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Business of the House

I am sorry to disappoint the right hon. Lady, but as a matter of arithmetic, this Government have a couple of weeks less than four years to run. Let me just run through her points. The right hon. Lady’s first point was about a debate on a Government motion. There has been no conspiracy, but I will ask my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport to ask the BBC whether its results can be made available earlier. In the case of quoted companies it is important for the times at which results are announced to be kept to exactly, but as the BBC is a public corporation with no share price to worry about, I see no particular reason why the information should not be available to the House in advance. I will do my best. The right hon. Lady’s second point concerned the debate on armed forces personnel. First, there are, quite properly, five debates a year on different aspects of the armed forces. Secondly, a problem for the Chamber, with which we all have to deal, is the intensive activity of Select Committees, which means that their members are often abroad. I do not honestly think it is possible to programme debates to take account at all times of whether Select Committee members are abroad. I experienced the same problem with foreign affairs debates. I should have preferred members of the Foreign Affairs Committee to be present for those debates, but sometimes it simply was not possible. Let me say parenthetically that we shall have to do something about the fact that Select Committees are increasingly meeting exclusively on Tuesdays or Wednesdays. That is affecting attendance in the Chamber, and putting disproportionate pressure on the facilities of the House. I hope that the Chairman of the Liaison Committee will be prepared to talk to me about it. As for job cuts in the national health service, the right hon. Lady knows that, in a context in which spending on the health service has more than doubled, there are some temporary difficulties in the management of budgets. I wish that she and her colleagues would stop scaring patients in their constituencies, and implying that a golden age existed when the Conservatives were in power. She knows that to be completely untrue. The right hon. Lady mentioned the Windsor, Ascot and Maidenhead health forum. That is fine, but why did she not mention that in her area, which is covered as a whole by Thames Valley strategic health authority, there has been an increase of 2,700—22 per cent.—in the number of nurses and a 40 per cent. increase in the number of doctors? There is no way in which marginal, temporary reductions in the overall level of spending will take away from patients in the right hon. Lady’s area, and in every other area in the country, that dramatic increase in the number of doctors and nurses, and the huge increase in levels of health care for the right hon. Lady’s constituents. The right hon. Lady went on to talk about rail fares. Although her comments were rather opaque, I understood her to be complaining, root and branch, about the consequences of rail privatisation. I know that she was not in the House when the Railways Act 1993 was passed, but I gather that she would have supported railway privatisation. [Interruption.] I can read too, and what the right hon. Lady’s newspaper says is wrong. It is true that in the case of one or two privatisations we may not have got things entirely right, but we were absolutely right when it came to the method of railway privatisation. The fares have been changed as a result of decisions by the train operating companies, which the right hon. Lady and her colleagues set up under the rail privatisation deal. Let her explain that to her constituents, along with the fact that since 2001 we have more than doubled spending on the railways. The right hon. Lady’s last point concerned the Human Rights Act and the decision on control orders. I do not intend to comment on that, as it will go before the Court of Appeal shortly. All I will say is that I think that the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke), a former Chancellor of the Exchequer who now chairs the Conservatives’ democracy group, was probably correct in describing the Leader of the Opposition’s proposals in respect of the Human Rights Act as ““xenophobic”” and wrong-headed. [Interruption.] What is the Government’s view? We have set it out. Vernon Bogdanor was even more correct to say that, as the Leader of the Opposition’s former tutor, he would have sent his most recent speech back to him had it been an essay, and asked him to rewrite it.