Business of the House

Debate between Alan Campbell and Jesse Norman

Thursday 23rd October 2025 Commons Chamber

[Jesse Norman (Hereford and South Herefordshire) (Con)]

Will the Leader of the House give us the forthcoming business?

[The Leader of the House of Commons (Sir Alan Campbell)]

The business for the week commencing 27 October will include:

Monday 27 October—Remaining stages of the Victims and Courts Bill.

Tuesday 28 October—Opposition day on a motion in the name of the official Opposition—subject to be announced.

Wednesday 29 October—Remaining stages of the Sentencing Bill.

Thursday 30 October—General debate on property service charges, followed by a general debate on the ageing community and end-of-life care. The subjects for these debates were determined by the Backbench Business Committee.

Friday 31 October—The House will not be sitting.

The provisional business for the week commencing 3 November includes:

Monday 3 November—Second Reading of the Public Office (Accountability) Bill.

[Jesse Norman]

In addition to the tributes that were paid earlier this week, I believe I will be speaking for all Members in mourning the death on Monday of our former colleague Oliver Colvile. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] Oliver entered the House with me in that glorious parliamentary generation of 2010. He was nationally famous for taking a wicket in India on live television for the Lords and Commons cricket team, and for his memorable call in 2015 for hedgehogs to become a national emblem of the UK. As he pointed out in this Chamber,

“hedgehogs are prickly in character, have a voracious appetite and a passion for gardens, and have a noisy sex life.”—[Official Report, 10 November 2015; Vol. 602, c. 351.]

He said that he left it to the Deputy Speaker to decide which of those traits he himself possessed.

The Leader of the House has rightly put some distance between himself and his predecessor in electing not to engage in political knockabout, and I am four-square behind him on that. In that spirit, I will content myself by simply noting some of the news this week. The UK has just recorded net borrowing of more than £20 billion in September, the highest of any month since 2021. The Crown Prosecution Service has been forced to abandon the most consequential trial of Chinese spies for many years. Four people have resigned from the grooming gangs inquiry panel and the leading candidate to be chair has withdrawn. Newspapers have been briefed by No. 10 that the new Cabinet Secretary will be removed in the new year, after barely 15 months in his post. A person deported under the Government’s one in, one out programme has immediately returned by dinghy, reportedly citing his terror at being in France.

The Leader of the House may or may not wish to comment on those issues, but there are two specific items affecting many Members of this House that I bring to his attention. The first is the imminent closure of the fruit and vegetables aid scheme. As he will be aware, the UK fresh produce sector is worth more than £3 billion and is a significant part of the UK farm economy. There has been a plan in place for some time to grow that sector rapidly over the next three years through public and private investment in equipment, technology and infrastructure, but the current scheme closes at the end of this year without any movement to date on this crucial issue from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Will the Leader of the House therefore ask the Secretary of State to pick up this issue as soon as possible, push ahead with the plan and make a statement to the House, so as to avoid risk to the horticulture sector, local food production, jobs and national food security?

The second issue relates to the Government’s new local government fair funding review. As the House will know, this is a fraught area of concern for Members across the House, and I declare a particular interest, since it appears likely that Herefordshire council—my own county—will face a funding gap next year of around £27 million, or 11% of its net budget. That is a gigantic sum, which comes on top of the withdrawal of the rural services delivery grant, which supported so many local services. It is entirely unclear what the rationale for such a cut could be, especially for what is a relatively poor and sparsely populated part of the country. I also note, and bring to the attention of colleagues across the House, that the new formula will create serious problems for many local authorities up and down this country, including London boroughs.

The need for reform is clear, but the Government are still consulting barely six months before the new formula is due to be rolled out. Haste is the last thing anyone needs in an area of this complexity and delicacy. May I impress on the Leader of the House the need for care and deliberation from the Government in how this consultation is carried out and then implemented? Will he in turn express this concern to ministerial colleagues and give proper time for these issues to be debated at the length they deserve in this Chamber?

[Sir Alan Campbell]

I am pleased to see the shadow Leader of the House back in his place this week. I just inform him, if he did not already know, that last week we discovered in his absence that he has a highly capable deputy in the hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (John Lamont), who may or may not be joining us in deliberations later.

I join the shadow Leader of the House in paying tribute to Oliver Colvile, who the House will remember fondly as the MP for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport from 2010 to 2017. Our thoughts are with his family. Apart from his other achievements, not least in seeking to save hedgehogs, my understanding is that he never broke his party’s Whip and therefore would have been a Chief Whip’s dream, I can assure the House.

We also remember this week that it is 59 years since the Aberfan disaster, when 144 people lost their lives, including 116 children. We must never forget. Today also marks the launch of the Royal British Legion poppy appeal. We remember those who served and gave their lives in the service of our country, including those who were Members of this House.

I also pay tribute on a personal level and give my thanks to Kate Wilson, who is leaving the Cabinet Office this week. Her career has spanned three decades, and she supported successive Governments’ work in Parliament on behalf of the office of the Leader of the House of Commons and the Government Chief Whip’s office, and I hope the whole House will join me in wishing Kate the best in her future endeavours.

I also join with you, Mr Speaker, in wishing England all the very best in their rugby league match on Saturday against Australia. We wish England well.

I turn to the shadow Leader of the House’s points. First of all, it is true that we need to get the balance right in these questions between serious matters and, from time to time, knockabout. I have spoken to him privately about this, and I am committed to ending some of the knockabout—but given the list that he presented, he is tempting me. As some of the issues might come up in questions later, the only thing I will say is on my starting point last week on questions about the economy: any Conservative Member who asks a question on the economy should begin with an apology.

On the substantive matter that the right hon. Gentleman raises—the food and vegetable aid scheme—he is a strong advocate for the industry and particularly for his beautiful county of Herefordshire, where I understand it has been a great year for apples, but not always for other veg and fruit. I will draw his remarks to the attention of the DEFRA Minister, who I am sure will be happy to meet him if he seeks a meeting, and who will also keep the House updated on that matter.

On local government funding, I will respond by saying that the current system of local authority funding has left some places behind—there is no doubt about that. It is not a fair system. The previous Government understood this very well in their fair funding review, but, as with many issues, they just did not deliver on it. We will make good on our commitment to introduce improvements to align funding with need, and that will be the first time that has happened since 2013. We will also publish our response to the fair funding review 2.0 later this autumn, which will be followed by the publication of the provisional multi-year settlement. In the usual way, there will be plenty of time to debate that.

Business of the House

Debate between Alan Campbell and Jesse Norman

Thursday 11th September 2025 Commons Chamber

[The Leader of the House of Commons (Sir Alan Campbell)]

Probably more than I am, Mr Speaker. [Laughter.] The business for next week is as follows:

Monday 15 September—Consideration of Lords amendments to the Employment Rights Bill.

Tuesday 16 September—Second Reading of the Sentencing Bill.

The House will rise for the conference recess at the conclusion of business on Tuesday 16 September and return on Monday 13 October.

The business for the week commencing 13 October includes:

Monday 13 October—General debate on baby loss. The subject for this debate was determined by the Backbench Business Committee.

Tuesday 14 October—Remaining stages of the Mental Health Bill [Lords].

Wednesday 15 October—Remaining stages of the Sustainable Aviation Fuel Bill.

Thursday 16 October—Second Reading of the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Bill.

Friday 17 October—The House will not be sitting.

The provisional business for the week commencing 20 October includes:

Monday 20 October—Committee of the whole House and remaining stages of the Diego Garcia Military Base and British Indian Ocean Territory Bill.

[Jesse Norman]

I thank the Leader of the House for the business.

On this 24th anniversary of 9/11, I know the whole House will want to join me and, I am sure, the Leader of the House in sending our best wishes to the families and the friends of the victims of those horrendous terrorist attacks.

So, too, our best wishes go to those grieving the murder of Charlie Kirk in the USA, and to our own great colleague, the hon. Member for Washington and Gateshead South (Mrs Hodgson), for the terrible news she has had this morning.

I thank the recently departed Leader of the House, the right hon. Member for Manchester Central (Lucy Powell). She and I had our disagreements; I do not think there is much doubt about that. She supported the wrong football team, and I struggled to get her to answer my questions, but she was diligent and effective in responding to Members across the House, as well as in Committee. Without getting too teary about it, I will even miss her appalling puns.

But it is an ill wind that blows nobody any good. Hurricane tax dodge blew away the Deputy Prime Minister and destroyed the Prime Minister’s much-vaunted phase two, but it has brought us the former Labour Chief Whip! He was a history teacher, and there cannot be many better forms of public service than that. After his distinguished career channelling industriously away in the usual channels, I warmly welcome him blinking into the bright lights of the Dispatch Box.

I had somehow thought that, having plumbed the depths of incompetence over the summer, the Government would now settle down a bit. How naïve—how desperately foolish—I was. The No. 10 team were obviously taking the mickey. They were laughing at us. “You think this is incompetent?”, they said, “We have hardly got going. We can do vastly better than that. Resets are for wimps—let’s have a full-blown crash reshuffle. Let’s have a new Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary, as well as a new Deputy Prime Minister. And let’s undermine the Chancellor of the Exchequer by ostentatiously lining up the former Chief Secretary to replace her. The markets will really welcome that. Even better—let’s have an election for deputy leader of the party. People are already scared to death about all the taxes coming in the Budget, but they will be completely reassured if we run a Labour leadership election at the same time. Ideally, we can make the deputy leader a former Cabinet Minister whom the Prime Minister has just abruptly fired. That’ll be good for stability. Oh, and we can go further! We can actively undermine relations with our closest ally if we throw in a major scandal over the Prime Minister’s personal choice as ambassador to the USA.”

If only this were a joke—instead, it is a tragedy. It is like we are trapped in an unending episode of “The Office”, with the Prime Minister as David Brent. The unions are ratcheting up their pay demands. The RMT is holding seven days of rolling walk-outs. The tube has come to a standstill. The only people who probably will not be affected are junior doctors in London, who have voted to have strikes until the new year, so they will be staying at home anyway. As the former director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies remarked, it all shows how “staggeringly unprepared” Labour was for government, and it is we across this House and all our constituents who are paying the price for their arrogance and negligence.

The Leader of the House will only just be coming up to speed now, of course—one perfectly understands that—but, if I may, I would make one early request of him, with the utmost seriousness. He will know that many thousands of veterans, including hundreds in my constituency and in his, have had their lives thrown into uncertainty and bad—desperate, in some cases—anxiety by the Government’s decision to repeal the Northern Ireland veterans legislation, the Northern Ireland (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023. That was more than a year ago now. The Government promised a legally sound and effective legislative solution to the problem they had created, so could the Leader of the House let us know—now or in a written update before the recess—when the Northern Ireland Secretary will come to the House and publish that solution?

[Sir Alan Campbell]

First, may I add my tribute to my predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Manchester Central (Lucy Powell), for her excellent work as Leader of the House over the last year? She spearheaded the revival of the Modernisation Committee, which was a manifesto commitment, and oversaw the packed legislative programme that formed the basis of this Government’s first King’s Speech. I know that I am among many MPs across the House who want to thank her for her diligence and hard work.

I would also like to express my thanks to Colin Lee, the Clerk of Legislation, who retires this week, having joined the House service in 1988. MPs from across the House have valued his wise counsel over many years, and I know the whole House will wish him well.

I know that the House will also share my sadness about the death of Sir Roger Sands, who was Clerk of the House from 2003 to 2006. Sir Roger was a distinguished servant of the House for 41 years, and the House will want to convey our condolences to Lady Sands and Sir Roger’s family.

I thank the shadow Leader of the House for welcoming me to my place. Before I turn to his remarks, I should caution him, and indeed the House, that the last time I answered a question at the Dispatch Box was in the same year that the iPad was released. Both you and I, Mr Speaker, had a little more hair and of a darker hue. At the time the average price of a pint of beer was £2.91—there are people sat behind me who were not even old enough to buy alcohol then.

I am looking forward to these sessions with the shadow Leader of the House. We have been in the House together for a decade, but I cannot claim to know him particularly well, so I also went to Wikipedia to find out a bit more. He is a philosopher, a historian and an author of note. It is clear that he is a thinking Conservative, which is an increasingly rare commodity.

I associate myself with the right hon. Gentleman’s comments about the anniversary of 9/11, and about the death of Charlie Kirk. Let us remember that, in these circumstances, Mr Kirk’s family have been robbed of a father and a husband. There is no justification at all for political violence, whatever the views of the person involved.

I know that there will inevitably be a degree of knockabout about the state of the Government, and indeed of the Opposition, at business questions. I am happy, any day, to have a debate on the comparison between this Government’s 14 months and the right hon. Gentleman’s disastrous Government of 14 years. The only thing that we were unprepared for was the scale of the state that this country was in.

On the right hon. Gentleman’s substantive point about Northern Ireland, he knows that those are difficult matters and that the Government have given a commitment to bringing forward legislation. It is important that reassurances are in place, and I can tell him that the Government will be saying something shortly.

Let me finish with this. The shadow Leader of the House and I both have a deep respect for Parliament. I can give him and the House the reassurance that I take my responsibility, both as the Government’s representative in Parliament and as the House’s representative in Government, very seriously indeed.