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Business of the House

I, too, welcome the Deputy Leader of the House to his stand-in role, and ask him to pass our best wishes to the Leader of the House for a speedy recovery. May I join in the strongest protests that have been made about yesterday's business? Every objective listener to last week's business questions would have taken what the Leader of the House said then to mean that the business would follow its normal course: that new clauses would be taken first and amendments next. It was not until this week that the Government tabled a programme motion to change the normal procedure. It is not acceptable for that to be done in any circumstances, but it is even less acceptable given that we were led to believe, literally a week earlier, that it would not be done. We have been given plenty of reassurances that the Government will consider how we deal with Report stages. Four Government Bills are to be dealt with in the next two weeks, and amendments and new clauses are likely to be tabled. Can the Deputy Leader of the House assure us that there will be time for Opposition Members and Labour Back Benchers to debate those amendments and new clauses, and for a proper Third Reading debate to take place? If he cannot, he and the Leader of the House are not doing their job properly in regard to the most serious parliamentary matter. May I link that with a question about the timetable for next year's sittings, which was announced last week in a written statement by the Leader of the House? It was announced that the House would sit for 128 days, fewer by far than in any other non-election year since at least 1979. ...Yes, it was an election year. No Government have announced such a small number of sitting days for nearly 30 years. When people are going to lose their jobs, for us to give ourselves holidays—an extended Christmas and new year holiday, for instance—[Hon. Members: ““It is not a holiday.””] It is a break from this place. For the House of Commons not to come back to work between July and October gives it the most adverse reputation out there. The Deputy Leader of the House and his colleagues have indicated that they are interested in constitutional reform. Will the Deputy Leader now say whether the Government are serious about handing over control of the business of the House from the Government to Parliament? If he does not tell us that, I will table a motion for us to debate, proposing that Parliament should be in charge of Parliament's business, not the Government, who are clearly rigging it to their own party-political advantage. We heard today of the continuing difficulties of establishing a political settlement in Zimbabwe. May we have an early debate about whether asylum seekers from Zimbabwe who cannot go home should be allowed to work in this country while they wait for their cases to be decided? I gather that there are Ministers who share that view, and it is the logical view. I ask for us to be able to debate the matter, so that those poor people who cannot go back to their own country, who want to work here, pay taxes and contribute, and with whom Britain has the strongest links, can have an opportunity to participate in this country while their future is determined. Finally, yesterday we received a major lobby on pensions. May we have a debate on the state pension before the uprating statement, so that we can quiz the Government on whether the level of the pension will be what pensioners need and demand, and whether it can be what pensioners who have worked believe, honestly, that they deserve?