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

I can do nothing but agree with the hon. Gentleman, who makes a sensible point. I believe that many hon. Members would like to serve on all the departmental Select Committees and certainly a majority of the House Committees as well, and I speak as someone who found tremendous challenge and great enjoyment in chairing the Procedure Committee. On electing Committee Chairmen, my experience is that the first time that the unpleasant arm of the dark side of the House was clearly brought to bear was way back in 1992. I saw letters from the Whips Office to members of the Cabinet and other Ministers urging them to attend a debate that should have been decided by Back Benchers. In fact, there was an unofficial Whip and a particular execution of a Member took place on that occasion, but I do not think that what my party carried out did it any good. By the time that the current Government sought to unseat Donald Anderson and Gwyneth Dunwoody, the House was aware of what was likely to happen and reacted, and their attack on two very distinguished Members was unsuccessful. Let me now move on to what the right hon. Member for North-West Durham just talked about: the Back-Bench business committee and the House business committee. I should like both of those committees to be established and the Back-Bench business committee included in the House business committee, so that there is a Back-Bench input at all stages into how the House spends its time. I very much support the case made by the hon. Member for Cannock Chase. I repeat that I believe that he has done the House a great service in the constructive and robust way in which he has described the proposal of his Committee, which undertook its work in a very short time but produced an excellent report none the less. Let me perhaps finally move on to an intervention that I made about the programming of the remaining or Report stages of legislation in the House and the way in which the House deals with Lords amendments. As the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome said in very clear terms, tranches of amendments and new clauses are tabled—sometimes by the Government, and often by the Opposition in seeking properly to scrutinise Government legislation and to improve it—for the remaining stages and pass to the House of Lords undebated in this House. I am an avowed supporter of the other House in its current form. I believe that it does a uniquely good job in doing part of what we should be doing in this House— scrutinising Government legislation—but this House very often leaves much of that scrutiny to the unelected, appointed House. Whether it has a democratic mandate I do not care one way or the other—we always have the final say in this House—but because of its expertise, it can do a wonderful job. I believe that it is wrong to programme the debates on amendments and new clauses in a Bill's remaining stages because they have not been debated in the Public Bill Committee upstairs, as has been said by hon. Members on both sides of the House. As my right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young) said, the remaining stages of a Bill—Report and even Lords amendments—are the one occasion when a Member of Parliament who was not on the Public Bill Committee and was not called on Second Reading has an opportunity, on behalf of his constituents, to raise matters that may be very important to them and to a particular constituency. I am surprised that although the issue was considered by the House of Commons Reform Committee, there is no specific proposal to limit programming at the remaining stages of a Bill and at consideration of Lords amendments. My right hon. Friend the shadow Leader of the House made the point, as have other speakers in the debate, that too much legislation comes before the House. We get constipated with the amount of legislation before us. I can only say to the Leader of the House and to the hon. Member for Cannock Chase, who led the Committee so well, that his proposals have my full support. As long as they go through, I will feel that in my almost 39 years in this place, I have made a contribution to the improvement of Parliament and to increasing the confidence that people have in it to do the job that they send us here to do.