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Legislative Process

That suggestion has not been received with complete approval in all parts of the House, although my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield does have a fine record as a member of the Chairmen’s Panel. I shall be entirely honest with my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (John Bercow): I am not completely convinced of the need for a business management committee. I am disappointed that the Government have been unwilling to accept the Modernisation Committee’s simple and practical proposal on programming. At the moment, programme motions are put immediately after Second Reading, having been determined in advance in order to be taken at that stage. That means that they have been tabled before the House has had the opportunity to air its views on Second Reading, and before the issues that are likely to be controversial have been identified. It is therefore impossible to programme properly if the motion is taken immediately after Second Reading. We should allow more time, and any programme motion that is taken immediately after Second Reading should be limited in its content, with a further motion following it a couple of days later, after it has been possible to have discussions on the information that came to light during the Second Reading debate. By that point, hon. Members’ views on the subjects under discussion will have become clear. I am sorry that the Government have not picked up that point in the Modernisation Committee’s report. The Modernisation Committee has raised a number of issues that relate to tidying up the way in which the House operates, including ways of making it easier for Members to manage their business and to find out what is happening. The Liberal Democrats made a point earlier about amendments having to be tabled one day earlier than at present. From my experience, I believe that it is not only the Government who would benefit from such a change. It would also make it easier for members of the Committee considering the amendments to take a view on them, which would improve the quality of the debate. It is crucial, however, that the Chairman of the Committee should retain the ability to accept amendments tabled at a later date, albeit in special circumstances. The motions leave out two crucial matters that the House needs to consider in relation to improving the legislative process. One is the need for post-legislative scrutiny—I mentioned the Law Commission’s report earlier—which is a matter that we need to look at. Any business would find it very strange that we pass laws that people have to abide by, but have no regular process to determine whether they have worked or achieved what they set out to achieve. I accept that Select Committees sometimes consider certain pieces of legislation, but there is no regular, agreed way of ensuring that key legislation always receives such scrutiny. In order to provide such post-legislative scrutiny, we need greater clarity from the Government on the whole purpose of the Bill in question. That matter was raised earlier by the hon. Member for Cambridge (David Howarth). Such clarity of purpose is important but, sadly, has been reduced. This is particularly the case now that more and more legislation is passed down to be dealt with by secondary rather than primary legislation. Large amounts of legislation are now being passed through secondary legislation, most of which receives no debate at all. Those proposals that are debated are normally debated for only an hour and a half in Committee. The recent exchange between my hon. Friend the Member for Eddisbury (Mr. O'Brien) and the Deputy Leader of the House on the delegated legislation to establish the new strategic health authorities provided a good example of this. That legislation was introduced in June and came into force on 1 July. The strategic health authorities came into being on 1 October. However, the order was debated in the House in the middle of October, after all that had happened. We need to consider not only the volume of secondary legislation but the process by which we handle it, to ensure that we are subjecting it to an appropriate level of scrutiny.