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Business of the House

I am grateful to the Leader of the House for the forthcoming business. Yesterday, the right hon. and learned Lady said that she would table the motion on Professor Sir Ian Kennedy's appointment as chairman of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority within the next few days. Will she ensure that the House is given fair warning so that that does not just pop up on the Order Paper by surprise, as the appointment of the Speaker's Committee on IPSA did last week? May I repeat the call for a debate on how Sir Christopher Kelly's report will be implemented? Despite what the right hon. and learned Lady said yesterday, of Kelly's 60 recommendations, I have counted at least 12 that are decisions that need to be taken by the House, and another 10 recommendations on strengthening IPSA will require primary legislation. That means that more than a third of Sir Christopher's report requires the attention of the House rather than the independent regulator. The right hon. and learned Lady said yesterday that she did not think that we should be addressing the question of legislating to change the IPSA structure, but is it not clear that that is exactly what we shall have to do if, as she said yesterday, we implement Kelly's proposals in full? May we have a statement from the Prime Minister on his assertion on 10 June that Government action has saved 500,000 jobs? Both the Prime Minister and the Chancellor have repeatedly used that figure in the House to justify Government decisions over the past 12 months, but last night the Treasury published documents under the Freedom of Information Act showing that the advice given to Ministers before this year's Budget was that a figure of""between 250,000 and 450,000"" could be used, but that any""public statement should be worded carefully"." Moreover, the documents make it completely clear that it could be seen as spurious for the Government even to claim that number, because monetary policy, which we have consistently supported, is independent of Government. Will the Prime Minister and the Chancellor take an early opportunity to correct the record? The Committee on Reform of the House of Commons is due to set out its findings by the end of next week. Will the right hon. and learned Lady confirm that when it is published she will make an oral statement to the House on how the Government plan to take forward that Committee's recommendations? When might we have an opportunity to debate that Committee's important report? Next Monday, we were due to debate secondary legislation on the 2011 census. That debate has been unexpectedly postponed. Given that we have expressed real concerns about the intrusive nature of some of those questions, is that an indication, as we hope, that the Government have decided to reconsider the invasive format of the new census? May I ask the Leader of the House yet again to provide us with the date of the pre-Budget report? The Chancellor had his opportunity at Treasury questions on Tuesday, but did not take it. There are reports that the Prime Minister is clashing with the Chancellor over the former's plans for a massive new spending spree before the election. Do the Government not owe it to the public to come clean on their spending plans? Finally, on the economy, may we have a statement on the recent outburst from the Government's enterprise tsar, Lord Sugar—that the majority of small firms are just "moaners" who need not a bank but an insolvency practitioner? Is that not a rather unusual way to champion a sector that is normally referred to as the lifeblood of the economy? With the Federation of Small Businesses calling for Lord Sugar to go, does the Leader of the House think that he still has the confidence of the companies that he is meant to be representing? Or is it time to say, "You're fired"?