Information for Backbenchers on Statements

Mark Durkan Excerpts

Tuesday 20th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

As a minority party Member, I am of course disqualified from membership of the Backbench Business Committee, but happily, I am not disqualified from participating in the debate, which so far has involved many of the Members who have worked very hard on that Committee.

The Leader of the House helped us by canvassing suggestions as to where we might go from here. It is important to use the motion not just as a “wailing wall” exercise to talk about every past transgression on statements, or to compare how many press briefings this Government give compared with the previous Government. There is guilt all around, so we need to consider how we go forward. If the motion is passed tonight, it will go to the Procedure Committee, but what will it do?

One basic problem touched on by the right hon. Member for East Yorkshire (Mr Knight) is that the ministerial code as such is deemed to be in the charge of the Prime Minister as opposed to the House. One of the things that I would want to see the Procedure Committee do is to draw up a House code of accountability that would apply to Ministers and to Select Committee Chairs if making statements or bringing serious matters— that they have investigated or have made recommendations on—to the attention of the House. A clear House code of accountability would get past the circular argument that takes place whenever hon. Members make a point of order about the lack of a statement—or the alleged inaccuracy of a statement—and then you say that it is not a matter for you, Mr Speaker. In the end, Ministers are meant to be accountable to Parliament, but there is no accountability when these things go wrong. A clear House code of accountability would help us to achieve that.

[Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that if there were to be such a House code, it should look at mechanisms to deal with the situation in which, however inadvertently, Ministers mislead the House—as a Minister did when he claimed that my local authority had only 2% cuts—or do not answer questions when asked? We do not have a proper remedy in such circumstances, which are all too common at present.

[Mark Durkan]

I accept what my hon. Friend says. However, I doubt that a new House code of accountability would be able to cover all these issues. It would have to be more like a highway code than an exhaustive and comprehensive law that was specific in all cases. On the basis of case law and application, it could improve, and then Ministers would not be able to claim that they were in any doubt about what it required.

We must also be careful, as Back Benchers who want to ensure that announcements are made in this House rather than being pre-spun to the press and elsewhere, that we do not end up complaining that too many statements are being made and we do not have enough time to spend on substantive legislative business. For another couple of months, I will carry on serving in another Chamber, and that is a common complaint there. We have too many set-piece statements that do not amount to very much and people find it hard to see anything key, important or new in them. Those three words have all been used at various times to describe the test for whether statements should be made in this House.

I sat on the Benches opposite during the last Parliament and heard many statements that did not contain much new. It might have been that the Prime Minister wanted to identify himself with a policy, but the policy itself was not new, and at times we wondered why statements were being made. While we want to press the point that statements should be made in this House rather than being presented through the media or at other set-piece events, we do not want to end up in a ridiculous situation.

The Leader of the House made some useful suggestions. We should not always have oral statements with up to an hour of questions. Often the questions become repetitive and, just as Minister’s statements are accused of spin, so too the questions and the replies can be accused of counter-spin. It cuts both ways. Are there intermediate arrangements that we could have between a written statement, which involves no questions or time for questions, and an oral statement accompanied by a lengthy opportunity for questions? My hon. Friend the Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound) referred earlier to a possible gradation of statements. As the Leader of the House suggested, if a statement were available in writing, it could then be the subject of questions without the statement being rehearsed in the House.

[Stephen Pound]

When I made that intervention, I may have unwittingly caused offence to certain Members representing rural constituencies. The point I was trying to make was that a review such as the 2013 review of the Rural Payments Agency surely is not in the same scale of immediacy as some of the other statements, such as on the implementation of the Bribery Act 2010. Does my hon. Friend accept that we could have a code of prioritisation on this, perhaps even a hierarchy of needs?

[Mark Durkan]

I fully agree with my hon. Friend, although as always the question will be: who makes the judgment, who makes the call? However, so long as people think that an honest judgment has been made and a fair call attempted, the House would be broadly satisfied. It should always be the case that, if a written statement is made without the chance for questions, there should perhaps be a business slot early in the following week in which people can, if they want to, ask questions about a statement. Perhaps there should be an opportunity for questions to be asked about all the written statements made in the previous week.

I do not understand why the House does not sit until half-past 2 on a Tuesday. I understand the argument on the Monday—that Members are travelling from constituencies and want to spend the weekend with their families in their constituencies—but I do not understand why we wait until half-past 2 on a Tuesday. There should be more early-day business, perhaps on Tuesday, and in fact one window for early-day business could be specifically for ministerial statements. That might be an opportunity for people to have a round-up of free-ranging questions about matters that were the subject of written ministerial statements the previous week, and Ministers would have to be available on that basis.

As I understand it, in the Scottish Parliament, Ministers have to be available to answer questions on a fairly free-ranging basis. We could have a special question time slot—it could be done Westminster Hall-style—in the Chamber almost as a special committee of the House, if we do not want to transgress on to other things. There are ways and means to ensure that, even if a statement is tabled in the first instance as a written statement, we can ask questions about it and hold people to account, so that the procedure of the written statement is not abused. That applies to some of the issues raised by other Members about the hours of the House and the times at which we sit.

It is important to have better advance notice of statements. Again, the Leader of the House was helpful when he said that perhaps more work could be done to ensure that there is advance notice of oral statements. I sympathise with my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) who spoke as a new Member on this point. It is bizarre that we can find in our papers all written ministerial statements, which we cannot question, for that day, but nothing about oral statements, unless we have been listening to the radio and have guessed what topics are likely to be the subject of oral statements. If we could have more advance notice, it would help us in our preparation of questions.

We need to ensure, however, that we have a good balance in what we ask of the Government, because we do not want the business of the House to become dominated by set-piece statements and questions. We also want live debates and good interaction in those debates. I appreciate why the Backbench Business Committee has singled out this issue for the first debate under its lead—it is correct in the light of recent experience and also experiences in the previous Parliament. However, with everybody making accusations, we should bear in mind one of the wisest adages I have ever heard about politics: irony in politics is just hypocrisy with panache. Hearing many of the complaints that each side of the House is making against the other about what different Governments have done reminds me of that. We need to remember that Back-Bench Members are not free from sin either.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Williamson]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention and I freely acknowledge that the Secretary of State came and apologised, but that brings me back to my point. Is an apology or the need to make an apology a sufficient deterrent? Surely what we want on both sides of the House is to ensure that there is no need for Ministers to come and apologise. As the Secretary of State has been so willing to make an apology on five separate occasions, that undermines the value of that censure on a Minister. If we go back 20 or 30 years, perhaps an apology from the Minister might have been a more significant deterrent than it seems to be today. We need to find an alternative mechanism to ensure that these sorts of concerns and problems do not arise in the future.

I come from a local government background and there is a long-standing tradition about such issues in local government. As a former leader of Derby city council, I know that my most significant announcement as leader would be about the budget and the setting of the council tax, and it would be routine for us to embargo the statement that I was going to make to the council chamber. Perhaps that is something that we ought to adopt in this House: Ministers’ statements could be embargoed and that embargo could have some legal force. Perhaps that would be a way of ensuring that the House is treated with the gravitas that, in my view, it deserves.

[Mark Durkan]

Does that not raise the point that if we took up the Leader of the House’s idea of having clearer advance notice of oral statements, the protocol should be that as soon as notice of a statement were given, an embargo would kick in? We would probably then need to change the civil service code as well to prevent leaks and briefings taking place at civil service level rather than from Ministers or Members of the House.

[Chris Williamson]

My hon. Friend makes a particularly cogent point. That would certainly be a valuable way forward.

I know that all new Governments have a political agenda and want to get their legislation on to the statute book, but I have been struck by the breakneck speed at which the new Administration are seemingly determined to railroad legislation through the House. Perhaps that is one reason why there have been so many leaks to the media. The House is not being given sufficient time to scrutinise legislation. This is a cross-party point; I have heard hon. Members on the Government Benches express similar concerns. The Academies Bill is a case in point: there are significant reservations on the Opposition side, but there are also reservations on the Government side and it is regrettable that measures are being railroaded through by the new Administration despite those concerns.

A cross-party consensus on finding a better way forward seems to have emerged. How long has this Parliament been sitting now? I have been elected for about 10 weeks and I do not know how many times you have been called on, Mr Speaker, through various points of order, to admonish Ministers for making statements before coming to the House. That simply cannot go on; it just is not good enough. We have to find a better way of doing business in the Chamber. I hope that we can find cross-party consensus on that, and I hope that Ministers will take this issue more seriously than they have hitherto. I hope also that they will take the possibilities on board, particularly given the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan) about giving embargoes legal force and changing the civil service code.