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Business of the House

It is good to see the hon. Gentleman in his place. I am sure that the real reason why he wants that debate on pensions is that he will be able to bring along the leader of his party, the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr. Clegg), so that the right hon. Gentleman can understand precisely how much the state pension is. It is not £30 a week. The hon. Gentleman made an interesting and important point about Zimbabwe. I will pass his comments to the relevant Ministers, and will also take what he said as a suggestion for a possible topical debate. As for whether the business of the House should be run by Parliament or Government, the fact is that, last year, 59 of the 155 days on which Parliament sat were determined not by the Government but by the official Opposition, the smaller parties or Back Benchers. I will only add that it is not right to compare this House, and our constitutional settlement, with arrangements in other countries. In our case, the Government are the Government only because they have a majority in the House. I therefore think that the hon. Gentleman makes a constitutional faux pas. On next year's sittings, the dates of the party conferences are an issue, as that has made it difficult for us to start earlier in October than we did this year. There is also an issue in that next year's Session will finish earlier than this year's; this year it will finish late in November and the state opening of Parliament and the Queen's Speech is not until December, but next year they will be considerably earlier. It is therefore wrong to compare too precisely next year's dates with this year's. I should also add that although the hon. Gentleman says that we are on holiday when we are in recess, that is certainly not my experience. Since I was elected to the House in 2001, my experience of parliamentary life is that I work just as hard during the recess as I do when I am sitting here, and I find that my constituents expect me to do so because the job of the constituency MP has completely changed over the last 20 years. On yesterday's events, there was a programme motion before the House, which it voted for, so we decided to go forward with the business, and we had a series of votes. In the end, the main issue is that it is absolutely right and proper that we should have an appropriate amount of time to scrutinise all proposed legislation that passes through this House. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill was debated in total, on the Floor of both Houses, for 86 hours, with 10 sessions in the Lords and, so far, eight sessions in the Commons. I think that that is an adequate amount of time for us to be able to do our work, not least because there was also substantial pre-legislative scrutiny.