Business of the House

May I lend weight to the points made by the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton (Alan Duncan) about the protesters in Luton? I have been very strongly against many of the Government's military expeditions, but that is not the way to make a protest; it was inappropriate. I am glad that the Leader of the House mentioned that one of the functions of the regional Select Committees is to monitor the work of the Department for Transport. I am sure that the Secretary of State for Transport will be quaking in his boots at the thought that the Labour party quasi-Committee for the south-west will be chaired by his own Parliamentary Private Secretary. That is true parliamentary scrutiny. I am pleased to say that the Coroners and Justice Bill will be given two days' consideration on Report—23 and 24 March—but is the Leader of the House aware of the fact that the Committee only finished its work on Tuesday this week, after one extra sitting and three late sittings? The very bare minimum statutory time will have elapsed between the finish of the Committee and debate on Report. The Government have given a large number of commitments to table amendments to that complex Bill. I simply do not believe that they will be ready for the debate on Report. Will she look at that again? Can we have a debate on the efficacy of face-to-face passport interviews in which our constituents have to engage, at great personal expense very often and at great personal inconvenience? The figures until July 2008 were that 216,000 of those interviews had taken place at a cost of £115 million. Of those 216,000, not a single person was rejected. Are we entitled to ask whether that is worth that money and inconvenience to our constituents? I do not know whether the Leader of the House noticed the comments made by Sir Tim Berners-Lee—who, of course, is the inventor of the world wide web—at a meeting in the House yesterday with my noble Friend Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer, at which he drew attention to the dangers of so-called behavioural targeting technology, which is the way that people's personal attributes are taken from their activities on the web and used for advertising purposes. He said:""We must not snoop on the internet. What is at stake is the integrity of the internet as a communications medium."" Do we not need to take that issue seriously if we are to maintain the privacy of the individual? Lastly, I have asked for debates on satnavs before, and for debates on local authority spending. Could we bring the two together, and have a debate on council priorities in Leicestershire? I notice that Conservative-controlled Leicestershire county council is fitting satnavs to 14 lawnmowers because it claims that there has been an""unprecedented amount of growth"," and that gardeners""kept getting lost in long grass"" —[Laughter.] It would be funny if people were not losing their jobs, and if there were not people who needed the help of council services. I wonder whether the story puts a whole new complexion on the term "county council cuts". ... It is genuine.