It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir David—albeit fleetingly, perhaps. I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows). I did not agree with all her points, but I thought that the collaborative tone of her response to the Grenfell Tower tragedy set the tone that the public want and expect to see in the House.
I commend the Gracious Speech. I am not going to labour the point on Brexit, except to make two brief points. First, the ex-remainers who continue to increase the demands that we should make on our European partners for concessions as we leave the European Union are actually making it harder to get any deal at all, because the more we demand and the more concessions we want, the more we will be accused of cherry-picking. The EU has made it very clear that—to paraphrase Michel Barnier—we cannot enjoy the benefits of membership and not be in the EU. Perhaps the ex-remainers have a plan to make so many demands that will not be granted to us in the hope that the country will decide, “Well, maybe we shouldn’t leave the EU after all.” I put it to them that if there is any idea that we are going to try to reverse the decision taken by the British people in the referendum, that would be an incendiary decision for the House to take.
Secondly, we keep hearing about a cliff-edge. What is this cliff-edge? It seems to me to be a continuation of the fear campaign that is now so discredited. There is obviously not going to be a comprehensive trade agreement within two years—to that extent, we are not going to have a deal—but are we seriously suggesting that the
EU is so insane that it will not make the same kind of arrangements on aviation, data protection, intellectual property, customs facilitation or product recognition on standards that it makes with 100 or 150 other countries with which it does not have a trade deal? I prefer to regard the EU as a bit more constructive than that; indeed, the EU has said that it wants to be constructive and does not want to punish us. If we leave without a comprehensive trade deal, we will have an agreement about lots of detailed things that will enable the goods to flow across the Northern Ireland border, just as the goods flow across the border between Canada and the United States without the lorries stopping, as my right hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire (Mr Paterson) said.
I commend the Gracious Speech because I am delighted to see that it contains a draft patient safety Bill, which is the result of a 2015 recommendation on clinical incident investigation by the Public Administration Committee, which I chaired at the time. I had hoped to see a draft Bill on reform of the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, which the Committee described as “stuck in time” in our report entitled, “Time for a People's Ombudsman Service”. If we are going to introduce a public advocate for public disasters, is it going to be a statutory body? Would it not be a good idea to combine ombudsman reform with a new public advocate statutory function?
I wish to talk about the response to the Grenfell Tower fire and to raise some issues relating to how a public inquiry could be established. Just this year, in February, the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee produced a report called “Lessons still to be learned from the Chilcot Inquiry”. We drew on previous reports produced under the chairmanship of Dr Tony Wright. Public confidence in public inquiries is not to be taken for granted. As well as Chilcot, we looked at other inquiries that lost public confidence, including the child sex abuse inquiry, and at the length of time that it took for the Saville inquiry in Northern Ireland to report. We recommended that a public inquiry should not be established unless the House has voted for it, on an amendable motion dealing with the remit, the timetable and the chairmanship, and that before such a motion is debated a special Select Committee should be established to consider those matters and report back to the House.
Everyone wants to set up this inquiry as quickly as possible in response to public anger, which is very understandable, but so many public inquiries are set up in haste before their terms of reference are properly considered. The Leveson inquiry, for example, has been regretted because not enough thought was put into it. I do not belong to the tradition of democracy that believes that the elected Government are necessarily the fount of all wisdom, however much I admire the Prime Minister herself.