Member of Parliament of Mrs. Mavis Skeet, whose case received a great deal of coverage in the national press last week. I should make it clear that I do not have the family's permission to go into the details of the case. However, I spoke to the Secretary of State last week about my concerns over the handling of the case. I hope that, with the family's consent, at some point he will make public the outcome of his investigations into her treatment.
  I came into politics to fight to ensure that people such as Mrs. Skeet receive proper treatment. I am sure that most Labour Members, and some Opposition Members, would want to ensure that such problems do not arise. I am driven, in part, by my personal experiences, which I have shared with the House before—my father faced a two-year wait for a heart bypass and died before he got the operation—so I understand how families in such circumstances feel. It will not only be Mrs. Skeet; others will be going through difficulties of this nature.
  Dr. Tonge: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
  Mr. Hinchliffe: With respect, I shall not take interventions. I know that many hon. Members wish to contribute, and the hon. Lady may well have the opportunity to make her own point.
  Let us not deny the fact that the NHS faces serious problems. As the Chairman of the Select Committee on Health, I would not deny that, as we see those problems. Most hon. Members looking at their local health services would accept that there are difficulties. However, those problems have not developed overnight and will not be cured overnight. The problems have occurred over a long period. It is easy to blame previous Governments. When we talk about how the health service is run, however, we should understand that today's policy changes will not impact in many areas for five or 10 years, or more.
  The current difficulties underline elements of Labour's inheritance on health policy and what we faced when we came to power. I want to make clear one or two areas for which I think the previous Government are responsible in terms of the current difficulties and those that we shall no doubt face again in the months and years to come.
  First, the previous Government broke down the national service that we had had since 1948 into numerous competing fragments. We inherited the hugely expensive bureaucracy of the internal market—a wasteful exercise introduced by the Tories, where money that should have been spent on patient care was spent on chasing pieces of paper. Secondly, under the Conservatives, the national health service was heading rapidly in the direction of American-style private medical care. There is no doubt about that. The policies that they introduced included tax breaks for private medicine—mentioned again today—the wholesale privatisation of community care provision and two-tier access, which was clearly the case in my constituency. I have named constituents in the past who were denied certain services that their next-door

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  neighbours could get because they happened to have a non-fundholding rather than a fundholding GP. That was the reality of Conservative policies.
  Having spent time talking to health service staff, I know that we had a demoralised staff who were leaving the service in droves—often to go to the private sector, which was expanding under the Tories—because they believed that the NHS had no future.
  I welcome many of the positive steps that the Government have taken to return health to the vision of Bevan and the socialist pioneers to whom I look in terms of where I want the health service to go. If we stick to those principles, the majority of people will support the steps that we take. I welcome the increased funding that the Government have been able to devote to health recently. Indeed, although I suspect that people will feel differently about tax in two months' time, I would be happy for the Chancellor to cash in on the current concerns of people who would be prepared to forgo the reduction in income tax if the money were devoted to the NHS.
  I welcome the proposals in the Health Act 1999, which largely abolish the internal market. The duty to co-operate is common sense and will return the health service to what it was in the beginning. However, will my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State consider further the splits in responsibility at local level between the different elements that we inherited? My constituency has seven different elements dealing with health and community care, not including primary care. Many of those bodies could be combined.
  I also welcome the Government's moves to emphasise quality of provision, because I have come across some worrying problems in my work on the Health Committee in recent years. It is early days yet, but I commend the results so far. I also welcome the emphasis on primary care, which was part of Bevan's vision but has never been realised, and the proposals for public health and prevention. That was a non-issue for the Conservative Government, but it is crucial in addressing the problems that people face.
  I welcome the staffing strategy, the recruitment work that the Government have undertaken, and their work on winter pressures. I know that we have recently had some problems, but they would have been far worse without the Government's steps to prepare local agencies to work together. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and his team know that I welcome the work they have done on bringing the NHS and social services closer. As someone who worked before 1974 in a local authority with a health department, I think that my right hon. Friend should go further and consider full integration of the NHS with local authority social services. He will know that the Health Committee also recently recommended that approach.
  The debate this week has been about more than simple practical proposals. It has been about the fundamental issue of whether we as a society can afford a national health service. The great and good have been wheeled out on both sides. For example, Mr. Roy Lilley suggested at the weekend that we penalise smokers and obese people. He did not mention that obesity and smoking are most common among the poorest and most disadvantaged in our society, as I know from my constituency.
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  Private health insurance has also been mentioned, but no thought has been given to the fact that many people with pre-existing conditions, or of a certain age, would never get private cover. What would they do? They are why we have a national health service in the first place, and we should be proud of that. Regardless of people's background, class, income, social status or health problems, they receive equal treatment in the NHS. That is the objective that we set back in the 1940s.
  We have heard consistently during this Parliament the Tories' belief that expanding the private health sector is the only way forward for health provision. Last week, the shadow Secretary of State was quoted in The Sunday Times as saying:
  "The Conservatives are no longer concerned with the maintenance of the NHS as the primary provider".
  That is on the record in the paper—[Interruption.] The Tories may be sending letters to The Sunday Times, but that quotation is there in print and available in the Library. We know about the Tories and the NHS. They never believed in maintaining the NHS right from the start, but their obsession with the private sector ignores reality.
  My views on the private sector are not based solely on ideology. I am concerned with the practical effects of expanding the private sector. The Select Committee was unanimous in its concern over the private sector's abysmal record in quality of provision. In one instance, I was accused of using strong language, but where I come from we call a spade a spade, as my hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley (Mr. Barron) will confirm. We say what we mean, and people respect us for it. I was criticised for comments that I made after listening to a man whose wife had been treated in a private hospital. He told me that, when she died, he had to lay out her body because there was no one else to do it. I admit that I was angry about what I consider to be an unforgivable situation. If I had time, I could give other examples of the lack of quality in the private sector. The Opposition take no account of the genuine unease—even within the private sector—about the standards of the care that that sector provides.
  The Select Committee report examined staffing levels, and our finding was clear: staff haemorrhaged from the NHS are going to the private sector, where they get more money and sometimes enjoy better conditions of service. We concluded that expanding the private sector merely removes staff from the national health service. It is nonsense, therefore, to suggest that it is somehow helpful to expand the private sector. It is helpful only if, for political reasons, the NHS is to be run down. That is the Tory party's approach.
  I urge the Government to go in the opposite direction and bring about, at the very least, the complete separation of the NHS from the private sector. I should be interested to find out what impact there would be on waiting lists if part-time NHS consultants worked full time and cared for people on the basis of need and not ability to pay.
  Finally, I want to let the House into a secret: before last Friday morning, I had never heard of Lord Winston, even though I know most of the great and good in the national health service. Moreover, the man from BBC national radio who telephoned me on Friday morning for a comment had never heard of him either, so it was not just a matter of me being a thick Yorkshireman.
  No one is sure of what Lord Winston meant or said, but he appeared to suggest that a middle road—some sort of third way, perhaps—existed between the state system

  719
  and the private sector. I believe that, in this instance, there is no such third way. Either one believes in the national health service concept and subscribes to its principles, or one does not. The Tories have shown today that the Government believe in that concept, and that they do not.
  5.23 pm
  Sir Norman Fowler: The hon. Member for Wakefield (Mr. Hinchliffe) rather wrecked his credibility with his display of ignorance about Lord Winston. However, I shall follow his example and be brief.
  The trouble with the speech by the Secretary of State was that it offered nothing to the public. The House should recognise that people are genuinely worried about the present state of the health service. The right hon. Gentleman rejected all new thinking and ideas—a ridiculous approach to adopt. The Government must accept that they alone are to blame for the criticism heaped on them in the past few weeks.
  No party could have done more to exploit the inevitable difficulties that occur in the health service than the Labour party in opposition. I was Secretary of State for Health and Social Security for six years. My abiding memory is that the Labour Opposition opposed all changes in the service—even the introduction of general managers, which the Labour Government have now adopted. It is a bit rich, therefore, for the Secretary of State to say that he believes in good management of the national health service.
  However, that Labour Opposition did more than just attack the then Conservative Government. They also raised the public's expectations. Their promise was specific: vote Labour, and the problems of the health service would be ended. That message has now been radically altered. The promise is that if people vote Labour, the problems may be over in 10 years' time. The angry reaction to that change of position is not surprising.
  The issue today is whether we continue down this dismal road of political recrimination and simply continue the party battle of slogans, or whether we have a serious debate on a better way forward for the health service. I have no doubt that that is what the public want us to do. There may be some very important interest groups in the health service, but what the public—the patients—want should be crucial. I think that the public want a serious debate about how to achieve better health care.
  I should mention that I am chairman of Numark, an industrial provident society with more than 1,300 community pharmacies. Having declared that interest, I intend to speak not about pharmacy, however tempting it may be, but more generally.
  In the years since 1947, the health service has developed steadily under Governments of both colours. When the Prime Minister says that today more patients are being treated, more operations are being carried out and more hospitals are being built, that is precisely the case that I put forward 15 years ago. It was the case that my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) put forward when he was Secretary of State for Health, as, I am sure, did my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Sir R. Whitney) when he was Under-Secretary of State for Health. It was true then and it is true today. However, it does not answer the fundamental question of whether enough patients are being treated or enough operations carried out.
  720
  This country has the best-value health service in Europe. By that I mean that we get more value for the money that we use than any other health service that I know of. That is a tribute to the doctors, nurses, staff and managers of the national health service. However, running a cost-effective health service is no longer enough. The public expect more, and I think that they are right to do so. The most important principle of the health service is that no one should be deprived of health care because of lack of income. Whatever other judgments are used on who will have health care, the question of a man or woman's income does not enter the equation. That remains fundamental. No one wants a system in which people are excluded from health care provision because of lack of income.
  Increasingly, people feel that in addition they should not be deprived of self-evidently important health care because of a lack of resources in the health service. The dilemma was most famously put by Enoch Powell, who said that any health service faces the problem of infinite demand meeting finite resources. That is the dilemma of the health service in this country and anywhere else. No system is perfect; equally, it does not have to be as imperfect as ours. It is clear from the cases that have been widely reported over the past few weeks that people who should be treated are not being treated. No one, whatever their political party, wants that.
  The real question is how to bring those extra resources into the health service. How do we ensure that those resources are best used? The issue should be about how to achieve the best possible health care for the maximum number of people. In achieving that, we should consider all the options. That is where I quarrel with the Government. It is not written in stone that general taxation is the only means whereby money can be raised for the health service. That is not a fundamental principle of the health service—it is simply the way that it has always been.
  I remember talking to Margaret Thatcher about the health issue before the 1987 election. She thought that a royal commission on health was the way forward. That was unusual, because Margaret Thatcher was not renowned for appointing royal commissions—I could put it more strongly than that. In the event, no commission was appointed, but today, three years after the 1997 election, the case for an inquiry—at least—into the financing of the health service is overwhelming. A royal commission or some other independent and authoritative inquiry would allow us to consider all the options by which we could bring extra resources to health.
  We can continue to make the health service entirely dependent on general taxation. That seems to be the approach taken by the Prime Minister, and by the Secretary of State, who says that there is no alternative to public spending, which will bring us up to European standards, not now, but in six to eight years' time. There are strong arguments against that course. Of all the health slogans that I can think of, "The health service is safe in the hands of the Treasury" would certainly be the oddest. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe is sitting behind me, so I shall be gentle, but the idea that the Treasury is populated by kindly Ministers and officials eager to resource health care is somewhat fanciful. Public spending has not resourced the health service adequately to date. That fact is a commentary not on the present or the previous Governments, but on all the Governments of the past half century.

  721
  If we make health an overwhelming public spending priority, other priorities such as education, law and order, defence and pensions will suffer. To rely exclusively on general public spending is a triumph of hope over experience. We should look at other options. One possibility is a health tax, which might have the advantage of creating some connection between the taxpayer and the health provider. Another option is to raise revenue by some form of personal insurance to add to public funding from tax. Many European countries already use that system, and it is both foolish and depressing to reject that prospect out of hand. It is wrong to suggest that that system would Americanise—or even privatise—the health service.
  In Germany, I am told, there have been many television pictures of patients in Britain lying on trolleys and so on. Newspaper comment in Germany has been not about how wonderful the British health service is, but about how the Germans do not want our system of shortages. We deceive ourselves if we think that the rest of the world regards the method by which we finance our health service as the way it should be done. People in other countries may well say that our doctors, nurses and other staff are dedicated professionals who make the most of every penny. I hope that they do, and they would be right to say so, but no one advocates moving towards our system of finance.
  I fear that, if we do not seek new paths, in 10 years' time we shall still be debating these problems in the same depressing way. There is no doubt that the old national health service has achieved a vast amount and, having served as Health Minister for six years, I certainly applaud that. But we need change. We need a new national health service, possibly run as a separate commission, but certainly receiving new and consistent streams of income. Such a service could achieve so much more. The Government have turned their face against change, and I deplore that. If they do not alter that stance, my party will rise to the challenge. The present crisis, following past crises, provides an opportunity to think anew.
  5.34 pm
  Mr. Kevin Barron: In view of the remarks made by my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Mr. Hinchliffe) and by the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Sir N. Fowler), perhaps I should point out that I have known Lord Winston for many years. I first met him in 1984, when he was Robert Winston and I was a Member of the House, helping to talk out a Bill sponsored by Enoch Powell, which would have stopped research into the human embryo and thus into infertility. At that time, I thought that Robert Winston was a brilliant clinician and, having considered the events of the past few days, I still think so, although he is now a politician—we are led to believe.
  I am sorry that the hon. Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox) has left the Chamber, because I quite enjoyed the earlier knockabout over his and the Opposition's perceptions of NHS funding. When he got down to his three ways to save the NHS, which I understand have been expressed in a letter from the Conservative party to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and Members in other parties, he mentioned two points in particular. The first was that the Conservatives wanted long-term
  722
  funding of the NHS. The second was that they wanted increased funding year by year. That was not our experience during the last five years of the previous, Conservative Government. [HON. MEMBERS: "Yes, it was."]
  The right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield said that the Conservatives had built hospitals every year. Under the Tory Government, they did not build hospitals for many years. What really happened was that they cut back savagely on capital expenditure in the NHS—not £10 million or £15 million but hundreds of millions of pounds. That was the amount that they cut from capital expenditure during their last three years in office. Consequently, my right hon. Friends who have held the position of Secretary of State for Health have had to use the private finance initiative to restore some of the savage cuts to building in the NHS. For the Conservatives to say that they built hospitals is absolute nonsense.
  Mr. Martlew indicated assent.
  Mr. Barron: My hon. Friend agrees. He and I were involved in many debates on the NHS.
  At a fringe meeting at the Conservative party conference, the hon. Member for Woodspring said:
  "I think what we are proposing will revolutionise private health insurance in the way we revolutionised pensions in the 1980s."
  When the Labour Government came to office in 1997, they had to put right many wrongs; for example, the case of my constituents who had been robbed by going into private pension schemes. The Government had to set up schemes so that people could get back the money that had been taken off them by private pension plans. After the Conservatives were defeated in 1997, I thought that they would have learned something, but they have learned nothing from the way they ran the Government—getting citizens into a mess.
  In relation to the announcement that was made just before Christmas, my own health authority—the Rotherham health authority—received an increase of 7.28 per cent. That is a real-terms increase of 4.6 per cent. It is the best increase for many years—since long before May 1997. That real increase will do something about the real problems in our area.
  During the past few weeks, we have seen vested interests at play in the NHS and in politics. We know that the Opposition have a vested interest; in theory, it is to oppose. They claim that the NHS is not just in acute crisis, but that it has been brought to its knees. I do not believe that, nor does anyone working in the NHS.
  Since 1997, the Government have been changing the way money is spent in the NHS. They have built up public health services and supported primary care groups. They have spent money on services that were formerly poor relations in the NHS. They have deliberately done all that to try to improve public health so that we can hope that, in 10, 20 or 30 years' time, there is not the need for an acute sector of the size it is today.
  Our debates on the national health service always concentrate on hospitals and repairing people who have been damaged or who have become the victims of circumstances, but they are not sensible debates about promoting public health. The Government have rightly targeted the biggest killers, such as cancer and

  723
  heart disease. They have spent money on those diseases, but they have been criticised for doing so. I think that such criticism is wrong.
  The Government have reduced waiting lists. I do not care what anyone says about that. Waiting lists peaked in April 1998 and they have fallen by 18 per cent. since then. Hon. Members can come to the Chamber to say how long X and Y have waited, but they should talk to the people who are waiting for less time now than they were in April 1998. They will say that the Government are doing the right thing.
  Mr. Graham Brady: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
  Mr. Barron: I might give way in a minute.
  The Government are improving joint action between local health authorities and local authorities to improve care for people in the community with disabilities and to improve mental health care. We have waited years for such an agenda and for joint co-operation. Money has gone into that as well as into the modernisation of the national health service.
  Since 1948, the health service has been riven by an internal debate between hospitals and general practitioners and between the acute sector and primary care. The Government are taking those issues on. Such action is perceived to hurt some people and especially those who work in the acute sector. They do not like what is happening. Their empires are being realigned, but the Government are absolutely right to realign them and I will defend them when they do. When we hear from the vested interests and organisations involved in hospital care, we must always remember that the Government's aim is to improve public health and the health of the nation.
  The Government are modernising the national health service. None of the new money—as much as it is—that is going into health authorities such as my own is being given to them so that they can continue to spend in the way they did in the past. Packages tell them that they must spend differently. The Government are also making the health service more modern by improving information technology and using such wonderful technology for the general good.
  The Government are improving clinical practice. They are not just putting money into the national health service, but are making sure that it is spent properly. Let us forget about the cost of the private sector; let us instead examine the reference costs on which the Government reported a few weeks ago. They considered the actual costs of certain procedures in the health service and clinical outcomes, so that, after 50 years of its existence, we can begin to have an idea of what goes on in the NHS.
  A press release in the Library provides three examples of reference costs. It shows how we should be able to ensure better care and get the most effective use of resources. I have suffered from lower back pain over the years, and the press release shows that one course of treatment for that can cost £638 in some hospitals, but that the costs rise elsewhere to £1,578. We ought to know why.
  Day care for rheumatoid arthritis can cost £183 in some hospitals but £370 in others. The national health service should provide that service, but there should not be such a difference in costs. The costs of bronchial pneumonia
  724
  emergency admissions range from the lowest figure of £828 up to the highest, £1,617. Wherever it comes from, that is taxpayers' money that is spent on health care, but there are great cost discrepancies in the national health service. The Government are absolutely right to look into such matters, which concern people who work in the health service because such examination requires them to consider their costs, their use of resources and their clinical effectiveness. Numerous measures are being taken to improve clinical effectiveness.
  I know from my experience in this House that any Member can go to the Library and read reports from the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Commission about expenditure in our health service and many other areas of public life. Those reports reveal extraordinary divergences of cost and expenditure.
  I remember a report about procurement in the NHS, which was published about four years ago. I have it in my office. It told how a hospital, which was not identified, bought a syringe drive for £800 from a manufacturer in October of the year concerned. The following March—in the same financial year—another department in the same hospital bought a syringe drive from the same supplier for £1,036. That department was trying to get rid of its annual budget by the end of March because in April it was to get another departmental budget. The report showed that procurement practices in the NHS are costing us tens of millions of pounds per annum.
  I am all in favour of the Government putting new money into the NHS, and I am pleased that my health authority has received a big increase of 4.66 per cent. in real terms for the next financial year. However, I am also concerned to ensure that the health service is spending money properly in the most cost-effective and clinically effective way. I am unconvinced that it is doing so.
  I turn now to a vested interest. The Secretary of State quoted a letter that was sent to The Times but which was not published today. In that letter, clinicians were saying that the situation was not as bad as it was being painted in the media. I do not think that the situation is that bad; nor do most people who know the national health service.
  A front page article in The Times today contains a quote that I assume is connected with the increase that nurses have received this year. As the hon. Member for North Devon (Mr. Harvey) said, nurses received a big increase this year and last year, which is aimed to sustain nurses and to get more of them back into the NHS. We should all be pleased about that increase. The quote in The Times is from Dr. Ian Bogle, the chairman of the British Medical Association, who said:
  "Doctors' pay is now seriously out of line with other professionals. It needs to be restored to the appropriate level."
  When I read that, it took me back to the years before I came to this House—the '70s—when the then Labour Government were giving flat-rate increases to people who were poorly off because they wanted to try to make work pay for them. At that time others asked, "What about our differentials?" I hope that I have not misquoted Dr. Bogle or the BMA, but if that is their line, we have returned to the argument about differentials.
  We should all—doctors and nurses included—be concerned about having a health service that provides for this nation. We should forget about vested interests in society, and some of the vested interests in the NHS ought to be removed. We ought to be improving clinical effectiveness and spending resources better.

  725
  Conservative Members sit there smiling because they have been in government and they refused to start the modernisation that this Government have introduced. This Government certainly have my support.
  5.48 pm
  Mr. Kenneth Clarke: This is the third time in less than 12 months that I have taken part in a health service debate. I therefore hope to make it my shortest speech because I want to hear the remarks of many of the other hon. Members who wish to take part in this short debate.
  Looking back on what I said before, I find that I warned about the impending sense of crisis in the national health service. I said that unless the Government shook themselves out of their complacency, they would take us into a series of winter crises like those that we have seen before. It gives me no pleasure to say that that is exactly what has happened because the response on previous occasions has been a combination of complacency and slogans—until the Secretary of State now finds himself in a serious position.
  It is certainly true, as the hon. Member for Wakefield (Mr. Hinchliffe) said, that we have experienced winter crises before. That is all the more reason for predicting them when we realise that things are going wrong. It was no remarkable insight on my part or that of the other hon. Members who spoke in those earlier debates to talk of an impending crisis. Any Member of Parliament who kept in touch with the NHS would have received repeated warnings about the mounting problems, mainly financial, in health authority after health authority.
  Long before this winter began, every Member of Parliament was receiving an increased burden of correspondence from people complaining about the steadily deteriorating service that they were receiving. The Government's response was a party political debate. There was almost a complete absence of constructive long-term policy to address the problem. I am not sure that they are accepting even now that they have had a bad winter, after a predictable increase in flu cases hit a vulnerable system. Having listened to them, I think that they have returned with more complacency and slogans for the future.
  Mr. Roger Casale: Will the right hon. and learned Gentleman give way?
  Mr. Clarke: I shall not give way only because of the pressure of time. I usually enjoy giving way.
  I shall outline why I think we face the present crisis, what the short-term causes have been and what the immediate response should be. I believe that the principal underlying cause of the present problems is financial. Indeed, it is a financial crisis. As I have said before, the Government got the money wrong. They have set about tackling public expenditure problems in a most peculiar way, which has damaged the health service most especially.
  It is not true that the Government followed for the first two years the spending plans that a Conservative Government would have followed. That is a slogan, but it
  726
  is untrue. We had annual spending rounds during which Secretaries of State for Health discussed with the Treasury the current situation in the health service and what it would be reasonable to spend in the light of economic circumstances during the next year.
  I do not believe that any Conservative Secretary of State for Health ever accepted that in years two and three there would be handed out what had been pencilled in during previous years. It was the now candidate for mayor of London, the right hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras (Mr. Dobson), who had the unfortunate experience while Secretary of State for Health of being told that that was exactly what would happen to him. If a Major Government had been returned to office, I do not believe that we would have contemplated anything of that sort.
  The idea that health service expenditure would be fixed for three years in that way and never revised has been addressed only in the final years of this Parliament. As the hon. Member for North Devon (Mr. Harvey) has said, if the Government stick to their present plans they will, at the end of this Parliament, get back to a percentage increase in NHS spending that matches that of the former Conservative Government. That illustrates what was wrong; the Government made no attempt to address what was going on.
  It is not true that the Government were constrained by public sector debt problems, for example. They simply went to a slogan-based approach to public spending that bore no relation to the needs of the NHS.
  What has been the Government's reaction so far? I watched the Prime Minister on the Frost programme, and it seems that the Government have come up with another slogan. It seems that £21 billion is now discredited. I shall not repeat the excellent description of the way in which that ridiculous figure was arrived at that the hon. Member for North Devon gave the House. No one outside the House believes that the figure is an honest description of the Labour party's spending plans. Lord Winston is not the only one with doubts.
  We now have not a three-year but a five-year target. When the next three years have passed, we shall have expenditure on the NHS that equals average percentage GDP across the European Union. That target does not address the needs of the service or priorities within government. It is a slogan that has already been produced for the next election campaign. Whether it is realised depends on many unforeseeable events, most of which are utterly beyond the Government's control. To what extent will our GDP grow over the next few years? Many European Governments are trying to reduce their health expenditure. To what extent will their GDPs grow? What rate of increase in expenditure will in practice be the outturn in other European countries?
  At present, no one can seriously guess what the average percentage of GDP spent on health will be throughout the European Union. Nobody knows what our GDP will be. We have only a press release for a Frost interview, not a serious and fresh look at the funding needs of the NHS. The police service, which has also been badly dealt with by the Government, and the education service, which thought that it was the first priority, have already started saying, "What does this mean for us?" If EU average expenditure on health races ahead or if United Kingdom GDP dips, what will happen to our claims for our needs? The Government's approach is absurd.

  727
  The Government should not adhere to their present three-year comprehensive spending review without revisiting it. It was a dreadful mistake to give up annual spending rounds, and the NHS is one of the victims. It is impossible to set in stone arbitrary targets for spending and not allow the Secretary of State to revisit them. I do not believe that the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Government will stick to their published plans for this year, next year and the year after, whatever the next comprehensive spending plan produces.
  The Prime Minister had the nerve to say, correctly, that the problems of the NHS should be tackled by a combination of money and reform. I think that we are all agreed upon that. Quite a few Conservative Members have taken part in various attempts at reform in the past, and reform is further needed. The difficulty is that the Government's approach to reform so far has been essentially slogan-based and extremely political. It is a rather short-term reaction to what they inherited. When genuine new ideas are put forward for the medium or longer term, the Government are deeply resistant to contemplating any fresh look at how the health service might be financed or run.
  Lord Winston said that the Government have not told the truth about the abolition of the internal market. Only the Labour party calls it the internal market. I am glad to say that the Government do not tell the truth when they claim that they have abolished the former arrangements. They have kept the purchaser-provider divide and much of the management information. They tell the hon. Member for Wakefield that they have abolished the internal market. Actually, they still have it in place. In fact, they are messing about with it in a somewhat ill thought-out way. I believe that when the Government's reforms are handed over, they will not be in a state of perfection. We made dramatic changes to the way in which the NHS was run and it could reasonably be expected that there would be continued evolution from where we were—but evolution was certainly required.
  The purchaser-provider split gives distinct people in the health service, particularly GP practices, health authorities and advisers to patients, the chance to question what health needs are most dominant locally and how best to commission the highest standard of care delivery. That is what purchasing the service means. Someone examines the greatest priority need and decides how to use resources to meet it.
  Providers are able to respond to demands. Slogans such as "Let us go for co-operation and not competition" have been used as an excuse for inhibiting the ability to switch from one source to another so that those involved might have a choice in how they best provide the service in their locality. That should not have happened. I have talked in the past about the replacement of GP fundholding with primary care trusts. It was a retrograde step, which has reduced the role of GPs.
  NHS Direct was set up far too rapidly. The new Secretary of State was dominated by consumerism when he first took office. I do not mind being dominated by that, but NHS Direct may or may not work. It is a rather ill-tried concept. Money is being put into it when funding is not obviously readily available. The danger is that that will increase expectations of, and demands on, the service without proving to be an effective way forward. It is costing money and staff at a time when that expenditure could be better directed elsewhere by others in the service.
  728
  I shall comment briefly on other reactions to the crisis. The nurses' pay settlement has been mentioned. I am glad that the Government stick with the review body system, which they used so to dislike and which they inherited from the Conservative Government. Of course, it is nice to be able to implement a review body award in full straight away. The Government make the point that we did not do so and that we used to phase awards. We phased them because we used to have regard to the ability of the service to afford the pay increase that was to be introduced.
  We always implemented review body awards in full. However, it would have been irresponsible to say to health authorities, "We are now going to implement the pay award in full when we know that you do not have the funds." The Government, who panicked over the weekend about the health service, have done just that. They believe that, as it is in local areas that they will carry the consequences of a diminished ability to deliver the service, they can have their press release now about how they are implementing pay increases in full and straight away.
  My right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Sir N. Fowler) said most of what I wished to say about the longer term, and I have taken up my time speaking about the shorter term, but I could not put it better than my right hon. Friend has already done.
  Every time an Opposition Member speaks about change, we are accused of wanting to privatise the NHS. That sterile argument is ridiculous. My hon. Friend the Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox) made it clear that we are committed to the NHS, to its principles and to increased expenditure on it. We wish to explore ways in which the resources available to health care as a whole can be increased. Some suggestions are ill thought-out. I do not approve of the American system, and under the continental system, Governments must be careful about the costs that they impose on employers and hence on employment, with the prospect of causing unemployment.
  We favour an imaginative look at alternative ways of funding health care. We have consistently supported partnership with the private sector. The Liberal Democrats, in the shape of the hon. Member for North Devon, were more than usually prepared to concede that expanding the private sector would ease the pressure on the NHS.
  Labour Members argue that if the private sector were allowed to grow, it would compete with the NHS for staff, so we should not even try to contemplate new resources coming into the health service from outside general taxation, because that would increase competition for doctors and nurses. That argument is fatuous and could be used against the expansion of resources in practically every other sector of the economy.
  The Prime Minister said on Sunday that of course his Government were in favour of partnership with the private sector. He seems to have lost touch with his own party, as well as with the state of affairs in the NHS. One has only to listen to the present Secretary of State and the previous one, and hear of experiences of attempts to develop further partnership with the private sector, to know that the Labour party is still marked by deep and bitter hostility to the idea that we should source health care other than from the national health service, financed by general taxation.

  729 ery other developed country in the world has found that a sterile approach. At a time when the Labour party has got into its first health service crisis, does not know why and has no policy for getting out of it—apart from a few slogans—it should be more receptive to the original and constructive propositions being put forward by the Opposition.
  6.2 pm
  Dr. Howard Stoate: It always gives me great pleasure to take part in health debates: I am one of the few Members who still has personal contact with the NHS, as I still do some medical surgeries in general practice.
  We have heard some extraordinary statements today. The one from the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) takes the biscuit. He tried to explain that he phased in the pay awards when he was Secretary of State because the health authorities could not afford to pay them. Of course they could not—the previous Government did not give them the money. Had the Government given health authorities the 6.8 per cent. average that we have given, they would have been able to afford decent pay awards for decent staff.
  Mr. Brady rose—
  Dr. Stoate: I shall give way in a moment.
  To cool the temper of the debate, I shall try to establish whether there is a genuine crisis in the NHS. I shall do so by reference to my own experience. As the House knows, I am a general practitioner. This morning I contacted my local health trust to find out what was happening. It is indeed under severe strain, among other reasons because it is 92 nurses—about 13 per cent. of the nurse complement—short.
  Why are health trusts short of nurses? Because they cannot get trained nurses. Why can they not get trained nurses? Because there are not enough trained nurses in the health service. They are doing their best to put that right, as are the Government, but it is nonsense to suppose that we can produce trained nurses out of a hat.
  The idea that complementing the health service by using the private sector would solve the problem is even greater nonsense. The same number of trained nurses would be split between two hospitals—the national health hospital, which would be struggling to keep them, and the private hospital, which would be struggling to poach them. It is fairly obvious that there would be winners and losers, but we cannot stretch the number of nurses, unless we want them to do double shifts and work 16 hours a day.
  Mr. Gillan rose—
  Dr. Stoate: I shall give way later, but I want to make progress first.
  It is impossible to get more out of our dedicated staff. That applies not just to nurses, but to professions allied to medicine, including technicians, and of course doctors. If doctors are doing coronary artery bypass grafts down the road at the private hospital, they are not doing them in the NHS hospital. The idea that twice as many coronary artery
  730
  bypass grafts could be done if the private ward down the road were opened does not accord with the facts, because the same surgeons work in both the private sector and the NHS.
  When I refer patients for surgery, they often ask me whether they can go privately. The answer is yes, they can go privately, but they will see the same consultant and get the same treatment. And guess what? If they get the treatment privately, the consultant whom they see will not be in the NHS hospital. We cannot have it both ways. The idea of expanding the private sector as some miraculous panacea will not do the business.
  We heard tell of Lord Winston's comments. Lord Winston is an honourable and decent physician, and he has a point of view, but I cannot agree with it. Consultants are feeling frustrated and let down. As has been pointed out, the reason is that the Government's health reforms, putting primary care in the driving seat, threaten some interest groups. The reforms threaten the monopolies of certain physicians and specialists, who are seeing some of their power put back into primary care, where doctors, nurses, social service staff and others are making decisions on what constitutes the best health care for their area, in conjunction with health improvement programmes, the Commission for Health Improvement and the work of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence. All that will improve health care, but may well damage some personal empires and private interests in the health service. I understand that view, although I disagree with it, but to sensationalise the position is quite wrong.
  We also heard it said that we need to increase health resources to the European average. That is certainly a target, but we must be careful to compare like with like. In the UK, NHS spending and private health spending together represent about 6.8 per cent. of gross domestic product. The European average is about 8.8 per cent. of GDP—about 2 per cent. more. However, if we analyse those systems, we find that they are much more bureaucratic than ours.
  In the 1960s and 1970s the NHS used to spend 3 to 4 per cent. of its total budget on administration and bureaucracy. The Conservatives managed to increase that to 6 per cent. by introducing their market reforms, which increased administration costs, if not clinical costs. In most European systems, the administration costs are far higher—10 per cent. in some cases. In America, administration costs are even higher, and can reach 12 or 15 per cent. If that money is stripped out, the European average of 8.8 per cent. of GDP is closer to 7.8 per cent, which is not so very far above our 6.8 per cent.
  I am not arguing that the NHS has enough money. No hon. Member believes that—it clearly does not have enough money. Everyone in the House believes that we need to spend more. There is no argument about that. The question is how we do it.
  I listened closely to suggestions from the Opposition about how we could increase the contribution of the private sector. Let us assume that there are enough doctors and nurses, and concentrate on funding. Various alternatives have been proposed, and it is unfair for the Opposition to claim that the Government have not thought them through. The Government have considered them carefully.

  731
  The alternatives are compulsory insurance or voluntary insurance. Both have costs. Compulsory insurance is merely a stealth tax. If people are told that they must have private insurance, that is the same as taxation. Where is the advantage in that? We might as well pay for the service out of general taxation. If people are urged to have voluntary insurance, something different will happen. People will say, "If I'm going to pay voluntarily for health insurance, I want something more in return than the bloke down the road, who doesn't have it."
  That will create a huge split in the service and a massive two-tier system. I do not believe that the British people's sense of fair play would allow that. There are far greater problems. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said, the people who need health insurance— those with chronic illnesses and pre-existing conditions— will not get health insurance.
  I should like to see the health insurance company that would take on someone with chronic diabetes, renal failure and eye problems. It would be crazy if it did, and I am sure that actuarial advisers would say that that was a bad bet, in the same way as insurance companies will not take on a young driver with four convictions for drunk driving. They do not want to know such people, and they will not want to know people with chronic health problems. If, however, private health insurance companies were forced to take those people on, it would merely force up the premiums for everyone else, and we would be back where we started. People will not want to pay hugely inflated premiums. Private health insurance simply does not cut the mustard. It is not fair for Conservative Members to claim that we have not thought the matter through. We have considered it for many years.
  I want to comment on the suggestion that the health service has deteriorated rapidly since the Labour party took office. When I qualified in medicine 20 years ago, our health service was the envy of the world. Nobody challenged that slogan. Twenty years on, however, we are led to believe that we have the worst system in Europe— a health service that is even worse than Poland's. For 18 of those 20 years, the national health service was in the hands of the Tory party; it has been in the hands of the Labour party for only two years or so. That sets alarm bells ringing and makes people wonder what happened. Could it be that the previous Government were not especially interested in preserving the health service? Perhaps they liked the idea of the slow decline of the NHS into a second-rate service; perhaps it served their purpose. When my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Mr. Hinchliffe) read out The Sunday Times article, which outlined the wishes of the hon. Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox) for the NHS, the matter began to become clear. Perhaps the hon. Member for Woodspring does not want the NHS to be the primary provider in the new century.
  I want to consider the flu epidemic. I shall not speak for too long because other hon. Members want to contribute, but most of the media interest has sprung from the so-called flu epidemic. Frankly, I am not sure whether there is a flu epidemic—and I do not even care, because the answer depends on the way in which one measures an epidemic. A traditional measurement is 400 sufferers per 10,000 visiting a general practitioner in one week. However, nowadays, more options are open to those who suffer from flu. They can visit their pharmacist, phone NHS Direct, go to casualty, speak to a neighbour or take
  732
  home remedies. Many people are far better informed and do not go to their GP. However, the people who visit their doctor with flu are more ill than in previous years. There are far more cases of genuine flu rather than the flu-like symptoms of previous years. Patients are more ill, need far more treatment and take longer to get over the illness. Some people have taken three or four weeks to recover.
  This morning, I saw a lady who was very ill through flu complications. In previous years, I would have sent her to hospital. However, the Government have made a real advance: for the first time, I had an option. I could tell that lady that she did not need to go to hospital because we could manage her condition at home with proper nursing, physiotherapy, and through involving social services. For the first winter I can remember, we can manage that patient at home on an acute basis. The NHS is well prepared for the crisis. I turned up and said what needed to be done. In a few minutes, we took action, the services were provided and the lady could be looked after at home, where she wanted to be. The NHS is thus more modern and better prepared than some hon. Members claim.
  I want to consider flu injections. Much research shows that flu injections work, although they are not perfect. However, there are two provisos. The injections need to be targeted at vulnerable groups and we need to increase the herd immunity of the population. I hate to refer to hon. Members as a herd, but the description fits the concept of immunity. Those needs mean vaccinating more widely. The Government should consider carefully widening the net for flu jabs in an epidemic year. That means targeting not only all those who are at risk but their carers. I suggest targeting those who are over 65 rather than over 75, and injecting crucial care workers and others who perform an essential service in society. If a carer is sick with flu, it is a tragedy not only for the carer but the person who is cared for. The Government should consider widening the availability of flu immunisation to cover far more people. We can thus spare the NHS significant strain. If it is true that the NHS is under strain as a result of the flu bug, it is also true that much of the problem would disappear if it was controlled.
  The NHS ain't broke, but it needs fixing. It comprises a dedicated group of staff: doctors, nurses, staff in the professions allied to medicine, managers and others do a splendid job in difficult circumstances. We should pay tribute to them because they keep the NHS going. Clearly, we must do something to provide more resources for the NHS. The Government are honest and open in admitting that we need more money and in holding a debate on the source of the funding. For all the reasons that I and other hon. Members have given, privatising more of the health service or increasing private insurance will not provide what we want. We need a modern health service for this century. Privatisation and private health insurance are not the answer; we require a better-funded public health service. I will leave the calculations to the Chancellor and his colleagues because that is their field, but I call for greater funding in future.
  If Conservative Members want to reform a bankrupt and outdated institution, they need look no further than their party. I wonder whether the private sector would be interested in buying it from them.
  6.16 pm
  Mr. Michael Portillo: I want to talk about money and pick up on the excellent speech that my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Sir N. Fowler) made. I also want to show that the way in which we fund the health service is largely an historical accident, and not replicated in any other country in the world.
  The source of money in any society is its citizenry. However a service is funded—through insurance or taxes—the people of a country are the only source of money. However, it is easier to raise money for a purpose such as the national health service if the funds available are numerous and varied. If there are several pots from which to draw money, the strain is far less than when the entire burden is placed on one source: in the case of the NHS, taxation.
  Mr. Casale: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
  Mr. Portillo: I shall not give way at all.
  The method of funding the NHS in this country came about in an arbitrary manner. Beveridge, who produced his report in 1942, tackled the NHS only briefly. None the less, he commented that
  "previous contribution—
  by which he meant previous insurance contribution—
  "is the ideal, better even than free service supported by the taxpayer."
  Bevan devised the idea that the service should be funded only by the taxpayer. In a recent history of the NHS by Geoffrey Rivett, he stated that
  "few other countries, outside the Eastern bloc, followed the … route"
  that Britain took. However, even Nye Bevan recognised that the NHS could survive only if it leant on the private sector. He realised that he could not afford to pay consultants to work in the NHS for the money that was necessary to engage their services. He permitted them to work privately and allowed pay-beds in NHS hospitals. He said:
  "I stuffed their mouths with gold."
  In other words, he bought off consultants. Labour Members know that that is true. For some Labour Members, especially the hon. Member for Wakefield (Mr. Hinchliffe), to talk of the private sector as though it were evil or inimical to the NHS is not only stupid but unhistorical. The NHS has changed little, and continues to depend fundamentally on a cross-subsidy from private patients, which enables it to have consultants' services at cut prices.
  Bevan invented the principle that the health service should be funded almost exclusively by taxpayers. As Labour Members know, he and the rest of the Labour Cabinet fell out about that because even the Labour Cabinet that introduced the NHS favoured prescription charges and charges for spectacles. Many supported charging for hospital stays. Even the Labour Government who introduced the NHS believed that it could not survive on taxpayers' funding alone.
  When Nye Bevan resigned, the right hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr. Benn)—who was a witness to all those
  734
  events and is in the Chamber now, I think because I told him that I would be quoting him—said, most interestingly:
  "On this question of 'principle' of a free health service, it is nonsense. There are many national scandals it would be costly to correct. This is not a matter of principle, but to the contrary it is a practical matter. There is only one test we can apply and it is an overall one: 'with what we have and can get by way of revenue, how can we lay it to the best advantage of those who need it most?'"
  Mr. Tony Benn: The right hon. Gentleman said that he would quote from the diary. It was from this seat that I heard Aneurin make his resignation speech. If the right hon. Gentleman reads a little further, he will see that I was in favour of increasing income tax to finance the service. Perhaps he will do me the justice of quoting what I wrote 49 years ago.
  Mr. Portillo: I am most grateful to the right hon. Gentleman, and my purpose in warning him that I would quote him was intended to enable him to be here if he wanted. His practical approach of all those years ago contrasts sharply with the dogmatic approach of his party's Front Benchers in today's debate. The irony is that Bevan—who resigned in 1950 and was regarded as an outcast, at least by the Labour Cabinet and even by much of the Labour party—subsequently became a hero, and the idea that the health service had to be funded from taxpayers' money alone was raised to the status of a dogma. That dogma, I am afraid, has dogged the debate ever since.
  In 1949, the health service absorbed 3.5 per cent. of gross domestic product. Today, that figure is still under 6 per cent. Over 50 years, there has been a minimal increase in the percentage of GDP dedicated to the health service as people—[Interruption.] I do not know what the hon. Member for Liverpool, Garston (Maria Eagle) is crying about. As every Member of the House knows, this country contrasts sharply with most others where health services have not been funded exclusively by taxpayers. Let me cite figures that appeared in The Times yesterday: Britain spends £889 per head of population; France, £1,433; and Germany, £1,634. We have heard that the United States spends twice the proportion of GDP that we do, but it may astound Labour Members to know that 43 per cent. of its health spending was spent by the public sector in 1993 and it is likely that that figure has increased substantially. That means that the United States public health sector spends more per head of population than the British Government. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Dartford (Dr. Stoate) shakes his head, but it is so. Getting on for 50 per cent. of health spending in the United States is spent by the Government. If that is divided by the population, the figure is more than we ourselves spend.
  I want to get on to the point about diversity of sources. In the Netherlands, 68 per cent. of health spending comes from social health insurance; 14 per cent. from private insurance; and only 10 per cent. from taxes. The insularity of the Labour party shocks me, as does the idea that a country that is only a few miles away has a system that must self-evidently be rotten or imperfect. The Secretary of State said that he did not want to look at Germany because things did not work there. That must be news to the Germans, but, for the record, about 14 per cent. of health spending in Germany comes from the Government. Here is the appalling fact for us all to face: not only is the

  735
  NHS not regarded as the best health service in the world, but we now have the most inequitable system in the world. I do not know of many countries where having money makes as much difference as it does in this country to the treatment received. We know that a person with money can get an operation immediately, and that a person who does not may have to wait several years.
  Maria Eagle: Eighteen years.
  Mr. Portillo rose—
  Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I am sorry to interrupt the right hon. Gentleman, but may I say to the hon. Lady that the silence of parliamentary private secretaries is a wondrous thing?
  Mr. Portillo: Given that this country has what appears, at least on paper, to be the most socialist of all health services that I can think of—as Geoffrey Rivett would say, at least outside the old eastern bloc—it is a national disgrace that this is the country where having money makes the biggest difference to whether a person receives timely health treatment.
  Laura Moffatt: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
  Mr. Portillo: No, I am about to end my speech.
  There is an extraordinary paradox: the Prime Minister says that he wants to modernise Britain, but on the health service he is completely paralysed and unable to look outside the blinkers of the way in which we have done things for 50 years. The right hon. Gentleman regards himself as outward looking and internationalist and wants to be at the heart of Europe, but apparently cannot see through the fog of the channel to look at how things are done differently in different places. It is extraordinary to see such a Prime Minister so dug in and so dogmatically wedded to everything that we have done in the past and to the way in which we have done it. There is no other part of the heritage of the Labour Government of the 1940s to which the Prime Minister is wedded in such a way. Exclusively, apparently, the health service has to remain frozen and preserved in aspic.
  The Prime Minister's comments have been disappointing and unworthy. The slogan that has been developed—"the only alternative to modernising is privatising"—is downright dishonest, and many of my right hon. and hon. Friends were deeply depressed that the new Secretary of State was content to sloganise and wanted to make the NHS an election issue, apparently refusing to address the serious point. My conclusion is that Nye Bevan may indeed have done a great service to this country by freeing its people from fear of medical bills, but that, by raising to the status of dogma the financing of the national health service by the taxpayer, he has frozen in fear, in perpetuity, the politicians who ought to be addressing this serious issue.
  6.27 pm
  Laura Moffatt: I have a couple of minutes to make my points, in particular about staff. I have been astonished by some of the comments of Conservative Members. There were amazing understatements, such as
  736
  that from the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke), who said, "I believe that we did not leave the reforms of the health service quite at the point at which we would have liked." The right hon. Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Mr. Portillo) said that the health service is preserved in aspic, as though the only issue relating to modernisation is the way that it is funded. Was he entirely satisfied with the state of the NHS when he lost his job in 1997? I suspect not, if what he said today is true.
  It is dishonest of the Opposition not to say that the so-called reforms that they put in place have caused these difficulties because they have. There is no question about that. We have gone down a path that has caused the greatest difficulty for our staff in the NHS and the Labour Government are making sure that we get back on the straight and narrow, get people back into the health service and properly respond to their needs, particularly in cash. However, that is not the only issue. It is right and proper to reward nurses, but no one could do the job just for the money.
  Not one Conservative Member talked about the safety issues facing the NHS. If people are our most precious commodity, as they are in the NHS, we must respect them and understand that they want to work in an NHS that is safe and does the job that they as professionals expect it to do. It is important that we respond properly to their needs. For example, in the south-east, the availability of affordable housing is an issue and we have to make sure that people can work in places where it is extremely difficult to recruit. The NHS becomes unsafe because we cannot get people to work in it.
  We talk about beds, beds, beds and say that there are not enough in the NHS, but that is not the issue. One can go to Ikea and get as many beds as one wants. This is about the people who are working to ensure that the patients in the beds are safe, and are being cared for according to the standards that we all expect.
  The modernising agenda is there. The Labour party is responding to the needs. We, not the Conservative party, are listening to people, and that is why we will get it right.
  6.30 pm
  Mr. Philip Hammond: I have listened carefully to all that has been said, some of which has been very interesting. The hon. Member for North Devon (Mr. Harvey) agreed with my hon. Friend the Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox) that the growth of the private sector would complement the national health service. I welcome that uncharacteristic display of openness from a Liberal Democrat.
  The hon. Member for Wakefield (Mr. Hinchliffe), who is not present, is at least consistent, and I would not expect him to move an inch. I disagree with him entirely, but I respect his consistency: he is one of the few Labour Members who have stuck to a position that they have maintained for many years. He did, however, manage to ignore the experience of the rest of Europe and, indeed, the rest of the world.
  My right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Sir N. Fowler) helpfully drew attention to the sterility of much of the political debate about the NHS. He referred to longer-term trends extending over periods exceeding any Government's time in office. The conclusions that we must draw from those longer-term trends underline that,

  737
  notwithstanding the rhetoric, all Governments over the past 20 years or so have spent more on the NHS, and the problems have not gone away. That emphasises the need for serious consideration of strategic approaches to those problems.
  The hon. Member for Rother Valley (Mr. Barron) seemed to suggest that doctors were to blame, because they are building and defending their empires. He apparently supports the idea that the Government should tell doctors how to spend their resources. He calls it modernisation; I suspect that most people in the health service would call it meddling. Most telling of all, after his condemnation of the internal market, he gave figures relating to the differing costs of certain procedures in different hospitals. He was right to draw attention to the disparities, but had it not been for the internal market he would not have had the figures.
  Mr. Barron: According to the hon. Gentleman, I said that doctors were to blame. In fact, he has answered his own point. The figures that I gave relate to the practices of clinicians in the NHS. I asked why some clinical interventions cost three times as much as others. Surely he accepts that ensuring that our money is used in a resourceful way should be a priority.
  Mr. Hammond: It is an important issue, and the hon. Gentleman is entirely right; but without the internal market he would not have the figures that he has been quoting at us, and we could not pursue his argument and, hopefully, make the necessary savings.
  In our last health debate, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) warned the Secretary of State that winter crises would inevitably recur unless the fundamental issues were addressed. I remember that very well. My right hon. and learned Friend is eminently qualified to draw attention to the myth continually promoted by the Government that a re-elected Conservative Administration would have stuck to the draft spending plans. Everyone knows that we had annual spending rounds, and spending on the NHS would—as it always had—have increased year on year. By pretending that they would follow the Conservative spending plans, the Government starved the NHS for the first two years; now they wonder why the patient is not responding to force feeding.
  My right hon. and learned Friend spoke of the discredited £21 billion slogan. As he said, it has now been replaced by a new slogan referring to a "five years ahead" target to match a European spending average that has not been defined for us. It is not even clear to me that that constitutes a pledge. I hope that the Minister can tell us whether the Prime Minister gave a clear commitment on Sunday.
  The hon. Member for Dartford (Dr. Stoate), who often speaks on these matters, said that the NHS wasn't broke, but did need fixing. He seemed to miss an important point about additional resources. He said that expanding private spending would simply denude the NHS of resources. Let me tell him that, whether financial resources come from the private sector or the public sector, they will contribute exactly the same to the pot, and the problem will be exactly the same: how to turn financial resources into real
  738
  resources. The Secretary of State may say that that problem can be solved by injecting more public money, but it can equally be solved by finding other financial resources.
  Dr. Stoate: It is generous of the hon. Gentleman to give way to me in his winding-up speech. In fact, I was referring to NHS staff. There are not enough doctors, not enough nurses and not enough members of professions allied to medicine. Until we have trained more people— as the Government are doing—reapportioning the same number of staff between the private and public sectors will not improve the situation.
  Mr. Hammond: What the hon. Gentleman said was that more private spending would denude the NHS of resources. More needs to be spent on health care, but the problem of translating financial resources into real resources—doctors and nurses—will be the same whether the money comes through additional private spending, a mixed model or more state expenditure.
  My right hon. Friend the Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Mr. Portillo) drew our attention to the important fact that it is largely through historical accident that our national health service is funded as it is. He posed a good question: why is it, outside the eastern bloc, a unique model for the delivery of health care? If it had so much to recommend it, why did not other countries in western Europe copy it when rebuilding their economies in the 1950s and 1960s? He also drew attention to the insularity of the Labour party. The party that does not want to be isolated in Europe has refused to learn anything from the lessons of all our European neighbours over 30 or 40 years.
  I am delighted that the Under-Secretary of State for Wales is to wind up the debate, but I find it odd that, with four junior health Ministers in the House, it was not possible to find one who was willing and able to do so.
  We have heard from Labour Members—not least the hon. Member for Crawley (Laura Moffatt)—a catalogue of complacency, in the face of the worst short-term crisis that the NHS has faced in living memory and against a backdrop of growing discontent with the state of our health system overall. The Government stand exposed as complacent, ill-prepared, shifty and manipulative when under pressure, and simply not credible when attempting to formulate a policy response to the longer-term strategic questions that face health services, while refusing to abandon any of their dogmatic baggage.
  I thought it a telling insight into new Labour's priorities that, at the beginning of last week, with patients dying for want of intensive-care beds, staff working at breaking point and hospitals bursting at the seams, there was, according to the Secretary of State, "not a crisis". But by the end of the week, one doctor speaking his mind and telling the truth about Labour's national health service had become a crisis of such proportions that it required the direct involvement of the Prime Minister.
  Labour has no credible policy solution to the problems of the NHS: the Prime Minister's intervention confirmed that. We have no clue about how the Government would deal with the real problems in the long term. Their prescription is "more of the same"—although it is obvious to every qualified observer that, after nearly three years, the new Labour medicine simply is not working.

  739
  As my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield commented, in the Secretary of State's whole rambling speech, there was not a single new idea for the resourcing of our national health service.
  The Secretary of State said that he had an open mind, but it was abundantly clear during his speech that he has not. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield said, it is unbelievably depressing. The Secretary of State's dogmatic hostility to the private sector was tangible throughout his speech.
  Many hon. Members paid tribute to the valiant efforts of the dedicated staff—just about the only thing holding the health service together. I associate myself with those remarks, but the fact is that, despite those efforts, the NHS is not providing a basic acceptable level of service to all. The Prime Minister has acknowledged as much, snatching the rug as he did so from under the Secretary of State, who just a few days earlier had denied that that was the case.
  As it is currently managed and run, the NHS clearly cannot cope when faced with a sudden surge in demand. People living in an advanced, affluent democracy—the world's fifth largest economy—at the outset of the 21st century should not have to ask themselves, "If I fall sick, will there be a hospital bed available for me?" or, "If I need an intensive care bed, how many hundreds of miles will I have to be transported to get it?"
  Our neighbours in France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands take such a service for granted. It is increasingly clear that the British public are no longer willing to be denied the levels of health care that their neighbours enjoy simply because of the Government's dogmatic political ideology.
  The current crisis in the NHS is a catalyst that demands a triple response. First, we need an immediate short-term response from the Government. On that count, they have clearly failed. They failed to give a clear undertaking to hospitals that they could devote resources to medical priorities without risking penalisation under the Government's waiting list scheme. They have failed to take the lead in encouraging NHS hospitals to use the private sector where that is sensible. Instead, they have ducked and weaved, relying on spin, rather than looking for real solutions.
  The Government tried to exaggerate the status of the flu epidemic outbreak. They then misled us over the number of intensive care beds that had been created and suppressed the report of the inquiry into NHS beds, which will show that, despite their rhetoric, bed numbers have fallen under Labour.
  Secondly, in the medium term, we need an end to the system of initiatives that is doing so much to damage the NHS, particularly the Government's waiting list pledge, which has grotesquely distorted clinical priorities throughout the service in favour of Labour's political priorities. Since they came to office, they have doubled the number of in-patients waiting more than 13 weeks and doubled the number of people waiting for an out-patient consultation. We need an end to that distorting system immediately.
  Thirdly and perhaps most importantly, the crisis shows the need for a longer-term, more measured response to the underlying problems of the NHS: not a panic reaction such as the one that has occurred in the past couple of
  740
  days, with wild half promises and vague commitments, but a measured, serious review of the options for future delivery of health care.
  We have invited the Government to join in such a review, starting without any ideological baggage and looking at all the options with the open mind that the Secretary of State claimed he had. It has been made abundantly clear from the things that he has said that he rejects that opportunity to take the NHS off the political battlefield and to deal with it rationally.
  So far, the Government's only response to serious debate on the future of the health service is to level the rather pathetic charge that anyone who dares to question the sustainability of the present model—which is now almost all serious commentators—wants to privatise the NHS. That seems to be the only argument that the Government can deploy in defence of the status quo. They do not deploy reasoned arguments, call for open discussion of the options, or review experience elsewhere. It is simply a knee-jerk reaction. That strikes me as the position of a Government who are not confident of their case, but have a bunker-style mentality, are increasingly isolated at home on the issue and are in a minority of one, even among their socialist colleagues in Europe.
  The Conservative position could not be clearer. The Leader of the Opposition has made it clear, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Woodspring again today. We are committed absolutely to the NHS, free at the point of delivery. We are committed to increases year on year in real terms in NHS funding under the next Conservative Government. However, we recognise that, even with that commitment to tax-funded NHS spending, it will not be enough in the face of the explosion in medical technology and the imminent genetics revolution. All serious commentators now agree that what is needed is strategic and innovative thinking about the NHS. We have seen that there is no appetite on the Government Benches for such a debate.
  The irresistible conclusion for anyone with an open mind on the subject is that a great part of the additional spending that we will have to deploy to deliver the health services that the people of this country demand and deserve in the 21st century will have to come from sources other than general taxation. That is not to supplant the NHS, but to supplement it. It is to ensure sustainable growth in the overall resources that are available for health care.
  As a result of this debate, the Government need to recognise, if nothing else, that it is not the ideological purity of the NHS that matters to the people of Britain, but the practical reality of effective health care that is free at the point of delivery and there for them when they need it—as, tragically, it was not for Mavis Skeet and many others.
  6.46 pm
  The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Wales (Mr. David Hanson): We have had an interesting debate, although it has been somewhat curtailed because of the time available, on the important subject of the NHS. To answer the hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr. Hammond) immediately, I am here as the Under-Secretary of State for Wales because we are a United Kingdom Parliament. There are Labour Members who are interested in Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland health

  741
  matters and issues in a UK context. I recognise that the Conservative party does not have seats in any of those places, but it is important for us to look at the health service in the context of the UK. As hon. Members can see, the amendment has been tabled in the names of my right hon. Friends the Secretaries of State for Scotland, for Northern Ireland and for Wales, whereas the Conservative party motion refers to the UK as a whole.
  Some central themes have been raised: change, funding, modernisation and reform. However, there has been a marked divergence between the approach of the Conservative Opposition and that of Labour Members. Interestingly, the three Members who spoke from the Conservative Back Benches were the right hon. Members for Sutton Coldfield (Sir N. Fowler) and for Kensington and Chelsea (Mr. Portillo) and the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke). They were all Cabinet Ministers in the Conservative Government, who were in office for 18 years and caused many of the problems that we face today.
  The Conservative Opposition have suggested that there is under-funding in the NHS. They have made some imaginative suggestions about increased involvement of the private health sector in funding the NHS. Alternative ways have been suggested to allow the private sector to take over some of the responsibilities that are funded by taxation. All those ideas are contrary to the spirit of what the Government believe in, to which Labour Members have referred. It is interesting that, while serving their party in government for 18 years, those three Conservative Back Benchers supported the NHS by reducing its funding. They now come forward—
  Sir Raymond Whitney: Will the Minister give way?
  Mr. Hanson: In a moment.
  Those Conservative Members reduced NHS funding in overall terms—
  Sir Raymond Whitney rose—
  Mr. Hanson: I will give way in a moment.
  Those Members reduced funding in overall terms— [Interruption.]
  Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael J. Martin): Order. We cannot have such behaviour. The hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford (Mr. Davies) should not shout across the Chamber.
  Mr. Hanson: In that time, those Conservative Members reduced the NHS's real funding and caused difficulties, but they now suggest using the private health sector as an option for funding.
  Sir Raymond Whitney: Will the hon. Gentleman retract the misinformation that he has just given the House? The figures show that, in the 18 years of Conservative Government, real-terms spending on the health service increased by 75 per cent.
  Mr. Hanson: This Government will be providing additional resources to the national health service, over
  742
  and above what the Conservative Government provided. As a constituency Member of Parliament, my experience has been—[HON. MEMBERS: "Withdraw."]
  Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. There is no point in hon. Members shouting withdraw. The Minister is in order. Had he been out of order, I would have been the first to say so.
  Mr. Hanson: My experience as a constituency Member of Parliament is that, when the previous Government were in office, the number of beds in my constituency and overall NHS real-terms funding were reduced.
  In today's debate, my hon. Friends the Members for Wakefield (Mr. Hinchliffe), for Crawley (Laura Moffatt), for Rother Valley (Mr. Barron) and for Dartford (Dr. Stoate) have offered real alternatives in ensuring modernisation, commitment and long-term funding of the NHS and in tackling the consequences of the Tory record on the national health service. My hon. Friend the Member for Dartford expressed strong views on illness prevention, a primary issue that will have to be addressed if we are to ensure that the NHS is strongly supported.
  In this debate, there was, as ever, disagreement among Liberal Democrat Members. The hon. Member for North Devon (Mr. Harvey) certainly welcomed the Government's plans to achieve additional expenditure on health services, so that it matches the similar expenditure of our European partners. However, the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Dr. Tonge), who has left the Chamber, did not particularly support his comments, or those of Conservative Members, on private-sector involvement.
  We have had an interesting debate, in which hon. Members have raised various issues, but the themes developed by Conservative Members—on the private health sector and on underfunding—have not chimed with it.
  I am proud to be a member of a Labour Government— such as the one who founded the national health service. The right hon. Member for Kensington and Chelsea mentioned Bevan's founding of the health service, but not the fact that Conservative Members voted 51 times against its founding. I am proud to be a member of a Government who are committed to modernising the health service and to looking forward.
  There is great pressure on the national health service, and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health and others recognise that pressure. However, we should remember that, over Christmas, hundreds of people across Wales, Scotland and England received emergency care and were admitted to hospital, and that hundreds of thousands of people received other support and help from the NHS.
  Mr. Crispin Blunt: The hon. Gentleman relies on his own constituency experience to deny the 75 per cent. real funding increase provided by the Conservative Government. My constituency experience includes a 75-year-old lady who, on Christmas eve, was turned away from the Redhill hospital and sent to find an intensive care bed in Great Yarmouth. What does the Minister tell her and her family about the treatment that she received?
  Mr. Hanson: As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said, there have been problems—no one denies that.

  743
  At the start of 2000, there were 190 cases of flu per 100,000 population in Wales, whereas four weeks previously only three people per 100,000 had flu. It was a major increase in a short time. We have to recognise that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Dartford said, people are now suffering from flu for longer—on average, 10 to 12 days rather than four to five days—and that more older people are suffering from it.
  Certainly in Wales, and probably also in England, the pressures are the greatest in 25 years—[HON. MEMBERS: "No."] The Government have provided extra resources in England and Wales—[Interruption.] Pressures on health services in my part of Wales are certainly the greatest that they have been for 25 years, due largely to the number of people who have had flu—[Interruption.] We need to—
  Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I cannot allow the situation to continue. The Minister is entitled to a hearing.
  Mr. Hanson: Pressures on the health service have increased substantially because of the flu, but those pressures are being dealt with. We have provided additional resources to deal with winter pressures and undertaken severe long-term planning to deal with them.
  Today's debate gives us an opportunity to focus on the future, not simply on the current winter crisis. Since the general election, the Government have increased real-terms spending on the health service.
  Dr. Brand: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
  Mr. Hanson: I shall give way in a moment.
  Since the general election, an additional £1.9 billion has been pledged in England and, in the next three years, another £18 billion of extra expenditure will be provided. In those two years, in my part of Wales £291 million over and above the resources planned by the Conservative Government has been provided, and £1.3 billion of expenditure is pledged for the next three years. It is about the need to ensure long-term planning, modernisation, change and funding—which is the exact point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley.
  Mr. Wilshire: If there is so much extra money sloshing around, why has my health authority been ordered to cut £20 million of its spending in the next three years?
  Mr. Hanson: As my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Health said, there have been huge deficits in some health authorities.
  We should consider the Tory record. Under the previous Government—and the stewardship of the right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks (Mr. Hague), who was Secretary of State for Wales—Wales lost 1,200 hospital beds, inpatient waiting lists increased by 5,800, and 300 nurses, midwives and home visitors were lost.
  Mr. Hammond: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
  Mr. Hanson: No; time is pressing. [HON. MEMBERS: "Give way."] The hon. Gentleman overran his time.
  744
  We should focus on the Labour initiatives that the Government have taken in Wales and elsewhere. To date, NHS Direct has received almost 1 million calls. In Wales, NHS Direct has received—
  Several hon. Members rose—
  Mr. Hammond: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
  Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The hon. Gentleman has said that he will not give way.
  Mr. Hanson: The national health service, under the stewardship of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, has provided an additional £80 million for cancer services and an additional £3.5 million in Wales. The funding is part of meeting the target—in which the Prime Minister is directly interested—of saving 100,000 lives.
  Several hon. Members rose—
  Mrs. Gillan: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
  Mr. Hanson: No.
  Additional resources have been provided to assist nurse recruitment in Wales. Extra nurse posts are available in Wales and elsewhere. The Government have spent additional sums on walk-in centres, with 20 pilot centres established in the current year in England. Since the general election, the capital programme has increased dramatically.
  Several hon. Members rose—
  Mrs. Gillan: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
  Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. It is clear that the Minister will not give way. The hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan) should not remain on her feet, but should take the hint that he is not giving way.
  Mr. Hanson: We have ensured the largest capital programme in the history of the national health service, with £8 billion of additional expenditure in the United Kingdom.
  We are also making a commitment to modernise and invest for the future. The Labour commitment is for improved funding. As the Prime Minister said, we shall invest an average funding increase to ensure that, as a percentage of gross domestic product, the United Kingdom provides the same funding levels as those provided by our European partners. We shall ensure that, over five years, there is a 5 per cent. real-terms funding growth in the national health service to ensure that we bring ourselves up to the European average.
  The Government are about modernisation and aiming for higher standards. We are also about ensuring that we provide decent levels of care for our people. Conservative Members offer privatisation, but private health insurance is not a solution to the national health service's funding problems. They argue that people should insure themselves privately, but the people who might need private health insurance under the Conservatives are the ones whom the private health insurers will not touch.

  745
  We are committed to funding and modernising the national health service and to ensuring real improvements over the next five years under this Government and beyond.
  If people want privatisation, they should follow the route of the right hon. Member for Kensington and Chelsea, who said that it was just a historical fact that the national health service was founded under Labour. He said that, under the Conservatives, private health insurance would become the norm. We reject that approach. We stand for extra funding for the national health service.
  Question put, That the original words stand part of the Question:—
  The House divided: Ayes 183, Noes 328.

  Division No. 30]

  [7 pm

  AYES

  Ainsworth, Peter (E Surrey)

  Emery, Rt Hon Sir Peter

  Allan, Richard

  Evans, Nigel

  Amess, David

  Faber, David

  Ancram, Rt Hon Michael

  Fallon, Michael

  Arbuthnot, Rt Hon James

  Fearn, Ronnie

  Atkinson, David (Bour'mth E)

  Flight, Howard

  Atkinson, Peter (Hexham)

  Forsythe, Clifford

  Baldry, Tony

  Forth, Rt Hon Eric

  Ballard, Jackie

  Foster, Don (Bath)

  Bell, Martin (Tatton)

  Fowler, Rt Hon Sir Norman

  Bercow, John

  Fox, Dr Liam

  Beresford, Sir Paul

  Fraser, Christopher

  Blunt, Crispin

  Gale, Roger

  Body, Sir Richard

  Garnier, Edward

  Boswell, Tim

  George, Andrew (St Ives)

  Bottomley, Peter (Worthing W)

  Gibb, Nick

  Bottomley, Rt Hon Mrs Virginia

  Gill, Christopher

  Brady, Graham

  Gillan, Mrs Cheryl

  Brake, Tom

  Gray, James

  Brand, Dr Peter

  Green, Damian

  Brazier, Julian

  Greenway, John

  Breed, Colin

  Grieve, Dominic

  Brooke, Rt Hon Peter

  Hague, Rt Hon William

  Browning, Mrs Angela

  Hamilton, Rt Hon Sir Archie

  Bruce, Ian (S Dorset)

  Hammond, Philip

  Bruce, Malcolm (Gordon)

  Hancock, Mike

  Burnett, John

  Harris, Dr Evan

  Burstow, Paul

  Harvey, Nick

  Butterfill, John

  Hawkins, Nick

  Cable, Dr Vincent

  Heald, Oliver

  Campbell, Rt Hon Menzies (NE Fife)

  Heath, David (Somerton & Frome)

  Heath, Rt Hon Sir Edward

  Cash, William

  Hogg, Rt Hon Douglas

  Chapman, Sir Sydney (Chipping Barnet)

  Horam, John

  Howard, Rt Hon Michael

  Chidgey, David

  Hughes, Simon (Southwark N)

  Chope, Christopher

  Hunter, Andrew

  Clark, Dr Michael (Rayleigh)

  Jack, Rt Hon Michael

  Clarke, Rt Hon Kenneth (Rushcliffe)

  Jenkin, Bernard

  Johnson Smith, Rt Hon Sir Geoffrey

  Collins, Tim

  Colvin, Michael

  Jones, Nigel (Cheltenham)

  Cotter, Brian

  Keetch, Paul

  Cran, James

  Kennedy, Rt Hon Charles (Ross Skye & Inverness W)

  Curry, Rt Hon David

  Davey, Edward (Kingston)

  Key, Robert

  Davies, Quentin (Grantham)

  King, Rt Hon Tom (Bridgwater)

  Davis, Rt Hon David (Haltemprice)

  Kirkbride, Miss Julie

  Dorrell, Rt Hon Stephen

  Kirkwood, Archy

  Duncan, Alan

  Laing, Mrs Eleanor

  Duncan Smith, Iain

  Lait, Mrs Jacqui

  746

  Lansley, Andrew

  Shephard, Rt Hon Mrs Gillian

  Leigh, Edward

  Shepherd, Richard

  Letwin, Oliver

  Simpson, Keith (Mid-Norfolk)

  Lewis, Dr Julian (New Forest E)

  Smith, Sir Robert (W Ab'd'ns)

  Lidington, David

  Smyth, Rev Martin (Belfast S)

  Lilley, Rt Hon Peter

  Spelman, Mrs Caroline

  Lloyd, Rt Hon Sir Peter (Fareham)

  Spicer, Sir Michael

  Llwyd, Elfyn

  Spring, Richard

  Loughton, Tim

  Stanley, Rt Hon Sir John

  Luff, Peter

  Steen, Anthony

  Lyell, Rt Hon Sir Nicholas

  Streeter, Gary

  MacGregor, Rt Hon John

  Stunell, Andrew

  McIntosh, Miss Anne

  Swayne, Desmond

  MacKay, Rt Hon Andrew

  Syms, Robert

  Maclean, Rt Hon David

  Tapsell, Sir Peter

  Maclennan, Rt Hon Robert

  Taylor, Ian (Esher & Walton)

  McLoughlin, Patrick

  Taylor, Rt Hon John D (Strangford)

  Madel, Sir David

  Taylor, John M (Solihull)

  Maples, John

  Taylor, Sir Teddy

  Mates, Michael

  Thompson, William

  Maude, Rt Hon Francis

  Townend, John

  Mawhinney, Rt Hon Sir Brian

  Tredinnick, David

  Michie, Mrs Ray (Argyll & Bute)

  Trend, Michael

  Moss, Malcolm

  Tyler, Paul

  Norman, Archie

  Tyrie, Andrew

  Oaten, Mark

  Viggers, Peter

  O'Brien, Stephen (Eddisbury)

  Walter, Robert

  Ottaway, Richard

  Wardle, Charles

  Page, Richard

  Waterson, Nigel

  Paice, James

  Webb, Steve

  Paterson, Owen

  Wells, Bowen

  Pickles, Eric

  Whitney, Sir Raymond

  Portillo, Rt Hon Michael

  Whittingdale, John

  Prior, David

  Widdecombe, Rt Hon Miss Ann

  Redwood, Rt Hon John

  Wilkinson, John

  Rendel, David

  Willetts, David

  Robathan, Andrew

  Willis, Phil

  Robertson, Laurence

  Wilshire, David

  Roe, Mrs Marion (Broxbourne)

  Winterton, Mrs Ann (Congleton)

  Ross, William (E Lond'y)

  Winterton, Nicholas (Macclesfield)

  Rowe, Andrew (Faversham)

  Young, Rt Hon Sir George

  Ruffley, David

  Russell, Bob (Colchester)

  Tellers for the Ayes:

  Sanders, Adrian

  Mr. John Randall and

  Sayeed, Jonathan

  Mr. Stephen Day.

  NOES

  Abbott, Ms Diane

  Blizzard, Bob

  Adams, Mrs Irene (Paisley N)

  Blunkett, Rt Hon David

  Ainger, Nick

  Boateng, Rt Hon Paul

  Ainsworth, Robert (Cov'try NE)

  Borrow, David

  Alexander, Douglas

  Bradley, Keith (Withington)

  Allen, Graham

  Bradley, Peter (The Wrekin)

  Anderson, Donald (Swansea E)

  Bradshaw, Ben

  Anderson, Janet (Rossendale)

  Brinton, Mrs Helen

  Armstrong, Rt Hon Ms Hilary

  Brown, Russell (Dumfries)

  Ashton, Joe

  Browne, Desmond

  Atherton, Ms Candy

  Burden, Richard

  Austin, John

  Burgon, Colin

  Banks, Tony

  Butler, Mrs Christine

  Barnes, Harry

  Byers, Rt Hon Stephen

  Barron, Kevin

  Caborn, Rt Hon Richard

  Bayley, Hugh

  Campbell, Alan (Tynemouth)

  Beard, Nigel

  Campbell, Ronnie (Blyth V)

  Bell, Stuart (Middlesbrough)

  Campbell-Savours, Dale

  Benn, Hilary (Leeds C)

  Cann, Jamie

  Benn, Rt Hon Tony (Chesterfield)

  Caplin, Ivor

  Bennett, Andrew F

  Casale, Roger

  Benton, Joe

  Caton, Martin

  Bermingham, Gerald

  Chapman, Ben (Wirral S)

  Berry, Roger

  Chaytor, David

  Best, Harold

  Clark, Rt Hon Dr David (S Shields)

  Betts, Clive

  Clark, Dr Lynda (Edinburgh Pentlands)

  Blackman, Liz

  Blair, Rt Hon Tony

  Clark, Paul (Gillingham)

  Blears, Ms Hazel

  Clarke, Charles (Norwich S)

  747

  Clarke, Rt Hon Tom (Coatbridge)

  Hanson, David

  Clarke, Tony (Northampton S)

  Harman, Rt Hon Ms Harriet

  Clwyd, Ann

  Heal, Mrs Sylvia

  Coaker, Vernon

  Healey, John

  Coffey, Ms Ann

  Henderson, Doug (Newcastle N)

  Cohen, Harry

  Henderson, Ivan (Harwich)

  Coleman, Iain

  Hepburn, Stephen

  Colman, Tony

  Heppell, John

  Connarty, Michael

  Hesford, Stephen

  Cook, Frank (Stockton N)

  Hewitt, Ms Patricia

  Cooper, Yvette

  Hill, Keith

  Corbyn, Jeremy

  Hinchliffe, David

  Corston, Jean

  Hoey, Kate

  Cousins, Jim

  Hood, Jimmy

  Cranston, Ross

  Hope, Phil

  Crausby, David

  Hopkins, Kelvin

  Cryer, Mrs Ann (Keighley)

  Howarth, Alan (Newport E)

  Cryer, John (Hornchurch)

  Howarth, George (Knowsley N)

  Cummings, John

  Howells, Dr Kim

  Cunningham, Jim (Cov'try S)

  Hoyle, Lindsay

  Curtis-Thomas, Mrs Claire

  Hughes, Ms Beverley (Stretford)

  Dalyell, Tam

  Hughes, Kevin (Doncaster N)

  Darling, Rt Hon Alistair

  Humble, Mrs Joan

  Darvill, Keith

  Hurst, Alan

  Davidson, Ian

  Hutton, John

  Davies, Rt Hon Denzil (Llanelli)

  Iddon, Dr Brian

  Davies, Geraint (Croydon C)

  Illsley, Eric

  Davis, Rt Hon Terry (B'ham Hodge H)

  Jackson, Helen (Hillsborough)

  Jamieson, David

  Dawson, Hilton

  Jenkins, Brian

  Denham, John

  Johnson, Alan (Hull W & Hessle)

  Dobbin, Jim

  Johnson, Miss Melanie (Welwyn Hatfield)

  Donohoe, Brian H

  Doran, Frank

  Jones, Rt Hon Barry (Alyn)

  Dowd, Jim

  Jones, Ms Jenny (Wolverh'ton SW)

  Drew, David

  Dunwoody, Mrs Gwyneth

  Jones, Jon Owen (Cardiff C)

  Eagle, Angela (Wallasey)

  Jones, Dr Lynne (Selly Oak)

  Eagle, Maria (L'pool Garston)

  Jones, Martyn (Clwyd S)

  Edwards, Huw

  Kaufman, Rt Hon Gerald

  Ellman, Mrs Louise

  Keeble, Ms Sally

  Ennis, Jeff

  Kennedy, Jane (Wavertree)

  Etherington, Bill

  Khabra, Piara S

  Field, Rt Hon Frank

  Kidney, David

  Fisher, Mark

  King, Andy (Rugby & Kenilworth)

  Fitzpatrick, Jim

  King, Ms Oona (Bethnal Green)

  Fitzsimons, Lorna

  Kumar, Dr Ashok

  Flint, Caroline

  Ladyman, Dr Stephen

  Flynn, Paul

  Lawrence, Mrs Jackie

  Follett, Barbara

  Laxton, Bob

  Foster, Rt Hon Derek

  Lepper, David

  Foster, Michael Jabez (Hastings)

  Leslie, Christopher

  Foulkes, George

  Levitt, Tom

  Fyfe, Maria

  Lewis, Ivan (Bury S)

  Galloway, George

  Lewis, Terry (Worsley)

  Gapes, Mike

  Lloyd, Tony (Manchester C)

  Gardiner, Barry

  Love, Andrew

  George, Bruce (Walsall S)

  McAvoy, Thomas

  Gerrard, Neil

  McCabe, Steve

  Gibson, Dr Ian

  McCafferty, Ms Chris

  Gilroy, Mrs Linda

  McCartney, Rt Hon Ian (Makerfield)

  Godsiff, Roger

  Goggins, Paul

  McDonagh, Siobhain

  Golding, Mrs Llin

  Macdonald, Calum

  Gordon, Mrs Eileen

  McDonnell, John

  Graham, Thomas

  McGuire, Mrs Anne

  Griffiths, Jane (Reading E)

  McIsaac, Shona

  Griffiths, Nigel (Edinburgh S)

  McKenna, Mrs Rosemary

  Griffiths, Win (Bridgend)

  Mackinlay, Andrew

  Grocott, Bruce

  McNamara, Kevin

  Grogan, John

  McNulty, Tony

  Gunnell, John

  MacShane, Denis

  Hain, Peter

  McWilliam, John

  Hall, Mike (Weaver Vale)

  Mallaber, Judy

  Hall, Patrick (Bedford)

  Marsden, Gordon (Blackpool S)

  Hamilton, Fabian (Leeds NE)

  Marshall, David (Shettleston)

  748

  Marshall, Jim (Leicester S)

  Shaw, Jonathan

  Marshall-Andrews, Robert

  Sheldon, Rt Hon Robert

  Martlew, Eric

  Shipley, Ms Debra

  Maxton, John

  Simpson, Alan (Nottingham S)

  Meacher, Rt Hon Michael

  Smith, Rt Hon Andrew (Oxford E)

  Meale, Alan

  Smith, Angela (Basildon)

  Merron, Gillian

  Smith, Jacqui (Redditch)

  Milburn, Rt Hon Alan

  Smith, John (Glamorgan)

  Miller, Andrew

  Smith, Llew (Blaenau Gwent)

  Mitchell, Austin

  Snape, Peter

  Moffatt, Laura

  Soley, Clive

  Moonie, Dr Lewis

  Southworth, Ms Helen

  Moran, Ms Margaret

  Spellar, John

  Morgan, Ms Julie (Cardiff N)

  Squire, Ms Rachel

  Morley, Elliot

  Starkey, Dr Phyllis

  Morris, Rt Hon Ms Estelle (B'ham Yardley)

  Steinberg, Gerry

  Stevenson, George

  Morris, Rt Hon Sir John (Aberavon)

  Stewart, David (Inverness E)

  Stewart, Ian (Eccles)

  Mountford, Kali

  Stoate, Dr Howard

  Mowlam, Rt Hon Marjorie

  Strang, Rt Hon Dr Gavin

  Mudie, George

  Straw, Rt Hon Jack

  Mullin, Chris

  Stringer, Graham

  Murphy, Jim (Eastwood)

  Stuart, Ms Gisela

  Murphy, Rt Hon Paul (Torfaen)

  Taylor, Rt Hon Mrs Ann (Dewsbury)

  Naysmith, Dr Doug

  O'Brien, Bill (Normanton)

  Taylor, David (NW Leics)

  O'Brien, Mike (N Warks)

  Temple-Morris, Peter

  O'Hara, Eddie

  Thomas, Gareth R (Harrow W)

  Olner, Bill

  Timms, Stephen

  O'Neill, Martin

  Tipping, Paddy

  Organ, Mrs Diana

  Todd, Mark

  Osborne, Ms Sandra

  Touhig, Don

  Perham, Ms Linda

  Trickett, Jon

  Pickthall, Colin

  Truswell, Paul

  Pike, Peter L

  Turner, Dennis (Wolverh'ton SE)

  Plaskitt, James

  Turner, Dr Desmond (Kemptown)

  Turner, Neil (Wigan)

  Pollard, Kerry

  Twigg, Derek (Halton)

  Pond Chris

  Twigg, Stephen (Enfield)

  Pope, Greg

  Vis, Dr Rudi

  Pound, Stephen

  Walley, Ms Joan

  Powell, Sir Raymond

  Ward, Ms Claire

  Prentice, Ms Bridget (Lewisham E)

  Prentice, Gordon (Pendle)

  Wareing, Robert N

  Watts, David

  Prescott Rt Hon John

  White, Brian

  Primarolo, Dawn

  Whitehead, Dr Alan

  Purchase, Ken

  Williams, Rt Hon Alan (Swansea W)

  Quinn, Lawrie

  Rapson, Syd

  Williams, Mrs Betty (Conwy)

  Reed, Andrew (Loughborough)

  Wills, Michael

  Reid, Rt Hon Dr John (Hamilton N)

  Winnick, David

  Robinson, Geoffrey (Cov'try NW)

  Winterton, Ms Rosie (Doncaster C)

  Rooker, Rt Hon Jeff

  Wise, Audrey

  Rooney, Terry

  Wood, Mike

  Ross, Ernie (Dundee W)

  Woodward, Shaun

  Rowlands, Ted

  Woolas, Phil

  Roy, Frank

  Worthington, Tony

  Ruane, Chris

  Wray, James

  Ruddock, Joan

  Wright Anthony D (Gt Yarmouth)

  Russell, Ms Christine (Chester)

  Wright, Dr Tony (Cannock)

  Ryan, Ms Joan

  Wyatt Derek

  Salter, Martin

  Sarwar, Mohammad

  Tellers for the Noes:

  Savidge, Malcolm

  Mr. David Clelland and

  Sawford, Phil

  Mr. Gerry Sutcliffe.

  Question accordingly negatived.
  Question, That the proposed words be there added, put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 31 (Questions on amendments), and agreed to.
  Mr. DEPUTY SPEAKER forthwith declared the main Question, as amended, to be agreed to.

  749
  Resolved,
  That this House applauds the dedication and commitment of National Health Service staff for their tireless efforts at all times and in particular during the millennium holiday period and the current severe outbreak of flu; welcomes the Government's acceptance of the recommendations of the National Health Service Pay Review bodies in full and without staging for the second year, in start contrast to the practice of the previous administration; notes that, between 20th December and last weekend, there were 350,000 999 calls, over 800,000 attendances at Accident and Emergency departments and there have been over 250,000 emergency admissions; recognises the vital role in meeting these pressures played by the unprecedented level of planning for the winter, covering health and social services and the extension of NHS Direct to two-thirds of England; welcomes the measures already taken by this Government to increase the capacity of the National Health Service, including increased provision of critical care beds, the modernisation of Accident and Emergency departments, the biggest ever National Health Service hospital building programme, the employment of additional doctors and the recruitment of more nurses, the cuts in in-patient waiting lists, the extra investment to modernise cancer, coronary and mental health services and the commitment to increased investment in and modernisation of the National Health Service; and rejects the Opposition's proposals to privatise the National Health Service.

  Government Running Costs
  Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael J. Martin): Madam Speaker has selected the amendment in the name of the Prime Minister.
  7.16 pm
  Mr. Andrew Lansley: I beg to move,
  That this House takes note of the increase in running costs of central Government and rising waste in public expenditure; regrets that this means resources are not reaching front-line public services; regrets that the Government seeks to deflect criticism of their failure to deliver improvements in public services onto public servants; notes the doubling in the number of paid political advisers; and deplores the Government's reliance on spin-doctoring and bureaucracy in place of support for public services.
  This debate, and the one that preceded it, are two sides of the same coin. Nearly 1,000 days into this Labour Government, the public's experience of the health service, schools, transport and crime tells them that Labour is failing to live up to its election promises. They know that Labour is putting up taxes by stealth —£40 billion of extra taxes —and they are told that billions are going into health and education. Yet they know also that money is not reaching front-line services.
  In my constituency, Addenbrookes hospital—a world-class hospital—is budgeting this year for a £2.5 million deficit, its first-ever such deficit. In recent weeks, it has on four occasions had to transfer intensive care patients elsewhere—something it has had to do only once before.
  Vital as it is to increase the resources for health and other key public services, the responsibility that goes with it, placed upon Government, is to ensure that taxpayers' money is spent effectively. The public want to know where the money is going.
  One key part of the answer is that billions are going to meet the costs of Labour's failure to reform and reduce welfare spending. The Prime Minister said:
  "I vow that we will have reduced the proportion—
  of national income—
  "we spend on welfare bills of social failure."
  Yet the increase in social security spending will be more than £30 billion by the end of the Parliament. That, however, is not the whole story.
  Mr. Andrew Miller: The hon. Gentleman referred to the "reform" of welfare spending. Is he acknowledging, therefore, that welfare spending needed reforming?
  Mr. Lansley: Welfare spending needs to get away from the Government's approach of spending more while failing to reduce welfare budgets, and to get away from the means-testing proposals. We need a genuine reform of welfare spending that will enable more resources to be delivered to front-line public services. That is what the public are looking for.
  However, as I said, that is not the whole story. Where else is the money going? It is going into the cost of running central Government itself. Whitehall saw Labour coming, and big government is back. The figures are startling. The Conservatives cut the number of civil servants by nearly a third. Since the election, that reduction has virtually stopped.

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  The last Conservative Government introduced management information systems, tough running cost limits and measures to relate activity and outputs to resources and their deployment. By comparison, under Labour, we have the much vaunted public service agreements, which are geared less to the value for money of spending and more to Treasury micro-management of public services according to Labour's political objectives—even extending to setting the priorities of local government.
  The last Conservative Government had a grip on the cost of administering central Government itself. That is something that the public have a right to expect. At the last election, I met plenty of voters who wanted to see more resources for health, education and the police. However, I met none who wanted to see the Government spend more on administration.
  Mr. Malcolm Bruce: If the Conservative Government had a grip on government costs, could the hon. Gentleman explain why, in the last two years of that Government, the national debt doubled?
  Mr. Lansley: The hon. Gentleman knows that that Conservative Administration were rapidly reducing Government debt—[Interruption.] In the last two years—that is what the hon. Member for Gordon (Mr. Bruce) is asking. In the last five years of that Conservative Administration, we saw a 10 per cent. reduction in real terms in Government running costs. In the five years before the 1997–98 financial year, that was the record of the Conservative Administration.
  What has happened under Labour, by contrast with that 10 per cent. real terms reduction? The last published spending plans before May 1997 said that, compared with 1997–98, the running costs of Departments would be reduced by £223 million in the subsequent year and, in 1999–2000, would be £114 million lower than the base year. The Government's latest figures show that the cost of administration of Departments last year was £867 million higher than the preceding year and this year will be £1,104 million higher than the base year. Compared with previous plans, therefore, Labour has not delivered the planned savings, and it has also lost its grip and let spending on running the Government rise sharply.
  The result is that in the space of two years £2,300 million more has been spent on administration than was set out in the plans this Government inherited. That is an enormous sum that could buy much front-line activity. Given the debate that we have just had, it is instructive to note that the sum is more than half the annual cost of general practitioners in the NHS; it is more than is spent in a year on children's personal social services; and it is one third more than this year's total capital spending in the NHS. I recall that Labour's so-called early pledge to cut waiting lists by 100,000 was to be achieved by cutting administration costs by £100 million, but if Labour has spent £2,300 million more on administration, that is a compelling reason why it is failing to deliver.
  Department by Department the story is the same. For the Department of Health, we achieved a £93 million reduction in total running costs for the four years before the election, but that has been followed in the subsequent two years by a £38 million increase. At the Department
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  for Education and Employment, we achieved a £95 million reduction in the three years before the election, which has been followed by a £36 million increase in the past two years. For the Department of Trade and Industry, spending was down by £82 million in the two years before the election but has gone up by £55 million in the two years since.
  The cost and waste does not stop at departmental running costs. Scattered through the Government's spending plans are their slush funds, the so-called unallocated provision, which adds up to £173 million. It adds insult to injury for the taxpayer to have to pay more in taxes only for the money to be wasted or squandered on Labour's machinery of spin and disinformation. The public want more doctors and fewer spin doctors, and that is what the Conservative party will offer.
  To Labour, facts do not speak for themselves. Indeed, it believes that facts should not speak at all. Interpretation is all, and facts are secondary. Lack of accountability is the easy Labour way out of answering for the Government's lack of policy achievement. They spin their way out of problems, thanks to the growing phalanx of taxpayer-funded political advisers.
  In the summer last year, we had the absurdity of Labour's annual report, in which dozens of manifesto pledges were counted as realised because the Government had published some document or announced some future target. For Labour, activity is a substitute for achievement. Its response to criticism is to blame public servants, as we saw last summer. Labour wants to make the civil service, not Ministers, accountable for the results of its policies.
  I applaud the Neill committee's vigilance in following up the Government's evident desire to make political compliance the key to career advancement inside the civil service. The Neill committee last week recommended that the performance measurement of permanent heads of Departments
  "should be structured to allow for some element of independent validation so as not to undermine political impartiality".
  That is right, but as a former civil servant myself, I find it profoundly depressing that the qualities and values of civil servants, who are often highly able and dedicated to public service, are at risk of being undermined by the pressure for political correctness and compliance demanded by Labour Ministers and their paid political advisers.
  The growth of direct political interference in the provision of policy advice to Ministers is among the greatest dangers. On that, we can see clearly that big Government means worse Government.
  Mr. Brian White: Is the hon. Gentleman apologising for the actions of the Tory Government in the early 1980s, post-Rayner, when political allegiance to monetarism was the key to promotion, not ability? Many people left rather than subscribe to that view.
  Mr. Lansley: The hon. Gentleman was a civil servant himself at that time, as was I. His experience may have been different, but my experience at the Department of Trade and Industry was that there was no such basis for advancement in the civil service. I worked for Lord Tebbit of Chingford, who may have politicised me, but he did not politicise the civil servants with whom he worked.

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  Indeed, many people from that Department will vouch for the fact that he took impartial policy advice and never confused his responsibility as a party politician with his responsibility as a Minister.
  The Labour party has virtually doubled the number of special advisers. The pay bill has more than doubled. At 10 Downing street, there are now 25 politically appointed special advisers, but the former Prime Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Major), had eight.
  The Neill committee has made welcome proposals about the future scrutiny and numbers of advisers. Of immediate concern to us, however, is the malign influence that those advisers are having on Government and the body politic. They are not discreet advisers. They see themselves as extensions of their Ministers. They brief against each other as much as against us. They have briefed against civil servants, who cannot answer in kind. They speak at party meetings. They take key advisory posts, such as chief press spokesman or chief economic adviser, formerly held by permanent civil servants. They have made more than 170 overseas visits. They see themselves as plenipotentiaries for their Ministers and insert themselves into the chain of ministerial decision making, superior to, rather than complementary to, the impartial sources of advice on which Ministers should rely.
  Dr. Tony Wright: The hon. Gentleman just said that special advisers have a malign influence on the system. The Neill committee has recently considered the point and it did not come to that conclusion. In fact, the Neill committee heard from the Cabinet Secretary and others that special advisers had a valuable role to play.
  Mr. Lansley: I remember the point that the Neill committee made, but that did not stop the committee reviewing the compliance with the existing model contract and codes of conduct for special advisers and concluding that a new statutory code of conduct is required. The committee also recommended a limit on the number of special advisers. It is my view that the extent to which Labour has introduced political advisers and the extent to which they have overstepped their proper role is a malign influence.
  Special advisers have a valuable role to play, but they should do so within the code of conduct. Their role should be modest and dedicated to party political advice, not to seeking to influence the role of the civil service. My view differs from that of the Neill committee. I accept that the committee does not endorse my view, but the fact that it examined the way that the Government have acted in the past two years, and felt it necessary to extend its remit, is an indication of widespread concerns that are not confined to the Conservative party.
  Dr. Wright: Could the difference be that the Neill committee took evidence for its views?
  Mr. Lansley: Much of the evidence was persuasive. My right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir G. Young), the shadow Leader of the House, gave good evidence on those points. It is not for
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  me to anticipate the Neill committee's future judgments, but if there is no change in the way in which special advisers operate within the present Administration, the committee would be right to revisit the issue and take further serious steps to limit their number and their role in Government.
  The impact of special advisers on the civil service is evident in the way in which information officers have responded. Some 15 out of 17 of the most senior information officers in the Government have been removed, in one way or another. In place of information, we get disinformation. I talked today to one of those former chief information officers. He said, with understandable feeling, that to wave away the malign influence of unelected unaccountable political advisers was wrong. As he said, special advisers in those numbers, and with that attitude, will ultimately lead to a corruption of the system.
  The Prime Minister at least has made no bones about the party political nature of his information system. He described the job of his chief press spokesman as being to attack the Conservative party. No. 10 has now set up the knowledge network—1984-speak for a group that I am told is referred to as the Ministry of Truth in Whitehall—which is to be staffed by Millbank tower émigrés and headed by a Mr. Joe McCrea.
  The rules governing special advisers state that advisers must "express comment with moderation". I am sure that that was always Mr. McCrea's approach, and I can tell people unfamiliar with that soul of moderation that he was spin doctor in chief to the right hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras (Mr. Dobson) throughout the period when the right hon. Gentleman was Secretary of State for Health. Therefore, even as a new set of spin doctors try to spin their way out of the mess that he left behind, the architect of disinformation on health is to be embraced once again at the centre of Government.
  The Government appear to have learned nothing. When will they understand that false promises, double and triple counting and layers of gloss placed on unpalatable truths only make matters worse in the long run? I warn the Government that, in opposition, they may have been able to avoid the truth but, in government, truth will out. I fear that they will not heed that warning but will persist in believing that the relationship of perception to reality is a one-way street. They believe that, if they can control perceptions, reality does not matter.
  The Government are wrong. Reality influences perception, and it is no part of the civil service task to substitute Labour perceptions for reality. It is symptomatic of the threat that Labour represents to civil service impartiality that a senior official is reported to have said of the knowledge network being established in No. 10:
  "It is highly questionable whether some aspects of the system are justified in policy terms. Much of the information is only useful for political campaigning and there is huge concern that civil servants will be drawn into using it to provide party political information."
  We see the result. We have reached the sorry pass that the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food can announce an aid package of £530 million, only for us to find—with the help of a Select Committee and others—that it turns out to be worth only £1 million extra to farmers.
  Labour remains what it has always been—the party of higher taxes and bigger government. The reality of that is more bureaucracy, and more politicians, reviews,

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  quangos, tiers of government, incompetence and waste. There is now a mountain of extra government. An extra £2.3 billion has been added to the cost of administering central Government. It costs £35 million to run the Scottish Parliament, and the Welsh Assembly costs an extra£15 million. There are 359 extra paid politicians.
  Ms Hazel Blears: Will the hon. Gentleman tell the House what price the Conservative party places on democracy? Is he in favour of consulting people, drawing in other views and creating policies based on real-life experience? Does he agree that a mature Government bases policies on real evidence, or does he prefer the politics displayed by previous Administrations? Those arrogant and complacent Governments merely dictated from the centre and were completely out of touch with people.
  Mr. Lansley: We believe in the reality of democracy, which is about holding Executives to account as well as about representing people. Labour wants to wield power and aggrandise government, but we want to give power to people by giving local government the power to determine matters according to local circumstances and needs. Real democracy is not about giving power to tiers of regional government, or about making Britain the most governed country in Europe through the addition of more tiers of government. It is about making government and democracy effective.
  I said earlier that the Government believe activity can substitute for achievement, and that increasing the size of government automatically makes government more effective. I have news for the hon. Member for Salford (Ms Blears): more government generally means less effective government.
  I noted that there are now 359 extra paid politicians. I invite the hon. Member for Salford to ask people whether they think that this country would benefit from more paid politicians, or fewer. The Government have also set up 500 reviews. The Government appeared to take office on a democratic mandate, but their actions since have amounted only to government by review.
  The Government have also established 318 task forces. The Nolan rules were intended to ensure an open system of appointment of those outside government who give Ministers advice. Yet most of the 318 task forces are treated as temporary, whether they are or not. They are therefore considered to be outside the Nolan rules and an extension of ministerial patronage.
  The previous Government introduced the system known as the Nolan rules. Those rules were intended to ensure that there existed open and impartial sources of advice inside government, and that those sources included civil servants and people brought in to staff advisory bodies and executive bodies of all kinds. However, the Government have already set out to evade the rules and to extend Ministers' patronage. They call it bringing people into the tent—I suspect that they would not want to say that they were bringing people into the dome.
  There is also a layer of regional government, in the form of development agencies, that costs £69 million a year to run. I searched, without success, in departmental annual reports for evidence of a reduction in the running costs of central Government to compensate for the establishment of the regional development agencies.
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  An extra £70 million is to be spent on Government advertising this year. There has been a series of costly IT and administrative blunders. The Public Accounts Committee reported waste in parts of the benefits system and in the public-partnership for the London Underground. The cost of the national handover plan for the euro is, as yet, undisclosed.
  If the British people knew the half of the problem, they would rebel against the forces of big government. It is the Opposition's job to see that they do know the size of the problem and to offer the commonsense alternative—smaller government, with more power for people and their communities.
  The alternative also includes free schools, the patients guarantee and the tax guarantee. We would have fewer politicians, and more doctors but fewer spin doctors. We would demonstrate a renewed commitment to reducing the administrative cost of central Government. More money would be available for vital public services as a result. We would respect the impartiality and values of the civil service.
  Our alternative system would be accountable to a strengthened Parliament that was more able to hold the Executive to account. Genuinely devolved responsibility to communities and local government would mean that accountable decisions would be made locally.
  The contrast is clear. Those who talk of convergence in politics are not looking at this issue. The direction of Labour is to bigger government, diminished accountability and a weaker citizenry. The Conservative way is to go for smaller government that works better, which is more accountable and which strengthens the powers and responsibilities of citizens.
  The arrogance of this Government is never more brazen than when they are exploiting the power of government for their own political ends. They spend taxpayers' money on the machinery of government and on their pet schemes as if there were an inexhaustible supply of other people's hard-earned income. At the same time, they manipulate the press and the media to prevent the public from knowing what is really going on, and to undermine the effectiveness of the House or the media in holding the Government to account.
  This debate charges the Government with favouring big government, high running costs, waste and excess. The evidence condemns them, and I urge the House to support the motion.
  7.39 pm
  The Minister for the Cabinet Office (Marjorie Mowlam): I beg to move, To leave out from "House" to the end of the Question, and to add instead thereof:
  "notes that, compared to the previous administration, the costs of central Government have not risen in real terms, and have indeed fallen; supports the progress made by this Government in cleaning up politics and rebuilding the bond of trust with the British people, broken through the failures of the previous administration; welcomes the Government's actions to improve democratic accountability; endorses the inclusive approach to policymaking of the Modernising Government agenda, which involves more people from all walks of life; welcomes the improvement in standards in public life; and agrees, with the Sixth Report of the Committee on Standards in Public Life that 'special advisers have a valuable role to play.'."
  The hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) has painted an extraordinary picture. Few hon. Members would recognise it as an accurate or fair

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  account of the way in which the Government have started to reduce costs and improve accountability in political life. It is a sham and a farce to peddle the notion that this Government are less accountable and less open than the previous Administration.
  The hon. Gentleman referred in a cavalier fashion to perceptions; I shall deal in reality now, and answer some of the arguments that he has attempted to make.
  The hon. Gentleman argued that costs have risen. I have just listened to figures produced by the Opposition that could exist only in a fantasy land—just like last Sunday's claim by the Leader of the Opposition that the total cost of running Whitehall has risen by £1,000 million in the past two years and that he would cut that to fund his health spending plans. That is not the real world. Those figures are ludicrous: they take no account of inflation—of the running costs of wages and of materials that people use in their work every day.
  The real figures show that administration costs have fallen in real terms compared with those of the previous Government. We are spending less than the last Government on Whitehall bureaucracy. Spending was higher when the Conservatives were in power, yet they now say that they would make cuts in public services. We all know where those cuts would fall. The Conservatives would scrap the working families tax credit, the new deal and the national minimum wage; they would undermine child benefit and cut help for pensioners. Those are the first real cuts that they would make.
  The hon. Gentleman argued that the Conservative party would make a difference in the health service. Would they make as big a difference as we did in the first year, with £21 billion announced for NHS spending? [Interruption.] In the first year, we announced a spending figure of £21 billion. I shall go on to give the figures for the second and third years, if Conservative Members will give me a break.
  Spending on NHS bureaucracy has been reduced, and spending on front-line patient care has increased. We have done away with the two-tier system and, under the primary care system, patients' voices will be heard. We have started the building that will continue in the second year with the money that was announced in the first year. It will go on 37 new hospitals, the £100 payments towards winter fuel bills, free eye tests and increases in child benefit. Those changes have been made: they, and not the Opposition's perceptions, are the reality.
  The hon. Gentleman's second argument is that special advisers are a drain on the public purse. I am sorry that he disagrees, as he made it very clear, with Lord Neill, who said last week in his sixth report that special advisers have a valuable role to play. Sir Richard Wilson, head of the civil service, has said that he does not think that the senior civil service—who number about 3,500 or 3,600—is in danger of being swamped by 70 special advisers; he does not regard what is happening as creeping politicisation.
  Mr. Andrew Tyrie: When the Prime Minister appointed 53 advisers, which was a substantial increase on the 38 posts that existed when he came to power, he said that although there would be more advisers, the total salary bill would be kept under the same
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  cost umbrella of £1.8 million that he had inherited from the previous Government. Why has the salary bill now reached £4 million?
  Marjorie Mowlam: The Prime Minister made no secret of the fact that he wanted special advisers in the Government to help drive the Government's policies forward. I make no apology for the fact that we are governing in a different way from the previous Administration. Given the mess that they got into, I am sure that most people welcome the change.
  In answer to the question from the hon. Member for Chichester (Mr. Tyrie), the overall costs have remained broadly in line with what the Prime Minister promised. We have made no secret of the numbers and cost of special advisers or of their work. We said that the number and funding of special advisers would be published—something that no previous Government had done. We have done all that.
  The fact that we have special advisers guarantees—contrary to what the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire argued—the impartiality of the civil service. Who writes my party conference speeches with me? Do I ask a civil servant? No—I ask a special adviser. That is what they are there for. They protect the civil service, rather than making it political.
  Let me reinforce that point by quoting Jonathan Baume of the Association of First Division Civil Servants. He said:
  "A good special adviser is well worth having in any Department—it is also fair to say that this Government have used its special advisers in a much more upfront way. A good special adviser is an asset to a Department, both to the Minister and to the civil service."
  Mr. Damian Green: The Minister quotes Jonathan Baume. His predecessor at the Association of First Division Civil Servants now sits on the Labour Benches in the Lords, so I am not sure whether those comments are completely impartial.
  The Government have put special advisers in executive control of impartial civil servants. Career civil servants know that they must serve the interests of the Government of the day if they want to get on. That is the new corruption that the Government have introduced through the special adviser system.
  Marjorie Mowlam: That is an insult to the civil service. The quote I gave was from the head of the Association of First Division Civil Servants, whose integrity the hon. Gentleman has just questioned. Civil servants continue to be impartial advisers. If they were not—if we did not have special advisers giving us political advice—there would be the potential for politicisation. At the moment, there is not.
  Mr. Keith Simpson: What about Alastair Campbell?
  Marjorie Mowlam: Alastair Campbell is not a party spokesperson. It is right that he is not paid out of the party purse. His contract makes it clear that he is employed to speak to the media on the Government's behalf. He expresses not his own views but those of the Prime

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  Minister, and he avoids personal attacks. [Laughter.] Does the hon. Member for Mid-Norfolk (Mr. Simpson) want to follow that up? Alastair Campbell's role is clear.
  Mr. Green: Will the Minister give way?
  Mr. Owen Paterson: Will the Minister give way?
  Marjorie Mowlam: Not for the moment. The fact that Alastair Campbell's is a political appointment means that civil servants are not being asked to become involved in political arguments. As with all special advisers, Alastair Campbell's appointment helps to preserve impartiality. [Interruption.] I look forward to hearing less of the raucous shouting and more inclination to deal with reality.
  The civil servants with whom we work have not complained, and their trade unions have spoken in support of our policies.
  Mr. Tyrie: Will the Minister give way?
  Marjorie Mowlam: Not at the moment. Let me deal with the media monitoring unit to which the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire also referred. There is, indeed, an attempt to monitor the media; all Governments have done it.
  Mr. Tyrie: Will the Minister give way?
  Marjorie Mowlam: I just want to finish this point. I have given way to the hon. Gentleman already. Media monitoring is an important aspect of Government policy and is intended to correct inaccuracies. All Governments have done it. The media move faster today, and there are many more outlets. That means more questions to which people expect a faster response.
  We have a duty to respond, to keep the public informed about what we are doing. We need the staff and the technology to make that possible in today's media world. We are not ashamed of that; I think that it leads to better information for the public whom we serve.
  The hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire also referred to changes of press officer in the past two and a half years. During the similar period from 1979 to 1981, the number of changes was comparable. There are many reasons for such changes; some are personal, some arise from recruitment, some result from promotion and so on. We have never tried to hide any change that has taken place.
  The hon. Gentleman argued that Ministers are not accountable. Unlike previous Governments, we have set high standards for Ministers, and we expect them to be upheld. I welcomed Lord Neill's statement last week that there is less cause for concern about standards in public life than there was when the cash for questions affair led to the setting up of the Committee on Standards in Public Life. I also welcomed his statement that there was no need for an independent ethics commissioner to investigate alleged abuses by Ministers. Since we came to office, we have strengthened the ministerial code to make sure that it worked effectively.
  The hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire argued that democratic accountability had diminished under the Labour Government. In fact, the opposite is true: we have
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  strengthened ministerial accountability. Devolution is enhancing democratic accountability, bringing government closer to the people of Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and, ultimately, London. We have brought democracy out of the dark ages by abolishing the voting rights of hereditary peers. We have increased parliamentary accountability by introducing pre-legislative scrutiny of some draft Bills, as the previous Government did not.
  Labour Ministers have made nearly twice as many oral statements in the House—80 in 1998–99, compared with 45 in 1993–94. Ministers are being held to account more often as a result of Westminster Hall debates. We are increasing the opportunities for Opposition Members to hold us to account. It is not our fault that the press do the job better than the Opposition.
  Mr. Andrew Robathan: I thank the right hon. Lady for giving way at last. We all know that statements are given first to the press. Given her experience in Northern Ireland, she may wish to read today's Evening Standard, and to discover that the statement that the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland is to make in the House tomorrow has been given to the press today.
  Marjorie Mowlam: I was making the point that pre-legislative scrutiny allows more people to be included in consultation. That can only help us to make decent policy. We have increased the openness of government. The Freedom of Information Bill will involve everyone more closely in decisions that affect their lives. The Representation of the People Bill will increase access to democracy by improving disabled access to polling booths and setting up a rolling electoral register to maximise people's opportunities to vote. The Political Parties, Referendums and Elections Bill will ban foreign donations, and require donations of more than £5,000 to be published and the donor to be identified.
  In the past three years, we have begun to transform the ways in which the government can be held to account. We are proud of that record, and the Conservative party, with its history of secrecy and scandal, can have little of value to say about it.
  Mr. James Paice: A few minutes ago, the Minister said that her party had introduced pre-legislative scrutiny. May I suggest that tomorrow she visits the so-called "truth office" in Downing Street to discuss that matter? If that unit is concerned with the truth, it will tell the Minister that what she has told the House is incorrect. In fact, the previous Government introduced pre-legislative scrutiny on, among other things, legislation on Sunday trading and abortion.
  Marjorie Mowlam: That was done on specific issues such as private Members' Bills or matters on which that Government were split. We are introducing pre-legislative scrutiny on legislation so that parties across the House may consider it in advance.
  The hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire made allegations about task forces. There are clear lines of accountability for task forces. They are accountable to Ministers, and Ministers are accountable to Parliament. We make no apology for using task forces to crack problems that we inherited from the previous Government. They include more people with a wide

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  variety of views. They involve experts as well as those whom the policy will affect. Task forces are a less centralised and a more accountable way of working. For the first time, the Government are publishing details of each task force, including membership, and updating those details every six months.
  One example is the social exclusion unit, which has policy action teams. For each policy, a committee is created comprising civil servants plus 100 or so people from outside, which allows the inclusion of a range of views previously not heard. The recent independent Democratic Audit report on Government task forces said:
  "We welcome the government's attempts to be more inclusive in its approach to policy review and implementation…to make the consultative and advice-seeking process more open to the public and to make it more inclusive of different kinds of expertise from civil society."
  The hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire also implied that we appoint people out of favouritism—[Interruption.] "Tony's cronies," as someone on the Opposition Benches says. I do not want to get into personal politics, but the individuals whom we have appointed across task forces provide good examples of our approach. David Mellor was appointed to chair the football task force; Chris Patten chaired the independent commission on policing in Northern Ireland; Lord Wakeham chairs the royal commission on reform of the House of Lords; Lord Mayhew chairs the advisory committee on business appointments; and Baroness Chalker is on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office panel of the 2000 advisory group. We have chosen those people for their expertise in particular areas. The cronyism argument does not hold up.
  The Government are committed to openness and accountability. We made a contract with the people at the last election to clean up politics, to make them open and accountable. That is what we have done in our first two years. I remind the House again of Lord Neill's observation that there is less concern about standards in public life than there has been since the cash for questions affair led to the setting up of the Committee on Standards in Public Life under the previous Government.
  We have come a long way, but we are far from complacent. We shall continue to work to clean up government. We shall work to rid ourselves of the legacy of distrust left behind by the Conservatives. We shall deliver, as cost-effectively and efficiently as we can, good government for the people of our country.
  7.58 pm
  Mr. Malcolm Bruce: The Minister will be reassured to know that we accept that the Government need special advisers. That is not a fundamental problem. Government, after all, is about politics, and the need for political advice within the machinery of Government is accepted. It was an established fact under the previous Government. The question is not whether we should have policy advisers of a political character, but what the balance should be between political presentation and what is developed as policy advice.
  I am slightly taken aback by the complacency, or perhaps the inconsistency, of the Conservative attack—it is as if there had been no continuity of practice between
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  the previous Conservative Government and the present Labour Government. There were highly political advisers to the previous Government; for example, Bernard Ingham was a highly political member of that Government, who spun stories against Ministers. I suspect that some of the frustration and anger of Conservative Members is due to the fact that Labour have been more successful at using advisers for positive political affect, rather than for the succession of public relations disasters that harried the Tories out of office.
  We need to ask whether we are imposing a more political management on to the civil service. The Minister for the Cabinet Office, does not think so. I do not necessarily disagree, but one or two developments have given rise to the question. For example, to give powers to Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell to direct civil servants raises the question that there could be a tension between political advisers and civil servants—as was pointed out in an intervention. That might compromise the integrity of the service.
  Ed Balls was a special adviser and I do not question his ability or the quality of his advice. However, to take him from that role to the position of chief economic adviser to the Treasury in one seamless move, without open advertisement or consultation raises questions about privilege and the process of association. Somewhere, there must be people who thought that they might have got that job, but, until it was filled, they did not even know that it had been vacant. Those are reasonable questions and the Government should consider them.
  The point has already been made that expenditure on entertaining, on the press, on publicity and on the number of special advisers has risen under the Labour Government. Since they came into office, the number of special advisers has risen from 38 to 74—nearly double. What effect does that have on the political process? It does not always add anything to that process. The Prime Minister may have read in today's press of the collapse in his personal support—he was the most popular politician, but his approval rating is now only plus 9 per cent. The right hon. Lady emerges as the most popular politician in the country, a fact in which she no doubt takes comfort. Perhaps the Prime Minister might consider whether part of that collapse is the result of his and the Government's obsession with news management and presentation over substance. Over time, people will judge Governments on substance.
  Under the previous Government, I sat on several Committees as my party's Treasury spokesman and noted that Labour Members, in opposition, were terrified to commit themselves to any firm policy. Whenever they were under pressure to state their policy, their ploy was to call for a policy review. On our calculations, by the time of the last election, they had asked for 1,000 policy reviews. That might have been understandable when they were in opposition. They wanted to be elected; it saved them from committing to anything and showed that they were interested in policy.
  However, although they are now in government, with the responsibility for making decisions, it does not seem that that instinct has been much curbed. The Government set targets; they set up task forces and review groups, all of which are designed to keep the policy process moving. They produce an annual report in which, miraculously, all their targets appear to have been achieved—although the Government's interpretation of an achievement is not

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  what most people would always recognise. For example, one target was that there would be a referendum on Britain's entry into the euro. The report described that as "achieved". We still intend to have a referendum on entry. There are several other targets of the same character.
  The problem is that the Government set and evaluate their own targets and, then, in their annual report, claim that the targets have been achieved. There have been problems with some of the targets. They have used most regularly those for class sizes and waiting lists. Class sizes for years one, two and three have probably gone down, although they have not yet reached the Government's overall objective. However, although it was not part of Labour's pledge, it is noticeable that class sizes for years four, five, six and seven and the sizes of secondary classes have all gone up. That means that the Government's claim was rather partial.
  Hospital waiting lists were coming down, but, after the flu epidemic, it has been acknowledged that they are likely to rise. However, we have discovered that the lists are being reduced by putting people on lists to get on to the waiting lists. The Government may say that they are meeting their targets, but the public say that as that does not change the quality of the service, the targets are not relevant. I do not imply that the targets were not genuine, but they cannot be defined in that narrow way.
  I do not often quote The Daily Telegraph, but its leader of 10 January summarises the matter rather well. It states:
  "Fortunately, on the question of whether the targets are being met, we are able to listen to the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott. He admits that 'because the targets are demanding, they are not always achieved'. Given that targets—which were always met, naturally—were a favourite tool of Communist governments to demonstrate their supposed efficiency, we should be on the watch for the day when the Government announces that all the trains are running on time. Targets are useful, but only when the electorate, and not the government, is the judge of whether they have been met."
  Mr. Mike Hancock: If my hon. Friend had been in the House earlier this afternoon, he would have heard one such example of over-hype when the Secretary of State for Health told us about 100 new intensive care beds. However, despite the fact that he had had almost a week's notice of today's debate, when push came to shove, he was able to tell us where only eight of them were.
  Mr. Bruce: That is an example of the problem.
  We can all have a little bit of fun at the Government's expense. Sometimes these debates form a legitimate part of that process. However, the Government must address the fact that, if the public become cynical about targets and do not think that they have honestly been met, or if the targets are renewed and redefined when they are not being met, or if the public can tell that what surrounds the targets does not add up—that there are no genuine improvements to the quality of service—no amount of presentation will get the Government off the hook.
  Mr. Oliver Letwin: Does the hon. Gentleman agree that it is especially remarkable that, during the past few days, in Standing Committee, the Government have rejected attempts by his party and by the Conservatives to ensure that the Comptroller and Auditor General audits the performance target results?
  Mr. Bruce: I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman's question. That is a point that we have been making for some time.
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  I challenge the Government that—although it might be an uncomfortable suggestion to Governments wrestling with genuine difficulties and uncertainties—the crucial test will be whether government by objectives and outcomes will be a real part of the process, rather than a synthetic sham. If the Government are the only determinant of whether they are achieving their targets and can redefine those targets, the public will become cynical.
  I offer some advice. In their comprehensive spending review, the Government have got into the habit of triple accounting—globally adding up the cumulative effect of all their spending plans to telephone numbers that are meaningless. I doubt that the average Member of the House—never mind the wider public—can really conceive of the difference between £2 billion and £20 billion in regard to what those amounts can achieve. We want to know what the practical difference will be, in a way that we can all understand. By hyping the figures to the largest possible amount, the Government have raised public expectations to an unsustainable degree. They are now reaping the consequences.
  Another problem is the role of the House. I have been in the House for 16 years, visited and talked to parliamentarians in other legislatures and shared experiences with them. By comparison with many others, we are a pretty weak and ineffective Parliament and that is because the Executive do not use Parliament as part of the process. They do not recognise—it makes no difference which party is in government—that politicians from both sides of the House could make a contribution to many policy issues. They have experience of representation, not all of which is party political, and that fact does not deny that the Government will ultimately decide and use their majority to do so.
  When I came to the House, I had the naive belief that we had heated, public debates on the principle of a Bill in the Chamber, but we then went into Committee where everyone sat down and worked through in a business-like way how to make the legislation work. What a load of baloney! I am not saying that it has never happened—there must have been one or two occasions when it has—but I can rarely think of an occasion when a Government have been really willing to work with a Committee in those terms. That makes many Members feel frustrated, given their and the public's expectations of what we should be doing.
  I wholly agree that it would be good if the House had more say in helping to determine Government objectives and on how their targets should be set and monitored. That would raise the standard of debate and public confidence in Parliament and in politics. A bold Government might regard that as something that would benefit them as well as the political process. However, I fear that this Government are more concerned with the management of the process.
  When I read the note on the knowledge network project, which has already been mentioned, I was appalled at what it was supposed to do. According to documents obtained by The Guardian, its objective was to
  "explain the Government's core message so that citizens can get the full facts without going through the distorting prism of media reporting."
  The article continues:
  "It will take the form of a computer network into which every Department can feed their 'lines to take' on every key issue and from which every Department can read."

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  The Kremlin would have been proud of that turn of phrase. In other words, the project will produce the line to be defended at all times. It does not provide substance to the belief that there is the degree of inclusiveness that the Government like to boast about.
  Mr. Miller: May I remind the hon. Gentleman of his comments on The Daily Telegraph? He said that he was reluctant to quote from it regularly. That point acknowledged that the process of media communication distorts what is said in the House by, for example, the hon. Gentleman and by Government. Does he not acknowledge that there is a place for direct communication—I am sure that the hon. Gentleman communicates regularly with his constituents—between public and Parliament that bypasses the organs of the daily press?
  Mr. Bruce: Yes. I used a turn of phrase that suggested that the media were some kind of obstacle to the process rather than a different component of it. That is a different matter. My speech has balanced a quote from The Guardian with one from The Daily Telegraph. On this occasion, I agree with what The Daily Telegraph said.
  The Government tell us that we do not understand the process and they change the targets and the terminology. Since the turn of the year, we have seen what I suspect is a whole new battery of neo-Poujadism emanating in particular from the Home Office. Those who deign to criticise the Government or the Government's programme are either described as woolly Liberals or as the massed ranks of Conservatism. That does not leave much room for anyone else. The more spin doctors there are, the more targets they develop. That means more confusion and disillusionment with the process of government.
  The process has sunk to a particular depth in the use of special advisers specifically to brief Labour Members on the party line. That is clear abuse of the process. The Conservatives have come under inquisition for their use of Short money for campaigning purposes. I am not here to defend the Conservative party, but it is difficult to see how using special advisers to brief Labour Members at the taxpayers' expense is different from using Short money to support the Conservative's campaigns. If one is wrong, the other must also be wrong. On that basis, if the Conservatives will have to pay the money back, will the Labour party pay it back to balance things out?
  I wish to raise a serious point—I do not think that this will surprise the House—that explains why I and Liberal Democrats are so committed to radical constitutional reform. We want a written constitution, a representative voting system, a federal constitution and an elected second Chamber to enhance the role of Parliament in developing and monitoring public policy. We believe that such reforms are pivotal to securing that aim.
  On the passivity of the House, can anyone remember when it last rejected even a component of a Budget? We have not rejected a Budget, and even the European Parliament, which is so reviled by the Tory Opposition, has shown more spine than that.
  I am a strong supporter of devolution and I tell those who criticise it that there is something already to be learned from the process that we have set up in Scotland.
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  Andrew Cubie's committee, which was appointed by the Scottish Executive, has produced a more considered review of policy on student finance and university funding than anything that the Department for Education and Employment would even be allowed to think about. That is pluralism and it should not be an embarrassment. It is what devolution is designed to do. It allows different ideas to be explored in a different context. However, we hear that Downing street and the Department for Education and Employment are appalled at that degree of independence.
  The truth at the end of the day is that new Labour will reap what it sows. To Liberal Democrats, the desert of Tory spending commitments reaps the whirlwind of public anger over the state of the national health service. Reannouncing the same funding over and over, and triple counting spending pledges will yield good headlines in the short run. However, if responses and resources are not there, the targets are not real and the objectives are not met Alastair Campbell's team may spin like whirling dervishes but it will not fool the British people.
  8.18 pm
  Mr. Hilary Benn: I should declare an interest, if not necessarily an expertise, as a former special adviser. It is principally on that subject that I want to contribute to the debate. Four points have been raised about the role of special advisers. They relate to the existence and legitimacy of special advisers, their effect on government and governance, their numbers and the extent to which they help the effectiveness of government.
  There has been much media comment on special advisers and the Opposition have made great play of the issue tonight. For example, the Financial Times has referred to the shadowy role of special advisers in general and a leader in the Evening Standard said:
  "It is a scandal that ministers' special advisers are paid from the public purse to advise their bosses about the likely consequences of their actions on party and public opinion."
  Conservative Members nod, which is helpful because those quotes are from 1989 and 1993 when the Conservative party was in government. They merely demonstrate that advisers work for all Governments and it is right and proper that they should be under continual scrutiny. The righteous indignation to which the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) treated us about special advisers and this Government was not quite as righteous as it seemed.
  I shall deal first with legitimacy. The truth is that special advisers have existed in their current form for about a quarter of a century, although I read with interest in the Neill report that the very first special adviser was appointed by Lloyd George. That may not be the best precedent to follow, but it was almost a century ago.
  We know that special advisers are curious creatures in the civil service because they are appointed by Ministers and last only as long as the Minister who appointed them. They are required to abide by the civil service code of conduct but, for obvious reasons, are free from the restrictions on political activity. As I pointed out in a recent debate in Westminster Hall, my letter of appointment rather pointedly stated that special advisers are free from the requirement that normally all civil servants should be appointed on merit. I always thought that that was a rather gentle way for the civil service to remind special advisers that they are not quite the same as the people with whom they are working.

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  Why has the system evolved? Rightly, Ministers want a source of advice and expertise that civil servants cannot and, as I think all hon. Members would agree, should not be asked to provide. That expertise, as well as covering the Department's policy area, may deal with presentation of policy. Above all, special advisers bring to the job an understanding and knowledge of the governing party's politics, its history and the background to its policy debates.
  I shall give a simple example. A civil servant could, technically speaking, design a perfect policy, such as—to pick an example at random—the poll tax, but a sensible adviser would recognise it as being politically unworkable and advise against it. It is a great pity that there was not such an adviser in the previous Government because they would have saved billions of pounds if someone had been able to say, "Sorry, that isn't going to work."
  The key point, however, is that Ministers get that advice from a particular perspective, which is a point that the model contract specifically refers to. It says—and I welcome this—that
  "the civil service has no monopoly of policy analysis and advice".
  We could argue, as my right hon. Friend the Minister for the Cabinet Office pointed out, that the existence of advisers helps to shield civil servants from pressures that they might otherwise face.
  In a very British way, we have evolved a compromise because we have avoided a situation in which Opposition politicians who come into government are forced to leave behind the people with whom they have worked very closely in opposition. In the case of those Members sitting on the Opposition Front Bench today, those advisers are paid for out of Short money at public expense, and rightly so. I have no argument with that. We do not put politicians into the civil service machinery bereft of the support and advice network that they have relied on. That would be nonsensical.
  On the other hand, we avoid the spoils system that operates in countries such as the United States, where a change of Administration results in the whole top tier of the civil service being removed and placemen and placewomen being appointed. That is why I think that the Neill committee got it right when it said:
  "special advisers have a valuable role to play".
  I say to the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire that if there were any evidence of malign influence, a threat to the impartiality of the civil service or any undermining of the values of civil servants, I would have expected the Neill committee to identify that and refer to it in its report. It did not do so because that is not the case. In fact, Neill explicitly recognises the legitimacy of special advisers, and I trust that the House will as well.
  The second issue is the effect of special advisers on the process of government. I happen to think that the current group of special advisers are very professional and effective. Indeed, they are rather more effective than their predecessors before May 1997, which may, in part, explain the Opposition's sense of grievance about them this evening.
  Advisers act as the eyes and ears of Ministers, and with the complexities of modern government, which the hon. Member for Gordon (Mr. Bruce) referred to, and the sheer volume of submissions that emerge from what I call the departmental silos and fall on to the Minister's desk, it is important that special advisers support Ministers in trying to sift through those submissions.
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  In my experience, the dialogue between advisers and civil servants was helpful in clarifying issues, which meant that the submission that was finally presented to a Minister had benefited from advice from both of those perspectives. Those perspectives are different but they are both recognised within the system. That system can work only on the basis of trust and respect for those different standpoints. It is essential that advisers advise, civil servants advise and Ministers, who are accountable to this House, decide. Nothing must ever get in the way of that fundamental principle.
  On the question of numbers, we must be careful not to confuse influx with influence. The shadow Leader of the House said in his evidence to the Neill committee that we would
  "begin to change the nature of the debate and the way a Civil Service department operates—if the special advisers became, as it were, the dominant influence on the Minister rather than the civil servants."
  That argument has more to do with the relative quality of the advice than with the number of advisers because if one took that argument to its logical conclusion, one adviser could be one too many if he or she were that influential. In practice, as we know, the 70 or so advisers in the civil service are opposed to—I do not mean in a policy sense—several hundred thousand civil servants, which is hardly an equal contest. I do not think that the numbers argument is credible.
  My final point is about effectiveness. I thought that the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire strained credulity in a slightly half-hearted contribution, not least because the Government have been extremely effective in organising the machinery of government to try to achieve their objectives.
  I shall reflect for a moment on my experience as a special adviser in the Department for Education and Employment and some of the measures that the Government have set in train. The hon. Member for Gordon referred to the fact that we are on our way to meeting our class size pledge. Hopefully, by the end of this Parliament we will have nearly doubled the number of early years education places and doubled capital investment in school buildings and equipment.
  We are supporting primary schools, in particular, in raising standards of numeracy and literacy. We have gone from having no numeracy and literacy summer schools before the last general election to running 1,500 this year. We have put about 10 million new books into schools, courtesy of the extra money that we have invested. We are investing about £1 billion to support information and communication technologies.
  We have made a record investment in further education, which was sadly neglected and greatly punished under the previous Government. We are working towards enabling 50 per cent. of our young people to benefit from higher education and we have managed to more than halve long-term youth unemployment. I simply say, modestly and quietly, that if that is not getting on with the business of government, and if that is not substance, then I do not know what is.
  There is a great deal still to be achieved. However, what really lies behind the motion is that the Opposition are attacking the messengers, the special advisers, who cannot speak for themselves. I was keen to contribute to the debate because they cannot respond to the attacks that have been made on them tonight. When we come to the

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  next general election, I think that the Opposition are afraid that the electorate will demonstrate, as at the previous general election, that they rather like the message.
  8.28 pm
  Mr. Peter Luff: In addressing the motion and the Government's amendment, I ask myself why I feel such deep antipathy to the Government's spin-doctoring techniques. In a way, it is because I feel for the Government. The tragedy for the Government and for the country is that they think that they can do no wrong, which is a dangerous thing to believe. To believe one's own propaganda, as the hon. Member for Leeds, Central (Mr. Benn) obviously does, is a tragedy for a politician.
  I resent that belief because it leads the Prime Minister into making some serious charges against the Opposition that I do not think are sustainable. Each week, I sit on the Opposition Benches to hear the saintly Prime Minister accuse me of the most heinous crimes against humanity. I am told that I do not want a national health service, to reduce unemployment, to help the developing world or care about crime, poverty and social exclusion because I am a Tory, which makes it impossible.
  I have news for the Prime Minister and for his right hon. and hon. Friends. He is wrong. Right hon. and hon. Members on both sides of the House care passionately about such matters. Our difference is often, but not always, about means, not ends. I accept that there are issues on which we disagree about the ends too, such as the future of sterling, the future of the United Kingdom, our right to participate in country sports and to eat particular foods.
  The dreadful way in which the Government have been caught up in the web of their own deception means that they can no longer see that essential truth, and that makes their attacks curiously offensive. The Prime Minister seems genuinely to believe that the answers to the problems that will always exist in any democratic society lie in bigger government and more politicians. That goes to the heart of the Opposition's motion. He seems to believe that the answer to Britain's problem is more politicians in Wales, Scotland and everywhere else, including this place. We should try to reduce the number of Members here, not increase them as the Boundary Commission inevitably does.
  Mr. Lindsay Hoyle: Resign.
  Mr. Luff: I will if you will. I am not referring to you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, but to the hon. Gentleman.
  My hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) said that 359 new politicians are the result of the Government's policy, and that is not the answer to our problems. I heard the Minister for the Cabinet Office deny the increase in public expenditure for the management of central Government. I have the figures. Last year, we were planning to cut it by £223 million. Instead, the Government increased it by £967 million. That is £1,190 million extra. This year, our planned cut is £114 million. The Government's increase will be £1,104 million. That is a total over two years of £2,408 million. That is the increase in the cost of
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  government that the Government have imposed on us. That is because they genuinely believe—this is the tragedy—that that is the right way to run a country. It is not.
  The regional development agencies were rightly highlighted by my hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire. He said that they cost about £69 million. These monsters have laboured mightily to bring forward their regional strategies.
  I have the strategy of "Advantage West Midlands", the West Midlands regional development agency. In an earlier debate, I highlighted the facile gibberish of the language in which it is written, but what of the content? The glossy and unreadable document includes such surprising insights as:
  "Research shows that people with the highest skill levels are most likely to find and keep employment and enjoy higher earnings."
  As Michael Caine would say, "Not a lot of people know that."
  Later we read:
  "Transport is seen as being very important for growth."
  I am grateful to the agency for this fresh insight into the workings of the United Kingdom economy.
  When the agency is not offering such insights, it is threatening to meddle where it is not wanted. The document states:
  '"Advantage West Midlands' has no responsibility for housing".
  That does not stop it from stating that it intends
  "to play an effective role in helping to co-ordinate housing and regeneration strategies across the region."
  It knows absolutely nothing about the region. How can it seriously say:
  "It is the blend of culture, unique histories and shared futures that defines the West Midlands"?
  That defines every arbitrarily drawn region of the United Kingdom. It is a load of nonsense. Nothing defines the west midlands except some arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a bureaucrat.
  Mr. Paterson: I entirely endorse all my hon. Friend's comments on regional development agencies and the west midlands region. The people of Shropshire bitterly resent being lumped in with the central conurbation of the west midlands, which will dominate all RDA decisions. They will be the country cousins, left out on a limb.
  Mr. Luff: I am glad that I gave way to my hon. Friend, who makes exactly my point. The people of Worcestershire have exactly the same feeling. How do you think I felt, Mr. Deputy Speaker, as Chairman of the Select Committee on Agriculture, to read that the West Midlands RDA says implicitly of my constituency:
  "The main problems generally include … too much reliance on farming and forestry"?
  That is an opportunity, not a problem. Birmingham-based bureaucrats of the agency that was imposed on us by the Government do not understand that.
  The Minister of State, Cabinet Office (Mr. Ian McCartney): For the record, will the hon. Gentleman confirm that he was an adviser to Lord Walker, the former

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  Secretary of State for the Environment—the very gentleman who drew up the boundaries of the west midlands and the other English regions?
  Mr. Luff: I do not want to have a debate about that. Of course the boundaries are useful for administrative purposes and for gathering statistics, but that does not mean that the people of Worcestershire should be run from Birmingham. Will the Minister get that simple thought into his very small brain?
  Of course we must carve up countries for administrative and statistical purposes. That has some passing relevance, but it does not mean that the historic counties of England must be run from remote places such as Birmingham, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire (Mr. Paterson) rightly said.
  It is not just the development agencies, but the Government who write dreadful documents. I was glad to hear the hon. Member for Gordon (Mr. Bruce), who is not now present, refer to the wretched little document entitled "The Government's annual report". Rightly, he poured ridicule upon it. It is a check list of completed actions. It states, for example:
  "The Royal Commission on Long-term Care. Done."
  It is true that it has been done. It has been well and truly done, ignored, pigeon-holed and forgotten, because its recommendations were too difficult.
  The report goes on to refer to
  "The referendum on voting systems",
  as my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition pointed out last week. That is said to be "On course." Yes—on course for the waste paper basket. The report continues:
  "Simplify Government. On course. See page 57."
  I saw page 57 and could not understand it.
  A further entry reads:
  "Hold referendum on any EMU decision. Kept."
  Excuse me, Mr. Deputy Speaker, did I miss the referendum? Was I asleep?
  The Government had to buy half the copies of this wretched little document. They claim that the other 49,000 were sold. I should love to see Tesco's sales figures. The document should never have been produced. It goes to the heart of this dreadful Government and the motion rightly tabled by the Opposition.
  Mr. Tyrie: Does my hon. Friend agree that the most extraordinary part of the document is the last page, headed "Your say", which I suppose is Labour's dim attempt at some form of accountability to the public? It states that last year, the Government asked people's views and have published a cross-section of them on the opposite page. All we get back is a little tapestry of cuttings, rather than a serious account of people's views. It is supposed to be a serious public document.
  Mr. Luff: My hon. Friend is right. That hardly encourages people to believe that, in the new, open, inclusive style of government of which the Government boast, their views are being taken seriously. I am grateful to him for making an important point.
  With regard to the new deal, the Government are once again in danger of believing their own propaganda. They seem to think that their huge expenditure has created jobs.
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  It has not. The jobs were being created by the private sector. Youth unemployment was collapsing under the previous Government because of the success of their economic policies.
  The present Government have spent £20 million of our money—taxpayers' money—on promoting the wretched new deal. They are doing so for party political advantage. They are trying to be seen to do something about unemployment. That is a monstrous use of money. New jobs are being created not by the Government, their bureaucrats or the new deal, but by hard-working small business men and women, who were doing so anyway without the Government's meddling interference.
  Others want to speak, so I shall be brief. The Minister's research was quite good. He suggested that I was a special adviser to Lord Walker of Worcester. I was not. I was a special adviser between 1987 and 1989 to Lord Young of Graffham at the Department of Trade and Industry.
  I freely admit that special advisers have a useful role to play. That is why the previous Government had a number of them. They can bridge the gap between civil service and party, work alongside Parliamentary Private Secretaries on parliamentary liaison, and inject original thinking into policy making. They are an extra set of eyes and ears for the Minister.
  All that is good, but their role is not, as the special advisers of this Government seem to think, to promote party at public expense, to undermine the Government information service or to brief against other Ministers. It is clear that that is happening in spades in the Government.
  We must cap the numbers. What justification is there for increasing the number of special advisers at No. 10 from eight under the previous Government to 22 under the present Government?
  Mr. Tyrie: Twenty five.
  Mr. Luff: Twenty five, I am told—a huge number. The same applies to press officers. My hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire rightly highlighted the sacking of the Government information officers. It is a scandal—an outrage. The Government's attitude seems to be, "Clear them out and make room for people who are more compliant with our wishes." It is not often appreciated that Alastair Campbell has a spy in every Department. Campbell's cronies bully and intimidate their colleagues and journalists. They may be civil servants now, but a year or two ago, many were Labour press officers or Labour party officials. That is an outrage.
  As Conservative Members frequently point out, the Government are more obsessed with spin doctors than real doctors, and with glamour rather than the gritty reality of improving public services. The Government are run by elites for elites. In November 1998, a letter from Dr. Richard Mullen to The Daily Telegraph discussed the BBC's excellent serialisation of "Vanity Fair" by Thackeray. It also commented on Thackeray's "Book of Snobs". Dr. Mullen said that, in that book, people
  "would find much that is apt today. Thackeray's best writing was done in an age full of prattle about 'reform'—Victorian English for modernisation—when a section of the middle class succeeded in grabbing power from the House of Lords.
  These 'Liberals' ruled for what they endlessly proclaimed was the benefit of 'the People', but their rule always benefited the prattlers themselves. Thackeray was superb in exposing the cant and hypocrisy of such stuff.

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  How he would have relished the sight of Blairites invoking the sacred mantra of 'the People', while a deferential 'wait-person' delicately shaves white truffles on to their polenta, or pointing out how they spend more on their wallpaper than they pay hard-working nurses."
  My hon. Friends laugh. I agree that it would be funny if we were not considering a subject as serious as government. It is not funny, but frightening. This bloated, complacent, arrogant Government resemble Falstaff in Verdi's opera or Don Giovanni in Mozart's. Their end was always inevitable; it was only a question of when and how. For the Prime Minister's sake, I hope that the end is characterised by the recantation and forgiveness of Falstaff, not the damnation of Don Giovanni.
  8.41 pm
  Mr. Mark Todd: It will be hard to maintain the unusual excitement that was generated by the hon. Member for Mid-Worcestershire (Mr. Luff). Unlike both previous speakers, I have never been a special adviser to the Government, or wished to be such. I have worked in the private sector for 20 years, trying to create wealth in this country. That implies no criticism of hon. Members who have been special advisers, but it shows that other perspectives can inform the debate.
  The charge is that the Government have politicised and fattened central government. I concede that a substantial change has occurred in the way in which central Government govern. That process has not gone far enough, but the right strategic choices have been made. From the mess of departmentalised policy silos, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, Central (Mr. Benn) referred, and agency government, which was the legacy of the previous Administration, customer and citizen-focused provision, based on measurable objectives, has begun to emerge. From a highly educated but often numbing culture of introversion in our civil service, there are signs of recognition of the need to encompass genuinely new skills and backgrounds and to adopt an outward-looking perspective. From a culture in which ministerial accountability was muddled at best and denied at worst, there is growing recognition of the need to accept ownership of the goals and administrative competence of performance in Government.
  I shall explore those themes. In information technology, strategy, project definition and management have, until now, been handled by individual Departments. That has meant a lack of purchasing strategy. A multiplicity of purchasing decisions makes for increased inefficiency and overall waste. A confusion of technologies and methodologies makes assembling a complex project difficult. There is no critical mass of project skills. Reference has been made in previous debates to the relatively small number of civil servants who have key skills in managing complex information technology projects. Silos with often impermeable boundaries mean that no learning occurs from experiences elsewhere. It is hard to grasp why something goes wrong or why other things succeed in particular projects, and to learn from that outside the silo.
  It is hard for citizen access to be organised beyond simply the front end of a web page and there is no governmental strategic vision relating information services to policy goals. Those gaps have been obvious for a considerable time—certainly throughout the latter part of the previous Administration—and the outcome has
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  been an array of failed, poor-quality, expensive systems. That process was inevitable, but the Government have recognised those faults and started to remedy them, strengthening the central IT function and developing a strategy.
  We have made a critical start and a key choice in setting things right: our civil service culture has recognised the need to increase recruitment from the private sector, introduce outward-looking processes such as benchmarking, recognise the need for cultural change and develop new leaders, greater openness and greater co-working.
  Encompassed in Sir Richard Wilson's report, which I suspect has probably not met the eyes of many Conservative Members, is a clear vision for the civil service of the future. It is relatively brief, and is worth repeating in full because it places in context some of the remarks about the demoralisation of the civil service and its difficulties in working with the Government:
  "Our aim is to help make the UK a better place for everyone to live in, and support its success in the world. We want to be the best at everything we do.
  In support of successive administrations, we will:
  act with integrity, propriety, and political impartiality, and select on merit; put the public's interests first; achieve results of high quality and good value; show leadership and take personal responsibility; value the people we work with and their diversity; innovate and learn; work in partnership; be professional in all we do; be open and communicate well".
  The report clearly bears no resemblance whatever to Conservative Members' perception of morale and focus in the civil service, which is serving today's Government and will serve future Governments of any political complexion. It paints a picture of focused determination, not demoralisation or despair.
  The establishment of cross-departmental teams to tackle a wide range of issues is a hallmark of this Government and the phrase "joined-up government" has entered the dictionary. I refer to the White Paper on modernising government, which gives some of the reasons why joined-up government—which is an innovation of theirs, in large part—is necessary:
  "People had to give the same information more than once to different—or even the same—organisations. A mother of a boy with physical disabilities said: 'I have lost count of the times I have had to recount my son's case history to professionals involved in his care.'
  There is often no obvious person to help those most in need to find their way around the system.
  There is a lack of integrated information to enable service providers to give a full picture of what help might be available.
  There is minimal use of new technology. Most government Departments have a website, but few allow people to fill in forms on line. And government websites are not well linked to other relevant sites."
  That paints a pretty clear picture of the problem that faced the Government on coming to office: a fragmented service often offered excellent quality in isolation, but did not work together to achieve the needs of the individual customer or citizen it was working towards. It had failed to adopt business practices—one would hardly say modern business practices—that focused on the needs of the customer or individual it was seeking to serve. Instead, it focused introvertedly on the departmental mechanisms on which people's rewards were often based.
  At last, one can expect issues of social exclusion to be addressed by all relevant agencies. The sure start initiative and others for tackling drugs and for redesigning our

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  criminal justice system all require a multi-agency, multi-departmental approach. That is to be commended, yet we have heard not a word of such innovation from Conservative Members.
  When I attended a meeting to discuss rough sleepers recently, I was struck by the immediate recognition of the important role of the Ministry of Defence. In fact, the importance of that role would be obvious to any citizen dealing with such problems. As most of us will have observed, many who find a place on the streets have left the armed services relatively recently. It is shameful to have to admit that the recognition of the need for Departments to work together to address problems is novel. We did not see a great deal of it during the 18 years that we witnessed previously.
  The establishment of regional development agencies has been criticised today, but I think that it has enabled local communities to apply upward pressure in arguing for joint initiatives. Regional offices of government have begun to consider joint solutions to many obvious regional problems. It is easy to deride the way in which an RDA has drawn up its strategy. I do not live in, or represent, an area in the west midlands; my seat is in the east midlands. The strategy in the east midlands has been widely commended, has set extremely high standards and has drawn attention to a variety of issues that require attention, across the entire scope of government service.
  At the highest level, the performance and innovation unit has addressed a range of cross-departmental issues for the future. We look forward to, for example, its pronouncements on the study of the Post Office, which will almost certainly demand a cross-departmental response. High-level reports such as that provide a critical input into Government thinking for the future. The comprehensive spending review also addressed the need to realign budgets in the direction of clear political goals.
  As for accountability, in debates such as this, one is often struck by the shortness of Conservative memories. Few could forget the performance of the former Home Secretary, who claimed that the conduct of prisons was a matter not for him but for the Prison Service— [Interruption.] I am afraid that my hearing is sometimes very poor in the Chamber. I did not catch what was said by the hon. Member for North Shropshire (Mr. Paterson).
  Mr. Paterson: I said that the former Home Secretary had reduced the amount of crime, which I would have thought was the fundamental role of a Home Secretary.
  Mr. Todd: That trend has continued under the present Government, if we take their time in office as a whole. In any event, that does not constitute a response to the question of accountability, which I understood to be the focus of the debate requested by the Opposition.
  I was present at the debate on the Passport Agency and its performance. It is worth contrasting the performance of the last Home Secretary with the frank apology offered by the current Home Secretary. There was no attempt to blame the civil service; rather, there was a recognition that Ministers were accountable for performances of that kind. The stark contrast between the two approaches struck me at the time.
  The phrase "boom and bust" has become almost a catchphrase in Government, so I will use another. We will take no lessons on this from the last Government. I have
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  not used those words before, but they seem singularly appropriate in this instance. When it comes to accountability in Government, there is little to be learned from the 18 years of Conservative administration.
  Without dissolving that accountability, the present Government have also sought to consult more widely. The pre-legislative process has been extended to cover major Bills, which has helped to isolate the issues that divide us—the existence of such issues is inevitable—from genuine discussion of how best to manage specific policy choices. Changing a complex and history-ridden institution and political process is hard and frustrating, but the right choices have been made so far. The management of those choices will be challenging, and mistakes will be made. Improving management quality at both civil service and political level will be necessary, but excellent progress has been made.
  The motion snipes at the fringes of the issue. The Opposition spurned the opportunity to tackle many of these opportunities during their 18 years in government, and I see little reason to listen to them now.
  8.54 pm
  Mr. Owen Paterson: It is a great pleasure to be called to speak in the debate on the cost of central Government.
  I thought that it would be interesting to go back to 1997, when the Government set out with such high hopes. The Labour manifesto bluntly said:
  "We have modernised the Labour Party and we will modernise Britain. This means knowing where we want to go; being clear-headed about the country's future; telling the truth; making tough choices … being prepared to give a moral lead where government has responsibilities it should not avoid."
  I wonder what Lord Winston thinks of that in the light of this week's events.
  I have much simpler beliefs. I think that people are happier with less government, fewer politicians, fewer bureaucrats and therefore less taxation. I can think of no country that has been made more successful by an increase in Government activity, or in taxation. In the light of that, I am appalled at what has happened in the past two and three quarter years.
  The second line of the motion expresses regret that
  "this means resources are not reaching front-line public services".
  They certainly are not in Shropshire. Not one publicly funded service in Shropshire is adequately funded. The Government have wilfully shifted £500 million from the shire counties to the inner cities. One can see it immediately.
  My hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Mr. Gill) dug out some figures in a written answer, which show that the average pupil in a Shropshire primary school receives £2,220, whereas a pupil in a Southwark primary school receives £3,396. Resources are not reaching front-line public services in Shropshire.
  We hear that, instead of being 6.1 per cent., this year's standard spending assessment increase is only 5.4 per cent. That is another £500,000 to £600,000 that the people of Shropshire will not get and were expecting. Amazingly, the fire brigade is 47 per cent. underfunded. It bought no new fire engines in 1998. It is struggling to see how it will afford to buy any more this year, with one pump costing £130,000. Resources are not reaching front-line services, such as the fire brigade.

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  West Mercia—this affects my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Worcestershire (Mr. Luff)—has the lowest net expenditure per 1,000 of population in the shire counties. To reach the average, it would need an increase of £14.3 million. To reach the highest level, it would need a £55.3 million increase. It is clear that resources are not reaching front-line services, such as policing in West Mercia.
  Sixty-seven per cent. of people in Shropshire drive to work in a car and 97 per cent. of goods go by motorised lorry. There is a £100 million backlog on the roads.
  Mr. Tyrie: I wondered whether you had had any notification of that. Has there been any accountability to you, or to local people about those changes?
  Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael Lord): Order. I remind the hon. Gentleman that he must use the correct parliamentary language.
  Mr. Tyrie: Has there been any accountability to my hon. Friend about the lack of resources?
  Mr. Paterson: No. Those are arbitrary decisions by a central Government dominated by urban interests. They ignore national interests, too. Major road schemes are a constant battle because the Government have an in-built prejudice against the motorised vehicle.
  In the light of the figures that I have mentioned, it is staggering to see what has happened to the cost of running Government Departments. In 1997–98, the cost was £13,246 million. It rose by an amazing £1,104 million in 1998–99. That would provide 11 district hospitals, probably 110,000 hip operations at today's figures, over 60,000 E grade nurses and 36,000 junior doctors. Those are striking figures for the general public to ponder when they think of the crisis in health and in Government services elsewhere.
  Where is that money going? Before Christmas, I tabled a written question to the Minister for the Cabinet Office and it is already out of date. I asked how many special advisers there were. I was told that there were 68, but an addendum to the written answer gave another six. My hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Mr. Tyrie) has managed to elicit information showing that the number has been ratcheted up to 77. They are also not cheap, those boys. Moreover, the bill has increased from £1.8 million in 1996–97, to an estimated£3.9 million in 1999–2000. They also spent £500,000 on jollies abroad.
  Taxpayers in Shropshire wonder what they are getting out of those special advisers. What have they got out of the antics of Alastair Campbell, who is paid by the taxpayer a cool £93,562 annually? This week, his service was to tent-peg into the ground a real expert—and member of the Labour party—who understands health problems and was promoted to the Lords for his expertise in health matters.
  What did Lord Winston say before he had his talk with Alastair Campbell? In the New Statesman, he said:
  "There are fewer IVF treatment cycles under this Government than there were under the Tories … One could not be anything but unhappy about that. There is a lot wrong with the Health Service and no one is prepared to say so … It's just gradually deteriorating because we blame everything on the previous Government."
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  After Lord Winston received a wet sandbag behind his right ear, he said:
  "I certainly do not believe … that the NHS is worse under this Government than the last Government."
  In the New Statesman, Lord Winston said:
  "Our reorganisation of the Health Service was very bad. We have made medical care deeply unsatisfactory for a lot of people. We've always had this right, but monolithic view, that there should be equality throughout at the point of delivery. All very good stuff, but it isn't working."
  After Lord Winston's interview with Alastair Campbell, he said:
  "I believe that the basic direction of NHS policy is right under this Government and in primary health care there have been considerable improvements. We now need to see these in hospitals and specialist services in particular."
  It is a real disservice to the British people that Alastair should be paid more than £90,000 annually to distort entirely the debate on health. Lord Winston is a real expert and has genuine points to make on a matter of national interest that affects every citizen, but taxpayers' money has been spent to shut him up. He has gone to ground, and we have not heard from him since. It is disgraceful.
  The hon. Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell) endorsed that view. On 14 January, in The Scotsman, he bravely said:
  "Special Advisers have become an abomination. They cause little but sickness in the body politic. They intrigue and chatter, causing misunderstandings about policy … I just do not think that those who engage in this kind of activity should be paid for by the taxpayer."
  I heartily endorse that view.
  Politicisation of the civil service has become particularly apparent in relation to Government information officers. Why, since the 1997 general election, have 16 of the 18 most senior press officers been either removed, moved sideways or pensioned off? Perhaps it is worth listening to the words of Mr. Andy Wood, who was replaced as director of information at the Northern Ireland Office. He said:
  "At principal and senior information officer level, discontent with the increasingly politicised atmosphere in which they have to work is running at a high rate."
  What about task forces? In November 1999, a report conducted by Democratic Audit—an independent research group at the university of Essex—was published. It identified 318 task forces, on which 2,500 appointees sit. What do the task forces do? They review. Subsequently, the Government received bad press for having too many reviews—so we had a review of reviews, resulting in a ban on reviews. I suspect that, at the next stage, we may progress to a review of bans and that, subsequently, we may come full circle and have a ban on bans. One really wonders where that money is going and what it is achieving.
  We should also examine expenditure on devolution. We now have 359 more elected politicians and are spending £120 million more on the cost of elected representatives. Before the referendum, in the White Paper, the Scottish people were told that their Parliament would cost them £50 million. On the latest estimate, however, the building alone will cost £109 million.
  We should again ask the West Lothian question, which has been much publicised in the press: why should decisions on the roads and health of the people of

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  Shropshire be made by hon. Members from north of the border, whereas I have no say there? There is no equity in the arrangement, and it cannot last.
  The same is true of the Welsh Assembly, which has more impact on my constituents. Its costs are running at £15 million to £20 million. The cost of the temporary and permanent accommodation is estimated at £17 million to £20 million. However, the situation could get worse because, amazingly, the building that has been designed is too big for the plot available. There could be yet more cost for the benighted British taxpayer. The organisation is also inefficient. The Select Committee on Welsh Affairs, of which I am a member, has great trouble in getting the Welsh Assembly to answer letters even to set up meetings.
  There are other outrageous costs that have upset my constituents, particularly in the farming sector, which has taken a hammering under this Government. Farm incomes were at record levels under the last Government, but they have now plummeted. Pig farms are closing every week and milk prices are at rock bottom. What did my farmers think when the right hon. Member for Copeland (Dr. Cunningham), the previous Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, spent £930,000 relocating MAFF offices and making extravagant trips on Concorde? There is real arrogance in the Government. They must learn that 1 May 1997 did not settle history for good.
  The Government also spend huge amounts on publicity. The amount spent by Government Departments on opinion poll research, media advertising, direct mail publicity, press releases, websites and extra publicity totals an astonishing £107,184,624. A lot of that is spent very badly. I shall give just one example that annoyed my local farmers. When the British cattle movement service helpline was set up, 109,000 leaflets were issued, of which 50 per cent. contained errors in the address. A letter of apology then had to be issued to livestock farmers. The total cost of the apologies was £45,000. There is not time to give further examples.
  The Labour Government set out with high hopes and an excessive belief in their ability to deliver good. They are failing, and many people resent the extraordinary increase in the cost of central Government, which is not benefiting them in their everyday lives. I support the motion.
  9.7 pm
  Mr. Andrew Miller: The hon. Member for Gordon (Mr. Bruce) expressed concern about the relevance of Committees and even debates on the Floor of the House at the moment. I understand his worry, but the quality of the official Opposition is so poor that it is no wonder there is a problem. The debate has illustrated that in spades.
  I was going to refer to the role of special advisers, but my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, Central (Mr. Benn) was so eloquent on the subject that I shall not develop the argument. I have known him for longer than anyone who was listening to him—with one right honourable exception, who was sitting in the corner like a cat at the cream, justifiably proud of my hon. Friend's speech. In all the time I have known my hon. Friend as a special
  780
  adviser, I do not remember him ever straying from the lines that were developed in the contracts that were rightly in place before he came to the job.
  Mr. Letwin: I should like to give the hon. Gentleman an opportunity to adjust something that he has said. Does he not think it odd that he attributes only to the—no doubt existing—failings of the Opposition the lack of willingness of Ministers to adjust in Committee, given that we are currently witnessing repeated ministerial resistance to efforts in Standing Committee on the part of the Public Accounts Committee—including the right hon. Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams) who leads for the Labour party on the PAC, and other Labour Members, as well as the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives— to establish a national accounts commission to settle accounts independently and to enable the Comptroller and Auditor General to audit them by enforcement? Is not that proof that he is wrong and that the hon. Member for Gordon (Mr. Bruce) was right?
  Mr. Miller: If the hon. Gentleman has an axe to grind about the Public Accounts Committee, I suggest that he keep it with the PAC. I was just about to praise the decision of one of his right hon. Friends—the right hon. Member for Henley (Mr. Heseltine), who set up the Government's central IT unit. When he did so, I said that it was an impossible function and that it was not going to work. There was not the political will, because of the lack of co-ordination on the part of Ministers in that failing Cabinet, to make that central IT unit develop and flourish, as it has done under this Government. There was no willingness to embrace the kind of change to which I shall refer.
  I want to concentrate my remarks on a phrase in the amendment, referring to the role of Government in the context of the "Modernising Government agenda". The legacy of the structures and systems over which the previous Administration presided is in many areas the difficulty, and my hon. Friend the Member for South Derbyshire (Mr. Todd) gave a good example. When we were in opposition, the Tories told us time and again that they knew how to run businesses. If that is how they run businesses, God help British business.
  The point made by my hon. Friend the Member for South Derbyshire was emphasised time and again in research that I did in the period leading up to the publication of the White Paper "Modernising Government". On page 25 of the White Paper, a chart illustrates the number of organisations a person needing long-term care may have to deal with. It is a terrifying list—the whole page shows a complex chart. That is the case time and again when we look at key life events.
  When my right hon. Friend the Member for Copeland (Dr. Cunningham) introduced the White Paper, the phrase "life events" was ridiculed by Opposition Members. They may shake their heads, but it is recorded in Hansard. That part of the White Paper was regarded as trivial, but it is not—it is a central area on which we must concentrate.
  I looked in detail at the example of the number of organisations that a person has to deal with following a death in the family. Someone came up with the record number of 23. That is absurd. When one is dealing with something that is so painful and personal, one finds that one must deal with people in the hospital and with the

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  doctor who issues a death certificate. One is then wandering in a paper maze, trying to find out what to do when one is least well-equipped to deal with it. That is the kind of administrative nightmare that we must unravel in developing the modernisation of our Government.
  The philosophy must be based on better service to the customer. There is no doubt that public service needs to be reformed and modernised. Again, the word "modernised" is often ridiculed by Opposition Members. I would remind them of a paper placed in the Library on 15 December—the report to the Prime Minister from Sir Richard Wilson, the head of the home civil service. Under the heading "civil service reform", Sir Richard makes it clear that, in the autumn, at Sunningdale, the permanent heads of the main departments who make up his management board pledged themselves personally to drive forward a new agenda of civil service reform, both corporately and in modernising Government. I am certain that the Opposition would not suggest that Sir Richard Wilson was exceeding his brief by using words such as modernisation, which they ridicule time and again. I genuinely commend that document to the Opposition. I invite them to remember that we are here to deliver services to citizens, and our task is to improve those delivery mechanisms from the shambles that we inherited.
  9.15 pm
  Mr. Andrew Tyrie: Everybody accepts that Governments of all hues are less accountable to the House than they used to be. I do not think that there are any takers for any other view. The health announcement that the Prime Minister made on the Frost programme is a reflection of that—it was the biggest single spending commitment of this Parliament and it was made on a television programme at 9 o'clock on a Sunday morning, instead of to the House of Commons. That would have been inconceivable 20, or even 10, years ago.
  We are living in an age in which Parliament is increasingly bypassed. The press do not get their information from watching our proceedings: they go directly to civil servants whom they hope will leak them information or they talk to Ministers who definitely leak them information. The public do not watch our proceedings much: they watch their elected representatives performing on television in interviews. There has been a steady erosion of the importance and relevance of the House of Commons in British public life, as I am sure the father of the hon. Member for Leeds, Central (Mr. Benn) would wholeheartedly agree.
  The Prime Minister almost wholly controls the House of Commons and he is in the process of ensuring that he can put his placemen into the other half of Parliament. That is mostly what the reform of the House of Lords is about. A group of people who had no logical right to be there—the hereditary peers—but who were at least independent, have been removed and are being replaced by appointed representatives, a disproportionate number of whom are from the Labour party. Some 195 life peers have been appointed by the Prime Minister, which is fast
  782
  approaching as many in two and a half years as the Conservative Administrations between 1979 and 1997 appointed in 18 years.
  Mr. Neil Turner: Does the hon. Gentleman accept that for every 10 of Tony's cronies in the House of Lords, there are four of Charlie's plants and 12 of little Willie's silly billies?
  Mr. Tyrie: That does not merit a response.
  We must ask what other ways there are to hold Prime Ministers to account. Prime Ministers have, from time to time, dominated the House of Commons, but even then some checks on them have operated. Prime Ministers have historically been accountable to the Cabinet. Even Margaret Thatcher in her strongest moments was accountable to a small group in the Cabinet and she never really succeeded in ruling alone.[Laughter.] Those who laugh at that idea have little knowledge of the inside workings of the Thatcher Administration in the mid-1980s. If they care to read the memoirs of Lord Howe or Lord Lawson, they will see that what I am saying is accurate. Indeed, it is one of the reasons behind her fall.
  This Prime Minister is accountable to nobody in Government. The Cabinet has become virtually a rubber stamp. Historically, Prime Ministers have generally also been held accountable to some degree by the internal party democracy from which they sprang. However, I doubt whether the parliamentary Labour party acts as an effective check on the Prime Minister. I wonder whether the party's national executive council has any teeth. Labour Members may tell me differently and be able to recount occasions when they have knocked the Prime Minister off course and caused him to listen carefully to all their utterances. However, I do not see Labour Members rushing to give me examples of events. I do not think they have taken place.
  The Prime Minister has more or less abandoned all pretence at dispersing power in his party, in Cabinet or to Parliament. He talks openly about the need for a strong centre.
  Mr. Andrew Rowe: Does my hon. Friend agree that it is understandable for a new Prime Minister and his party to believe their rhetoric at the beginning of a period of office? In such circumstances, is not it likely that the party will allow that Prime Minister more latitude than when the rhetoric turns out not to be convincing?
  Mr. Tyrie: My hon. Friend makes a good point, and I agree.
  The Prime Minister has appointed a coterie in No. 10 to ensure that the strong centre can become meaningful. That is why 25 advisers sit in No. 10 Downing street, compared with the five or six that Margaret Thatcher had, and the eight that my right hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Major) had.
  There has been a sharp increase in the number of advisers throughout Whitehall. The hon. Member for Leeds, Central made a number of interesting points, which I shall address in turn. Although I disagree with it, his speech was one of the most perceptive and thoughtful to be made by a Labour Member tonight.

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  It is worth reminding the House of the facts. Margaret Thatcher began with seven advisers. When she left office, there were about 20 of them. My right hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon inherited that number, and there were 38 when he left office. This Prime Minister began with 53 advisers. After nine months, there were 67, and now there are 77. The numbers are rising steadily, and the ratchet effect is inevitable.
  The Minister for the Cabinet Office said that the Prime Minister's pledge of an initial cost envelope of £1.8 million would be adhered to. That is nonsense: by November 1997, the cost envelope had risen to £2.6 million, and it now stands at £4 million. That excludes some pension costs and all secretarial support and office costs. To comply with the Prime Minister's 1997 pledge, there will either have to be mass sackings, or all the advisers will have to take a pay cut. I do not know how the target of £1.8 million will be adhered to. Something pretty drastic would have to happen, but of course the Prime Minister is not going to ask for anything of the sort.
  Advisers have a legitimate role. I strongly support the introduction of outside advice into Whitehall. However, it is not acceptable for the massive increase in the number of advisers to be accompanied by a reorientation towards highly party political work. Of course there was a party political aspect to being a special adviser when I was in Whitehall but, according to anecdotal accounts from people in the civil service with whom I used to work, that element has increased dramatically. Those accounts are also supported by evidence given to the Select Committee on Public Administration when it investigated the Government information service some time ago.
  Incidentally, the Minister said that civil servants had not complained about that trend. In fact, they have complained a great deal, and some—especially those who have left the service—have been prepared to go public. I have no time to read all the evidence, but I urge the Minister to study the evidence from Mr. Steve Reardon. He said that advisers
  "blurred management lines and proper demarcation lines … and served to put considerable strains on the relationships between private offices, ministers and the press secretary which had not previously existed."
  He added that the relationship with the special advisers was difficult. Numerous other former civil servants are prepared to attest to those difficulties.
  The problem is that there is no clear demarcation line to limit party political work. That is why I wrote to Lord Neill with several recommendations. The first was that there should be a cap on the number of advisers. The second was that there should be a code of conduct creating that demarcation line. The third was that Permanent Secretaries should be given the power of, and responsibility for, enforcing contracts and the code of conduct. I am very pleased that Lord Neill appears to have accepted all three recommendations.
  We could go down a different route for our civil service. The American system, for example, has hundreds of appointees. France has the Cabinet system, putting a few key people into private offices and turning them into Cabinets. That answers the question of the hon. Member for Leeds, Central; he asked how 70 people can take on thousands of civil servants. It is not the numbers that count—indeed, the hon. Gentleman said so elsewhere in
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  his speech. What counts is whether those people are in key positions to enable them effectively to take over part of the work formerly undertaken by civil servants. We will be moving towards that once the special adviser numbers increase to the extent that they have small teams operating in private offices.
  We must put a stop to the growth in advisers. We are seeing the creation of what amounts to a campaign team for the re-election of the Labour party, working in Whitehall and paid for by the taxpayer. That is wholly unacceptable.
  9.27 pm
  Mr. Claire Curtis-Thomas: I have had the privilege of listening to all the debate this evening. Although I admit to being pretty disappointed by some of the contributions, I strongly support others.
  The hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) called for transparency in government and the need for a reform on spending. He said that his Administration had had a grip on administrative costs, and that they had sought to hold executives to account. I presume that they thought that the most effective way of doing that was to cut the number of civil servants by a third.
  I was disappointed, to say the least, at the hon. Gentleman's contribution, and at those of the hon. Members for Gordon (Mr. Bruce) and for Mid-Worcestershire (Mr. Luff). The hon. Member for Mid-Worcestershire descended into a flash flood of emotion and, as we know, flash floods wreck and do not build. I suppose that wrecking and building were characteristics of the previous Administration.
  I want to talk about something far more significant than the appointment of 70 advisers—namely, what the Government have done for business. They have sought to put in place the structures and processes to make legislation far more effective for business. They want to be accountable to this income-generating activity on which we all depend.
  The hon. Member for South-East Cambridgeshire (Mr. Paice) has already said that legislation had previously received some pre-legislative scrutiny. That is simply not adequate when we consider the mass of legislation affecting the business community that the previous Administration brought before the House.
  As a business person at the time, I perceived the legislation as being introduced without review of what went before. I received multiple diktats from the same Department in one week. It was evident that the right hand never understood, or even knew, what the left hand was doing. That led to a great deal of frustration and confusion. At no time did anybody ask me for my opinion. I wrote to many individuals in numerous Departments trying to explain the daily difficulties that I faced as a direct consequence of their activity—and I am still waiting for a response.
  It was with pleasure that I noted that on coming to power, the Government immediately established the regulatory impact unit. It is not a glamorous unit, but it seeks to do what most businesses want the Government to do—to scrutinise each piece of legislation with regard to its impact on business. That is to be welcomed. It requires Departments to do something that they have

  785
  never done before. Guidelines have been produced to help them execute this task. They were desperately needed, as each Department decided what was appropriate in the light of its own guidelines, so the effectiveness of each Department could not be compared and contrasted. Some hon. Members will have noticed that legislation is now accompanied by a regulatory impact assessment, a vital document that has arisen not as a consequence of civil service input, but as a direct result of communication and consultation with the groups affected by Bills.
  We heard a lot about deregulation and red tape under the previous Administration, who set great store by what they were sweeping away. Let me put their efforts into context. Much to the relief of the business community, the Conservative Government enacted the Deregulation and Contracting Out Act 1994. That was supposed to make great changes for the business community, but it did not.
  Since 1994, the number of orders pursued as a result of the Act is 46. The business community, at a conservative estimate, has an annual turnover of £1 million billion, but over the past three years the reduction resulting from the Act has been £120 million. That does not make a great deal of difference to business. We have tinkered at the edges rather than achieving fundamental root-and-branch re-evaluation of regulations that we expect businesses to continue to follow long after they have ceased to be effective or competitive.
  I welcome the inclusion in the Queen's Speech of a regulatory reform Bill, which will impact both on business and on public sector Departments. That represents a major and welcome shift in scrutiny. Significant sums go to the public sector, and we need to move from legislation that is no longer effective and constrains the public sector towards meaningful legislation that will enhance activity.
  Finally, the previous Government may have been accountable, but by conducting a crusade against administration, they removed the structures by which they might have listened to the people they purported to serve. They served themselves; we accept that communication costs money while seeking to be an effective and accountable Government.
  9.32 pm
  Mr. Oliver Letwin: We have heard much interesting discourse this evening. Alas, the Chamber has not been very full, although the subjects under discussion are almost as important as those that attracted a larger audience earlier.
  Our starting point was costs. My hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) spoke eloquently about the £1 billion a year more that is being spent on the apparatus of government. The Minister for the Cabinet Office sought to make light of that figure, saying that it took no account of inflation. One could almost hear Sir Humphrey telling her so. Alas, on accrued calculation, the increase between 1997–98 and 1999–2000 exceeds the rate of inflation by about £500 million. That is a significant real-terms increase.
  My hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire (Mr. Paterson) was keen to point out the contrast between that increase and what the Government spend in his constituency, where the costs of publicity have risen faster than the amounts spent on the ground. We turned next to
  786
  special advisers and information officers, and my hon. Friend raised the role of Alastair Campbell and the notorious silencing of Lord Winston—now to be known as the silencing of the lamb.
  My hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Mr. Tyrie), who has made a notable contribution on the question of special advisers, identified a trend that we must admit occurred under previous Governments, but which has been accelerated by the present one. As he pointed out, we are heading remorselessly towards the establishment of campaign teams in Whitehall that serve to extend the principle of elective dictatorship. They give the Prime Minister ever-increasing control. Again, that is not a new phenomenon, but it has been accelerated under the Labour Government.
  There has been an increase in the number of special advisers, an increase in political appointments to information positions and an increase in costs. Of course, there is a connection between them—one leads, in small part, to the other.
  Other matters are deeper and far more significant. In a remarkable speech, the hon. Member for Leeds, Central (Mr. Benn) said something that is of the greatest possible significance to the House. There were moments when, from his intonation, I thought that I was listening to his father, the right hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr. Benn). Alas, there were not moments when, from the contents of his remarks, I thought that I was listening to the right hon. Gentleman on the subject of the protection of the House and its prerogative.
  The hon. Member for Leeds, Central told us that he celebrated the great virtuosity with which the Government have used the machinery of government to achieve their ends—that was the broad gist of his remarks. He is right—unqualifiably right. The Government have shown great virtuosity in using the machinery of government to achieve their own ends. The problem is what my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Worcestershire (Mr. Luff) described. The end that the Government have in mind is not merely that of governing—no reason why they should not use the machine to achieve that—but much more: they are determined to use government as a means of remaining in government. That notorious annual report is the supreme example of that.
  When the Minister for the Cabinet Office replied to my hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire, she made light of all that. She said that there were no real complaints from civil servants: no one thought that there had been any serious politicisation of the civil service— no, no, nothing of the kind. I draw her attention to the statement that, at principal and senior information officer level, discontent with the increasingly politicised atmosphere in which those officers have to work is running at a high rate. Who said that? Was it some Conservative spokesman? Was it somebody who had nothing to with the right hon. Lady? No, it was Mr. Andy Wood, the director of information during her tenure at the Northern Ireland Office. She knows whereof she speaks, because she has been one of its prime exponents.
  According to the right hon. Lady's information officer, she has helped to ensure that the Government's brilliant performance—we have to grant them that—has been better than that of any previous Government at using the machinery of government to achieve their own ends. The hon. Member for Leeds, Central also pointed that out. The

  787
  Government have attacked the Opposition. If possible, they have obliterated the Opposition through big tentery— the use and manipulation of the media—as never before and never so brilliantly. They have made an effort to use the fact of being in power to remain in power.
  I emphasise that fact, because it is a remarkable attack not only on the Opposition and on the civil service, but on our constitution. Above all, our constitution depends on the fact that the people who gain power do not use it to remain in power. The cardinal feature of a democratic constitution is that those who find themselves the tenants of power cannot abuse that power to obliterate democracy thereafter.
  The situation in this country is strange. We do not have a written constitution of the kind for which the hon. Member for Gordon (Mr. Bruce) calls. There is nothing to govern the activity of our Government or our politicians—nothing but the procedures of the House and our ability to interrogate and to hold to account. The sad truth is that, because under its procedures the House is run by the majority that is run by the Government, we cannot hold Governments to account unless they are governed by the procedure and the convention enshrined in the civil service.
  Our civil service is not just a set of servants of the Government of the day. They are the servants of the Crown and the state in the profound sense that they are there to enshrine proper procedure and to protect the veracity of the information flowing from Government to the populace so that we in this place can hold Government to account and can argue the truth about facts and debate policies. If the Government use the civil service, politicise it, surround it with campaign teams, put in special advisers and make sure that it turns its attention to producing annual reports that are mere examples of self-congratulation, they will begin to undermine the constitutional foundations of our democracy.
  Mr. Rowe: My hon. Friend is making a remarkably powerful speech and I entirely agree with him. It is in the nature of party politics that parties do their utmost to remain in power. However, the Labour party, which is now in government, expects the taxpayer to pay for what used to be a charge on a political party. Is that process not part of an undesirable atrophy of the political parties in this country?
  Mr. Letwin: I agree with my hon. Friend that the Government seek to use the taxpayer for their own party political ends. He is right to say that it is legitimate for a political party to seek to remain in power and that it is wrong for it to use taxpayers' funds—£1 billion more of them—to achieve that aim. Above all, it is wrong for a Government to use the civil service in that way. That undermines the civil service as the guardian of our constitution and undermines the ability of this place to hold the Government to account. In the end, that is what counts most.
  If I had to trade that £1 billion—or several billion more—and the special advisers across Whitehall who do the Prime Minister's bidding for the sovereign integrity of the civil service as the guarantor of the veracity of Government information and the procedures that enable us to hold them to account, I would do the trade. The Government do not offer us that trade. They offer us
  788
  expense, the addition of advisers everywhere, the campaign teams and finally the corruption of the politicisation of the civil service, which offers an end to our constitutional integrity. That is the charge, and I hope it sticks.
  9.43 pm
  The Minister of State, Cabinet Office (Mr. Ian McCartney): Before I respond to the hon. Members for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) and for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin), may I pay tribute to my hon. Friends the Members for Leeds, Central (Mr. Benn), for South Derbyshire (Mr. Todd), for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Mr. Miller), for Crosby (Mrs. Curtis-Thomas) and for Wigan (Mr. Turner) for their speeches and interventions? The special mixture of integrity and knowledge of the subject that they showed bodes well for future Labour Front-Bench teams in government when I hope to be collecting my zimmer from the Cabinet Office. On the Government Back Benches is a range of Members who will be able to take the Government forward to their second, third and fourth terms.
  I hope that the hon. Member for Gordon (Mr. Bruce) does not take this personally, but, as I listened to him, I almost lost the will to live. He said that, when the Labour party was in opposition, it had policy reviews, but no commitments. What about the new deal and the national minimum wage for more than 2 million people and what about linking the new deal with economic stability to provide 600,000 new jobs, more than halve youth unemployment and halve long-term unemployment? We have reformed the criminal justice system by providing more than £19 billion to help and put £21 billion into education with more to come. We have put billions into urban regeneration and social housing, and provided more rights for consumers and for workers, who have the social chapter and the right to paid holidays for the first time.
  However, I make an apology to the hon. Gentleman. We made no mention before the election of the introduction of the working families tax credit, which is the biggest boon to cutting family poverty in Britain this century. We did not mention the record increase in child benefit or the introduction of a minimum income guarantee for pensioners. I apologise for that, but pensioners, mothers and working families with the working families tax credit do not want us to apologise. They say, "Thank God we elected a Labour Government in 1997".
  I turn now to the speeches by the hon. Members for South Cambridgeshire and for West Dorset. They demonstrated the three phases that the Tories have gone through since their landslide defeat. The first phase is the one in which Tories said, "I can't believe it. I've lost the ministerial car and the special advisers." However, I see that some of those advisers have washed up on the Tory Back Benches. Some former Tory Members got their P45 from their constituents and had to apply for a proper job for the first time in 18 years.
  The second phase was denial. The Tories told themselves that they had done nothing wrong except perhaps that they had not been extreme enough, right-wing enough or Conservative enough. They invented a world in which there was no Tory sleaze, no incompetence and no favours for friends.

  789
  Tonight, they have entered the third phase, which I call the brass neck phase. During this phase they are brazening it out and trying to give the impression that all they left us was a golden legacy. What a legacy. [Interruption.] Hold on a minute, lads. When we came to power in 1997, 40 per cent. of the largest quangos were chaired by Tory party members or people who had donated to Tory party funds. Those people, mainly men, were responsible for dispensing billions of pounds of public funds. They had been appointed for the sole reason that they were Tory party activists or had donated to the slush funds that the Tories have yet to open up to public scrutiny.
  Mr. Letwin: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
  Mr. McCartney: No, I gave up ten minutes of the time for my wind-up speech so that the hon. Gentleman and his colleagues could speak, although they did not make the best use of their time.
  Sir Donald Wilson, the former president of Chester Conservative Association—Chester was a Labour gain at the last election—was appointed chairman of the West Midlands regional health authority. He made a complete mess of that, but was he sacked? No, unfortunately, he was transferred to run my health authority, the North West regional health authority. Sir Bryan Askew, a defeated Tory candidate in Penistone and in York, was given a job running the Yorkshire health authority.
  Did Lord Crickhowell, a defeated Tory MP and ex-Cabinet Minister, go on the dole? No, he was paid £51,000 to run the National Rivers Authority. Michael Pickard became chairman of the London Docklands development corporation. He got that job for the simple reason that he founded the chain of Happy Eater restaurants, which are the favourite eating establishments of the right hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Major). The Tories really investigated the credentials of people they put in charge of public funds. David Plastow ran the Medical Research Council for the simple reason that his company consistently donated to the Tory party.
  When Mrs. Thatcher came to power, she promised to abolish quangos. By 1992, she had increased their budget from £13.9 billion to £42 billion—a sum equivalent to a fifth of the entire national expenditure and more than the total sum that we spend on local government. There was no consistency of policy on appointments.
  Mr. Letwin: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
  Mr. McCartney: No. The hon. Gentleman should listen because he is not facing reality, and I have to bring him back to reality.
  When the Tories ran out of business men they moved on to politicians and those who had been defeated at the polls. In 1991, the Welsh Secretary was responsible for appointments to 81 public bodies, with the Welsh Office having powers directly to appoint 1,261 people to them.
  The Welsh Secretary appointed Ian Grist, a former Tory Minister, to head the South Glamorgan health authority. He was defeated by his constituents but given a job by the Tories. The secretary to Gwilym Jones, another Welsh Office Minister, was also appointed to the South Glamorgan health authority. Jeff Sainsbury, a former Tory
  790
  councillor, was put in charge of the Cardiff Bay development corporation. Phil Pedley, a defeated Tory candidate, was put in charge of the Board of Housing for Wales, succeeding another failed Tory candidate.
  When the Tories ran out of failed politicians, they turned to the Conservative party's national union executive. Of its 200 members, we have identified at least 37 who landed jobs in the public sector, including the party treasurer Charles Hambro, Sir Basil Feldman, Sir Philip Harris, Sir Robert Balchin and Beata Brookes.
  Mr. Letwin: I am delighted that the right hon. Gentleman has given way, and I am most grateful to him. I wonder whether, in the light of that marvellous tirade, he could answer a simple question. Will he guarantee that the Government will apply Nolan rules to the appointment of members of task forces?
  Mr. McCartney: The Government are not only applying Nolan rules but extending accountability across the appointments system. The Government have applied the accountability rules to all appointments to quangos, which meant 6,000 more appointments. This is the first Government to have tenants on task forces talking about their housing conditions. The Tories put construction director bosses on to quangos and we are putting on to them members of residents' and tenants' associations.
  Mr. Graham Brady: Will the Minister give way?
  Mr. McCartney: I will give way to the hon. Gentleman later.
  When the Tories ran out of members for the national union executive, they called in the Tory praetorian guard, their wives. That was the next group to be given public appointments. There was Lady Elspeth Howe, the then Deputy Prime Minister's wife, Anne, and Lady Brittan, wife of Sir Leon Brittan. As for Mary Archer, I wonder whether she had an opportunity to persuade us that she had more abilities than her husband. There was Lady Ann Parkinson, wife of Lord Parkinson. In addition, there was Lady June Onslow, wife of Sir Cranslow Onslow.
  Mr. Luff: Get it right.
  Mr. McCartney: The hon. Gentleman may have a go at my accent but I have more integrity in my little finger than there is in the whole of the Tory party. It does not matter if the gentleman is called Cranslow Onslow or Cranley Onslow. The fact is that the Tories gave his wife a job without consulting the public. There was then Arabella Lennox-Boyd, wife of a former Foreign Office Minister, Mark Lennox-Boyd.
  When the Tories had fixed jobs for their friends and their families they started fixing things for themselves. It was the greatest folly of the previous Conservative Government. There was Tim Smith, who was forced to stand down as the Member for Beaconsfield because he involved himself in cash-for-questions. Neil Hamilton was defeated in Tatton—I thought that that would silence Conservative Members—after resigning as a Minister because of his involvement in cash for questions. Graham Riddick was defeated in Colne Valley. He also accepted cash for questions.Thehon.Member for Bosworth

  791
  (Mr. Tredinnick) was criticised for agreeing to accept £1,000 in return for tabling questions. Jonathan Aitken was defeated in South Thanet after being forced to resign as a Minister following revelations that he had stayed at the Ritz, courtesy of middle east arms dealers.
  Sir Andrew Bowden was another Member linked to Greer. He was used to lobby and to recruit other Tory Members to lobby for him. Angela Rumbold, the former Deputy Chairman of the Tory party, was defeated in Mitcham and Maiden. She arranged meetings with Ministers for lobbying companies. William Waldegrave was criticised for being involved in misleading the House. Sir Nicholas Lyell was criticised in the arms to Iraq affair. The hon. Member for Rutland and Melton (Mr. Duncan)—[Interruption.]
  Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The Minister must distinguish carefully between ex-Members and current Members.
  Mr. McCartney: I am clearly differentiating between right hon. and hon. Members and I am naming hon. Members who are here and referring to those who were defeated in the general election and their former constituencies. It is important that, in a debate about standards, probity, integrity and open access to government, we set the record straight. I have no intention of allowing Conservatives to get away with their gross incompetence and sleaze during the period of the Conservative Government.
  Mr. Brady: I am sure that the Minister was about to move to the list of 260 Labour councillors who have been appointed to health trusts—[Interruption.] In the light of that, will he give an assurance to the House that if and when the commissioner for public appointments reports that in that scandalous process there has been political bias, those people will be dismissed and that new appointments will be undertaken without political bias?
  Mr. McCartney: I am proud that we took the opportunity in government to change the way in which the Tories ran national health service trusts. For the first time, we are giving opportunities to women to be appointed. We are giving opportunities to members of ethnic minorities, people with disabilities and people from the local community, whether they work in the business community, in industry or in the local authority.
  The previous Government scarred the capacity of local health trusts to represent the community. In my community, for example, they appointed people who did not even live in that community. Those people were appointed simply because they were members of the Conservative party.
  Sir Leonard Peach, the previous Commissioner for Public Appointments, stated in 1998 about appointments to NHS trust boards that
  "there was no evidence of Ministers intervening to ensure advancement of their nominees or colleagues"
  and that
  "patronage on behalf of individuals is clearly not an issue."
  792
  That was the position, and the hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale, West (Mr. Brady) does not like the fact that NHS trusts are no longer the bastion of Tory party members appointed—
  Mr. Brady rose—
  Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The Minister has indicated that he is not giving way at present. It would be helpful if he could indicate whether he intends to give way or not.
  Mr. McCartney: With all due respect, Mr. Deputy Speaker, as I am 5 ft 1 in tall, it is sometimes difficult to know whether I am standing or sitting. I gave way to the hon. Gentleman and replied to him. He just does not like the reply.
  The hon. Member for Rutland and Melton (Mr. Duncan), who is present, was criticised for using the right-to-buy provisions offered by Westminster council to fund the purchase of valuable council-owned property by a friend. That is the level of members of the Tory party, who used the right to buy to advance themselves.
  That is the reality of Tory sleaze. No wonder that under the Tories, public confidence in the political process plumbed new depths. Under the Tories, sleaze entered the political dictionary. They left a tainted legacy.
  Labour's 1997 manifesto promised to clean up politics in order to rebuild the bond of trust between the British people and government. The Conservatives seem to be opposed to the very idea of accountability in the democratic process. They support hereditary peers, unaccountable quangos and secret government.
  We know from the debate this evening—I hope our colleagues in Scotland and Wales realise this—of the Tories' continued opposition to the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly. They have tried to thwart the Government's determination to improve democracy by devolving government to Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the English regions. They have opposed the removal of the rights of hereditary peers, and in the past they resisted universal suffrage and votes for women. There is nothing new in the Tories' opposition to the extension of democracy.
  There is a further damning indictment of the Tories. Under their Government, we paid more and got less. They spent billions on the NHS internal market, while there were fewer doctors and nurses, and they privatised the dental service. They introduced the poll tax, which failed and cost the British taxpayer £14 billion. The Tories were the Government of BSE, which cost the British farming community billions of pounds in lost jobs and lost trade.
  On Black Wednesday the Tory Government lost £10 billion of British reserves, and they doubled the national debt to £30 billion a year. It took a Labour Government to eliminate that national debt.
  What about Steven Norris, the Tory candidate for London mayor? As Minister for Transport in London, in two years he ripped off the British taxpayer with overrun costs of £1.4 billion for the Jubilee line extension, yet he

  793
  wants to be mayor of London. It was a case not of "catch a tube", but of "get on your bike".
  The Tories cannot even add up. The right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks (Mr. Hague) said that central bureaucracy costs £1.1 billion, but he adjusted that the following day. No wonder he cannot get his figures right. His financial adviser is Michael Ashcroft, a resident of Belize and the man who bought the Tory party lock, stock and barrel.
  There is no disguising the fact that the Government have introduced greater accountability. More real people serve on quangos, instead of Tory place men and women. People are appointed on merit, not as favours. We have ended the secrecy about appointments. We have stopped ministerial patronage. We have slammed the door on the political scandals of the last two years of Tory rule. The Tories have learned nothing. I urge the House to reject their motion and support the Government.
  Question put, That the original words stand part of the Question:—
  The House divided: Ayes 179, Noes 331.

  Division No. 31]

  [9.59 pm

  AYES

  Ainsworth, Peter (E Surrey)

  Emery, Rt Hon Sir Peter

  Allan, Richard

  Evans, Nigel

  Amess, David

  Faber, David

  Ancram, Rt Hon Michael

  Fallon, Michael

  Arbuthnot, Rt Hon James

  Feam, Ronnie

  Ashdown, Rt Hon Paddy

  Flight, Howard

  Atkinson, David (Bour'mth E)

  Forsythe, Clifford

  Atkinson, Peter (Hexham)

  Forth, Rt Hon Eric

  Baldry, Tony

  Foster, Don (Bath)

  Ballard, Jackie

  Fowler, Rt Hon Sir Norman

  Bercow, John

  Fox, Dr Liam

  Beresford, Sir Paul

  Fraser, Christopher

  Blunt, Crispin

  Gale, Roger

  Body, Sir Richard

  Garnier, Edward

  Boswell, Tim

  George, Andrew (St Ives)

  Bottomley, Peter (Worthing W)

  Gibb, Nick

  Bottomley, Rt Hon Mrs Virginia

  Gill, Christopher

  Brady, Graham

  Gillan, Mrs Cheryl

  Brazier, Julian

  Gray, James

  Brooke, Rt Hon Peter

  Green, Damian

  Browning, Mrs Angela

  Greenway, John

  Bruce, Ian (S Dorset)

  Grieve, Dominic

  Bruce, Malcolm (Gordon)

  Hague, Rt Hon William

  Burnett, John

  Hamilton, Rt Hon Sir Archie

  Butterfill, John

  Hammond, Philip

  Campbell, Rt Hon Menzies (NE Fife)

  Hancock, Mike

  Harvey, Nick

  Cash, William

  Hawkins, Nick

  Chapman, Sir Sydney (Chipping Barnet)

  Heald, Oliver

  Heath, David (Somerton & Frome)

  Chope, Christopher

  Heathcoat-Amory, Rt Hon David

  Clark, Dr Michael (Rayleigh)

  Hogg, Rt Hon Douglas

  Clarke, Rt Hon Kenneth (Rushcliffe)

  Horam, John

  Howard, Rt Hon Michael

  Collins, Tim

  Hughes, Simon (Southwark N)

  Colvin, Michael

  Hunter, Andrew

  Cotter, Brian

  Jack, Rt Hon Michael

  Cran, James

  Jenkin, Bernard

  Curry, Rt Hon David

  Jones, Nigel (Cheltenham)

  Davies, Quentin (Grantham)

  Keetch, Paul

  Davis, Rt Hon David (Hattemprice)

  Key, Robert

  Dorrell, Rt Hon Stephen

  King, Rt Hon Tom (Bridgwater)

  Duncan, Alan

  Kirkbride, Miss Julie

  Duncan Smith, Iain

  Kirkwood, Archy

  794

  Laing, Mrs Eleanor

  Sanders, Adrian

  Lait, Mrs Jacqui

  Sayeed, Jonathan

  Lansley, Andrew

  Shephard, Rt Hon Mrs Gillian

  Leigh, Edward

  Shepherd, Richard

  Letwin, Oliver

  Simpson, Keith (Mid-Norfolk)

  Lewis, Dr Julian (New Forest E)

  Smith, Sir Robert (W Ab'd'ns)

  Lidington, David

  Spelman, Mrs Caroline

  Lilley, Rt Hon Peter

  Spicer, Sir Michael

  Livsey, Richard

  Spring, Richard

  Lloyd, Rt Hon Sir Peter (Fareham)

  Stanley, Rt Hon Sir John

  Llwyd, Elfyn

  Steen, Anthony

  Loughton, Tim

  Streeter, Gary

  Luff, Peter

  Stunell, Andrew

  Lyell, Rt Hon Sir Nicholas

  Swayne, Desmond

  MacGregor, Rt Hon John

  Syms, Robert

  McIntosh, Miss Anne

  Tapsell, Sir Peter

  MacKay, Rt Hon Andrew

  Taylor, Ian (Esher & Walton)

  Maclean, Rt Hon David

  Taylor, Rt Hon John D (Strangford)

  Maclennan, Rt Hon Robert

  Taylor, John M (Solihull)

  McLoughlin, Patrick

  Taylor, Matthew (Truro)

  Maples, John

  Taylor, Sir Teddy

  Mates, Michael

  Thompson, William

  Maude, Rt Hon Francis

  Tonge, Dr Jenny

  Mawhinney, Rt Hon Sir Brian

  Townend, John

  May, Mrs Theresa

  Tredinnick, David

  Michie, Mrs Ray (Argyll & Bute)

  Trend, Michael

  Moore, Michael

  Tyler, Paul

  Morgan, Alasdair (Galloway)

  Tyrie, Andrew

  Moss, Malcolm

  Viggers, Peter

  Norman, Archie

  Walter, Robert

  Oaten, Mark

  Wardle, Charles

  O'Brien, Stephen (Eddisbury)

  Waterson, Nigel

  Ottaway, Richard

  Webb, Steve

  Page, Richard

  Wells, Bowen

  Paice, James

  Whitney, Sir Raymond

  Paterson, Owen

  Whittingdale, John

  Pickles, Eric

  Widdecombe, Rt Hon Miss Ann

  Portillo, Rt Hon Michael

  Wilkinson, John

  Prior, David

  Willetts, David

  Redwood, Rt Hon John

  Willis, Phil

  Rendel, David

  Wilshire, David

  Robathan, Andrew

  Winterton, Mrs Ann (Congleton)

  Robertson, Laurence

  Winterton, Nicholas (Macclesfield)

  Roe, Mrs Marion (Broxbourne)

  Yeo, Tim

  Ross, William (E Lond'y)

  Young, Rt Hon Sir George

  Rowe, Andrew (Faversham)

  Ruffley, David

  Tellers for the Ayes:

  Russell, Bob (Colchester)

  Mr. John Randall and

  St Aubyn, Nick

  Mr. Stephen Day.

  NOES

  Abbott, Ms Diane

  Best, Harold

  Adams, Mrs Irene (Paisley N)

  Betts, Clive

  Ainger, Nick

  Blackman, Liz

  Ainsworth, Robert (Cov'try NE)

  Blears, Ms Hazel

  Alexander, Douglas

  Blizzard, Bob

  Allen, Graham

  Blunkett, Rt Hon David

  Anderson, Donald (Swansea E)

  Borrow, David

  Anderson, Janet (Rossendale)

  Bradley, Keith (Withington)

  Ashton, Joe

  Bradley, Peter (The Wrekin)

  Atherton, Ms Candy

  Bradshaw, Ben

  Atkins, Charlotte

  Brinton, Mrs Helen

  Austin, John

  Brown, Russell (Dumfries)

  Banks, Tony

  Browne, Desmond

  Barnes, Harry

  Burden, Richard

  Barron, Kevin

  Burgon, Colin

  Bayley, Hugh

  Butler, Mrs Christine

  Beard, Nigel

  Byers, Rt Hon Stephen

  Beckett, Rt Hon Mrs Margaret

  Caborn, Rt Hon Richard

  Bell, Stuart (Middlesbrough)

  Campbell, Alan (Tynemouth)

  Benn, Hilary (Leeds C)

  Campbell, Ronnie (Blyth V)

  Benn, Rt Hon Tony (Chesterfield)

  Campbell-Savours, Dale

  Bennett, Andrew F

  Cann, Jamie

  Benton, Joe

  Caplin, Ivor

  Bermingham, Gerald

  Casale, Roger

  Berry, Roger

  Caton, Martin

  795

  Chapman, Ben (Wirral S)

  Griffiths, Win (Bridgend)

  Chaytor, David

  Grocott, Bruce

  Clapham, Michael

  Grogan, John

  Clark, Rt Hon Dr David (S Shields)

  Gunnell, John

  Clark, Dr Lynda (Edinburgh Pentlands)

  Hain, Peter

  Hall, Patrick (Bedford)

  Clark, Paul (Gillingham)

  Hamilton, Fabian (Leeds NE)

  Clarke, Charles (Norwich S)

  Hanson, David

  Clarke, Rt Hon Tom (Coatbridge)

  Harman, Rt Hon Ms Harriet

  Clarke, Tony (Northampton S)

  Heal, Mrs Sylvia

  Clelland. David

  Healey, John

  Clwyd, Ann

  Henderson, Doug (Newcastle N)

  Coaker, Vernon

  Henderson, Ivan (Harwich)

  Coffey, Ms Ann

  Hepburn, Stephen

  Cohen, Harry

  Heppell, John

  Coleman, Iain

  Hesford, Stephen

  Colman, Tony

  Hewitt, Ms Patricia

  Connarty, Michael

  Hill, Keith

  Cook, Frank (Stockton N)

  Hinchliffe, David

  Cooper, Yvette

  Hodge, Ms Margaret

  Corbyn, Jeremy

  Hoey, Kate

  Corston, Jean

  Hood, Jimmy

  Cousins, Jim

  Hope, Phil

  Crausby, David

  Hopkins, Kelvin

  Cryer, Mrs Ann (Keighley)

  Howarth, Alan (Newport E)

  Cryer, John (Hornchurch)

  Howarth, George (Knowsley N)

  Cummings, John

  Howells, Dr Kim

  Cunningham, Jim (Cov'try S)

  Hoyle, Lindsay

  Dalyell, Tam

  Hughes, Ms Beverley (Stretford)

  Darling, Rt Hon Alistair

  Humble, Mrs Joan

  Darvill, Keith

  Hurst Alan

  Davey, Valerie (Bristol W)

  Hutton, John

  Davidson, Ian

  Iddon, Dr Brian

  Davies, Rt Hon Denzil (Llanelli)

  Illsley, Eric

  Davies, Geraint (Croydon C)

  Jackson, Helen (Hillsborough)

  Davis, Rt Hon Terry (B'ham Hodge H)

  Jamieson, David

  Jenkins, Brian

  Dawson, Hilton

  Johnson, Alan (Hull W & Hessle)

  Denham, John

  Johnson, Miss Melanie (Welwyn Hatfield)

  Dobbin, Jim

  Donohoe, Brian H

  Jones, Rt Hon Barry (Alyn)

  Doran, Frank

  Jones, Helen (Warrington N)

  Dowd, Jim

  Jones, Ms Jenny (Wolverh'ton SW)

  Drew, David

  Dunwoody, Mrs Gwyneth

  Jones, Jon Owen (Cardiff C)

  Eagle, Angela (Wallasey)

  Jones, Dr Lynne (Selly Oak)

  Eagle, Maria (L'pool Garston)

  Jones, Martyn (Clwyd S)

  Edwards, Huw

  Kaufman, Rt Hon Gerald

  Efford, Clive

  Kemp, Fraser

  Ellman, Mrs Louise

  Kennedy, Jane (Wavertree)

  Ennis, Jeff

  Khabra, Piara S

  Etherington, Bill

  Kidney, David

  Fisher, Mark

  King, Andy (Rugby & Kenilworth)

  Fitzpatrick, Jim

  King, Ms Oona (Bethnal Green)

  Fitzsimons, Lorna

  Kumar, Dr Ashok

  Flint, Caroline

  Ladyman, Dr Stephen

  Flynn, Paul

  Lawrence, Mrs Jackie

  Follett, Barbara

  Laxton, Bob

  Foster, Rt Hon Derek

  Lepper, David

  Foster, Michael Jabez (Hastings)

  Leslie, Christopher

  Foster, Michael J (Worcester)

  Levitt, Tom

  Foulkes, George

  Lewis, Ivan (Bury S)

  Fyfe, Maria

  Lewis, Terry (Worsley)

  Galloway, George

  Uddell, Rt Hon Mrs Helen

  Gapes, Mike

  Lloyd, Tony (Manchester C)

  Gardiner, Barry

  Love, Andrew

  George, Bruce (Walsall S)

  McAvoy, Thomas

  Gerrard, Neil

  McCabe, Steve

  Gibson, Dr Ian

  McCafferty, Ms Chris

  Gilroy, Mrs Linda

  McCartney, Rt Hon Ian (Makerfield)

  Godsiff, Roger

  Goggins, Paul

  McDonagh, Siobhain

  Golding, Mrs Llin

  Macdonald, Calum

  Gordon, Mrs Eileen

  McDonnell, John

  Griffiths, Jane (Reading E)

  McGuire, Mrs Anne

  Griffiths, Nigel (Edinburgh S)

  Mackinlay, Andrew

  796

  McNamara, Kevin

  Sarwar, Mohammad

  McNulty, Tony

  Savidge, Malcolm

  MacShane, Denis

  Sawford, Phil

  McWilliam, John

  Shaw, Jonathan

  Mallaber, Judy

  Sheerman, Barry

  Mandelson, Rt Hon Peter

  Sheldon, Rt Hon Robert

  Marsden, Gordon (Blackpool S)

  Shipley, Ms Debra

  Marshall, David (Shettleston)

  Simpson, Alan (Nottingham S)

  Marshall, Jim (Leicester S)

  Smith, Rt Hon Andrew (Oxford E)

  Marshall-Andrews, Robert

  Smith, Angela (Basildon)

  Martlew, Eric

  Smith, Rt Hon Chris (Islington S)

  Maxton, John

  Smith, Jacqui (Redditch)

  Meacher, Rt Hon Michael

  Smith, John (Glamorgan)

  Meale, Alan

  Smith, Llew (Blaenau Gwent)

  Merron, Gillian

  Snape, Peter

  Miller, Andrew

  Soley, Clive

  Mitchell, Austin

  Southworth, Ms Helen

  Moffatt, Laura

  Spellar, John

  Moonie, Dr Lewis

  Squire, Ms Rachel

  Moran, Ms Margaret

  Starkey, Dr Phyllis

  Morgan, Ms Julie (Cardiff N)

  Steinberg, Gerry

  Morley, Elliot

  Stevenson, George

  Morris, Rt Hon Ms Estelle (B'ham Yardley)

  Stewart, David (Inverness E)

  Stewart, Ian (Eccles)

  Mountford, Kali

  Stoate, Dr Howard

  Mowlam, Rt Hon Marjorie

  Stringer, Graham

  Mudie, George

  Stuart, Ms Gisela

  Mullin, Chris

  Sutcliffe, Gerry

  Murphy, Jim (Eastwood)

  Taylor, Rt Hon Mrs Ann (Dewsbury)

  Murphy, Rt Hon Paul (Torfaen)

  Naysmith, Dr Doug

  Taylor, David (NW Leics)

  O'Brien, Bill (Normanton)

  Temple-Morris, Peter

  O'Brien, Mike (N Warks)

  Thomas, Gareth R (Harrow W)

  O'Hara, Eddie

  Timms, Stephen

  Olner, Bill

  Tipping, Paddy

  O'Neill, Martin

  Todd, Mark

  Organ, Mrs Diana

  Touhig, Don

  Osborne, Ms Sandra

  Trickett, Jon

  Palmer, Dr Nick

  Truswell, Paul

  Perham, Ms Linda

  Turner, Dennis (Wolverh'ton SE)

  Pickthall, Colin

  Turner, Dr Desmond (Kemptown)

  Pike, Peter L

  Turner, Neil (Wigan)

  PlasWtt, James

  Twigg, Derek (Halton)

  Pollard, Kerry

  Twigg, Stephen (Enfield)

  Pond, Chris

  Vis, Dr Rudi

  Pope, Greg

  Walley, Ms Joan

  Pound, Stephen

  Ward, Ms Claire

  Powell, Sir Raymond

  Wareing, Robert N

  Prentice, Ms Bridget (Lewisham E)

  Watts, David

  Prentice, Gordon (Pendle)

  White, Brian

  Prescott, Rt Hon John

  Whitehead, Dr Alan

  Primarolo, Dawn

  Wicks, Malcolm

  Purchase, Ken

  Williams, Rt Hon Alan (Swansea W)

  Quinn, Lawrie

  Radice, Rt Hon Giles

  Williams, Mrs Betty (Conwy)

  Rapson, Syd

  Wills, Michael

  Reed, Andrew (Loughborough)

  Winnick, David

  Reid, Rt Hon Dr John (Hamilton N)

  Winterton, Ms Rosie (Doncaster C)

  Robinson, Geoffrey (Cov'try NW)

  Wise, Audrey

  Roche, Mrs Barbara

  Wood, Mike

  Rooker, Rt Hon Jeff

  Woodward, Shaun

  Rooney, Terry

  Woolas, Phil

  Ross, Ernie (Dundee W)

  Worthington, Tony

  Rowlands, Ted

  Wray, James

  Roy, Frank

  Wright, Anthony D (Gt Yarmouth)

  Ruane, Chris

  Wright, Dr Tony (Cannock)

  Ruddock, Joan

  Wyatt, Derek

  Russell, Ms Christine (Chester)

  Tellers for the Noes:

  Ryan, Ms Joan

  Mr. Mike Hall and

  Salter, Martin

  Mr. Kevin Hughes.

  Question accordingly negatived.
  Question, That the proposed words be there added, put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 31 (Questions on amendments):—

  797
  The House divided: Ayes 327, Noes 162.

  Division No. 32]

  [10.16 pm

  AYES

  Abbott, Ms Diane

  Cousins, Jim

  Adams, Mrs Irene (Paisley N)

  Crausby, David

  Ainger, Nick

  Cryer, Mrs Ann (Keighley)

  Ainsworth, Robert (Cov'try NE)

  Cryer, John (Hornchurch)

  Alexander, Douglas

  Cummings, John

  Allen, Graham

  Cunningham, Jim (Cov'try S)

  Anderson, Donald (Swansea E)

  Curtis-Thomas, Mrs Claire

  Anderson, Janet (Rossendale)

  Dalyell, Tam

  Ashton, Joe

  Darling, Rt Hon Alistair

  Atherton, Ms Candy

  Darvill, Keith

  Atkins, Charlotte

  Davey, Valerie (Bristol W)

  Austin, John

  Davidson, Ian

  Banks, Tony

  Davies, Rt Hon Denzil (Llanelli)

  Barnes, Harry

  Davies, Geraint (Croydon C)

  Barron, Kevin

  Davis, Rt Hon Terry (B'ham Hodge H)

  Bayley, Hugh

  Beard, Nigel

  Dawson, Hilton

  Beckett, Rt Hon Mrs Margaret

  Denham, John

  Benn, Hilary (Leeds C)

  Dobbin, Jim

  Benn, Rt Hon Tony (Chesterfield)

  Donohoe, Brian H

  Bennett, Andrew F

  Doran, Frank

  Benton, Joe

  Dowd, Jim

  Bermingham, Gerald

  Drew, David

  Berry, Roger

  Eagle, Angela (Wallasey)

  Best, Harold

  Eagle, Maria (L'pool Garston)

  Betts, Clive

  Edwards, Huw

  Blackman, Liz

  Efford, Clive

  Blears, Ms Hazel

  Ellman, Mrs Louise

  Blizzard, Bob

  Ennis, Jeff

  Blunkett, Rt Hon David

  Etherington, Bill

  Borrow, David

  Fisher, Mark

  Bradley, Keith (Withington)

  Fitzpatrick, Jim

  Bradley, Peter (The Wrekin)

  Fitzsimons, Loma

  Bradshaw, Ben

  Flint, Caroline

  Brinton, Mrs Helen

  Flynn, Paul

  Brown, Russell (Dumfries)

  Follett, Barbara

  Browne, Desmond

  Foster, Rt Hon Derek

  Burden, Richard

  Foster, Michael Jabez (Hastings)

  Burgon, Colin

  Foster, Michael J (Worcester)

  Butler, Mrs Christine

  Foulkes, George

  Byers, Rt Hon Stephen

  Fyfe, Maria

  Caborn, Rt Hon Richard

  Galloway, George

  Campbell, Alan (Tynemouth)

  Gapes, Mike

  Campbell, Ronnie (Blyth V)

  Gardiner, Barry

  Campbell-Savours, Dale

  George, Bruce (Walsall S)

  Cann, Jamie

  Gerrard, Neil

  Caplin, Ivor

  Gibson, Dr Ian

  Casale, Roger

  Gilroy, Mrs Linda

  Caton, Martin

  Godsiff, Roger

  Chapman, Ben (Wirral S)

  Goggins, Paul

  Chaytor, David

  Golding, Mrs Llin

  Clapham, Michael

  Gordon, Mrs Eileen

  Clark, Rt Hon Dr David (S Shields)

  Griffiths, Jane (Reading E)

  Clark, Dr Lynda (Edinburgh Pentlands)

  Griffiths, Nigel (Edinburgh S)

  Griffiths, Win (Bridgend)

  Clark, Paul (Gillingham)

  Grocott, Bruce

  Clarke, Charles (Norwich S)

  Grogan, John

  Clarke, Rt Hon Tom (Coatbridge)

  Gunnell, John

  Clarke, Tony (Northampton S)

  Hain, Peter

  Clelland, David

  Hall, Patrick (Bedford)

  Clwyd, Ann

  Hamilton, Fabian (Leeds NE)

  Coaker, Vernon

  Hanson, David

  Coffey, Ms Ann

  Harman, Rt Hon Ms Harriet

  Cohen, Harry

  Heal, Mrs Sylvia

  Coleman, Iain

  Healey, John

  Colman, Tony

  Henderson, Doug (Newcastle N)

  Connarty, Michael

  Henderson, Ivan (Harwich)

  Cook, Frank (Stockton N)

  Hepburn, Stephen

  Cooper, Yvette

  Heppell, John

  Corbyn, Jeremy

  Hesford, Stephen

  Corston, Jean

  Hewitt, Ms Patricia

  798

  Hill, Keith

  Moonie, Dr Lewis

  Hinchliffe, David

  Moran, Ms Margaret

  Hodge, Ms Margaret

  Morgan, Ms Julie (Cardiff N)

  Hoey, Kate

  Morley, Elliot

  Hood, Jimmy

  Morris, Rt Hon Ms Estelle (B'ham Yardley)

  Hope, Phil

  Hopkins, Kelvin

  Mountford, Kali

  Howarth, Alan (Newport E)

  Mowlam, Rt Hon Marjorie

  Howarth, George (Knowsley N)

  Mullin, Chris

  Howells, Dr Kim

  Murphy, Jim (Eastwood)

  Hoyle, Lindsay

  Murphy, Rt Hon Paul (Torfaen)

  Hughes, Ms Beverley (Stretford)

  Naysmith, Dr Doug

  Humble, Mrs Joan

  O'Brien, Bill (Normanton)

  Hurst, Alan

  O'Brien, Mike (N Warks)

  Hutton, John

  O'Hara, Eddie

  Iddon, Dr Brian

  Olner, Bill

  Illsley, Eric

  O'Neill, Martin

  Jackson, Helen (Hillsborough)

  Organ, Mrs Diana

  Jamieson, David

  Osborne, Ms Sandra

  Jenkins, Brian

  Palmer, Dr Nick

  Johnson, Alan (Hull W & Hessle)

  Perham, Ms Linda

  Johnson, Miss Melanie (Welwyn Hatfield)

  Pickthall, Colin

  Pike, Peter L

  Jones, Rt Hon Barry (Alyn)

  Plaskitt, James

  Jones, Helen (Warrington N)

  Pollard, Kerry

  Jones, Ms Jenny (Wolvem'ton SW)

  Pond, Chris

  Pope, Greg

  Jones, Jon Owen (Cardiff C)

  Pound, Stephen

  Jones, Dr Lynne (Selly Oak)

  Powell, Sir Raymond

  Jones, Martyn (Clwyd S)

  Prentice, Ms Bridget (Lewisham E)

  Kaufman, Rt Hon Gerald

  Prentice, Gordon (Pendle)

  Kemp, Fraser

  Prescott, Rt Hon John

  Kennedy, Jane (Wavertree)

  Primarolo, Dawn

  Khabra, Piara S

  Purchase, Ken

  Kidney, David

  Quinn, Lawrie

  King, Andy (Rugby & Kenilworth)

  Rapson, Syd

  King, Ms Oona (Bethnal Green)

  Reed, Andrew (Loughborough)

  Kumar, Dr Ashok

  Reid, Rt Hon Dr John (Hamilton N)

  Ladyman, Dr Stephen

  Robinson, Geoffrey (Cov'try NW)

  Laxton, Bob

  Roche, Mrs Barbara

  Lepper, David

  Rooker, Rt Hon Jeff

  Leslie, Christopher

  Rooney, Terry

  Levitt, Tom

  Ross, Emie (Dundee W)

  Lewis, Ivan (Bury S)

  Rowlands, Ted

  Lewis, Terry (Worsley)

  Roy, Frank

  Liddell, Rt Hon Mrs Helen

  Ruane, Chris

  Lloyd, Tony (Manchester C)

  Ruddock, Joan

  Love, Andrew

  Russell, Ms Christine (Chester)

  McAvoy, Thomas

  Ryan, Ms Joan

  McCabe, Steve

  Salter, Martin

  McCafferty, Ms Chris

  Sarwar, Mohammad

  McCartney, Rt Hon Ian (Makerheld)

  Savidge, Malcolm

  Sawford, Phil

  McDonagh, Siobhain

  Shaw, Jonathan

  Macdonald, Calum

  Sheerman, Barry

  McDonnell, John

  Sheldon, Rt Hon Robert

  McGuire, Mrs Anne

  Shipley, Ms Debra

  Mackinlay, Andrew

  Simpson, Alan (Nottingham S)

  McNamara, Kevin

  Smith, Rt Hon Andrew (Oxford E)

  McNulty, Tony

  Smith, Angela (Basildon)

  MacShane, Denis

  Smith, Rt Hon Chris (Islington S)

  McWilliam, John

  Smith, Jacqui (Redditch)

  Mallaber, Judy

  Smith, John (Glamorgan)

  Mandelson, Rt Hon Peter

  Smith, Llew (Blaenau Gwent)

  Marsden, Gordon (Blackpool S)

  Snape, Peter

  Marshall, David (Shettleston)

  Soley, Clive

  Marshall, Jim (Leicester S)

  Southworth, Ms Helen

  Marshall-Andrews, Robert

  Spellar, John

  Martlew, Eric

  Squire, Ms Rachel

  Maxton, John

  Starkey, Dr Phyllis

  Meacher, Rt Hon Michael

  Steinberg, Gerry

  Meale, Alan

  Stevenson, George

  Merron, Gillian

  Stewart, David (Inverness E)

  Miller, Andrew

  Stewart, Ian (Eccles)

  Mitchell, Austin

  Stoate, Dr Howard

  Moffatt, Laura

  Stringer, Graham

  799

  Stuart, Ms Gisela

  Watts, David

  Sutcliffe, Gerry

  White, Brian

  Taylor, Rt Hon Mrs Ann (Dewsbury)

  Whitehead, Dr Alan

  Wicks, Malcolm

  Taylor, David (NW Leics)

  Williams, Rt Hon Alan (Swansea W)

  Temple-Morris, Peter

  Thomas, Gareth R (Harrow W)

  Williams, Mrs Betty (Conwy)

  Timms, Stephen

  Wills, Michael

  Tipping, Paddy

  Winnick, David

  Todd, Mark

  Winterton, Ms Rosie (Doncaster C)

  Touhig, Don

  Wise, Audrey

  Trickett, Jon

  Wood, Mike

  Truswell, Paul

  Woodward, Shaun

  Turner, Dennis (Wolverh'ton SE)

  Woolas, Phil

  Turner, Dr Desmond (Kemptown)

  Worthington, Tony

  Turner, Neil (Wigan)

  Wray, James

  Twigg, Derek (Halton)

  Wright, Anthony D (Gt Yarmouth)

  Twigg, Stephen (Enfield)

  Wright, Dr Tony (Cannock)

  Vis, Dr Rudi

  Wyatt, Derek

  Walley, Ms Joan

  Tellers for the Ayes:

  Ward, Ms Claire

  Mr. Kevin Hughes and

  Wareing, Robert N

  Mr. Mike Hall.

  NOES

  Ainsworth, Peter (E Surrey)

  Fox, Dr Liam

  Allan, Richard

  Fraser, Christopher

  Amess, David

  Garnier, Edward

  Ancram, Rt Hon Michael

  George, Andrew (St Ives)

  Arbuthnot, Rt Hon James

  Gibb, Nick

  Ashdown, Rt Hon Paddy

  Gill, Christopher

  Atkinson, David (Bour'mth E)

  Gillan, Mrs Cheryl

  Atkinson, Peter (Hexham)

  Gray, James

  Ballard, Jackie

  Green, Damian

  Bercow, John

  Greenway, John

  Beresford, Sir Paul

  Grieve, Dominic

  Blunt, Crispin

  Hague, Rt Hon William

  Boswell, Tim

  Hamilton, Rt Hon Sir Archie

  Bottomley, Peter (Worthing W)

  Hammond, Philip

  Bottomley, Rt Hon Mrs Virginia

  Hancock, Mike

  Brady, Graham

  Harvey, Nick

  Brazier, Julian

  Hawkins, Nick

  Brooke, Rt Hon Peter

  Heald, Oliver

  Browning, Mrs Angela

  Heath, David (Somerton & Frome)

  Bruce, Ian (S Dorset)

  Heathcoat-Amory, Rt Hon David

  Bruce, Malcolm (Gordon)

  Hogg, Rt Hon Douglas

  Burnett, John

  Horam, John

  Butterfill, John

  Howard, Rt Hon Michael

  Campbell, Rt Hon Menzies (NE Fife)

  Hughes, Simon (Southwark N)

  Jack, Rt Hon Michael

  Cash, William

  Jenkin, Bernard

  Chapman, Sir Sydney (Chipping Bamef)

  Jones, Nigel (Cheltenham)

  Keetch, Paul

  Chope, Christopher

  Key, Robert

  Collins, Tim

  King, Rt Hon Tom (Bridgwater)

  Cotter, Brian

  Kirkbride, Miss Julie

  Cran, James

  Kirkwood, Archy

  Curry, Rt Hon David

  Laing, Mrs Eleanor

  Davies, Quentin (Grantham)

  Lait, Mrs Jacqui

  Davis, Rt Hon David (Haltemprice)

  Lansley, Andrew

  Dorrell, Rt Hon Stephen

  Leigh, Edward

  Duncan Smith, Iain

  Letwin, Oliver

  Emery, Rt Hon Sir Peter

  Lewis, Dr Julian (New Forest E)

  Evans, Nigel

  Lidington, David

  Faber, David

  Lilley, Rt Hon Peter

  Fallon, Michael

  Livsey, Richard

  Fearn, Ronnie

  Lloyd, Rt Hon Sir Peter (Fareham)

  Flight, Howard

  Llwyd, Elfyn

  Forth, Rt Hon Eric

  Loughton, Tim

  Foster, Don (Bath)

  Luff, Peter

  800

  Lyell, Rt Hon Sir Nicholas

  Spelman, Mrs Caroline

  MacGregor, Rt Hon John

  Spicer, Sir Michael

  McIntosh, Miss Anne

  Spring, Richard

  MacKay, Rt Hon Andrew

  Stanley, Rt Hon Sir John

  Maclean, Rt Hon David

  Steen, Anthony

  Maclennan, Rt Hon Robert

  Stunell, Andrew

  McLoughlin, Patrick

  Swayne, Desmond

  Maples, John

  Syms, Robert

  Mates, Michael

  Tapsell, Sir Peter

  Maude, Rt Hon Francis

  Taylor, Ian (Esher & Walton)

  Mawhinney, Rt Hon Sir Brian

  Taylor, John M (Solihull)

  May, Mrs Theresa

  Taylor, Matthew (Truro)

  Michie, Mrs Ray (Argyll & Bute)

  Thompson, William

  Moore, Michael

  Tonge, Dr Jenny

  Morgan, Alasdair (Galloway)

  Townend, John

  Moss, Malcolm

  Tredinnick, David

  Norman, Archie

  Trend, Michael

  Oaten, Mark

  Tyler, Paul

  O'Brien, Stephen (Eddisbury)

  Tyrie, Andrew

  Ottaway, Richard

  Viggers, Peter

  Page, Richard

  Walter, Robert

  Paice, James

  Wardle, Charles

  Paterson, Owen

  Waterson, Nigel

  Pickles, Eric

  Webb, Steve

  Prior, David

  Wells, Bowen

  Redwood, Rt Hon John

  Whittingdale, John

  Rendel, David

  Widdecombe, Rt Hon Miss Ann

  Robathan, Andrew

  Wilkinson, John

  Robertson, Laurence

  Willetts, David

  Roe, Mrs Marion (Broxbourne)

  Willis, Phil

  Ross, William (E Lond'y)

  Wilshire, David

  Ruffley, David

  Winterton, Mrs Ann (Congleton)

  Russell, Bob (Colchester)

  Winterton, Nicholas (Macclesfield)

  St Aubyn, Nick

  Yeo, Tim

  Sanders, Adrian

  Young, Rt Hon Sir George

  Sayeed, Jonathan

  Shepherd, Richard

  Tellers for the Noes:

  Simpson, Keith (Mid-Norfolk)

  Mr. Stephen Day and

  Smith, Sir Robert (W Ab'd'ns)

  Mr. John Randall.

  Question accordingly agreed to.
  Mr. DEPUTY SPEAKER forthwith declared the main Question, as amended, to be agreed to.
  Resolved,
  That this House notes that, compared to the previous administration, the costs of central Government have not risen in real terms, and have indeed fallen; supports the progress made by this Government in cleaning up politics and rebuilding the bond of trust with the British people, broken through the failures of the previous administration; welcomes the Government's actions to improve democratic accountability; endorses the inclusive approach to policymaking of the Modernising Government agenda, which involves more people from all walks of life; welcomes the improvement in standards in public life; and agrees with the Sixth Report of the Committee on Standards in Public Life that 'special advisers have a valuable role to play.

  BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE
  Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 15 (Exempted business),
  That, at this day's sitting, the Motion on the Line of Route may be proceeded with, though opposed, until 11.30 p.m.—[Mr. Dowd.]
  Question agreed to.

  Line of Route
  10.30 pm
  Mrs. Marion Roe: I beg to move,
  That this House approves the First Report from the Administration Committee on the Revised Framework for Re-opening the Line of Route during the Summer Adjournment (HC98).
  I have to admit to a distinct feeling of déjà vu as I move a motion to approve an Administration Committee report on the Line of Route. On 26 May last year, the House was unable to approve the Committee's original proposals, and we were asked to come forward with an alternative framework.
  I am grateful for the determination shown by my colleagues on the Committee, by the former Serjeant at Arms and the director of finance and administration and their staff, and by the consultants. That has enabled us to advance our new proposals—assuming that this House and the other place agree to them—in time for a re-opening this year.
  As the House may have heard, Mr. Walker, the director of finance, has been ill and recently underwent a major operation. May I take this opportunity, Mr. Deputy Speaker, to express to him the Committee's best wishes for a speedy and a complete recovery? [HON. MEMBERS: "Hear, hear."] I thank the Leader of the House for making time available for this debate.
  I have to advise the House that there is a printing error in the report that could cause confusion. In paragraph 27, the correct financial year is 2000–01.
  In drafting our new proposals, the Committee took on board comments made during the debate last year, especially those made by the hon. Members for North Cornwall (Mr. Tyler), for Burnley (Mr. Pike) and for Workington (Mr. Campbell-Savours), and by my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth). We have listened to the concerns that have been raised, and I hope that hon. Members will agree that we have acted accordingly in response to the wish expressed by the House.
  Bearing in mind that any tour of the Palace has to be of a suitable and dignified nature, the Committee has produced proposals that we consider are as limited—and involve as small an investment—as possible. I shall be brief, as time is short and I do not wish to deprive Members of an opportunity to speak. I wish to highlight a few points, particularly those about which the House expressed most concern last year.
  As we say in the report, in the previous debate,
  "no objections were raised to the principle of a re-opening"
  provided that it was done on an experimental basis. The House objected to introducing an admission charge to visit the Palace. We do not now propose such a charge. Visitors will still have to pay—
  Mr. Eric Forth: Oh!
  Mrs. Roe: I accept that some right hon. and hon. Members may say that I am being pedantic, but there is a crucial difference. Visitors will be paying not to visit the Houses of Parliament, but for the services of a guide.
  Mr. Douglas Hogg: One of the things that troubles a number of hon. Members
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  is that it is hard to see why members of the public should have to make a prior arrangement to come here at a particular time. It is difficult to see why, as with cathedrals and many other public places, they should not simply come to this place as and when they choose during the recess. Why on earth should they have a guide? I, for one, much prefer to go around public places by myself.
  Mrs. Roe: Members of the public can come to the House of Commons through their Member of Parliament, as now. They do not need to have a guide. In fact, their Member of Parliament can obtain tickets for them and they can come through the House in the usual way without a guide. Obviously, Members of Parliament can show people round the House themselves, or get a member of staff or spouse to do it for them. However, it was assumed by the Committee that most people who visited during the summer recess would be tourists, and we expected that they would prefer to have a guide. That is why that facility will be available. After we had considered the approach taken by other historic places of interest in London— Buckingham palace, for example—we felt that the proposals were the best way to cope with the numbers that we anticipated would wish to see the Palace. If we have timed and booked visits, there will be no confusion and no difficulty for hon. Members.
  Mr. Oliver Heald: I echo my hon. Friend's comments about the Committee, which struggled with the issues that the House gave us to consider. [Interruption.] Perhaps my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) would do me the courtesy of listening to my remarks. With the present arrangements, we have a Line of Route because it is right to have some management and supervision—for safety and security reasons—of visitors to the Palace of Westminster. The necessity for some supervision, security and safety means that people should not be allowed to wander unaided around this important building.
  Mrs. Roe: I thank my hon. Friend for those comments, which I endorse. The Palace is not a museum with treasures in glass cases or areas cordoned off. It is a workplace, and it is therefore important that groups of visitors are properly supervised. The security arrangements are also important.
  Mr. Peter L. Pike: Will the hon. Lady make it clear that during August and September it will still be possible for a Member of Parliament or a member of staff to take round a small group without making any payment?
  Mrs. Roe: I confirm that that will be the case, as it is now. In August, that facility is available on Wednesday and Thursday mornings and in September, on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday mornings. On those mornings, Members of Parliament will not be inhibited in any way from taking constituents, friends or whoever they like around the House, because nothing has changed. The new proposals are for an additional facility and I hope that all right hon. and hon. Members will feel that we have listened to what they said when we put the issue to the House before.
  Mr. Andrew Mackinlay: In the 1960s, there was a free Line of Route. I realise that interest in

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  Parliament has increased since then, but the proposals will not break entirely new ground and I wonder what arrangements were made in those days. I remember taking the Line of Route from the Victoria tower when the House was not sitting and that the guide was free, although I might have tagged on to another party that had paid.
  What comparisons have been made with other Parliaments, such as the French National Assembly, the Bundestag and the Congress of the United States of America? Visits to the White House—I know it is not a legislature—are free—
  Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael J. Martin): Order. I cannot allow the hon. Gentleman to continue on those lines.
  Mrs. Roe: I am afraid that I did not visit the House in the 1960s but I am sure that the hon. Gentleman knows that it was the murder of Airey Neave and the consequent security issues that caused the Line of Route visits to be stopped. I do not know the exact arrangements that were made, but I will let him know. I imagine that Members of Parliament could do then what they can do now and that that would have been free. I will come to the arrangements made in other countries later, but in general they are all different. I said that there would be no admission charge, and that is the situation at present. Many people already pay a modest charge—to the doorkeepers, to blue badge guides or to the education unit—to take part in tours along the Line of Route.
  I cannot stress too strongly that nothing in our proposals will affect the arrangements that apply during the summer or when the House is sitting. Summer reopening will be an additional facility. It is designed to appeal mainly to those who might be termed casual visitors: tourists who come to London. The proposed arrangements will not affect hon. Members' existing rights of access or the autumn visits programme.
  Some hon. Members were concerned, rightly, that a summer opening could affect the annual parliamentary works programme. I hope that the House will be reassured that the Committee was advised—by the director of parliamentary works—that the works plan for summer 2000 can be carried out without significant obstruction to the line of route.
  The House will be interested to note that the planned works include repairs to the rail around the Throne in the other place, laser cleaning of the stonework in the passage between the Central Lobby and the Members' Lobby, and the replacement of some acoustic tiles. My personal view is that these works may enhance a visit, rather than detract from it. Visitors will be able to see some of the essential repair work that has to be carried out from time to time in the Palace. In any case, many people enjoy watching others at work. That is why there are often spy holes in the hoardings around building sites.
  The nuts and bolts of the proposed operation are set out in detail in paragraphs 17 to 20 of the report. I shall not detain the House by rehearsing them at length now. However, to make a visit to Parliament as enjoyable and efficient as possible, it will be necessary for visitors to book timed tickets and a guide in advance of their visit. The operational day will be divided into a series of admissions slots, with a limit on the numbers admitted in
  804
  each slot. The proposal is that five groups, each of 20 visitors plus a guide, would be admitted at 15-minute intervals.
  Mr. John Bercow: Will the guide charge be higher or lower than the charge currently paid by groups who use the service, or will it be about the same?
  Mrs. Roe: Charges vary and, because they are private arrangements between hon. Members and others, they are no concern of mine. I have heard that the charge will be slightly higher, but there is nothing to prevent hon. Members from making arrangements with the people with whom they have arrangements at present, on behalf of their constituents and others. Those arrangements will not be changed in any way. The guide service will be an additional facility.
  The arrangements that we propose differ from those in operation in any other Parliament in the world. However, our inquiries show that no two Parliaments operate exactly the same system. Arrangements vary greatly, from strictly required pre-bookings to a policy that amounts to little more than "turn up at any time".
  Most Parliaments seem to have guided tours, rather than the auto-guides originally proposed by the Committee, and even then there are differences. In Canada, for example, tours are paid for by the taxpayer, and the guides are members of staff of the Canadian Parliament. In Austria, the tour guides are employees of an outside agency, and visitors pay their admission charge of approximately £2 at a reception desk inside the entrance to the Parliament building.
  Dr. Nick Palmer: Is the hon. Lady aware that the Association of Professional Tourist Guides in Britain, which is affiliated to the Manufacturing, Science and Finance Union, has strongly welcomed the proposal? It gives the first opportunity for professional guides, trained outside Parliament, to show their skills within Parliament.
  Mrs. Roe: I am sure that hon. Members are grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that additional information.
  Due to the simpler arrangements being proposed, we are looking at an operation that, although cheaper, still is not cheap. Paragraph 29 of the report states that we could be looking at a bottom-line figure of some £138,000— an amount that has not been allowed for in the 2000–01 estimates. However, should the House of Commons and the House of Lords approve the report, I can confirm that it will not be necessary for a supplementary estimate to be put before the House because it will be able to draw upon its central reserve, which is designed to cover matters such as this.
  One important way in which the House could recoup some of its outlay is by the sale of gifts and souvenirs. Merchandising is discussed in paragraphs 21 to 25 of the report. The House will have noted that we had misgivings about the consultants' proposal for letting the contract for merchandising. We consider that before any final decision is taken, the views of the experts must be sought. I refer of course to the two refreshment departments, the Catering

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  Committee, chaired by the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-East (Mr. Turner), and the Lords refreshment sub-committee.
  Mr. Nicholas Winterton: Is my hon. Friend aware that some of us—perhaps only a minority— believe that a widening of the merchandising franchise to enable more and more people to purchase goods from the House of Commons and the House of Lords devalues such items? They are not quite the rarities that they used to be, and are not so well received, because far more people get them than when Members of Parliament were the main purchasers.
  Mrs. Roe: My hon. Friend must know that this matter is in the hands of the Catering Committee, not the Administration Committee. However, we believed it important to consult those who serve on those Committees in both the Lords and the Commons to obtain their views on how best to proceed with merchandising. I am sure that his point will be brought to the attention of the relevant Committee chairman.
  We must ensure that we obtain the best possible deal for our constituents—the United Kingdom taxpayers. That will be best achieved by the two refreshment departments providing the gifts and souvenirs, rather than an outside company, particularly as the reopening this summer will be purely experimental.
  The Committee thought it only right to sound a note of caution about the new proposals. That is set out in paragraph 15. Perhaps our greatest concern was that as there will not be a set charge, as previously proposed, unscrupulous tour operators may see the Line of Route tours as an opportunity to rip off the visitor and charge considerably in excess of the forecast charge per visitor of £2.50 each for participants in an English-language group or £2.86 each in a foreign-language group. No doubt the House authorities will keep a close eye on that, perhaps using spot checks to ascertain how much individuals are being charged. We felt that we should bring that matter to the House's attention. I must stress that our proposals are experimental and can be reviewed at the end of the experiment.
  I hope that the House will accept the report. Some hon. Members prefer last year's report and feel that our original proposals were the best way in which to proceed.
  Mr. Forth: No.
  Mrs. Roe: I assure my right hon. Friend that some Members feel that way. I accept that others may feel uneasy about handing over the guiding of tours of Parliament to an outside agency, but I urge them to give our proposals a chance. Summer reopening would be a trial, and I acknowledge that there are ifs and buts around our proposals. If any mistake is made, or if visitors are being exploited by tour operators, we shall reconsider matters and put them right before the House is asked to make summer reopening an annual event. The House will make the final decision. The matter will come before us again when the experiment is over. In the hope that it will be supported, I commend the report to the House.
  10.51 pm
  The Parliamentary Secretary, Privy Council Office (Mr. Paddy Tipping): Opening the House of Commons and the House of Lords this summer would be an experiment. This is a House matter, and the Government have no view. No party Whip is being applied. There are many differences of view across the political parties, and we have heard some of them already. When the matter was debated on 26 May last year, there were serious differences of opinion. Since then, the Select Committee on Administration has reflected further and produced new proposals. A great deal of effort has been made over a fairly long time, and I am grateful for the Committee's work.
  It is absolutely right that there should be greater public access to an important and historic building that is a symbol across the world. I still get a thrill when I walk through Westminster Hall, soaking up the atmosphere. The hon. Member for Broxbourne (Mrs. Roe) outlined how the new proposals differ from the previous proposals, but the rights of Members of both Houses must be protected, and the parliamentary works programme must go forward as planned.
  The proposal is experimental, suggesting a trial only during summer 2000. The Committee was clear on that point. Paragraph 32 of the report states that:
  "a reopening, Summer 2000 should be seen as a trial, and will be subject to review later that year."
  Lessons will be learned from the experiment, and the House will wish to consider whether summer opening can become permanent or whether there might be possibilities of extending public access at other times of the year.
  I strongly support the Committee's report, but will highlight a few proposals. First, if the motion is agreed, the relevant Committees in the other place will consider the matter, and the other place will be asked to agree to a parallel motion. Secondly, as with the previous scheme, some input will be required from the public purse, mainly for security costs. The financial contribution will depend on take-up. That is a matter that the Committee has discussed and considered in detail. There could be an annual operating deficit of £232,000—of which the Commons' share would be £138,000. The House needs to bear that in mind when considering the matter.
  As has been pointed out, merchandising must be considered. The sale of souvenirs will help to defray the costs. However, we must ensure that those souvenirs are appropriate and that they reflect suitably on the character of the House and of Parliament. The Committee recommended further discussion of that point.
  Whatever the souvenirs that people take away, they will also take away important insights into the work of Parliament, and vivid memories and recollections of the building. Without doubt, this place affects and infects people. I shall support the trial opening. I hope that, in due course, it can be further extended.
  10.56 pm
  Sir George Young: I welcome the work of the Administration Committee and the introductory remarks made by my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Mrs. Roe). I am conscious that, on the previous two occasions when the Committee submitted recommendations to the House—on vellum and on the Line of Route—the House rejected them. I hope that it will be third time lucky.

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  I was happy with the original proposals, for which I voted on 26 May. Those included a charging structure, which meant that both Houses would recover their costs over five years, based on an average payment per visitor of £5.17, including VAT. That would have enabled the House to meet the other claims on its budget over a five-year period, without having to make provision for reopening the Line of Route.
  The new report, which reflects the views of the House in that earlier vote and has overcome the fears of some critics, does not put the proposal in a five-year time frame. Indeed, as my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne said, she recommends a trial this summer, followed by a review. I understand the reasons for that, but appendix B of the report shows an annual operating deficit of between £200 and £230,000, because the average charge per visitor has fallen to between £2.50 and £2.80, leaving a subsidy per visitor of £2.80.
  On top of that, there are start-up costs—£400,000 in the earlier report. Although the second report knocks out some of those costs, I cannot find in it an estimate of the revised start-up costs. That will be of interest to the House of Commons Commission. There will be budgetary implications. At a time when we are urging financial discipline on other public bodies, we should exercise it ourselves.
  The principle that visitors should pay, which I support, has been retained, although it is presented not as an admission fee, but as an apportioned share of the costs of a guide. I prefer the original proposals, but I am happy to support the ones before us.
  I wish to raise a few points. Will my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne tell us where the new visitors' office—referred to in paragraph 13—will be?
  In the original proposals, the House was, in effect, a retailer; we controlled the purchase price and dealt with the visitors. We are now moving into wholesale mode— somebody else will retail the package. The result could be that visitors would pay the fees to which the House objected last May, but the House would not receive the proceeds. The House could find that the retailer has creamed off the difference. My hon. Friend touched on that point. One needs to keep an eye out to ensure that there is no abuse. I hope that, if we discover abuses and that someone else is creaming off the surplus that should go to the House, we shall reconsider the matter with a view to recouping such surpluses.
  Mr. Dale Campbell-Savours: Is not it fair to ask the guides to police the system for us?
  Sir George Young: I am not sure that even the guides will know how much visitors are paying to tour organisers.
  Mr. Campbell-Savours: They can ask.
  Sir George Young: Indeed. However, my response to the hon. Gentleman's question is no, it would not be fair to the ask the guides, in addition to their other responsibilities, to police the system.
  Mr. Nicholas Winterton: Is there not a risk that, by contracting out this new guide system, which will be based in a booking office in the garden of the Victoria
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  Tower—at the other end of the Palace—we might drive up the cost of tours with the current guides of the House, for which Members of Parliament pay? My right hon. Friend appears to believe entirely in market forces in respect of current services and provisions in the Palace of Westminster. Am I right?
  Sir George Young: In a word—no. I see no reason why the contractual arrangements between Members and guides should be affected. I see them carrying on in the same way.
  My final question to my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne is whether Members need to pre-empt all tours on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday mornings in September. I leave that question in her mind, but is the demand from Members such that other groups cannot be allowed to visit at those times? Perhaps the matter will be kept under review.
  Subject to the answers to those questions, I shall—this is free-vote territory—support the proposals in the Lobby.
  11 pm
  Mr. Peter L. Pike: In the previous debate on this subject I might have played a major part in defeating the proposal that was before us then. However, it is not my intention to vote against the motion tonight. The Committee has addressed the points that were made in the previous debate and tried to come up with a proposal that deals with some of the issues raised.
  I cannot pretend that the proposal is a perfectly satisfactory conclusion, but it is an improvement. We underestimate the symbolism of Parliament not only in this country, but in the whole world. In the second world war, people from throughout the Commonwealth and from nations that lost their freedom looked upon Parliament as a symbol. People should have access to the building so that they can understand the Westminster parliamentary heritage.
  I still to some extent hold the view that free access should be available to people from all over the world. However, I accept the point of the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Mrs. Roe) that the proposal will produce additional access and will not replace any existing arrangements. It will give us an additional 41 days when members of the public will be able to gain access to the building. In that sense the proposal is an improvement, and a commitment has been made to consider how it has worked later in the year.
  Although, in theory, I would like people to be able to turn up and visit the Line of Route, I understand why there must be regulation. Those who accompany the groups from our constituencies know the pressure points in the Prince's Chamber and elsewhere. People wait to see the Woolsack, the Lord Chancellor's Chair and the Throne in the other place and they sometimes have to queue. We also face difficulties in this Chamber when everyone wants to see where Black Rod bangs the door. There must be a sensible flow of people through those pressure points, so I understand the need for controls.
  I hope that we shall make forms available, so that people can tell us how they think the system has worked. That would be useful. We could ask people to tell us anonymously how much they had paid for their tour. That would provide us with a check on what they pay the tour

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  organisers. If the hon. Lady has not already thought of that point, she might consider doing something along those lines.
  I accept what my hon. Friend the Minister said about retailing and merchandising quality souvenirs. We do not want people to buy the tat that they can buy at a cheap market anywhere in the country. We want them to be able to buy good quality stuff that befits the Palace of Westminster and the Houses of Parliament. That is extremely important.
  I dismiss, however, the point about security and the £230,000 deficit. I accept that there will be a cost to the public purse, but when we consider what it costs to run this building and Parliament as a whole, £230,000, or any capital cost of setting up the scheme, is chicken-feed. We must enable the people of this country, particularly young people, to see their Parliament, where legislation is made.
  We must be a symbol to people from the Commonwealth and other nations, some of which fought, lost their independence or were occupied for a period. In this new millennium we want to send out the message that this place is important, and that it stands for something and will continue to do so. We ought to enable as many people as possible to see this place, so I shall be supporting the motion.
  11.6 pm
  Mr. Paul Tyler: I had the pleasure of not only moving the amendment on 26 May but, unusually in this Parliament, of winning a vote. The vote was against the Front Benches, because although they voted in a personal capacity, the Leader of the House and her Conservative shadow voted for the proposals, and it was Back Benchers who voted against them. I was pleased to be able to defeat the establishment.
  The vote was not only on the practicalities of the proposals; there was a principle involved. As the hon. Member for Burnley (Mr. Pike) has just said, a number of Members felt strongly that the way in which we were being asked to proceed would commit us to a course of action not for one year but, as the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir G. Young) pointed out, for five years.
  That programme had all the hallmarks of something that would expand because the up-front investment would be so great that it would not be viable or economically sound if it were not extended into other parts of the year, into weekends and even possibly weekdays. The fear that Members would not be able to let our constituents come to see our Parliament at work in the long term was behind that vote.
  I pay tribute not only to the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Mrs. Roe) and her Committee but to the Department of the Serjeant at Arms. They have worked hard to try to take on board all the concerns expressed by Members in the former debate. I particularly draw hon. Members' attention to paragraphs 13 to 16 of the report— if they have not read them already—which set out in succinct detail the variants on the previous report. Those paragraphs contain improvements and, importantly, set out the three features that are not now part of the proposals.
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  First, the scheme does not involve an admission charge per se. Secondly, there will be no booth—no ticketing regime with an elaborate new building in the Victoria Tower Gardens. The hon. Member for Macclesfield (Mr. Winterton) can rest assured that there will not be an excrescence on the parliamentary building at that end of the Palace.
  Thirdly, and most importantly, there will still be personal guides. We shall not have those terrible audio machines that go wrong and are not adaptable. Most other attractions in London have now discarded them as not being up to the standard required for a location such as this.
  Hon. Members felt that the proposals made in May were the thin end of a very big wedge, and that is why they turned them down by a large majority. On that basis, these proposals are a great improvement on the originals. However, there are concerns, and it would be wrong to let the moment pass without putting them on record. I hope that these considerations will be carefully monitored during the year.
  First, the numbers have been dragged out of a hat. I know that the Committee has had expert advice, but the proposed numbers are considerable, and it will be difficult to get them through the House in a comparatively short working day. Secondly, those who already take parties around are concerned about provision for smaller groups, which could be uneconomic under the proposals unless they are amalgamated with bigger groups, but there might then be a problem with different languages.
  The costs are set out in some detail, but as hon. Members have already said, they are still rather tentative. That, perhaps, is an additional reason for having only a one-year programme.
  Several hon. Members have referred to the possibility that contracting out may lead to profiteering. I think that the hon. Member for Broxbourne is right when she says that we must try to monitor the scheme very carefully. The hon. Member for Burnley is right also when he says that feedback from those who are experiencing the new regime will be the best way of ascertaining whether they are getting good value for money and whether we are offering good value for money.
  Finally, and most importantly, there are the efforts that have been made to make the scheme a one-off special and to have a trial period during this particular year. I do not dare mention the M word in the proximity of the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth). However, as there is a special exhibition in this building during the year, I think that we will find that visitors will come through during the summer who will want to see it. They will want also to see the working parts of this working building. In the circumstances, I think that a trial period with no long-term commitment is the right way forward.
  On the whole, that is the way in which the House works. We experiment, evolve and improve, and we also review. I hope that in addition we shall get feedback from those most concerned. That seems the proper way forward, and I congratulate the Committee on greatly improved proposals.
  11.11 pm
  Mr. Andrew Mackinlay: I intended to go home, but an hon. Member persuaded me to stay and vote against the motion. However, I shall not oppose it. It is

  811
  interesting that I do not see the Member in question in the Chamber. I am persuaded that before us is a long overdue measure. As I have said in the House previously, as many others will have done, we came here as children or young people and were thrilled by the place. That memory remains very much with me. I went on a tour without any organisation. I joined up at the Victoria tower and was allowed through. The system worked but I accept that the volume of visitors was different and that there had not been the terrorist regime that has blighted the past 20-odd years.
  When I first visited this place, I remember the guide telling us how Ministers used to put their feet on the Table. Since the television cameras have come into the Chamber, Ministers no longer do that. However, the information intrigued me, and I was enthused by it. For the next 28 years I tried to get elected to this place. Having been elected, I rushed into the Chamber and sat down on one of the Front Benches. I put my feet up and found that they would not reach the Table. Somehow I had always felt that I would never be a Minister. I shall leave Front-Bench positions to my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary, Privy Council Office and the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir G. Young).
  The tourist industry in London is well organised, with companies bringing people in from other continents. What safeguards will there be to ensure that tickets are not booked up on an organised basis so that they are all swiftly taken? That would mean that ordinary folk— perhaps small families coming up from other parts of the United Kingdom or from other parts of the world—who express an interest will be told, "I'm awfully sorry, madam, but all the tickets have been taken for today." I am nervous about that. Entrepreneurs and business managers in the big London hotels or cruise line companies will ensure that all the tickets are taken. That will be the first thing to hit the Sunday newspapers after a few weeks, and we will all be embarrassed.
  Mr. Campbell-Savours: There is to be a review.
  Mr. Mackinlay: I do not think that we should wait for the review. We should anticipate problems, and I hope that the one to which I have referred will be considered now.
  I had not realised until this evening that merchandising is so important. My view is different from that of the hon. Member for Macclesfield (Mr. Winterton). I agree with him, however, that there must be quality products on sale that are appropriate to the House, but they must not be bland. By contrast with the shop in the House of Lords, I regret to say that the products in the Commons shop are bland and expensive. I have drawn attention to that in an early-day motion. I regret the fact that the House of Lords shop is so superior to ours in its range of quality products, many of which are very attractive. Some heads need to be banged among members of our Catering Committee.
  I do not have confidence in the Catering Committee when it comes to dealing with this matter, and I hope that that will be taken on board. I am told that the running of the House of Lords shop is largely delegated to the folk who work in it, which is a good idea—better than managers on high salaries and hon. Members. I hope that that will be borne in mind.
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  It is long overdue that people should have access to this place. I know that it is a corny phrase, but it is the people's palace. I always say that to the people whom I bring to the House. In the seven years I have been a Member, I have never paid for a guide. Although there is a danger of my being the most highly paid tourist guide in London, I get an enormous thrill from acting out Speaker Lenthall's speech in St. Stephen's hall and from showing people the Crypt, which I know will not be part of the Line of Route. It is an important part of our job to ensure that everyone has access to this mother of Parliaments.
  11.15 pm
  Mr. Eric Forth: We have got ourselves in a dreadful muddle, and I suspect I know why. We cannot leave this place alone. We cannot let things be. We cannot allow things to remain as they have been, when they are reasonably or perfectly satisfactory. Everyone must now keep changing things, fiddling with them and adjusting them. I suspect that that is the main reason why we are faced with such an unsatisfactory muddle.
  An example of that is the argument that my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Mrs. Roe) delivered with virtually a straight face. We were told not to worry—there will not be an admission fee, and people will just be charged for a guide. To the extent to which that was put as a serious argument, and in the expectation that those of us who opposed it last summer will now be for it, that is a distinction without a difference. It illustrates the difficulty into which the Committee has got itself.
  My hon. Friend says that the House is to blame—that her Committee came up with some good ideas last year, which the House was disgraceful enough to reject. The Committee has had to come back with less good ideas, which we are asked to accept this time round. I do not accept them this time round, because they are still unsatisfactory.
  The hon. Member for Thurrock (Mr. Mackinlay) asked in an intervention whether other similar bodies did what is being proposed. I believe I am correct in saying that my other favourite legislature, Congress in Washington DC, does not charge for admission and does not require people to have guides. I have gone on to Capitol Hill many times, gone through security and been able to guide myself round the building.
  That, I thought, was right and appropriate. If it is possible in Washington DC, I should have thought that we could manage something similar in this place, without all the paraphernalia laid out in the report.
  Dr. Palmer: Did the right hon. Gentleman happen to be present when one of the visitors attempted to assassinate a member of the House of Representatives with a machine gun, and instead wounded several of the staff?
  Mr. Forth: I was not there at the time, but whether the gentleman with the gun would have been deterred by a charge for a guide, I am not entirely certain. I do not see the validity of what the hon. Gentleman is trying to tell me.

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  The other spurious argument that we are offered this evening is that this is only a trial. We have all heard that before. We were sold that pup when the televising of the House was proposed. That was supposed to be an experiment. We are being sold it again with the ridiculous and expensive alternative Chamber that has been wished upon us. We are told that that is an experiment. You know and I know, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that it is nothing of the kind: it was declared a triumph some time in the summer and made permanent.
  The Parliamentary Secretary, Privy Council Office, gave the game away. I noted his words carefully. He said that he knew that the proposal was only a trial, but he hoped that it would be extended. If that is not prejudging and giving the game away, I do not know what is.
  Let us make no mistake about it: if we support the motion tonight, which I hope we will not, we will be in a mess; we will be kidding ourselves, our public and our voters, and the change will almost certainly be permanent in one form or another. The proposal is unfortunate, and I hope that the House will not feel obliged to support it tonight. It can be put on ice.
  Mr. Nicholas Winterton: I am surprised that my right hon. Friend has not asked one question. A range of figures has been discussed—in the previous report, £5-plus per person. Now that the proposal is for a guide ticket, no one has said what it will cost individuals who visit the Palace of Westminster. We heard a price of around £2.50 mentioned—
  Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The hon. Gentleman's intervention is far too long.
  Mr. Forth: I do not know the answer to the question. It is significant that no one else, except perhaps my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne, knows.
  Mr. Heald: The appendix to the report explains that the cost would be between £2.50 and £3 per visitor.
  Mr. Forth: I am grateful to my hon. Friend, but I do not know how he is able to say that, because if there is no mechanism for control or regulation, the charge could be any amount of money.
  Mr. Campbell-Savours: I always believed that the right hon. Gentleman opposed regulation.
  Mr. Forth: I oppose regulation and am an unrepentant advocate of the free market, but I was trying to answer my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald) by pointing out that we cannot know the figure because it would be unregulated and would thus find its own level. We are operating in the dark.
  For all the reasons that I outlined, I remain completely unconvinced. If we have the opportunity for a Division, I shall vote against the report.
  11.21 pm
  Mr. Nigel Evans: We are discussing the mother of Parliaments. We have talked about not knowing whether the cost of visiting this place will be £2.50 or £3. We have considered additional merchandising and said that it should not be tat, as if that were important. However, if we wish to promote representative democracy, we want as many people as possible to visit us here—whether we are working or not—on six or even seven days a week. I oppose charging.
  During the summer, educational facilities are made available. Many youngsters visit the House, and several hon. Members give up their time to talk to school pupils and explain what we do. We do that to promote representative democracy, which we demean by talking about charging £2.50 or £3 for small groups of people, many of them tourists on package tours. The hon. Member for Thurrock (Mr. Mackinlay) was able to visit Parliament when he was a youngster, and get in without being part of a guided tour. He was so excited by what he saw that he ended up on the Government Benches, albeit below the Gangway.
  We should do all that we can to excite people of all ages about our work here. If we turn Parliament into a theme park, with a little tuck shop where we sell souvenirs—any old tat with a portcullis for which we can charge twice as much as it is worth—we do Parliament and democracy a disservice.
  I shall not vote in favour of or against the proposals. I emphasise that we ought to consider what we do to encourage people to vote. Tomorrow, we shall again consider the Representation of the People Bill. Voting statistics show that people are turned off by representative democracy.
  Mr. Pike: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
  Mr. Evans: No. After what people have heard this evening, I suspect that even fewer will vote in future.
  11.24 pm
  Mrs. Roe: With the leave of the House, I shall wind up the debate. Many hon. Members have made points and it is courteous to try to respond.
  The debate has been interesting and I am grateful to all hon. Members who contributed to it. I thank the Parliamentary Secretary for his support and I agree that all the souvenirs that are sold here should reflect the dignity of the House and be of high quality.
  I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir G. Young) for his support. He raised several questions. I agree that we should monitor carefully any possible abuse of charging by the operator. I made that point and we put it in the report, quite legitimately, to bring it to the attention of the House and so that everybody will know that we shall keep a careful eye on it.
  On Members' use of the Line of Route in August and September, my right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire suggested that every day might not be needed. I have given my word that there will be no change in the current arrangements and my right hon. Friend will understand that this is not a matter that the Administration Committee should consider at this time. Members will have the same opportunity to bring their constituents to the House as they do now.

  815
  I thank the hon. Member for Burnley (Mr. Pike) for his support and also for his suggestion about the survey that might take place among visitors. I am sure that the organisers will note that extremely helpful suggestion.
  Mr. Campbell-Savours: Will the hon. Lady make it clear to those who operate the system that we will reverse it if they abuse it?
  Mrs. Roe: That, of course, is the ultimate sanction and I am certain that the organisers will understand that that is exactly what will happen if they do not toe the line and behave honourably.
  I am most grateful to the hon. Member for North Cornwall (Mr. Tyler) for his support and also for his advice and assistance during our deliberations while we were suggesting the new framework and when the whole matter was being reconsidered. I am delighted that the hon. Member for Thurrock (Mr. Mackinlay) will not vote against the motion and I reiterate that we shall monitor take-up of the tickets. On merchandising, I have already explained that I believe that high quality is very important. The Administration Committee is of course not responsible for that end of the House of Commons' selling programme, which comes under the Catering Committee, and I am sure that the Chairman of that Committee will note the points that he has made.
  My right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) and my hon. Friend the Member for Ribble Valley (Mr. Evans) argued for visits to the Palace to be totally free, but visits are not free at the moment unless visitors are personally escorted by an hon. Member or by a member of staff. As I said in my opening speech, under the present arrangements many people already pay a modest charge to come through—
  Mr. Pike: Will the hon. Lady give way?
  Mrs. Roe: No, because I have only three minutes in which to speak.
  Mr. Pike: On a quick point?
  Mrs. Roe: I shall give way briefly.
  Mr. Pike: In answer to the hon. Member for Ribble Valley (Mr. Evans), will not the overwhelming majority of people—whether they visit the Palace in the recess or at another time or go into the Gallery—come into the building absolutely free?
  Mrs. Roe: That is absolutely right, and I am sure that my hon. Friend has taken that point on board.
  I find the remarks of my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst confusing, because I feel that he was suggesting that the guests of hon. Members might pay to come into the House and the general public might not. Surely that cannot be right. Perhaps I misunderstood and he was advocating scrapping the present arrangements so that guests cannot take part in any tour if an hon. Member cannot personally escort them. I find it difficult to understand where my right hon. Friend is coming from.
  816
  I reiterate that we propose an additional facility. None of the present arrangements for access will be changed and, as I said in the debate last year, no one will have to pay to see the House or its Committees at work or to meet their or any other Member of Parliament. The arrangements are exactly the same as they always have been.
  I hope that the House will not divide, but if it does, hon. Members should be fully aware of the possible implications. The proposal will give many more people—possibly as many as 80 per cent. of whom will be overseas visitors—the opportunity to see the home of Parliament and its treasures. For some, and possibly most, of those visitors, a tour of the Palace of Westminster will be the opportunity of a lifetime. Should the House vote against the motion, there would be no alternative: no amendments were tabled and therefore there would be no advice or instructions for the Committee to follow up. The choice, I regret to say, is not between paying for a guide or providing one free, but between reopening the Line of Route this summer or having to forget the whole proposal.
  Question put:—
  The House divided: Ayes 78, Noes 4.

  Division No. 33]

  [11.29 pm

  AYES

  Ainsworth, Robert (Cov'try NE)

  Kirkwood, Archy

  Allen, Graham

  Ladyman, Dr Stephen

  Anderson, Janet (Rossendale)

  Lepper, David

  Atherton, Ms Candy

  Lewis, Ivan (Bury S)

  Beckett, Rt Hon Mrs Margaret

  McAvoy, Thomas

  Betts, Clive

  Mackinlay, Andrew

  Bradley, Keith (Withington)

  Merron, Gillian

  Browne, Desmond

  Miller, Andrew

  Campbell, Rt Hon Menzies (NE Fife)

  Murphy, Jim (Eastwood)

  Campbell-Savours, Dale

  Naysmith, Dr Doug

  Caplin, Ivor

  Olner, Bill

  Chapman, Sir Sydney (Chipping Barnet)

  Pickthall, Colin

  Clwyd, Ann

  Pike, Peter L

  Crausby, David

  Pope, Greg

  Darvill, Keith

  Prentice, Ms Bridget (Lewisham E)

  Davey, Valerie (Bristol W)

  Quinn, Lawrie

  Dawson, Hilton

  Rendel, David

  Dobbin, Jim

  Roe, Mrs Marion (Broxbourne)

  Dowd, Jim

  Ross, Ernie (Dundee W)

  Emery, Rt Hon Sir Peter

  Russell, Bob (Colchester)

  Fitzpatrick, Jim

  Sawford, Phil

  Flynn, Paul

  Spellar, John

  Foulkes, George

  Stewart, Ian (Eccles)

  George, Andrew (St Ives)

  Stringer, Graham

  Gerrard, Neil

  Stunell, Andrew

  Gilroy, Mrs Linda

  Sutcliffe, Gerry

  Griffiths, Jane (Reading E)

  Taylor, Rt Hon Mrs Ann (Dewsbury)

  Griffiths, Nigel (Edinburgh S)

  Taylor, David (NW Leics)

  Hall, Mike (Weaver Vale)

  Taylor, Matthew (Truro)

  Hamilton, Fabian (Leeds NE)

  Tipping, Paddy

  Hanson, David

  Touhig, Don

  Heald, Oliver

  Twigg, Derek (Halton)

  Heppell, John

  Twigg, Stephen (Enfield)

  Hogg, Rt Hon Douglas

  Tyler, Paul

  Hughes, Kevin (Doncaster N)

  Watts, David

  Hughes, Simon (Southwark N)

  Wray, James

  Iddon, Dr Brian

  Young, Rt Hon Sir George

  Jenkins, Brian

  Jones, Martyn (Clwyd S)

  Tellers for the Ayes:

  Key, Robert

  Mr. William Ross and

  King, Andy (Rugby & Kenilworth)

  Dr. Nick Palmer.

  817

  NOES

  Barnes, Harry

  Cousins Jim

  Tellers for the Noes:

  Dalyell, Tam

  Mr. Eric Forth and

  Winterton, Mrs Ann (Congleton)

  Mr. Christopher Chope.

  Question accordingly agreed to.
  Resolved,
  That this House approves the First Report from the Administration Committee on the Revised Framework for Re-opening the Line of Route during the Summer Adjournment (HC98).

  COMMITTEES

    Environmental Audit
    Ordered,
    That Mr. Laurence Robertson be discharged from the Environmental Audit Committee and Sir Richard Body be added to the Committee.—[Mr. Robert Ainsworth]

    Public Administration
    Ordered,
    That Mr. Nicholas Soames be discharged from the Select Committee on Public Administration and Mr. John Townend be added to the Committee.—[Mr. Robert Ainsworth]

  Nancekuke Base
  Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Robert Ainsworth.]
  11.40 pm
  Ms Candy Atherton: This debate concerns both my current constituents and, sadly, some who are no longer with us. The issues that I plan to raise involve the use of land by the Ministry of Defence on the north coast of my constituency, at the base formally called Nancekuke, near Portreath. I shall be asking for a totally new inquiry into operations at Nancekuke and the possible effects on my constituents.
  Nancekuke was a chemical defence establishment— although that rather bland title hid its real role. Nancekuke was used to produce and test nerve gas after the second world war, and some of its equipment was salvaged from Nazi Germany.
  The production of nerve gas was given real impetus by the arms race, and the fear that the eastern bloc was moving ahead in the sphere of chemical warfare. As the Government stated in a declaration to the United Nations, Nancekuke was the United Kingdom's main chemical weapons research and development facility. Chemical weapons produced at Nancekuke were, it is believed, used offensively by the United States until 1964. More than 20 tonnes of the nerve agent GB sarin were produced at Nancekuke—which was a rather large amount, one might think, for research purposes alone.
  Nancekuke closed in 1980, after the 1976 defence review, and the buildings and equipment were buried on the site. That is but one of the issues that I wish to pursue in the debate.
  Nancekuke consists of eight scattered farms and old quarries and is at the heart of Cornwall's mining history. Many mines were never mapped. Mining is not referred to within the said disclosure to the United Nations. Originally, during the second world war, the site was used as an airfield, but, in the 1950s, people realised that it was being used as an Army research centre.
  The base first reached prominence when a local Redruth man, Trevor Martin, claimed that he was suffering from nerve gas poisoning after working as a fitter at the factory. Subsequently, it was discovered that the Ministry of Defence was dispatching nerve gas along the A30, to Porton Down, causing great local alarm.
  In the 1960s and 1970s, local Members of Parliament started asking questions, and one particular story rose to prominence. It concerned Tom Griffiths, who is delighted that his personal quest for the truth may—I very much hope that it will—be successful today.
  In 1958, Tom was working as a fitter at Nancekuke and had signed a declaration under the Official Secrets Act 1911. One day, he was the victim of an industrial accident, with another worker who has since died in an unrelated accident. Tom had been told to enter a laboratory cubicle without any protective clothing, after being told that it would be safe to do so. However, sarin was leaking into the cubicle.
  From that day onwards, Tom has been ill. He received no atropine, which many people believe is a partial antidote. He also did not tell his general practitioner of the accident, fearing the consequences of the Official

  819
  Secrets Act provisions. Tom's cholinesterase level dropped from 133 to 105 and did not return to normal for 15 months. Consequently, Tom was misdiagnosed, and therefore mistreated.
  It was not until 1969, when people started to understand Nancekuke's role, that Tom's GP realised that toxic chemicals were involved and referred him to a neurologist. He diagnosed nerve gas as being responsible for Tom's prolonged neurological and psychological problems. Later, a consultant toxicologist examined Tom and became convinced that sarin was responsible.
  Subsequently, Tom spent years of medical tribunals, appeals, counter-appeals and ombudsman involvement. It was a harrowing time, to put it mildly. I could spend the entire debate outlining Tom's case, but I do not have the time.
  It was eventually concluded that Tom had suffered from anti-cholinesterase action of organic phosphorous compounds. He received a very small payment from the Ministry of Defence. Tom has had to fight official secrets and duplicity for many years. It is time that his concerns were addressed.
  Another worker at Nancekuke who came to see me recently was responsible for testing the blood of fellow workers. On one occasion the machine that protected him from fumes malfunctioned and blew fumes into his face rather than away from him. To this day he has suffered effects consistent with toxic poisoning.
  I have also been contacted by people from constituencies further up the coast in Cornwall. They claim that toxic compounds were swept on to the beach at Padstow, leaving them burned and suffering from unusual and classic nerve gas effects. Their then Member of Parliament, John Pardoe, asked many questions about the subject. At much the same time, a large number of seals on the north coast were found dead. Decontaminants were flushed out through a cave into the sea. Those chemicals, rather than nerve gas, may well be responsible. We shall probably never know. Those who believe that they suffer to this day would like to know the answer.
  All that might be the stuff of anti-nuclear dissertations, were it not for Carlton Television's south-west news programme "Westcountry Live". Its "Insight" feature broadcast last month broke new ground in the long-running saga, producing the new evidence that many believe justifies a fresh inquiry.
  In 1970, because of concerns and legal battles, Ministers decided that a medical inquiry was required to look into the deaths and ill health suffered by workers at Nancekuke. I believe that there was a genuine wish to unearth the truth. I am pleased to say that it was a Labour Government decision. Sadly, in the interim between the decision to investigate and the results of the three-year survey, the Government changed complexion and the truth remained hidden. I am pleased that this Government have agreed to authorise the early release of the information. That is a tribute to open government and I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Minister and his colleagues for agreeing to a request from Graham Smith, the reporter from Carlton Television, for privileged access to examine the documents at Kew a full three years early. They make disturbing reading.
  Beneath the rather prosaic language that civil servants of only a few years ago seem to have adopted, the message is clear. Some 41 men died—nine during
  820
  employment and 32 after leaving the establishment— between 1950 and 1969. We learn more than was published before about how they died. Some complicated statistical analysis was applied and the conclusion was reached that such a death rate was lower than the national average. If a small company employing 150 people lost 41 current and former employees among a relatively young and healthy cohort, alarm bells would ring.
  Those men were working not underground or at sea, but in a factory and a laboratory environment. I should like my hon. Friend the Minister to look again at the issue. Can fresh thoughts be applied and modern statistical analysis used?
  The key time for the production of nerve gas—we are talking about production, not research quantities—was the 1950s. During the four years from 1955 to 1959, there were 306 cases of respiratory disease—almost double the numbers for the following years. Can those figures be explained by procedures having been tightened up? Are the figures a reflection of the amount of nerve gas produced?
  The report made conclusions over a 15-year period from correspondence between civil servants in the Ministry of the Defence and the Office for National Statistics. The documents show that civil servants then were well capable of spin. They wrote to the director of chemical and biological defence research saying that they wished to amend the draft letters to Members of Parliament. They eventually claimed that it was impossible to draw conclusions. In effect, they redrafted the results of the investigation politically. There was clear evidence of a doubling of bronchitis among industrial staff. That was not reported to Parliament at the time.
  The overwhelming impression that one gets is of the civil servants desperately trying to manipulate the facts to help themselves out of a hole—not out of concern for the then Government's workers, but in terms of defending negligence claims. Meanwhile, trade unions and their members were fighting health actions, with the Official Secrets Act coming between them and answers.
  A number of my constituents have contacted me in recent weeks, and they are genuinely concerned. In many cases, they worked at Nancekuke at the height of production. What medical checks have there been on former Nancekuke personnel since the closure? Does my hon. Friend the Minister not think that, given the high incidence of bronchial problems at the height of production, a sensible course might be to look again at the medical records of those who worked there— particularly in the late 1950s?
  Will my hon. Friend look again at the case of Tom Griffiths and others—not necessarily because they seek financial compensation, but because they want to know what happened? I would like to know why it was felt that it was too dangerous in the 1950s to manufacture nerve gas at Porton Down or elsewhere, but all right in Cornwall. Was it because Cornwall is surrounded on three sides by water and has a relatively smaller population than other areas?
  Nancekuke was closed in 1980. It is now a RAF listening station and attached to RAF Portreath. I have written to request a visit to the station, and I hope that I will shortly receive a positive reply. I would like to see the site for several specific reasons. When Nancekuke closed, the chemicals were transported to Porton Down.

  821
  Could my hon. Friend confirm that, and tell the House who conducted the work? Also, the buildings and equipment that could not be guaranteed as clean after decontamination were buried on site. In effect, the polluted elements were left on site 23 years ago.
  As I said, the site is a labyrinth of mine shafts. I have been told by many local people that there is a widespread belief that some of the equipment was just dumped down shafts. Production was concentrated on three sites, with the north site as the hub. I understand that only the south and central sites are used by the RAF today, and that several buildings still standing, but used for production, are not currently used.
  Why is the north site not used? Are there fears for safety? When was the last complete survey conducted? Is it true that a survey of the site was conducted last year? Would my hon. Friend the Minister be prepared to use modern scientific techniques to survey the land to check that containers are not buried on the site, rather than relying on previous assurances? Will he ask the Environment Agency to monitor water levels for the foreseeable future?
  My requests are given more urgency, given the experience of the hon. Member for Salisbury (Mr. Key). I understand that similar clear-up operations at Porton Down have revealed large amounts of buried chemicals—chemicals that we had been assured did not exist. I and many of my constituents have real concerns about this issue. What if the rumours are true, and there are chemicals buried locally? After 20 years, they may not be as securely buried as we would all wish. Did the recent survey find such evidence?
  Given that health and safety procedures were not as rigorous even a few years ago, might the materials be leaching into the ground? Given the Porton Down experience, will my hon. Friend the Minister conduct such a survey? This is a holiday area and, rightly, local people and visitors will want to know, and be reassured if he has the answers.
  I have felt as though I have been involved in a cloak-and-dagger operation since I started raising concerns about Nancekuke. Several figures in the county have implied that I am taking a risk in asking these questions. I find that rather fanciful, but respected individuals in the area have suggested that I take care.
  I would like to reiterate my thanks to my hon. Friend the Minister for his openness in enabling us to discover a little more about Nancekuke. Rather like the song, the opening of the documents has raised more questions than answers. Will my hon. Friend initiate the investigations that I am calling for? I cannot believe that it would be a problem, as the ability to locate chemical weapons and tackle leaks must be an element of armed forces training in a world where far too many countries have this capacity.
  Also, the ability to monitor those affected by nerve gas and other poisons must be a skill required in tackling chemical accidents. Pensions records should assist in locating those people, and the Government could gain many new friends if, once again, they showed that they were prepared to try to resolve the problems inherited from others.
  822
  We have this opportunity and I ask my hon. Friend the Minister to look with fresh eyes. These were toxic chemicals manufactured by and close to my constituents. We all need to know the answers and I look forward to my hon. Friend's reply.
  11.55 pm
  The Minister for the Armed Forces (Mr. John Spellar): I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Falmouth and Camborne (Ms Atherton) for this opportunity to discuss the work of the former Ministry of Supply establishment at Nancekuke in Cornwall and also the case of her constituent, Mr. Tom Griffiths. She is a strong campaigner for her constituents and we take her representations seriously. I also want to record our appreciation of our skilled staff at Nancekuke, Porton Down and elsewhere, whose work has played such a vital role in the defence of our country and our freedom.
  Before I deal with the specifics of the case and the other points raised, I have to say that I do not entirely agree with my hon. Friend's view on the issue, although I entirely understand the background to the concerns that she has raised. I hope that what I have to say this evening will allay fears that former employees at Nancekuke were at significant risk of being poisoned by nerve gas or, indeed, that activities at the site might have posed, or still might pose, some sort of hazard to the local population.
  It might be useful if I describe briefly the history of the establishment at Nancekuke and the site's present situation. I am sure that the House is aware of the use of chemical warfare by the Germans in the first world war when many of our service men suffered the debilitating effects of gases such as mustard and chlorine. I am sure that the House can also appreciate the devastating effects, not only for the individuals concerned but for our military operations. Those threats heralded the start of the research and development that have underpinned the UK's chemical and biological defence capability to the present day.
  The great war laid down the principles for the study of chemical warfare and chemical defence and, by the outbreak of the second world war, the ability to protect the UK and its forces against the use of gas had been brought to a level that was superior to that of any other nation. The development of our retaliatory capacity had been more limited but was greatly intensified during the second world war.
  Undoubtedly, at the time, our preparedness and that of our allies, did much to influence our opponents' decision not to use their considerable chemical warfare capability and we must be thankful that we were spared the additional casualties that would have been inflicted. However, it was the discovery of German shells containing nerve agents that provided a new dimension to the concept of chemical warfare and impetus to activities during the post-war period.
  The site at Nancekuke was one of several involved in the nerve agent programme. Established initially as an autonomous facility of the Ministry of Supply in 1951, Nancekuke was concerned at first with the investigation of processes for the production of chemical warfare agents.
  A chemical called GB—known to the Germans as sarin—emerged as the nerve agent on which the UK's chemical weapons were to be based and for that reason

  823
  was among the agents studied at Nancekuke. A pilot plant was built with a capability of producing up to one ton of nerve agent a week. Plans were also laid for a large-scale production plant. However, those never came to fruition because the UK decided to abandon its offensive chemical warfare capability in 1956.
  The pilot plant was decommissioned and, from then on, the work at Nancekuke was carried out solely in support of the defensive programme seeking to address the services' requirements for equipment to detect nerve agents in the field, for prophylaxis and therapy for nerve agent poisoning, for the protection of individuals and facilities, and for monitoring decontamination and residual contamination of terrain and equipment. Various nerve agents were produced but only on a laboratory bench scale.
  The House should be aware, however, that the work at Nancekuke was more wide-ranging than just the small-scale production of chemicals and agents for research and studies into the stability of those materials. There were many activities that did not involve working with nerve agents at all. For example, some production and development was concerned with riot control agents, chemicals for detectors, drugs for development as counter-measures, training stimulants and charcoal cloth for NBC—nuclear, biological and chemical—protective suits.
  I turn now to the general health of personnel working at Nancekuke. There is no evidence that personnel were likely to suffer effects on their health as a result of working there, or that the local population was in danger.
  I can say that because similar concerns were raised by the then Member for North Cornwall some 30 years ago, as my hon. Friend mentioned. They led to two studies by the Registrar General of the mortality and health of former employees up to 1969. As my hon. Friend knows from the answers to her recent parliamentary questions on this issue, the first study showed that the mortality of persons employed at Nancekuke was actually rather less than the average for England and Wales as a whole, possibly, it is said, due to climate and social conditions. This is also one specific instance in this matter where I have to disagree with her about secrecy: the results of the review were not kept secret but were published in the Official Report in 1970.
  My hon. Friend noted that 41 deaths out of a work force of 150 seems extraordinarily large. However, the deaths relate to the sum total of people who worked at Nancekuke over approximately its first 20 years, not to the number in any one year. Additionally, the number of staff on the site varied by year and, for some years, was in the region of 300. Regrettably, we no longer have records of precisely how many people were employed at Nancekuke over the period, but it probably ran into a couple of thousand.
  I shall risk disagreeing with my hon. Friend again. We are not convinced that the second study that looked at sickness data in Nancekuke employees warrants such attention as it has received recently in the media. Although the study into sickness and absenteeism among employees at Nancekuke could be taken to imply a greater incidence of some illnesses in some workers, it is worth stating the original expert conclusion that, due to a variety of factors, the data were insufficiently robust to be used as firm evidence of increased ill health among staff.
  824
  That was also the view of the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys in 1992, and that lack of statistical robustness is the reason why the results were not published formally. In fact, the paper itself explains why the comparisons between sickness rates at Nancekuke and the population at large might be considered invalid.
  For example, the data from Nancekuke includes all sickness absences, no matter how short, whereas the national data come from social security records that are confined to absences of at least four days. In addition, the industrial workers at Nancekuke constitute only a subset of the total work force at the site and yet were compared with the total UK working population. The report states that that
  "automatically biases the results against Nancekuke".
  There are also a number of other issues that could be held to invalidate the report. They include age ranges, national versus regional differences for illnesses such as flu, and Nancekuke's insistence—for understandable reasons—on medical examination for all minor episodes of illness. I do not have time to go into detail about them here but, in view of those shortcomings, it might have been expected that another review would have been carried out. However, all these years later, we do not know why that was not the case.
  Mr. Paul Tyler: Given the lack of a review, will the Minister make it possible for those hon. Members—such as myself and the hon. Member for Falmouth and Camborne (Ms Atherton)—to see the papers that are available to him? Clearly, there is no longer an issue of secrecy in this regard, but would it be possible to satisfy ourselves about the accuracy of what he is telling us?
  Mr. Spellar: I shall look into the matter, and write to the hon. Gentleman.
  On secrecy, I am sure that there is no question about the need for some classification to have been applied to various elements of the work at Nancekuke at the time. I should be very surprised if we disagreed on the issue of national security and the great sensitivities surrounding the chemical defence programme, but I understand that the need to protect such information can lead to unwarranted speculation and suspicion. However, the sickness data were not classified, and I am therefore pleased that I responded as I did to the hon. Member for North Cornwall (Mr. Tyler).
  Before I move away from possible health effects, it is fitting to turn to the case that my hon. Friend raised tonight—that of her constituent, Mr. Tom Griffiths, a Nancekuke employee who was accidentally exposed to sarin in 1958. I agree entirely with her that this was a very regrettable and unfortunate incident, but it was an accident, not an inevitable and predictable event. My Department accepted that, as a result of the accident, Mr. Griffiths suffered some short-term ill effects, and he received compensation in 1976. This is the only case that I am aware that my Department appears to have dealt with, and I am aware of only two cases that were handled by the then Department of Health and Social Security around 1970.
  The decision to close Nancekuke and transfer the remaining work to another establishment was taken during the 1976 defence review. Since 1980, the site has been

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  known as RAF Portreath. It is currently an Air Surveillance and Control System—ASACS—reporting post. As such, it forms part of the United Kingdom's air defence system. RAF Portreath also occasionally acts as a relief landing ground for search and rescue helicopters on training activities operating out of RAF St. Mawgan.
  I assure my hon. Friend that great consideration was given to drawing up a plan for the closure of Nancekuke in an orderly and phased manner, with due consideration of decontamination and disposal processes. It was certainly not the case that the withdrawal was careless or hurried, and no chemical warfare agents were ever disposed of to either the sea or the land at Nancekuke. In all, in the region of 20 tonnes of sarin were produced. Most of the nerve agents were chemically deactivated, and only small quantities were transferred to Porton for defence research. I am not aware of any chemical warfare agents being transferred to the United States, other than a few laboratory samples. Any other materials and decontaminated plant and equipment were disposed of at a number of clearly identifiable locations on the site.
  Nevertheless, I recognise that there has been an evolution in thinking about matters such as contamination of water supplies. My hon. Friend will be pleased to learn about the land quality assessment that is under way at the site, in line with my Department's policy of undertaking such assessments over a 10-year period from 1996. In particular, surface soil and water samples which have been undertaken by the National Rivers Authority have shown no signs of contamination from toxic agents and, as a responsible landlord, we are considering how best to take this work forward, including appropriate consultation with the representatives of local authorities, the Environment Agency for England and Wales, English Nature, and other Departments.
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  My hon. Friend raised the issue of clear-up operations at Porton Down, but that is an essentially different situation. The site of concern there was a munitions testing range rather than a production facility.
  The House may also be interested to know that the former activities at Nancekuke were declared by the United Kingdom under the terms of the chemical weapons convention in 1997. In addition, a team of international inspectors has confirmed that the production facilities have been destroyed and that the few buildings remaining were not being used for chemical weapon purposes. The site will be open for such inspection for at least another 10 years.
  My hon. Friend asks if she may visit the site. She will be glad to know that the RAF will be happy to host her at RAF Portreath.
  In conclusion, I hope that my hon. Friend and her constituents will now feel more confident about this issue. As Minister of State for the Armed Forces, I have had the opportunity to understand in some detail the importance of our progress in understanding chemical, and, indeed, biological weapons. Nancekuke provided a valuable contribution, which is still relevant in this very uncertain post-cold war world.
  I commend to the House our public paper, published last July, which sets out our policy and strategy for defending the United Kingdom and United Kingdom armed forces against the threat of biological and chemical weapons. As I said at the outset, I also commend the excellent work undertaken by our employees in providing this service in defence of this country and of our freedoms.
  Mr. Tam Dalyell rose—
  Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael J. Martin): Order. The Minister has replied to the debate.
  Question put and agreed to.
  Adjourned accordingly at ten minutes past Twelve midnight.