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Election of the Deputy Speakers

As a member of the Procedure Committee, I follow its Chairman in welcoming the fact that the Government have laid this motion before us today. I welcome this opportunity for the House to endorse, as I hope it will, the Committee's proposals, enabling it to continue to examine the ways in which we can make a reality of the election of Deputy Speakers, following and building on the considerable success of the House's new procedures for the election of the Speaker. In response to the comments of the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath), I re-emphasise that a number of rather difficult matters of detail remain before the Committee. It is important that we continue, as the Chairman said, to meet weekly to deal with those matters, and we hope to bring some satisfactory proposals before the House in the not too distant future. Of course, this issue is not unrelated to those dealt with by the Wright Committee; indeed, the issue was before that Committee, which referred it to the Procedure Committee for its consideration. I hope the House has an early opportunity not only to debate the Wright Committee's recommendations, which need to be seen alongside those of the Procedure Committee, but to decide on them in a positive way.