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

When anyone on the Labour Benches did not vote for me or for any other candidate, I hope that they did so on the basis of careful consideration of the reform credentials of all the candidates who put themselves forward for election. Once and for all, we need to nail this nonsense that somehow the election of the Wright Committee was fundamentally flawed. You cannot comb your hair in this House—you cannot utter a single word without it appearing on the internet, in a speech, in Hansard, on a blog or somewhere else. There is no excuse for anybody who voted for any member of the Wright Committee not knowing exactly where those candidates stood on the issue of parliamentary reform. I am delighted that the balance of force and opinion on that Committee was in favour of reformers. The recommendations of the Wright Committee are testament to that. The Prime Minister himself clearly supports the Wright report. I worried at times about that as there appeared to be some ambiguity in some of the announcements and pronouncements that were made, particularly on procedure, which I shall come to in a moment. However, the Prime Minister said of our recommendations in his speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research on 2 February:""These reforms will increase the ability and the legitimacy of Parliament to hold the Government to account—as I believe that the proper role of Parliament is, indeed, to scrutinise the executive, it should be given all the necessary powers and tools to do so."" The guy at the top is in favour of this, and I hope that an awful lot of the people who work for him are in favour of it. I certainly know that the proposals have been welcomed in the sensible realms of Her Majesty's media. On 24 November, Peter Riddell wrote in The Times:""We need our MPs to be not only honest but also effective in raising our concerns and scrutinising the Government. The former has obviously got the most attention with the expenses row. But the latter is crucial if confidence in Parliament is to be revived. That is why this morning's report, 'Rebuilding the House' from a special Commons reform committee, chaired by Tony Wright, matters."" We had endorsements from the Financial Times and from The Guardian, which stated:""Dr Wright's committee focuses on three subjects that may seem like Westminster arcana but which, separately and together, go to the heart of much that exasperates and angers the public about the workings of parliament…A debate is promised, which is good, but there is no guarantee of a vote, which is…bad. Ministers must get off the fence. They must give unambiguous support to the Wright committee report"—" and said that they must "Do it now." We appear to have unambiguous support for the recommendations as a result of the helpful statement from the Leader of the House, who has agreed to facilitate a debate on all the matters contained in the 50 recommendations made by the Committee.