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Political and Constitutional Reform Committee

This is a very welcome debate, which was promised by my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House when I raised the issue on Thursday. It seemed from informal conversations that I held with him afterwards that the debate would take place in prime time on Tuesday week. It has been brought forward, but that does not mean that people should feel they have been detained here and must stay here. Let me say, at the risk of inviting a mass exodus, that neither I nor, I am sure, any of my hon. Friends intend to call a Division this evening; therefore there will not be a vote, and therefore there is no need for anyone to stay here unless they wish to listen to the arguments. In brief, my argument is that when my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House introduced this motion without notice last Thursday, he said it could have gone through on the nod then but that he would be pleased for questions on it to be put to him, and I would like to put some of them to him now. First, how will this proposed Political and Constitutional Reform Committee interact with the other Select Committees proposed for the new House, for whose Chairmen we will be voting on Wednesday? On the face of it, this does not seem to be a departmental Select Committee. If it were a departmental Select Committee, it would be the Select Committee on the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and would deal with all the activities and responsibilities of that Department, including, most importantly, that Department's budget, but it appears instead to be a cross-cutting Committee on political and constitutional reform. Therefore, I hope that this question can be responded to in answering this debate: if the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister is not going to be scrutinised by this Select Committee, by which Select Committee will its responsibilities that fall outside political and constitutional reform be monitored and held to account? Following on from that point is this question: if this is a Political and Constitutional Reform Committee with a remit to consider political and constitutional reform, does that mean that all other Select Committees of this House are precluded from looking at issues of political and constitutional reform when they think those issues are material to the matters falling within their particular remits? If the purpose of tonight's motion is effectively to exclude all other Committees of the House from considering political and constitutional reform, the implications of that should be clearly spelled out. Finally, how will this new Committee interact specifically with the Justice Committee and the Public Administration Committee? Prima facie, the Public Administration Committee has a remit that would cover a lot of the day-to-day responsibilities of the Cabinet Office. Will they still be within its remit, or will they instead be within the remit of this new Committee? If it will not be the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister's Select Committee, why are we not spelling that out in terms? It is a pity that this motion was put on Thursday's Order Paper without any prior notice. We were invited to let it go through on the nod on Thursday evening, but my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) said that that should not happen so he objected to it. We have now rightly got a debate about it, and I hope that, in the spirit of the new politics, we will have some proper answers, including to the question that if this was such a good idea, why was it not thought of initially when we were setting up all the original Select Committees? Why, in other words, does it appear to be rather an afterthought?