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House of Commons Reform

I congratulate the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central (Mark Fisher) on securing the debate and on his comments, and other Members on their comments as well. The report, "Rebuilding the House", opens with a quote from Sir Robert Worcester:""The public are sullen, some even mutinous."" You can say that again. There has been no such disquiet in recent times about the state of our politics and our Parliament. Although the expenses scandals are part of that, let us not confuse what is symptomatic from what is causative. The problem is that people do not know what Members of Parliament are for, and if they do know what they are for, they know that we are not doing the job in the way they would want it done. That means that we must reform our political processes to make them more effective and relevant. It is instructive that those newspapers that were most vocal on the inadequacies of Parliament were unable to devote a single column inch to the Committee's report when it was published. They do not want to see Parliament made more effective, but I am happy that some Members do. I believe that there is a much wider agenda on democratic renewal, which other Members have touched on today. It would not be appropriate in this debate to discuss all the things I believe we should be looking at, but they include fixed-term Parliaments, the way in which we are elected to the House, the funding of political parties, which I spent six months discussing with colleagues and which has resulted in very little, and reform of the House of Lords, which I spent another six months discussing with other parties and which also resulted in very little. That agenda would include proper devolution and subsidiarity so that we move power to local government in this country and from the European level to the national level. Today, however, we are concentrating on Executive control of our legislature. We ought to recognise—those who do not should look at other Parliaments around the world—that this country is almost unique in having a Parliament dominated by the Executive. It is within our power to address that issue, if only colleagues from all parties in the House recognised the need to do so. It is within our power to address it, but we only have the opportunity to do so if the Executive allow it. That is the conundrum at the heart of the matter: we can change the balance of power between the Executive and the legislature only if the Executive let us do so, and we need to look at that. I do not believe that the Committee's report answers all the questions. It is a good report, but the Committee was constrained by its terms of reference and the time frame within which it was required to report, so there are issues with which its report does not deal. However, it does deal with much of what is going wrong. For instance, it asks questions what happens to Bills on Report. It is a catastrophe for the House that large and important Bills, often dealing with matters literally of life and death, pass unscrutinised to another place so that it can do the job that we in the elected House should be doing. That is an outrage. Even when Bills are brought before us that we are told will set a paradigm for the way in which such matters will be treated in future, that is not the case. When the Equality Bill was recently introduced in Parliament, the Leader of the House told us that it would be an example of the way to do it. Well, it was an example of the way we do do it, because half of it was not scrutinised on Report and was passed to the other House for it to do the job we should be doing. Access to the agenda of the House is a key area, and not just for the public. I absolutely agree with hon. Members who have said that the public should have a way of influencing what we discuss, but Back Benchers, Opposition parties and Members who have a genuine interest in bringing a matter forward, must have better access to the agenda. It is in that regard that the proposed business Committee becomes so important, but it is the one area on which I have doubts about the Select Committee's recommendations, because I would prefer a single business Committee. There should be a business Committee—I have no doubt whatever about that—because that is transparently what works in other legislatures, yet we leave it to the Executive to decide what we debate, which I find extraordinary.