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Report from the House of Commons Reform Committee on Rebuilding the House

I agree, and one of the misfortunes of what has happened is that the Procedure Committee has lost its centrality in the working of the House. I want that to be restored, and I want the Committee to have guaranteed access to the House to bring forward its propositions. We make many other recommendations, from the size of Committees to the operation of Opposition days, from sitting times to the Intelligence and Security Committee, but the three areas that I have mentioned are the main focus of our attention. Some hon. Members, as we have heard, may wish to dissent from some of our particular recommendations, but it would be disappointing —and troubling in terms of how Parliament is viewed—if there were to be dissent from the principles that underpin these recommendations. Another principle appears in bold throughout our report—and I am looking at my right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Durham (Hilary Armstrong) as I say this—and it is that an elected Government should have the means to implement the programme on which they have been elected. Nobody reading our report could doubt that that was one of our fundamental principles. It is fundamental to democratic politics that that should happen, and nothing in our report cuts across that, contrary to what some may believe. It is why ministerial business is protected, but it does not follow that effective scrutiny is therefore unnecessary or that the House should not control its own business. As Robin Cook never used to tire of saying, good scrutiny makes for good government. The best batsmen really do need the best bowlers. That is a particular challenge in a system of unseparated powers, which I support, whereby the Executive control the legislature and the party battle dominates everything. However, that makes it even more necessary to meet the challenge. That is what our report tries to do, in attempting to get the balance right between the Executive and the legislature, between governing and scrutinising, between party and Parliament, and between democratic politics as the exercise of power and democratic politics as the control of the exercise of power. There has been an imbalance in those respects in the past, as is now widely acknowledged. Any reforms have to get the balance right now.