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

The hon. Gentleman makes a fascinating point which would, if we let it, lead to a much longer argument. I do not want it to do that, however. I have great admiration for certain individual Members of the House who do not sit for party, but it is a fact of political life that political parties are the instruments for organising political choice for the electorate. They are indispensible to the system, and nothing that our report proposes seeks to depart from that proposition. I am sorry to have detained the House with a reminder of a similar moment in the past, but I hope that it will be helpful to us in the present. I note in passing, by the way, that a decade earlier still—in 1965—a large number of reform-minded Labour MPs who had been newly elected in that reform Parliament of 1964, including the present Father of the House, tabled a Commons motion calling for comprehensive modernisation of the House of Commons. Among their demands was one for hostel accommodation for Members. It has taken half a century and an expenses scandal to revive that one.