---

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

I have just overheard one of my colleagues describing the hon. Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Patrick Cormack) as a magnificent parliamentary specimen. I am sure that he was absolutely right. It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Gentleman. I clearly recall an occasion a few months ago when I had to speak after him. I think that it was during one of the Hansard Society debates during the speakership campaign. We were both asked to talk about our experience. He said that he had served the House since 1970—that is nearly 40 years—and I had to confess that I was not even born until a year after he began to serve the House. I agree with the hon. Gentleman and with most of the other speakers in this debate. I should like to join the consensus supporting the excellent work done by my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright) and his Committee. I also think that my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Derbyshire (Natascha Engel) made some good points, however, and I want to pick up the gauntlet that was thrown down by my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin) when he suggested that we could go further. The Committee's report will drag the House forward towards the 20th century from the 18th. After the election, however, we shall probably need the equivalent of a Wright II to drag it into the Facebook and Twitter age. I believe, having talked to colleagues here and outside the House, that there could be a real danger in the months and years to come of a divide between the 30-something parliamentarians and the others in the House. I shall explain why. Some of the newer group of Members will not have had their children yet and might be planning to do so in the future; others might have young children. Others will be more savvy than I am about new forms of communication and about how to contact and be involved with their electors. They will have different ideas about how we should engage with the public than the House has traditionally had in the past. My hon. Friend's excellent report will move powers distinctly from the Executive to the Back Benches and to Parliament. In the eyes of the public, will that give the country new confidence in us? No, I do not think that it will. It will give confidence to us as Members of Parliament, and to those in the Westminster village. It will support and help those with a trained Westminster eye. It will make a difference here, but, as my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Derbyshire and others are saying, if we are to make Parliament stronger, we need to shift the pendulum of power away from this place and into local communities. I have talked about this before, and I believe that it is relevant. We shall have to come back to the issue of the settlement between the citizen and our Parliament and debate it again in the future. I want to outline three key areas in which we can make a difference. They were not in the remit of my hon. Friend's review, but he had a limited period in which to complete it, and he has come an awfully long way. He has proposed great recommendations for change, and we should all support them. They are changes that we need to make, but we will need to make further changes down the line. One relates to representation. If Parliament is really to be in touch with society, we need to look, act, sound and be more like it. I see one or two heads shaking on the Conservative Benches, but I do not think that that sentiment is necessarily shared by all of those on the Conservative Front Bench. We are seeing an emerging consensus on this matter. We saw that after the Speaker's Conference. Indeed, several Members who were involved in that are here today. We have come some way, but it is important that we now look at and listen to the recommendations of that Conference. I hope that they will be discussed on the Floor of the House, and ideally not in a debate tucked away on a Thursday. Let us debate these matters on a Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, when the House is busy, because the report produced by the Speaker's Conference is important. It is not just about getting more people from an ethnic minority background or more women into Parliament; it is also, in this modern world, about being fair and understanding towards people with mental health issues, and about getting more people with disabilities into the House. I understand that that was not part of the remit of the review carried out by my hon. Friend's Committee, but those and other measures are still relevant. We need to consider how we can better relate to younger people and encourage them to come into the House and become Members of Parliament. Again, some small steps in the right direction have been taken and Mr. Speaker has done the right thing in moving towards providing crèche facilities in this place, but as the hon. Member for South Staffordshire has already pointed out—[Interruption.] One or two Members may smirk, but I suspect that in the months and years to come, recognition of the importance of such facilities will become part of the political consensus. At least I hope it will, in the same way that measures to move power from the Executive to the Back Benchers have become part of a consensus. As the hon. Member for South Staffordshire said, as Parliaments change—we may well soon get a big churn in the membership of this place—some of these issues may get forgotten, so it is very important that that does not happen and important to ensure that these changes are driven forwards in the next Parliament, whoever is here after the election.