Heads they win, tails we lose

PARLIAMENTARY REFORM JOHN P. MACKINTOSH, MP

Mr Mackintosh is a member of the House of Commons Select Committee on Procedure.

In the debate on procedure last month, Mr Crossman, as Leader of the House of Com- mons, presented what was, in effect, a half-term report. He and the Labour Chief Whip, being convinced parliamentary reformers, have set the Select Committee on Procedure to work on a series of proposals. As the reports come forth from the committee, they try to sell them to the Cabinet on a variety of grounds: that they will in some cases make the Government's task easier, that they will keep fractious back- benchers busy and out of ministers' hair and that such reforms are good for the radical, modernising image of the Labour party.

The difficulty is that many ministers (and shadow ministers) believe that the task of the Government is to legislate, and that there is no case for reforms which will only mean more argument and so delay necessary legislation.

In response, Mr Crossman is developing the doctrine that, since every change in procedure affects the distribution of power between Government, Opposition and backbenchers, if some reforms tidy up procedure and make it easier for the Government to carry through its business, then it is only proper that in return the Cabinet should concede something to the Opposition and to backbenchers.

So far, however, it has been largely a one- way process. The efficiency of the House has steadily improved so that though the amount of time spent on legislation has altered very little over sixty years (in 1906 57 per cent of the session, in 1938 40 per cent and in 1964-65 44 per cent), the output has increased enor- mously. The volume of legislation, which was 355 pages in 1906, grew to 995 pages in 1938 and then to 2,961 pages in 1964-65.

Recent reforms have assisted in this direction. It is often said that the Monday and Wednes- day morning sittings are not a success, but from the point of view of the Government they have been a great help. Because so few members attend, because the after-dinner talkers cannot wander in and provide 'a few observations,' the non-controversial or minor government busi- ness involved has been passing through much more rapidly than in the days when it was considered after 10 p.m.

Another reform which has had the same effect has been the Speaker's decision to speed up Question Time so that some fifty questions a day are reached instead of thirty-five or thirty-seven. This has been done by accepting fewer supplementary questions, and as these are the main test for ministers, the result has been to make it easier for ministers to evade or cover up on tricky points.

The Fourth Report from the Select Com- mittee on Procedure dealt with the Finance Bill and it is clear that the majority of Labour members on the committee agree with the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Mr John Diamond, in wanting to send the Bill 'upstairs' to a Standing Committee. This proposal would have helped the Government so much that no Oppo- sition could have readily conceded the point, while for many Conservatives there was an objection on principle to letting taxation be imposed without detailed discussion on the floor of the House.

For these reasons Mr Crossman decided to wait till the Select Committee reported on the whole process of legislation before either forcing through this change or trying to reach a bargain with the Opposition on Finance Bill procedure. In the meantime he turned to another device for making the Government's life easier on the Finance Bill, a voluntary timetable to be agreed with the Conservative front bench, a proposal which, to the annoyance of some of their backbenchers, the Conserva- tives accepted.

So far, the reform proposals that have been mentioned have tended to strengthen the posi- tion of the executive. The Opposition's only gain from this series of reports from the Select Committee was a recommendation that the procedure for emergency debates under Stand- ing Order No. 9 be relaxed. It was proposed to give the Opposition four extra half-days on which to raise topical debates and to sweep away all restrictive precedents on SO 9, to ask the Speaker to give no reasons for his decisions,

thus preventing the growth of new precedents, and to suggest that some four or five such de. bates a year would be a reasonable number. Mr Crossman, however, refused to act on these recommendations, explaining to the Hour; that he hoped to treat these matters, so ob\ ously helpful to the Opposition, when he came to deal with the whole question of public Bi!! procedure (on which the Select Committee is expected to report by July).

For backbenchers this interim series of measures held no reward. Indeed, since the present reforming period began, they hate gained only two specialist committees. These two, on science and technology and on agris culture, are only sessional experiments and their future is far from certain. The Leader of the House and the Chief Whip wish them to succeed and multiply but there is some oppo. sition among certain ministers and great ob- jections in Whitehall. Also the philosophy behind the committees is not absolutely clear. If they are to help to restore some of the back- benchers' lost influence, they must be anti- ministerial in atmosphere, the members must be secure against dismissal, the chairmen must refuse to take dictation (or friendly hints) from ministers to kep off certain subjects and a particular department must be studied over a period of years and • with the aid of expert staff till the members of the committee can argue with officials on an equal footing.

But if this pattern develops, resistance will grow. The Science and Technology Committee is not so dangerous because it is taking up spe- cific projects, it is looking ahead at what might be done rather than battening on a department to see what it has not done. So it was not sur- prising that when the Conservatives demanded a Committee of Inquiry on the 'Torrey Canyon' affair, the Government should slip out of the situation by asking the Science and Technology Committee to look at future methods of handling such disasters. Because its role was not entirely clear, the committee accepted this assignment, but with some misgivings. Properly speaking, as a backbenchers' weapon against the Government, the committee should choose its own subjects and, if the 'Torrey Canyon. were suitable, the investigation should hate been to see whether Government departments had been adequately prepared for this kind of maritime disaster before it took place.

The Agricultural Committee is, howeter, much clearer in its purpose and its public ex- amination of the ministry, though far from searching, has caused a shudder through officialdom simply because a permanent secre- tary and an ambassador have been hauled tiP and questioned. Clearly it is the correct model for future specialist committees if they are to become a real weapon in the hands of back- benchers. Committees of this kind should. be put on a permanent basis with proper full-tune staff and next session two or three more should be added to those already started. Good candidates for specialist committees are the Ministry of Labour, the Ministry of Transport, and one could be established on Economic Policy to cover the Treasury, the Department of Economic Affairs and part of the work of the Board of Trade. As these committees can operate in public (if they were to meet out•id. the Palace of Westminster they could in% re the presence of television cameras) and as they began to tackle topics of real moment and un•

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covered the crucial arguments that underlay policy-making„ the desire to serve on thorn would grow and they would soon become a major focus of backbench activity.