Education and Inspections Bill

The Committee will understand that the job of the usual channels is a difficult one. We do the very best we can and one thing I am not modest about is that from the beginning of my tenure as Chief Whip, it was determined that I should try to give notice to the House of everything I possibly could, and most crucially that I should notify the House a year in advance of recess dates. I was advised not to do that by all the wise heads because I was told we would occasionally find ourselves in a situation where, in order to meet the recess date, we would need to sit a little later. And the proposal is, I emphasise to the House, a little later. The 10 o’clock rising time is an advisory rising time and can only be met with the co-operation of the House. We are a self-regulating House and I have no powers of authority over anyone in the House but that rising time has been met spectacularly well this Session. We have rarely sat long beyond 10 o’clock. I genuinely apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, but he will understand that this is an extremely important Bill. I worked in education myself. You cannot calculate how long Bills will take; all we can do is estimate. We have no powers to do anything other than estimate that the groups on this Bill on the first two days would take an average of35 minutes per group. Of course people involved in the Bill will say that that is an extremely important Bill and it will take a long time. The Police and Justice Bill, for example, took 20 minutes per group and everyone involved would say that was dealing with extremely important issues. I apologise to the House that this has inevitably meant that we go a little later tonight than I would have liked. It is extremely rare for this to happen. I stay here every night until the cat is put out so I have a greater vested interest than anyone does in completing the matter.