Business of the House

Jesse Norman Excerpts

Thursday 11th September 2025 Commons Chamber

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

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

[Mr Speaker]

I welcome the new Leader of the House and thank the previous Leader of the House. I am looking forward to this session!

[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.