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Honours System (Reform)

: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his contribution, but there is no question of inflating the number of honours given out; it is just a question of distributing them differently. I thought that my hon. Friend was going to make a slightly different point—one with which I have sympathy, because it is practical—about how conferring a higher honour on a police sergeant who had gone that extra mile would impact on his position in his police force, and about whether that would undermine the command structure in that force. That would be a practical issue. However, the fact that we think that that is a problem says much about how we think the honours system reinforces existing power structures. It should not be doing that; it belongs to the nation, not to a prevailing power structure. That is the point. It reflects what we value and honour as a nation, and therefore it ought to be separated from power structures. Of course we should be able to reward achievement, but we should be able to do so at the upper echelons to show that we truly value those people who, in the words of the hon. Member for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald), go that extra mile. I would like the system to be extended in that way, but that would be enormously difficult to do, and I fear that my plea will go unheeded, because people who have reached the top of their profession expect an honouring in that sort of way. They will find it difficult to accept that people lower down the power structure should be honoured for their extra effort. However, I strongly believe that the system should be extended, because it reflects something important about our nation: the fact that it is one nation, and that we are all citizens, equal in each other's eyes, and should reward those of us who go that extra mile.