Simon Burns
Main Page: Simon Burns (Conservative - Chelmsford)(9 years, 8 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Mr Speaker
No, no. There is nothing further to that point of order. [Interruption.] Order. I simply say, with all due courtesy to the hon. Gentleman, who I am sure is sensitive to the interests and wishes of the House as a whole and to its desire to get on with Back-Bench business, that he has raised his point of order, that I have answered it and that there is nothing further to it. Whatever he thinks, I hope that he will be prepared to observe the normal courtesies that obtain in the House of Commons. That is the end of the matter for today.
Mr Burns
Mr Speaker, given your knowledge, which you have just explained to my hon. Friend, would you be kind enough to tell the House why you and/or the Commission felt that, unlike for the previous two panels that considered a Clerk of the House, the Deputy Speaker—the Chairman of Ways and Means—should not be on the panel but should be replaced by another right hon. Member who, in their role as the Chair of a Select Committee that governs the scrutiny of finance, had a potential conflict of interest?
Mr Speaker
I am very happy to answer the right hon. Gentleman, and I am extremely grateful to him for raising this point. There are two responses to him. The first is that in the selection of panels that make judgments of this kind, it is perfectly normal practice to vary the membership from one instance to another. There is nothing disorderly, irregular or particularly surprising about that, and I am sorry if he thinks that there is.
Secondly, I say to the right hon. Gentleman, whom I recall raising the point before about an alleged or perceived conflict of interest in respect of the right hon. Member for Barking (Margaret Hodge) on account of her chairmanship of the Public Accounts Committee, that I thought when he raised the point before it was a poor point, and it has not improved with time. There is no conflict of interest at all. I also say to the right hon. Gentleman, who I am sure would wish to be consistent in what I will describe as his thesis, that if he wishes to pursue that line of argument, which I believe to be erroneous, he would presumably apply it also to the Chair of the Finance and Services Committee, the right hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (John Thurso), in front of whose Committee the Clerk can periodically appear. He did not make that point about the right hon. Gentleman—rightly, because he would have been wrong to do so, and he is similarly wrong to keep making that point in respect of the right hon. Member for Barking.
I think the House will agree that I have set out the matters with crystal clarity, and I have done so a number of times. I would hope that, having had the point made to them a number of times, people would see it and acknowledge its veracity.