---

Legislative Process

That is a powerful point. Anything that allows a Minister to change tack without losing face should be encouraged. Moving on to the Public Bill Committee proposals, I again fully support what is in the report. I hope that it will lead to less yah-boo politics at the Committee stage and a greater opportunity for constructive scrutiny and enlightened debate. In his opening remarks, the Leader of the House treated the House to his experience when he first came here as an Opposition Member. When I was the Government Whip on a Standing Committee that was about to be appointed, I had a list of names and showed it to the Chief Whip. He said, ““Why do you want to put him on your Committee?”” I said, ““He knows something about the subject.”” He said, ““Yes, that is a very good reason for keeping him off the Committee.”” We should move on from the days when Government members of committees were told to shut up and keep quiet and Opposition Members felt that they had to talk and talk to fill the time. We can do better. I believe that the proposals in the report will show that that is the case. The Modernisation Committee report contains a suggestion that we introduce the innovation of requiring Members to table an explanatory note on their amendments. That is an interesting suggestion. My Committee is happy to look at it, including in the context of the concerns raised by the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath), who was worried about extending the time for tabling amendments. If we can find a way of having a satisfactory system for tabling explanatory notes to amendments, some of the concerns about a raft of amendments being tabled at the last minute, particularly where they refer to other legislation and therefore are not immediately intelligible, may be allayed. On the issue of September sittings, I realise that there are differing views on the subject. I want to share with the House some of the discussions I had when I was shadow Deputy Leader to the late Eric Forth, who delegated to me all the responsibility for dealing with the then Leader of the House on that issue; the Leader of the House at that time was the late Robin Cook. Although in debate he obviously made the point about holding the Government to account, Robin Cook's main concern—in fact, it was an irritant with him—was that every year the press had the headline, ““MPs away on a three-month holiday””. His argument to me was that, if we had a system where we came back for two weeks, and the recess after that time was a constituency and conference recess, the press would not be able to say that MPs had gone away for three months’ holiday. Judged by that aspect of it, the experiment has been a total failure because, in the years when we had September sittings, we still had the headline, ““MPs have gone on a three-month holiday””.