Sittings of the House (22 March)

John Spellar Excerpts

Wednesday 6th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[The Leader of the House of Commons (Mr Andrew Lansley)]

I beg to move,

That this House shall sit on Friday 22 March.

On 18 October 2012, I published the full parliamentary recess calendar to 6 January 2014. The whole House will recognise the benefit to Members, staff, the House authorities and the House service of giving as much certainty and notice as possible of future sitting days. It enables effective scheduling of hon. Members’ work in their constituencies and allows the House authorities to plan major work projects as effectively and efficiently as possible. On 17 December 2012, the dates I had announced were put to the House in the form of a motion. The House agreed, without a Division, to the dates that had been proposed. Indeed, I do not recall any debate on the matter, or any objections being received from Opposition Members.

[Mr John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

The right hon. Gentleman has just said that the motion was put to the House on 17 December. Had the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced the date of the Budget by then?

[Mr Lansley]

From memory, no.

[Mr Spellar]

I want to help the right hon. Gentleman with this, so that he can construct his argument more effectively. My understanding is that the Chancellor had on 11 December announced the date of the Budget in March.

[Mr Lansley]

I will gladly check my recollection, of course. My recollection is that the date of the Budget was announced in the new year, but I will gladly check that point. I am not sure that it is germane to the argument, however, because whatever the position might be, I had at that point already announced—on 18 October 2012, as I said—the calendar for the year ahead.

[Mr Spellar]

rose—

[Mr Lansley]

The right hon. Gentleman is standing. I think he is presuming that I am going to give way to him a third time.

[Mr Spellar]

I can develop my argument in my speech, but it might help the right hon. Gentleman if I do so now. The reason why it is relevant whether the Chancellor had already announced the date of the Budget is that the Leader of the House would have put the dates to the House in the knowledge that the Budget was going to be in March and knowing how many days it would require, and therefore knowing how it would fit in with his sittings pattern.

[Stephen Mosley (City of Chester) (Con)]

So why did you support it on the 17th?

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Eagle]

If one takes into account all the recesses since this Government have been in office, the figure goes up to 58%. That is a difference and it rather proves that this Prime Minister has a strange aversion to the House sitting on Wednesdays. That is what we are dealing with in our amendment.

Why on earth can the Prime Minister be frightened of Wednesdays? Last year’s Budget was enough to put the frighteners on anyone, let’s face it. It certainly set the bar high in standards of incoherence and incompetence, which even our part-time Chancellor will find hard to match this year. Let us remember that we had the granny tax, the churches tax, the charities tax and the pasty tax. The Chancellor had been so busy swanning around Washington in search of President Obama’s coat tails that he had forgotten to pay enough attention to one of his day jobs.

Last year’s Budget was unravelling even before the Chancellor had sat down. It was so disastrous that it spawned its own new word—omnishambles—which became the “Oxford English Dictionary” word of the year. There was open revolt against Budget measures on the Government Benches. Nine Tory MPs and four Liberal Democrats voted against the pasty tax, in defiance of their Whips. Sixteen Conservatives and one Liberal Democrat voted against the caravan tax, with two Liberal Democrat Ministers strangely missing the vote completely. No lesser person than Lord Ashcroft was moved to observe:

“The main problem is not so much that people think that the Conservative Party is heading in the wrong direction, it is that they are not sure where it is heading. And that includes me.”

[Mr Spellar]

Does this not speak to a greater truth, which also affects the issue before us, given that the Budget date had already been announced prior to the motion being put to the Commons? If my hon. Friend has read analyses of how Budgets have traditionally been made up properly, under Labour and Conservative Governments, she will know that many of the proposals in the last Budget had been proposed a number of times before by the civil service and had been batted back. What we have with this Government—here is the relevance to this debate—is a failure of process: a failure to attend to detail and a complete failure to attend to proper parliamentary and governmental process.

[Ms Eagle]

I agree wholeheartedly with the points that my right hon. Friend has made. As a former Treasury Minister, I can attest to the fact that some of the more disastrous bits of last year’s omnishambles Budget had indeed been put to Ministers for their consideration prior to their adoption last year and had been batted back for the nonsense that they were.

Because of the Government’s cynical manipulation of the recess dates, it took 28 days after that botched Budget for the Prime Minister to find himself back at the Dispatch Box to account for it. By then we had also had the fuel strike scare and the jerry can scandal to add to the chaos. Understandably, he was so unnerved that, red-faced and angry, he started attacking his own side. The hon. Member for Clacton (Mr Carswell) was wholly unfairly ticked off for having a sense of humour failure by a rattled Prime Minister who was demonstrating to the House just how easily he seems to be able to channel his inner Flashman. The memory of this omnishambles is obviously still raw. According to samizdats emerging from the 1922 Committee, the Chancellor has admitted to Tory Back Benchers that last year’s Budget was a disaster. Why else would he have been seen nodding vigorously as he was being exhorted, in language so earthy that I cannot repeat it here, not to—how can I put this politely and stay in order—mess it up this time?

Perhaps the Prime Minister’s reluctance to appear at the Dispatch box the day after the Budget debates to answer for his Chancellor’s omnishambles is an understandable human failing on his part, but it is not one in which this House should be assisting or that we should allow him to repeat this year. However, that is precisely what the motion will do unless our amendment is accepted. The Budget will be on 20 March and the Prime Minister is not due to appear at the Dispatch Box to answer questions until 17 April. Once more, that is 28 days after the Chancellor’s Budget statement.

If the Prime Minister finds it impossible to appear before the House to answer questions on the Budget before 28 days have elapsed, he could do what all Prime Ministers in the past have done and let his deputy do it for him. After all, we are told that the Liberal Democrats are intimately involved in all of the decision making about the Budget. We know that they are so central to the Government’s inner core that they make up two of the “quad” who, we are told, make all the final decisions. They are so closely involved in Budget decisions that they leaked most of it in advance last year so that they could take credit for all of the nice bits and distance themselves from the nasty bits. The only thing left for the poor Chancellor to surprise us with was the granny tax, and that was all he had to take credit for. No one seemed to benefit—unless of course they happen to be a millionaire awaiting their huge tax cut this April while everyone else feels the pain.

In the spirit of being a team player and recognising the Liberal Democrats’ acts of selfless sacrifice on tuition fees, why does the Leader of the House not just accept our amendment, change the sittings motion and let the Deputy Prime Minister step in and help out with Prime Minister’s questions straight after the Budget? Surely the Prime Minister trusts him to do a good job.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Eagle]

Yes, that is absolutely true. Perhaps in future the hon. Lady should check the record before she makes points as defective as that.

[Mr Spellar]

The hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth (Sarah Newton) makes a point which I think needs to be on the record. She says that the House voted for action, not war. The hon. Lady, who is fairly new to the House, will not be aware of the fact—I am sure that my hon. Friend the shadow Leader of the House is aware of it—that this country has never formally gone to war since 1939, but we have been involved in a considerable number of military actions. It is quite understandable that the hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth, not having been around at the time and not having been here long, would not understand that difference.

[Ms Eagle]

My right hon. Friend is entirely correct.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

His party was socialist, his Government were socialist and his successor was a socialist; I think that there is a lot of socialist still left in the Labour party.

We will have that Friday, a day of jubilee, to come in and praise the Government for what they have done and for their wisdom and foresight. We are being kindly and charitable—nice, really—to the Opposition by not inflicting upon them the terrible experience they must have every week. None the less, I must confess that I admire the nobility of the hon. Member for Wallasey in bringing forward her amendment. For the Labour party to take this on puts one in mind of the charge of the Light Brigade. How does it go?

“Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon behind them”

[Mr Spellar]

rose—

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I am sure that the right hon. Gentleman will volley and thunder.

[Mr Spellar]

Does the hon. Gentleman not care about the employment prospects of the fact checkers for Channel 4 and various journals who are regularly employed every Wednesday, including today, when the Prime Minister claimed that the bedroom tax did not apply to those with disabled children? Does he not feel for them in that they will have less work to do because the Prime Minister—I would never accuse him in this Chamber of misrepresenting the position—does not understand his own policies?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I believe it is orderly, Mr Speaker, to say that the right hon. Gentleman is guilty of terminological inexactitude. The Prime Minister said nothing about a bedroom tax, for there is no bedroom tax. The Prime Minister is somebody who deals in truth, right and justice, and therefore does not talk about things that do not exist.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

This really is a most curious debate. We managed to tease out the information from the Leader of the House, slightly reluctantly on his part, that he seemed not to have been aware before he spoke that the Chancellor had announced the date of the Budget. He can rightly say, to some extent, that perhaps that should have meant that the motion would be opposed. Frankly, however, as I said to him from a sedentary position, it is the job of the Government business managers—the Leader of the House, the Chief Whip and their very able and extensive staffs—to look out for these things, let alone, perhaps, those who are in charge of the grid at No. 10, if anybody is. This is not just about the simple issue of not having a whole series of clashing announcements on one day; it is about the good management of business and the stress-testing of propositions before they see the light of day.

[Mr Bone]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that none of these problems would arise if we had a House business committee? Then it would not just be a case of the Executive trying to force through such changes but of also having a committee to which every Back-Bench Member could make representations. Would that not be the answer?

[Mr Spellar]

In this context, I am not criticising the Executive for forcing things through but for not being on top of the job. Unfortunately, that is only too typical these days in a whole number of areas. There were several examples with the last Budget, where there were clearly issues that should never have got to the Chancellor of the Exchequer or the Chief Secretary, or perhaps even other Ministers. They should have been knocked out long before by Treasury officials or special advisers.

[Stephen Mosley]

The right hon. Gentleman talks about people not being on top of the job. Does he admit that when this was voted through on 17 December last year the Opposition knew what the date of the Budget was going to be and made the decision to support it? It was you guys who were not on top of the job because you were not aware of what you were doing that day.

[Mr Speaker]

I think that the hon. Gentleman’s meaning was clear, but it was notably colloquial—obviously too colloquial for the advanced and refined taste of the hon. Member for Dunfermline and West Fife (Thomas Docherty).

[Mr Spellar]

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I am sure that the hon. Member for City of Chester (Stephen Mosley) will get the hang of this place after a while.

Essentially, the Government determine the business of the House. It is absolutely right that that can be voted on, but it is the Government who work out the pattern of the parliamentary year—

--- Later in debate ---

That this House shall sit on Friday 22 March.

[Mr Spellar]

I am pleased to continue the argument. I slightly regret the absence of the hon. Member for The Wrekin (Mark Pritchard), who seemed to want to intervene. Maybe he has been nobbled in the meantime.

As you will recall, Mr Speaker, before we voted I made it clear, in answer to the hon. Member for City of Chester, that the Government are responsible for their own parliamentary business. With their considerable resource, they should be able to take account of the many factors required for a proper parliamentary timetable, not least with the current absence of legislation. Because they have messed up in other areas of the legislative programme, they are not actually bursting with items to be discussed.

[Mr Hollobone]

I am greatly enjoying the right hon. Gentleman’s speech, but does he not agree with me that the Government have promised the House that they will introduce a House business committee in 2013 to avoid these circumstances arising, and that were the committee established, these unfortunate proceedings could be avoided?

[Mr Spellar]

It is hugely tempting to follow the hon. Gentleman down that path, but it reveals a degree of misunderstanding of how the Westminster parliamentary system works. If the committee he mentions—this will be a long debate when we get to that—is in control of the parliamentary timetable, it will effectively become the Government, because it will control Parliament. The committee might deal with a particular part of the parliamentary timetable, just as the Backbench Business Committee does. However, responsibility for the entire parliamentary timetable—and there is nothing more intrinsic to the maintenance of government than supply and this expression, “Through the Budget”—is fundamentally the role of the Queen’s Government, as determined on a daily basis by the maintenance of a parliamentary majority.

[Mr Hollobone]

The right hon. Gentleman might be right in some respects, but were this business of the House committee to be established, it might well have on it a Government majority and be able to determine non-legislative time, even if it could not determine legislative time. Given that PMQs on Wednesday is non-legislative, I would have thought that the committee would be able to determine that the House sit on a Wednesday.

[Mr Spellar]

But it is a hugely important part of holding the Government to account. It clearly has a considerable impact on the Prime Minister, given his desire to avoid it. If one reads the memoirs of a number of Prime Ministers, not just of recent vintage—

[Michael Ellis]

Tony Blair.

[Mr Spellar]

Not just of recent vintage, I said. I know the hon. Gentleman is a new Member who thinks that history started with Tony Blair’s election. I know this belief is common within the Conservative party, but actually we did have Prime Ministers—both Labour and Conservative alike—before that. I was actually thinking of Harold Macmillan, but the hon. Gentleman was probably in short trousers when he was Prime Minister.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

I am interested in the line that my right hon. Friend is taking, but actually we are talking here not about the procedures of the House, but about the incompetence of the Government in handling the timetable. They have tabled this motion tonight because they did not realise that they needed the extra Friday to fit in the four days of debate on the Budget.

[Mr Spellar]

My hon. Friend rightly draws me back to the immediate topic, tempting, interesting and attractive though it is to discuss the broader issues of parliamentary sovereignty and procedure. He is right that most of the factors, including the date of the Budget, were well known when the motion was laid. The number of days that we traditionally take for the Budget debate was known, as too was the date of Easter. In fact, the date of Easter could have been known several decades, if not centuries, ago. The procedure for calculating Easter was decided at the Council of Nicaea in 325. At that time, they could probably have calculated when this Easter would be.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Was it not St Wilfrid and the Synod of Whitby that settled the date of Easter in England?

[Mr Spellar]

The date of Easter is the first Sunday after the full moon following the March equinox. I thought the hon. Gentleman was going to ask me whether this was under the Julian or Gregorian calendar, but he did not.

[Thomas Docherty]

My right hon. Friend will be aware that we are a United Kingdom Parliament. I do not know whether he is aware, but for a long time Scotland had a different Easter.

[Mr Spellar]

Several areas did. Of course, we would be straying into history if we noted that the last time we changed the calendar and the method of calculation, it did not work out too well and London got substantially burnt down. “Give us back our 11 days”, was the cry of the London workers.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

My right hon. Friend is showing a detailed knowledge about how Easter is calculated. Was he actually at one of these meetings when it was decided?

[Mr Spellar]

I said 325, not 7.24.

It is absolutely right that we need a full debate on the Budget. I therefore question why the Budget needs to be on a Wednesday—I hope the Leader of the House will intervene—if we wish to fit in those four days and, quite rightly, have the Back-Bench pre-recess debate. Why not have the Budget on a Tuesday and the debate on the following days? That would work perfectly well, although I do think—mention has been made of staff who work here, and so on—that having recesses in the middle of the week rather than in full blocks can affect many people, particularly those who are trying to adjust to have holidays with family or, frankly, those without children who are trying to avoid going on holiday at the same time as those with family. Not much thought seems to have been given to how these things are organised—or, indeed, to parliamentary delegations. These partial weeks do not seem to be a particularly good idea.

[Mr Hollobone]

rose—

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

rose—

[Mr Spellar]

I will give way to the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies), seeing as he has not intervened yet, and come back to the hon. Member for Kettering (Mr Hollobone).

[Philip Davies]

The right hon. Gentleman prompts me with his talk about the Budget perhaps being on a Tuesday. For many years it was on a Tuesday, but it was changed to a Wednesday. That was before my time in the House, so I wonder whether he could tell me when the Budget was changed to Wednesday from Tuesday in the first place. Did it have anything to do with Tony Blair changing Prime Minister’s questions to Wednesday so that he could not be questioned about the unravelling of his Chancellor’s Budget the day after he had delivered it? Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman could help us.

[Mr Spellar]

I find it strange that the hon. Gentleman should talk about unravelling Budgets, given the experience of the last Budget—it was never fully ravelled, let alone unravelled. As I recall, he played some part in helping to unravel that Budget. We are happy and pleased that he took such a principled position. [Interruption.] Fortunately his Whip is in conversation with someone else and will not have noticed.

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, and I tried to check how far back Budgets were changed from Tuesday to Wednesday. It is some way back, although I do not know whether it was anything to do with the bank rate or whatever. It is an interesting subject; unfortunately, I did not have time to research it. However, when Budgets were on a Wednesday, with PMQs on Tuesdays and Thursdays, that would have enabled questions to be asked of the Prime Minister. It would be perfectly proper—I would have thought it would be extremely helpful for the public debate—if the Budget was on a Tuesday and then the Prime Minister answered on the Wednesday. However, that is slightly separate; we would be able to fit in that time scale. What all this shows, yet again, is an inattention to detail and organising the business of the House.

[Thomas Docherty]

My right hon. Friend is a distinguished and long-serving parliamentarian. Can he recall whether it was custom and practice under the Labour Government that if the Budget was on a Wednesday, Prime Minister’s questions were sooner than four weeks later? Is that not one of the big problems we have with the proposal before us this evening?

[Mr Spellar]

It is very much—this ties in with when Easter is. It would be much better not to have such substantial gaps. Given the Prime Minister’s experience of trying to answer questions about the bedroom tax and his inability to answer the questions or, even more fundamentally, show an understanding of his own legislation, that is fairly worrying.

Let me turn to the question of Fridays. I am slightly surprised by the Leader of the House’s comments—as though Friday and Wednesday were comparable in terms of the constituency pattern. Members of Parliament often establish a pattern with their local organisations—schools, charities and businesses—that ties in with having their advice bureaus on a Friday. Members will ensure that they have a full programme during the day on a Friday and, often, an advice bureau in the evening. It might be all right for Members who only have to nip up the road to St Albans if Parliament sits until 2.30 pm, but for those who have to go further afield, getting back to undertake their advice bureaus becomes a significant problem. I suspect that most Members will have publicised when and where their advice bureaus will be at least six months in advance; many will have done it a year in advance. Indeed, they will have put up posters around their constituencies to advertise them, because they had not anticipated that the Friday under discussion would be a sitting day in the Commons.

Surprisingly, the Leader of the House has said that Members can speak on other days, but that is not how things work. Usually, under a very helpful Speaker, there is a bit of flexibility with regard to Budget debates, but the reality is that particular issues are debated on particular days. Members therefore need to know when subjects in which they are interested will be the prime focus of debate.

The Leader of the House has also said that the Government do not intend to make statements, but if he does some research, he will find that statements have been made on Fridays in the past. That would make the situation even more difficult for certain Members.

[Philip Davies]

The point is that it is up to the right hon. Gentleman and other hon. Members to decide where they want to be on the Friday under discussion. If he decides that it is more important for him to turn up at the advice surgery that he has advertised six months in advance, there is nothing to prevent him from doing so, even if the proposed debate takes place. Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman already does that during the House’s sitting Fridays for private Members’ Bills. He did not want to prevent the Opposition from calling for a recall of Parliament when the riots were taking place, but Members may have arranged to do other things during that summer recess.

[Mr Spellar]

I am not entirely sure that I follow the hon. Gentleman’s train of thought. He is right to say that debates on private Members’ Bills occur on Fridays, but Members know about them for a long time in advance. They can, therefore, set their constituency calendar some distance ahead and say, with assurance, “This is a non-sitting Friday, so there won’t be a Bill that’s of interest to my constituents and I can make arrangements.” That seems perfectly sensible. My point is that all of those elements were known and we find it slightly strange that, initially, the Leader of the House, at fairly short notice, tried to spring this change on the Commons. Fortunately that was spotted, so we are having a proper debate and exploring the issues.

It is becoming clearer that there are two fundamental issues, the first of which is the steady disorganisation of parliamentary business and the Order Paper. For example, there are increasing incidents of the House of Lords and the House of Commons not sitting during the same weeks. In some cases, that causes considerable discontinuity for Bills moving between the two Houses.

[Mr Lansley]

Before the right hon. Gentleman concludes his remarks—[Interruption.] We can be hopeful. If he looks at the motion, he will see that it is for the House to sit on 22 March. It does not amend the resolution of 17 December. It is the amendment that seeks to amend the resolution, the point of which was to establish the framework of recess dates, not to provide for which day, including Fridays, the House would sit. It would always have been necessary for us to come back to the question of a Friday sitting if that was the best solution. There was nothing defective about the resolution on 17 December.

[Mr Spellar]

I fully understand that when business is announced, it is always with the caveat that it is subject to the progress of Government business. As far as I am aware, no proposition has been advanced that this change is necessitated by the progress, or lack of it, of Government business.

If, for example, the Government had continued with their legislation on the reform of the upper House, but without a programme motion, that business might have taken up a considerable amount of time over the past few months. The Government might then have said that they had other issues that needed to be dealt with, that there had been insufficient progress on Government business at that point, and that they therefore needed an extra day. That would have been understandable, but this proposal is not of that order. A number of elements were involved, all of which were known, and the Government have mishandled it.

I mentioned the fact that the Lords and the Commons often meet in separate weeks. Many Members of Parliament are involved in groupings, organisations and even some formal bodies that go across both Houses, and it can be very difficult for people who organise events here, often in connection with extremely worthy causes and important issues, who are hoping to draw an audience of Members of both Houses. Similarly, parliamentary delegations from other countries often come here and want to meet up with fellow parliamentarians. The Inter-Parliamentary Union and the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, for example, are fully integrated between the House of Lords and the House of Commons, and peers and Members of the Commons are involved in them, but their events become much more difficult for them to attend because of the disconnection of the parliamentary timetable.

All those examples provide an indication that the Government felt that running Parliament was easy. They did not understand the dynamic of the Commons, in particular, and of Parliament in general. They did not understand the rhythm of the place. The change to the timing of the Queen’s Speech, for example, has had an impact. It has gradually worked its way through, but there is still some disconnect there.

The Government have introduced changes without really understanding how Parliament works, and this motion is another symptom of that. It should therefore quite properly be dealt with by the amendment, which will enable Members of Parliament to undertake their constituency activities, and enable the Prime Minister to do what he is trying to avoid doing, week after week—namely, to turn up here and answer to the Commons and to the country.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. Has the right hon. Member for Warley (Mr Spellar) concluded his oration?

[Mr Spellar]

indicated assent.

[Mr Speaker]

He has. I should not sound, or look, so surprised.