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Business of the House

Last week, I asked the Leader of the House if we could have a debate on the fiasco of the Rural Payments Agency, so this week, I shall ask him if we can have a debate on the consequences of that fiasco in terms of the £200 million-worth of budget cuts in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which will affect flood management, environmental protection, veterinary laboratories, Natural England, British Waterways—a long list of exactly the issues that the Prime Minister says are a priority for the Government. May we have a debate on how that was allowed to happen? While we are on environmental issues, I echo the view of the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May) that there should be a debate on transport. During the lifetime of the Government, traffic levels have risen by 11 per cent. Since 1990, carbon dioxide emissions from traffic have gone up by 10 per cent. to 32 million tonnes. When the Deputy Prime Minister was in charge of those things, he had a five-year plan, although of course it did not work. Now, he no longer has a five-year plan about anything, but we should have a strategy for dealing with road transport. It is not very obvious what that strategy is at present, so may we have a debate on it? I return again to the issue of Iraq. As the Leader of the House knows, I have asked regularly—almost every other week during this Parliament—for Government time to debate what is happening in Iraq. It is not good enough to rely on Opposition days for such debates or, indeed, on the day in the Queen’s Speech debates that is normally reserved for foreign affairs and defence matters across the whole world—that offers a panoramic view of our responsibilities rather than a focused debate about what is happening in Iraq. Given that the world view of events in Iraq is changing rapidly, it is simply not acceptable for British policy and strategy to be based on the short-term requirements of the United States mid-term elections rather than a British assessment of our interests and the interests of our armed forces. May we have that debate in Government time and, if necessary, can we delay Prorogation or have an extra day of debate on the Queen’s Speech so that we have an opportunity to do justice to the matter? Lastly, may we have a debate on the Department of Health’s useful advice to health service chief executives, displayed on its intranet, that they should"““go in and out of different doors of the building every day for a month””" and"““say hello to three people each time””?" Can we know whether they should do that before or after issuing the press release about the latest hospital closure?