MR MARK FISHER MP, SIR GEORGE YOUNG MP, TONY WRIGHT MP, MR PAUL TYLER MP AND MR ANDREW TYRIE MP

WEDNESDAY 22 JANUARY 2003

  1. I welcome to the Procedure Committee representatives of the Parliament First group, who will help us with our inquiry into procedures for debates and for Private Members' Bills and the powers of the Speaker and any other allied and associated matter. For the benefit of colleagues on the Committee and perhaps those taking down the evidence, Parliament First is a group of senior backbenchers in the House of Commons who work with the Hansard Society and others to promote the interests of Parliament. They are disturbed by what they see as Parliament's diminishing role in holding the government of the day to account. In particular they are concerned about the quasi-presidential role of the Prime Minister, the role of the media and the decline in parliamentary debates. Today the group is represented by Mr Andrew Tyrie, Mr Tony Wright, the Member for Cannock Chase, Mark Fisher, who I understand from Sir George Young is the shop steward, Sir George Young himself and Paul Tyler. The group is representative of all major parties in the House of Commons. First, Mark, I shall ask you and your colleagues to outline your concerns, in a minute each, which will help us to put questions to you. You are the first group of witnesses to appear before us in this inquiry.

  (Mr Fisher) Sir Nicholas, thank you very much for inviting us. It is a privilege to be the first witnesses in this inquiry. I shall not reiterate the material that you have in front of you. You have summed it up extremely well. We publish the paper that goes with those recommendations next month. You have the introduction and the summary of recommendations. As you can see, procedure is at the centre of many of the issues that we are discussing. At the core of what we are talking about is a greater clarity between the responsibilities of Parliament and the responsibilities of government. We are emphasising, in looking at procedure matters, that those matters have distinctly different roles. The Government's role is to tax, spend, act and be the executive and Parliament's role is to monitor, scrutinise, call to account and air grievances. It is never easy for us as back benchers to distinguish between our loyalty to our party and our loyalty to Parliament. It has become a great deal more difficult in recent years with the greater control that all parties have sought in the selection of candidates and in their behaviour here. That distinction in the minds of many colleagues, and in Parliament as a whole, and certainly in the mind of the media and those outside, between those two roles, has become very blurred. What is central is a distinct sense of the two different identities and an attempt to try to balance those two horses. We think that one of the most important ways to express that would be to create a business committee. Over the past 100 years Parliament has lost control of its business. We no longer set what we debate, when we debate it, or whether or not we vote on substantive motions. Those matters are all decided for us by the Government. When it is a matter of their own business, they have a good interest and a proper role in deciding that. But we estimate that about 50 per cent of parliamentary time is given over to business that is not a matter of fulfilling any government manifesto or putting through its legislative programme. Therefore, we believe that an independent business committee to act and to negotiate business on behalf of Parliament with Government, would be a distinct procedural improvement, and would clarify, both in the minds of Parliament and in the world outside, that Parliament is distinct from Government. Both are important and both have their roles, but there is a distinct responsibility between the two.

  2. Thank you, Mr Fisher. Before I ask Sir George Young to come in, it is interesting to note that both of you have been ministers in government. So that we do not lose the point, you talked about a business committee. Who would comprise that committee? How would that committee be set up?
  (Mr Fisher) We believe that it should be comprised of non-government Members of the House to reflect the balance of the whole House. The details of its constitution and its method of operation would need to be a matter for greater discussion. At this point we are anxious to establish that that would be a desirable addition to the structure of the House.

  3. Thank you. Sir George Young.
  (Sir George Young) Thank you, Sir Nicholas. Perhaps I can put down three markers. First, on debates: at the moment the Opposition gets all its time in the House by way of time for debates. I am interested in the proposition that we should trade time for debates for the right to demand statements. Statements have become more important, as opposed to debates, over the past 20 years. They are more topical, more Members can get in and the Chamber is fuller when we have statements. I think that there should be a negotiation on the time that we currently have to be traded in, in terms of the right to demand a statement that may last half an hour or an hour. My second point is related to what Mark has just said. How we take decisions about how the House is run should be taken by Select Committees that are chaired by senior back benchers such as yourself. I do not think that the Modernisation Committee, which sets much of the framework, should be chaired by a Cabinet Minister however friendly and sympathetic he may be. There is a clear conflict of interest between him being in charge of getting the Government's programme through the House, and the Modernisation Committee whose job it is to make sure that the executive is held to account. The third point is that we were told that when the hours were brought forward, that that would diminish the need to trail ministerial statements in advance. What has happened today shows that that ambition has not been fulfilled. There is a need for a new settlement between the Government and the House as to exactly what the conventions are because the present system is simply honoured in the breach. Finally, I hope that the Government may be persuaded to revisit the vote on Select Committees. Last year there was a very narrow vote, when I think there was some confusion. It goes to the heart of who controls the appointment of Select Committees. Those are four items that I would put on your agenda.

  4. Thank you very much. Tony Wright.
  (Tony Wright) I thought we had a different batting order but I am happy to speak now.

  5. I am trying to be totally unbiased and I am going from Government party to Opposition, back to Government and then to the Liberal Democrat Party and then back again to the Conservative Party.
  (Tony Wright) You are in charge. First, I bring you greetings from the Public Administration Select Committee, which I have the honour of chairing. In many respects we work on similar fronts, I hope to good effect. Latterly we have managed to achieve things that help your cause too. We have a formal amendment to the ministerial code, notwithstanding what George says, to get announcements made in Parliament. At least Ministers have now signed up to that and have to be held against it. We have an agreement that in answering parliamentary questions, Ministers should cite the relevant exemptions from the code of practice on access to government information. That is quite an important advance too. We played a role in making the first demands for the Prime Minister to appear annually before the Liaison Committee. I hope you think that we are working to your agenda in some respects. I was asked to say a word, by my colleagues, about the prerogative. Famously it was said once that the procedure is all that the poor Briton has. I think that should be the text for a procedure committee. A Conservative MP, Sir Kenneth Pickthorn, is known only for saying that in the chamber in the 1960s. That is something that should encourage us all, that we may one day say something in the chamber that may become memorable.

  6. A university member.
  (Tony Wright) Indeed. My point, in a nutshell, is that you have to understand the unfinished constitutional business that was left over from the end of the 17th Century. I am sorry to put it in that rather grand way. The fact is that when the rights of Parliament had been asserted, the executive retained the whole battery of prerogative powers. It was a very clever trick. All those powers that used to be held by the Crown, many of them simply transferred lock, stock and barrel, to the modern executive. The modern executive in the age of party and patronage has become ever more powerful. So armed with those historical powers, it has become a formidable force. That is why—again, to abbreviate a long history—we have the most powerful executive in the modern world, at least in the democratic world and the most supine Parliament in the modern, democratic, parliamentary world. That is just a fact. There is the question, how can we reclaim some of that? One thing that we can do is to put in hand a proper review of that bundle of prerogative powers. I do not want to bore you as a constitutional lawyer might. It is possible to explore this in great detail. There is a whole package of such powers. In a publication of which we shall give you the full text eventually, we gave a listing of what the bundle of prerogative powers are. The way to crystallise the matter is to say: how is it that we are about to go to war without Parliament having any right to vote on whether we go to war or not, unlike almost every other system. That is because of prerogative powers. They need to be looked at in some detail. Over the years there has been progress in domesticating some of them; that is making incursions into them. I can give examples of that. One example would be the way in which we sought on the appointments side, in recent years, to put some controls around the abilities of Ministers to appoint whom they want. We are carrying out an inquiry on that as a committee at the moment and hoping to make more progress. One can seek to restrain them, but I think that the time has come for a proper review of the whole bundle of prerogative powers, either through this Committee, our committee or through a special committee of the House. However, I urge you to make that one of your recommendations.

  7. I can only say, Mr Wright, that both you and I raised this matter directly with the Prime Minister yesterday. I think we put down a marker. That will be the first of a number. Mr Paul Tyler.
  (Mr Tyler) Chairman, I want to make three simple summary points. First, I underline the point that colleagues have made about seeking ways in which the House, as a whole, can reclaim some more influence—I do not say power—over its own business management. Chairman, you will be aware as a member of the Modernisation Committee and an active participant in all the discussions that we have had within the Committee and in the House, that on 29 October the House voted for consultation between the parties immediately following the Queen's Speech on the form of the legislative programme for the following year. What we did not do—it would not have been appropriate—was to decide precisely by what mechanisms those consultations should take place. It is well known that there is now a kind of embryo business committee in that the Leader of the House has convened meetings with the Shadow Leader, with myself as shadow, shadow leader and other representatives to look at the form of the legislative year. That is ongoing and `in the best traditions of Parliament'; it is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. We have a thin end of a very important wedge in there. Secondly, all Members of the Committee will be well aware of the response to your report about questions and particularly about urgent questions and topical questions. There was a very strong vote in the House on 29 October, I believe uniquely, on a proposal to which the Government were opposed. We believe very strongly that we should not let that matter lie. The best way it seems to us, in the best traditions of the House, is to use Urgent Questions as now called rather than Private Notice Questions, and they are a mechanism by which one can be more topical than was being proposed by your Committee. I note with great pleasure that the terms of reference of your current inquiry and the subject of the discussion this afternoon include the powers of the Speaker. We hope in the most tactful way possible that your Committee will emphasise to the Speaker that urgent questions should not just be limited to Front Benches and that they should not be used so sparingly that they cannot put a Minister on the spot when there is a genuine issue of great topicality. That is to reflect your own recommendations. We hope that you will be able to follow that up. Finally, we are very concerned that private Members in this place appear to have been the victims of attrition. There were the Jopling reforms, and more recent reforms, when the opportunities for private Members to initiate debates that result in a motion being voted upon by Members of the House are now very limited. Similarly we hope that the current inquiry that you have in hand on Private Members' Bills will lead to a change of emphasis: less coming out of the ballot onto the short list, but more that those who come out supported by the ballot and supported across the parties will have a better chance of reaching the statute book. We would not presume to put before you solutions, but we believe that that is an extremely important area for your inquires. On Private Members' Motions, there are a lot of ideas around. As I am sure you, Chairman, and others will know, one such I tentatively put on the table, that those motions that receive so many signatures—200—but also are representative of all parties, in the same way that one has to register an all-party group by rules of the House, perhaps should go into the hat for a ballot in the best traditions of the parliamentary raffle, and perhaps that should be the subject of a debate after 7 pm on a Tuesday or a Wednesday.

  8. Thank you very much. You have been provocative in some of what you have said. Finally, with an introductory comment, Andrew Tyrie.
  (Mr Tyrie) Thank you, Chairman. I agree with everything that has been said. You would not expect me to say anything else. The task is to put Parliament back nearer the centre of British public and political life. We are playing a bit part at the moment and we should be nearer the centre of things. If we are to do that, we need to scrutinise power where power really lies. In a quasi-presidential age, power lies with the Prime Minister. That is why four years ago I proposed that the Liaison Committee call the Prime Minister once a month for detailed cross-examination. I am very pleased that a first step in that direction has been made. In this report we have agreement that he should be called at least three times a year. I think that kind of detailed cross-examination is what the public want. It is clear that the public take their politics largely through the television. A Select Committee is a much more television-friendly theatre than the floor of the House.

  A second major proposal, that I have long supported and which Parliament First supports, is to bring more democracy to the process of appointing Select Committees and in particular Select Committee chairmen. We believe that Select Committee chairmen should be spokesmen for Parliament, on their relevant subject matters. If they were elected by colleagues, they would find themselves buttressed by that democratic legitimacy. How can that be done? Clearly, if the government of the day had any chance to run a vote, even with a secret ballot, they would end up chairing all the committees. So the current horse-trading would still have to take place as to which committee would be chaired by which party, as now. Once completed, I believe that the whole House should vote by secret ballot and anyone could put their names forward in an attempt to become a Select Committee chairman. This is a more general point: virtually every other country has abandoned trying to run its parliamentary scrutiny primarily on the floor of the debating chamber; virtually every one has built up an effective and sophisticated committee system. The Americans started that as early as the 1820s. One of the most effective democracies in the world at the moment is Germany. Parliamentary scrutiny in Germany is extremely powerful, detailed, penetrative. Their committee system is something that we had a hand in creating and is now something from which we could learn. An alternative view is that we should try to restore the floor of the House to its former glory. First, I do not think that there was a golden age, and, secondly, I do not think it is possible. We need a sense of realism about what has happened in the media-driven age. The media have penetrated Whitehall. We are no longer the primary source of information about the way in which the Government operate. The media get most of that directly themselves. Also parliamentary democracy is much weaker than it was. Another major source of the effectiveness of Parliament lay in the functioning of intra-party democracy and that is much weaker. There is much greater centralisation now of decision-making in parties and that is also driven by the media. Splits destroy parties.

  9. Thank you very much to all our witnesses for their introductory comments. I shall begin the questioning from the chair. Perhaps I can make a plea for succinct responses. Of the issues included in the title of our inquiry—for instance, procedures for debates, Private Members' Bills and the powers of the Speaker—which should be the first in line to be reformed or addressed in our report? If you all want to speak on that, speak briefly, but I shall be happy for only one or two of you to respond.
  (Mr Fisher) My choice, which I think is shared by all my colleagues, is the business committee. That gets to the core of making distinct identities. If we can establish a different way of running the business of the House that separates and distinguishes between Government and the executive on many of those other matters, such as the prerogative powers, where they are particularly sensitive, or not particularly necessary for the Government to hold on public appointments and so on, they would naturally follow. I would put the business committee first.

  10. Does anyone else want to comment on that?
  (Tony Wright) I would assent to that for this reason: if you look at where it all went wrong, it was over a period in the 1920s when Parliament lost control of itself. It lost the control to the executive. In order to start putting that right, you have to wrest back the control of business. I think that becomes the key that will unlock a lot of other things.

  11. You recognise—this came through in some of your opening remarks—that Members have an allegiance not only to Parliament, to which they are sent by their constituents, but also to their political party and that will affect how much Parliament can take control of its own affairs. To what extent, therefore, are your aims dependent on Members' attitudes rather than on changes to procedures?
  (Sir George Young) I think for some of our recommendations, for example changing the times for debates and the times for statements, that particular issue does not arise. The more emphasis that one puts on Select Committees, which was part of Andrew Tyrie's thesis, the more it becomes important for colleagues to act in a non-party collegiate way. Over recent years there has been a greater willingness for people on Select Committees to put on one side their party allegiance in the interests of the work of the Select Committees. That is a trend that is under way and probably needs to continue. At the end of the day it depends on independent-minded people on the Government Benches who actually decide how much of this will happen, because it is very much up to them to decide on what issues to make life a little more difficult for the Government than it is for the Opposition. So, yes, a change of attitude, but crucially among Government Members rather than Opposition Members.

  12. When you say Government, you mean the government of the day?
  (Sir George Young) Yes, the government of the day.

  Chairman: I shall now let other colleagues come in as they feel quite strongly about this matter.

  13. I am interested in what you said about independence of mind. As you may recall, I asked the Prime Minister what weight he gave to it. He said, "As much as any previous Government", to which I did that, but the media were looking at him and not at me for some strange reason, so my retort did not get in. Clearly that is an issue. I was struck by your report when in the fifth paragraph you paint a gloomy picture of Parliament. You blame party. You say, "Party is supreme; it is a vicious circle. The back benchers are tamed by loyalty, Parliament's voice is muffled and enfeebled, the media reduce their coverage, the public cease to notice or care, the Government gets on with governing and as its reputation and influence has crumbled, Parliament has at long last realised that it must change." That is a very bleak picture indeed. If you are right to identify the predominance of party over Parliament in the consciousness of MPs, do you think that it is possible for that battle to be joined or is it possible for us to have procedures that will make it possible for Parliament to have more of a voice?
  (Tony Wright) I need to be succinct, as you asked the Prime Minister to be yesterday. This goes to the heart of the matter. We are all party people. We are not here—speaking for myself—because we are people of magnificent individual virtue. We are here because we carry a party label. We have to be honest about that. The question is one of balance. It is a balance between doing our duty as Members of Parliament and doing our duty as members of party. That balance has become tilted over recent years in the direction that has dangers attached to it. It means that people think that Parliament has become supine, that people routinely, unthinkingly put party first. I am sure I am not giving away secrets, but those of us here who belong to the Labour Party are currently having letters sent to our constituency parties by the Whips' Office in the context of re-selection saying how many times we have voted against our party over the past two or three years. I am not sure whether it is good to have a large number or no number. We shall discover. It is a kind of brutal reminder of the realities of political life. Bringing this to a sharp conclusion—this comes back to the argument about career structure—what does it mean to be a Member of Parliament? What are you rewarded for? What are you punished for? You are not rewarded for being an assiduous Member of Parliament on the whole; you are rewarded for being an assiduous member of the party. We need to do things—we have some suggestions in our pamphlet—about Select Committees, such as making Select Committee membership and service count for more, controlling the power of patronage, hauling back the number of ministers and for goodness sake hauling back the number of PPSs. Soon we shall have PPSs having PPSs, and we shall have everyone on the payroll. You cannot have an active Parliament if you have that, so there are a number of things that you can do to begin to tilt back the balance. The tension is endemic.
  (Mr Tyler) It would be tempting to discuss various electoral systems that give more power to the electorate—to be able to choose between Tony Wright as an individual and Tony Wright as a member of the Labour party—but I shall not do that. I have two points to make. The first is that in a different age our predecessors would have regarded it as a clear breach of privilege contempt if any organisation, including political parties, sought to exert the kind of pressure that could be exerted on someone who is less independent of mind than Tony Wright. Therefore I think that there is a serious issue about the power, the influence and the way in which that is used by the party system. I speak as a former chief whip. There is nothing like a sinner repenting. The second point is that one of my former careers was as an architect. I am struck by the effect that it clearly has when we meet in this way, round a horseshoe, and members of parties are indistinguishable. I know which party people belong to but I expect that most other people, if they came to this room, would have no idea which members of this Committee are members of the Government party and which are members of the Opposition parties. To some extent that is also true of Westminster Hall. I think that is an extremely important part of the discussion that we have just had about the role of Select Committees. If the House of Commons can move out of the rather more confrontational and aggressive chamber atmosphere and into a more considered and collegiate atmosphere—it already happens to an extent in Select Committees and in regard to Bills—then I believe that we could make a huge difference to the balance to which my colleagues have referred.
  (Mr Tyrie) The architecture point made there points to a Guy Fawkes option for the floor of the House. I do not think that there would be many takers for that. We are stuck with the chapel arrangement that we inherited from several centuries ago. I want to reinforce a point that I made in response to the question about the power of the media in the 21st Century. It is not that they are some awful, ghastly leviathan doing things that we do not want them to do and at our expense; they are delivering only what their customers want. We have to respond to what their customers may be prepared to look at. Public opinion years ago—certainly 50 years ago—was shaped by tussles between the executive and parliamentarians. Today it is shaped by tussles between the executive and members of the media in TV interviews. We play a very small role. I do not think that that is going to change. The centralisation that has come with media coverage will remain in political life. We used to have independent Members before the war, elected without any party label at all, or they considered their party label to be relatively weak. That has gone for ever.

  14. With respect, there was one in the last Parliament and there is one in this Parliament.
  (Mr Tyrie) One out of 659 is not going to transform the way in which politics is conducted. Although I think that there is a strong anti-politics feeling out there—a groundswell of-anti-politics feeling there to be tapped—I think that it is unlikely that we shall be able to construct a reform of this institution that can give independents a greater voice. I would add one note of caution on the idea that party discipline has become so strong. The de-selection point was well taken. It is true that a party rebellion destroyed the most powerful Prime Minister since the war. Maybe we have an even more powerful one now, but certainly it is between Margaret Thatcher and the Prime Minister. She was destroyed by a rebellion, largely over the poll tax. It is certainly the case that at the moment there is very widespread dissatisfaction over the policy on Iraq in the governing party at the moment. That is beginning to find expression, despite all these powerful constraints on its expression. So all is not lost. What as a group we have been trying to say is, rather than try to press the one button that is all of a sudden going to transform things and put Parliament back at the centre of political life, let us have a go at looking at a series of reforms, trimming away at some of the accretion of power that the executive has come to exert over this institution, procedural issues being very important, changes in the way in which the Select Committees operate, getting the Prime Minister to speak more often and those kinds of things. I think that is probably the only sensible approach for a parliament to take.

  15. I have an observation first. I have great sympathy for Tony's observation about hauling back the amount of ministers and PPSs and more and more people on the payroll. We must all consider hauling back the amount and the number of Members of Parliament and ensuring that we get fairer and more even representation throughout the United Kingdom. On the proposed business committee, where does the Speaker fit in, if at all, in such a committee?
  (Mr Fisher) The Speaker is the guardian of the back bench rights and is of no party. A way to ensure impartiality and balance would be for the business committee to be under his chairmanship, or at least under his aegis, under the chairmanship of one of his speaker colleagues. As I said earlier, I think the details of the precise constitution and make-up of the business committee is a matter to be established once your Committee, as I hope it will, puts its influence behind the idea of the business committee. I have one comment on the first question, on whether it is a matter of attitudes changing or structures. I think the two have to go together—that is a rather boring party political answer. It is a great deal easier for colleagues and Members of Parliament to change their attitudes about the degree of independence that they are prepared to express if the structures are there to encourage them. The points that George has made about the Select Committee prove the point, that Select Committees engender an independence of thinking and often a critical independence of thinking simply because they provide the carapace and structure in which that can happen. I think one will lead to the other.

  16. I want to move on to Parliament and the Royal Prerogative, which has already been mentioned. Parliament First recommend that prerogative powers should be listed, a code of practice for their exercise should be developed, and that most of them should be put on a statutory footing, with a Select Committee to examine their use. I have three or four questions to put to you. Only two of you need to respond unless there is a particular matter that others want to draw to our attention. What do you see as the advantage of putting prerogative powers on a statutory basis? Do you envisage the statutes imposing some kind of parliamentary control? What particular prerogative powers are you most concerned about? There has been recent debate on the extent to which the House should be consulted before or after Armed Forces have been committed in some conflict. The Committee would be particularly interested in your views on this subject, which featured strongly in the Liaison Committee yesterday when evidence was taken from the Prime Minister.
  (Tony Wright) Just to say, in a rather different way to what I said at the outset, when my party was in opposition we were committed to a review of prerogative powers. Unfortunately that was not a commitment that appeared finally in the 1997 manifesto but it got very close to it. I would simply like Parliament through, now, you to renew that demand for a review. I think it is unrealistic to expect a committee concerned with a broad front to do the job. You have got to find the mechanism to get a proper review. The principle of that review—and it is not difficult and you will find many sources that do this, and we simply cite in our pamphlet one rather old source now where you can bring all these together—is that all these need to be re-visited. They need, as far as possible, to be put on a statutory footing and, therefore, a framework put around them which makes absolutely clear what Parliament can do and what the executive can do. At the moment you have the executive claiming all these, except where we have made particular incursions into them over the years. I think that is the essence of our position.

  17. Are you prepared to answer more specifically what particular prerogative powers?
  (Tony Wright) I mentioned a key one at the beginning. I mentioned public appointments. Obviously the current one is war making and when we spoke to the Prime Minister yesterday I did say how unusual it was for this prerogative power to exist, whereas in the United States they have a War Powers Act—a War Powers Act which says that the President has to go to Congress either before hostilities or within a specified number of days following hostilities to get authorisation. Now I just think we need a War Powers Act because all you would be doing then is to constitutionalise the prerogative. That is what you do, and you do the same thing in each of the other key areas. I think to have them all reviewed with a view to putting them on a statutory footing is the way to proceed.

  18. Tony, given the present circumstances that we are in, it is pretty obvious that the prerogative power of taking military action is the one we are all focused on, but perhaps in constitutional terms more important is the right to dissolve Parliament, so that our very existence depends upon the prerogative powers of the executive. In the past it has been used to political advantage, to dissolve Parliament early at a time of electoral advantage. How do you see this in terms of importance? Secondly, how receptive do you think this Government, or any successive government, would be to giving up those powers?
  (Tony Wright) It was a foolish omission on my part, because I have produced at least once, if not twice, a ten-minute rule Bill on fixed term Parliaments—precisely to constitutionalise that bit of prerogative powers. It seems to me to be not only an anomaly but constitutionally offensive for something as fundamental to the political system as when an election should take place to be in the hands of a government. This should simply be on a fixed cycle. If we said that we were going to start having local elections when the ruling party decided it was most useful to have it, it would be thought outrageous; yet we do it here and defend it as constitutionally necessary. It is a very good example and, again, it is something that we, as a party, were once committed to doing.

  19. Can I ask our witnesses whether that view expressed by Tony Wright in answer to the question by Eric Illsley is shared by other witnesses?
  (Mr Tyler) Absolutely.
  (Sir George Young) No.