---

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

We have to start somewhere, and I get more and more puzzled about what my hon. Friend actually wants. She said that many of the proposals that we are discussing this evening were arcane and too complex for the outside world to understand, but this is one that the outside world has grasped readily. It is about time we grasped it, too. We are not asking for anything revolutionary, just for probably eight days sometime in September. That would still allow time for the conferences and all the other things that have to happen. Members often forget that we actually voted for that six years ago as a part of a package put to the House by the late Robin Cook. The words he used when he introduced that measure—I remember them well—were, "The deal is". The deal was that in return for making the House's sitting times family friendly by giving us half-terms and so forth, we would sit for a week or two in September. That was the deal, and we reneged on it. The first excuse was that a security screen had to be set up, and when that ran out, the excuse was that there would not be enough business. I do not buy that and nor do the public, and it is time we addressed it.