Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill

The Under-Secretary of State for the Cabinet Office, my hon. Friend the Member for East Renfrewshire (Mr. Murphy) teased me a little during our earlier exchanges about the extent of my interest in matters of parliamentary procedure. I shall now get my retaliation in. When I was discussing these matters with him the other day, I noticed that the pockets of his suit were still stitched up, just as they were when he took delivery of it a long time ago. He assured me that this was not because he was a Scotsman. He said that it was a measure of simplification, and part of his attack on the bloated, the bulging and the unnecessary, and that it was therefore entirely in the spirit of the Bill. I offer that to the House simply as an initial observation. The Bill is about legislation, and it reminds us that we are a legislative sausage machine here. Governments come along, they give us stuff, and they stuff it into the machine. We process it—more or less—and it comes out the other end. It is then possible to claim that Parliament has decided on something or other. As we are just talking among ourselves this afternoon, however, I think that we can probably tell the story more truthfully. This Government and all Governments legislate too much. We legislate badly, we scrutinise legislation inadequately, and we do not revisit it when we have passed it—we simply go on to the next bit. We all suffer because of that. I say that because I do not want us to be starry-eyed about our normal way of doing legislative business here. Even though we may be worried about other procedures that are being suggested to us, we should not suggest that the alternative to what is being proceeded with is some splendid mechanism of detailed scrutiny. We may like to tell the outside world, and we may like to see it written in the constitutional textbooks, that we engage in dispassionate, line by line scrutiny of legislative proposals here, but we know that that is not the case. We should thank our lucky stars that most of the public never get inside Standing Committees. They never see the way in which legislation is routinely processed here: members of the Government side are required merely to be there and to say as little as possible in order to get the business through, and the Opposition, as far as they can, play a game of delay. Measures are taken through on whipped votes. We often vote for things that we do not think are very good. That is how we do it in all parties, at all times. Therefore we should not believe, in discussing alternative procedures, that the way that we deal with legislation here routinely is particularly admirable.