§ Mrs. Gwyneth Dunwoody (Crewe and Nantwich)On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. When you agreed on behalf of the House to the modernisation procedures, you were kind enough to say that you would protect the rights of individual Back Benchers, so that if written statements were made by Ministers you would expect them to be non-contentious in the way that they were presented. You may like to know that today, the Secretary of State for Transport has made a statement about the London underground. There are considerable economic and political reasons for that statement to be debated in the Chamber, as it includes the suggestion that the underground system will not now be handed over to Transport for London as quickly as possible. May I ask you to examine the way in which the matter has been handled, because, whatever the reasons for the decision, Members of Parliament have a right to question the Secretary of State about this contentious matter?
§ Mr. SpeakerMy priority is that Ministers should inform the House. They have a choice and they can use their judgment. They may make oral or written statements. In this case, a written statement has been made, and there has been no infringement of the rules of the House.
§ Miss Ann Widdecombe (Maidstone and The Weald)On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. I am aware that you do not have any responsibility for the content of ministerial questions, but could I ask you to direct a slight frown of disapproval towards the Home Secretary? I tabled, with due notice, 15 questions on prison overcrowding and received an answer to precisely one.
§ Mr. SpeakerI think that the right hon. Lady meant to refer to ministerial answers, not to questions. I have said before that perseverance is important in the House. She should keep annoying the Home Secretary until she gets the answer that she wants.
§ Simon Hughes (Southwark, North and Bermondsey)Further to the point of order of the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe), Mr. Speaker. Will you consider a slightly wider issue that relates to today's business as well as the matter that the right hon. Lady raised? At the end of the last Session of Parliament, I tabled in due time a number of questions to the Home Office that were material to the matters coming up in the Bill that we are about to debate. Most of them received answers saying, "I will answer this as soon as possible", or "shortly", or "I will write to the hon. Gentleman."
I retabled the questions at the beginning of this Session. We have now had about a month of this Session, and yesterday I received a whole sheaf of answers saying, "I will write to the hon. Gentleman shortly." The questions are all material to the issues that we shall consider in today's debate.
In addition to that, we had one week's delay in the publication of the explanatory notes to the flagship Bill of this Parliament, and we received today a written 911 statement from the Home Secretary—the item appears on the Order Paper—entitled "Responses to consultation exercise contained in the Criminal Justice White Paper". Many of us have pressed for answers and the statement tells us that answers to the consultation exercise will be published in the Library shortly.
Can you help us, Mr. Speaker? Can we do our job of scrutinising the Government if they do not give us key material until after we have debated the legislation to which it relates? That is unacceptable.
§ Mr. SpeakerI say to the hon. Gentleman—this may also help the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe)—that the Public Administration Committee is prepared to look at any complaints from hon. Members. The hon. Gentleman may wish to take that course of action.
§ Mr. Ronnie Campbell (Blyth Valley)On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. I received a reply from a Health Minister yesterday in response to a constituent's query raised in April, seven months after the original complaint was made. Can you help Back Benchers to get Ministers and Departments to give an early reply, because it makes us look like fools?
§ Mr. SpeakerSeven months is an undue length of time. If the hon. Gentleman sends me the correspondence, I will look into the matter.