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Business of the House

With reference to the superfluity of written ministerial statements today, I remind the Leader of the House that the ministerial code of conduct contains a specific rule that such statements should not be given the day before a recess. Will he get a grip on his colleagues in other Departments and ensure that they abide by the rules? We need an urgent debate on long-term care for the elderly. I have asked two questions in consecutive weeks of the Prime Minister on the subject without any sort of sensible reply—so I tried a different question to the Deputy Prime Minister yesterday. The Wanless report reinforces the point made by the royal commission that long-term care for the elderly should be provided free at the point of use and is an urgent matter. Given that five long Budgets ago the Chancellor peppered almost every paragraph with, ““Mr. Wanless this and Mr. Wanless that””, he obviously sees Mr. Wanless as a guru— He is now, but he was not then. In any case, it is time that we did something to give elderly people dignity in their old age. I hope that we can have an urgent debate. May we have a debate on housing? We have 1.5 million people waiting for a council house and homelessness has doubled in the lifetime of this Labour Government. We had an announcement in the Budget, with considerable fanfare, of £970 million for housing, but the small print of the budget for the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister contains not a single extra penny for housing. We need an explanation of why this Government do so badly in providing social housing that people can afford. Finally, may we have a debate on communications with Australia, because there is evidently a problem? We hear that the Prime Minister has apologised for the only thing that we did not want him to apologise for—saying that he was going—and we also hear that he has fundamentally undermined the energy policy by saying that new nuclear power stations are the future. Why on earth are we bothering with a review? There is clearly something garbling communications with Australia, and it is not even the Deputy Prime Minister. Will the Leader of the House look into that and arrange a debate?