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House of Commons Reform

I absolutely take your point, Mr. Chairman, and it is very kind of you to attribute the fact that I am taking rather longer than I had intended to my generosity in taking interventions. I feel that I am probably taking too long to introduce this debate anyway, because I know that in Westminster Hall today we have people who sat on the House of Commons Reform Committee and who have very important contributions to make to this debate. Therefore, I will try to bring my remarks to a close. If we are to fulfil our responsibilities as a Parliament, we need to get control not only of the business of the House and not only of the membership and chairmanship of the Select Committees, which this report identifies so clearly as an issue, but of the Standing Orders of this House, which the report identifies rather less clearly as an issue. The Standing Orders determine the future of this House and at the moment they can only be amended effectively by grace of the Government. They are our Standing Orders, not the Government's Standing Orders; they are the Standing Orders of this House and we ought to control them. There are things in the report that one could imagine, in an ideal world, being slightly stronger and places where it could go wider, as hon. Members have already mentioned, but the fact of the matter is that I think that the report is a superb beginning and a superb indicator of where we ought to be going. What we now need to do is to take this debate on to the Floor of the House and have it on a substantive motion, which many Members in Westminster Hall today have been pressing the Government for. There is an indication that we may get that substantive debate by the end of January. I hope that we will get it by that time. It would be very foolish of the Government, having done the difficult job of setting up this Committee, appointing the right people to sit on it and to report on this issue and getting, to their own credit, an excellent report if we were not allowed to debate the report and take the issue forward as quickly as possible. To leave such a debate to the next Parliament would be a terrible mistake. Furthermore, if we are right in thinking that a third, or perhaps even more, of the Members of the next Parliament will be new MPs, those new MPs will not know how this place works as well as some of us perhaps do, having experienced the virtues and vices of the present system. We need to move fairly fast in the next few months and I hope that we will do so. It is up to us to bestir ourselves and to identify what is peculiar about Parliament and our identity that is different from that of Government. If we do that, we will be laying a foundation for what this report calls itself, which is "Rebuilding the House".