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House of Commons Disqualification Act 1975

I agree with the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) that the explanatory note is, indeed, very useful, and I am delighted that my hon. Friend the Member for North-West Cambridgeshire (Mr. Vara), on the Front Bench, says that if there is an incoming Conservative Government later this spring there will be a substantial cull of quangos. I cannot think of a better starting point than the consolidated list, which the Minister says will be drawn up as a result of this debate. It will be a convenient point of reference for all those quangos, and I hope that sooner rather than later we will have circulated a list of those that are going to be culled. The hon. Member for Somerton and Frome makes a fair point that Conservative Governments have not always made a great success of maintaining a cull of quangos. Often, new quangos have come on to the scene. I remember the Matt cartoon that followed the establishment of the citizen's charter and the Citizen's Charter Advisory Panel. There are two people in bed, and the husband turns to the wife and says, ““Darling, I can't sleep—I'm so excited about the citizen's charter!”” The demise of the Citizen's Charter Advisory Panel is undoubtedly a good thing, and I hope that an incoming Conservative Government will not make similar mistakes in building up the quangocracy. This is a serious issue, because it shows that the number of people who are disqualified from standing for Parliament is increasing all the time. Those people represent the Executive—the state—and those of us in this legislature who wish for a smaller state would like to see a substantially reduced number of people who are disqualified from being able to stand for Parliament, because that would show that the legislature was going to get larger relative to the number of people in the Executive.