I refer to your letter of 11 May to the Speaker. I am grateful to you for giving me the opportunity to comment about programme motions and the associated Business Committees.

  I do not think it is for me to advise the Modernisation Committee on the principle of programming beyond remarking that it must make sense to look for a means of ensuring within the bounds of a parliamentary session that every piece of legislation in its entirety receives adequate scrutiny. The question is whether this can be done without serious impairment of the rights of Opposition parties and backbenchers.

  If then the justification for programming is that it allows debating time to be spread or rationed so that all parts of a bill can get appropriate attention, observation from the Chair would lead me to conclude that this outcome has not been frequently achieved. There could be a number of explanations:—lack of experience of members in handling the new system; insufficient allocation of time overall; a tendency to behave within a phase of the programme as has happened at the beginning of an unguillotined bill so that accidentally or deliberately time has not been allocated in the way presumably intended by the design of the programme. The losers in this process were often, but not exclusively, backbenchers.

  Based on what I saw of the new arrangements from the perspective of chairing Business Committees, I have two principal observations. However, I ought to say in parenthesis that the evidence for how the new arrangements have worked in practice is thin. In one case on a guillotined bill (Finance Bill, July 1997) both the Business Sub-Committee procedure (in the Standing Committee) and the Business Committee were used. Since then the Business Committee has been used in relation to six programmed bills (viz. Scotland; Government of Wales; Regional Development Agencies; Teaching and Higher Education [Lords]; Human Rights [Lords] and Crime and Disorder [Lords]) and in relation to no guillotined bills. Merely to list these bills is to illustrate another key point in this discussion: every bill is different, not only in content but also in the political context in which it is debated. At the outset in session 1997-98 there were several major constitutional bills taken on the floor of the House. This gave rise to a flurry of programme motions and frequent Business Committee meetings. For more than a year now nothing has come before me.

  On the basis of this limited experience I cannot in all honesty say that I could see anything distinctly innovative about programming. By the time the Business Committee assembled in my office a deal had already been done. The formal meetings lasted barely longer than the time it took me to enunciate the statutory words. I understand that in previous Parliaments it was normal for Business Committees also to deal very rapidly with guillotined bills. There were two exceptions. On the Government of Wales Bill which was proceeding under an agreed programme, the official Opposition divided the Business Committee on the provision of time for remaining stages and subsequently forced a division in the House on the adoption of the Business Committee's report. In the case of the Teaching and Higher Education Bill, when the members of the committee came to my office there had not been an agreement. However, there was no scope for the committee or its chairman in session to resolve the difficulty. The parties simply had to be sent away for further extensive discussions until they could agree. When I received a signal to that effect the committee reconvened and agreement was registered in thirty seconds.

  Business Committees can therefore be something of a charade, although on a long running committee stage the mechanism does enable the appropriate detailed timetable to be reassessed from time to time. The programmes on the Scotland Bill and the Government of Wales Bill provided for 8 and 7 days respectively in Committee of the whole House and 3 and 2 days respectively for remaining stages. These two bills gave rise to no fewer than 10 of the 16 meetings of the Business Committee in 1997-98. In the modern House such lengthy proceedings in Committee of the whole House are unusual. The Bills were also of course untypical in relating to proposals which had been approved in referendums and conferred powers in relation to parts of the United Kingdom which were not represented by any Members of the official Opposition party.

  My other main worry about the process so far is that it take insufficient account of backbenchers. Let me take the Government of Wales Bill by way of example. There was a prominent group of dissidents on the Government side of the House. Through the programming arrangement and the Business Committee they appeared to have no effective voice in adjudicating the adequacy of time available for discussion of the amendments in which they had a particular interest. They could be frozen out by the prevailing interests of the two front benches and of minority parties. Clearly a dissident group of backbenchers on either side is going to vary in composition for every bill and so I do not see how the present format can easily be amended in order to allow them a genuine input.

  It can be difficult to mesh in the timing of meetings of the Business Committee with the timing of the Chair's decision on selection of amendments. This can present a particular problem when the Business Committee has to meet on a Thursday before a sitting in Committee of the whole House or at report stage on the following Monday. I endorse what Madam Speaker has said about the danger of pre-empting discussions on selection and grouping of amendments. Another concern about selection has been that in the case of a longer running committee stage on the floor of the House, there may be a fear among some of those involved that the later tabling of amendments by others may effectively "gazump" time already allocated for certain parts of the bill.

  There has been a tendency for programmes (whether approved by the Business Committee or laid down in the programme order itself) to provide for complicated sub-divisions of the time available within each day. Detailed schedules of that sort can give rise to a number of problems in practice. For example, too early a first "chopper" may cause real difficulties for the House, if there are Private Notice Questions or statements. In a number of cases reports of the Business Committee and programming/guillotine orders have provided for periods of time rather than set hours, thus building in a desirable flexibility to cope with unexpected, but wholly justified, statements.

  Sometimes the time "slots" allowed for specific provisions have been very short—as little as 15 minutes in some cases—leaving no slack for divisions which others may reasonably wish to force on the previous time frame. Great collective self-discipline is needed if such tight provisions are to work to the general satisfaction of Members. While the usual channels may be fully aware of the time constraints imposed by a programme or guillotine, it sometimes appears that individual Members who are "outside the loop" may talk at length without fully appreciating the impact of the time they are taking on opportunities for others. This can lead to several groups of amendments within a particular time slot going undebated.

  To meet these concerns I am minded to offer a more radical suggestion. While I recognise that when the Modernisation Committee reported on programming in 1997 it was reluctant to opt for something as "rigid and structured" as a full-blown Legislative Business Committee, it did stress that "the needs of all parts of the House, including backbenchers must be taken into account" (para. 65). Perhaps in the light of recent experience here, the Modernisation Committee could usefully examine the role of the Rules Committee in the House of Representatives in the United States. They have a procedure which could be adapted to our evolving situation. In essence a Rules Committee would decide the amount of time to be allocated to a particular bill, but it would do so only after a hearing in public at which representations could be made by any member of the House. In other words, evidence and then deliberation. Arguably this would be an inclusive way of deciding the amount and apportionment of time to be accorded to each piece of legislation. The opportunity to argue in public before the Committee might lead to a more consensual and realistic timetable. The removal of the Opposition's weapon of delay and the possible denial of debating time for backbench amendments might thus be compensated. The Committee could have permanent membership, presumably reflecting the composition of the House. However it might be appropriate for the Chairman of Ways and Means or one of his deputies to be in the Chair.

  Such a reform would demystify the arrangement of the House's business without inhibiting in any way the right of the Government to complete its legislative programme. It might also make it easier to produce a fixed parliamentary calendar, a reform which itself might defuse much of the current dissatisfaction with the demands of parliamentary life.

  But if the Committee is not minded to go as far as that there still remains the issue of the general assent of all elements within the House. Any mechanism which merely gives to the Government of the day the certainty of securing by its majority in the House (and in any form of Business Committee) all its legislative aims would deprive Opposition parties of such leverage as they presently have to press, for instance, for an extra day or half day on particularly controversial measures. Opposition parties and minorities may from time to time wish to, or indeed have good reason to, complain vociferously about what they consider to be unreasonable behaviour by the Government of the day. An example might be the tabling by the Government of substantial new and controversial amendments at a very late stage in a bill's progress. More generally also the political situation surrounding a bill's progress may change dramatically after the initial agreement to a timetable. It would be unfortunate if all liveliness and spontaneity were to be crushed out of parliamentary life by inflexible mechanisms for programming. It seems to me therefore that if the Modernisation Committee is to make arrangements which give substantial advantages to the Government of the day, the delicate balances by which the House operates might at the very least need to be reflected in procedures providing some form of safety valve. Such procedures might, for example, give opportunities for a brief debate as well as a vote in the House on contested reports of any successor to the present Business Committee or on freestanding motions moved by the Opposition or backbenchers to amend a previously agreed programme.

13 June 2000