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[00:00:00] You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production, supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/PM.

Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

And I'm Mark D'Arcy. Coming up

Labour tightens its grip on Parliament.

Sir Keir Starmer stomps on his first set of Commons rebels.

And does the honeymoon end on Monday, when the Chancellor is due to set out the depth of the nation's financial woes?

Ruth, let's start with that because I suspect that what's going to happen on Monday is that Rachel Reeves is going to set the tone for what happens really over the next year or 18 months or beyond. We're [00:01:00] talking here about really underlining the depth of the financial crisis. The British state is running on empty.

Almost everywhere any minister looks in the departments that they're now running, they will see places where a vast injection of money is needed. But the money to do it isn't available. So you're looking at public sector pay settlements. The junior doctors will just be the start on that. Uh, defence spending.

Defence spending. The need for a vast boost in that which may not be able to wait on a all singing, all dancing defence review taking a leisurely 18 months. And almost every other sector. You know, the crisis in the prisons that they were talking about last week. The state of the schools. The state of almost any part of the public realm.

And I suspect that an awful lot of Labour MPs, when they came in, had a very nice couple of weeks. It's marvellous setting up an office. It's marvellous making your maiden speech. But now comes the moment when they're going to have to start saying no to the general public.

Indeed, so that's the sort of tone that has been set on the King's speech, of course, with the decision by Keir Starmer [00:02:00] to discipline his rebels.

They wanted him to spend several billion pounds on the two-child policy. But yeah, I mean, Parliament this week has approved a trillion pounds worth of public expenditure for this financial year and didn't even have a debate or a vote on it. Now there's very good reasons for that but you're spending a trillion pounds and the government's sort of suggesting that we think next week that there's going to be about a 20-billion-pound black hole.

Yeah, it's pretty scary. I mean to explain that these are basically the spending plans inherited from the Conservatives which weren't rubber stamped by Parliament before the last election and they have to rubber stamp them now just to keep the cash flowing into government so that the money doesn't dry up and public services have to stop.

So, it's almost a kind of a ritual act to allow this money to go forward. But beyond that, the cupboard is bare. And I suspect that, you know, the atmosphere is going to, it's like, you're going from teenage party at the start of this Parliament to boot camp starting on Monday. It's going to [00:03:00] be extremely tough.

And this is why I think Keir Starmer, confronted with seven MPs voting for this Scottish National Party amendment that was designed to try and lift the two-child benefit cap the Conservatives had brought in. Confronted with those rebels, he decided he was going to stamp down on them very hard. Withdraw the whip, for six months, tell them that their return to the Parliamentary Labour Party is contingent on good behaviour, and see whether they manage to behave well.

You won't have been surprised at some of the names though, I think, in there. No, no. Serial rebels. It really is a line-up of the usual suspects. Yeah, quite. I mean, clearly, it doesn't threaten the government majority. I mean, the government's majority's gone down from, what, 180 to 164, 66, something like that.

But he doesn't want Parliament to look chaotic and rebellious as it has over the last few years. And he doesn't want these 300 new MPs to feel that they've got licence to be voting against the government left, right and centre. As you say, when the going is going to get pretty tough from now on, the honeymoon [00:04:00] coming rapidly to an end.

But I think the interesting question on this week's discipline is, was it because it was a vote on an amendment to the King's Speech? Or was it discipline because they rebelled. Because if it's the former, you know, there's a sort of extra constitutional status attaches to the King's Speech votes. You know, it's the first big set piece thing at the start of the Parliament.

It's, it's where the government demonstrates that it's got the command, the confidence of the House of Commons. You've just had an election. This is the programme on which the government has run. To be essentially saying, by voting for the amendment from the SNP that our support for the program is conditional, from a government's perspective, that's not a good look, particularly when it's been very clear through the election campaign that they were not going to automatically abolish this provision on the two-child benefit cap. So, is it simply that it's the King's Speech, it's so important, it's the first sort of set of votes, or is this actually the line he's going to take against [00:05:00] any rebels?

Because the former you can manage more easily going forward. If it's discipline against any rebel in the future, anyone who sticks half a toe over half a line…

…yeah, then parliamentary management is going to become much more difficult.

Yeah, I think that's right. I suspect that you put your finger on it. I mean, you talked about the going getting tough, politics in Parliament for the last few years has been like Game of Thrones without the dragons.

You know, there's mayhem, fratricide, plots everywhere you looked. That really has to stop and I think that a lot of this was probably about breaking that mood and saying we want a different tone now and woe betide anybody who rocks the boat.

Yeah, I suspect he also doesn't want the constant attempts by certainly the SNP, possibly the Lib Dems to be trying to peel off Labour's left-wing members on vote after vote after vote. And sort of cracking down on that right from the outset, trying to set a tone.

And I think another person who might be trying to peel off MPs from the Labour left is Jeremy [00:06:00] Corbyn. Of course, once the, practically the Pope of the Labour left. And, he's already written to the seven Labour rebels, suggesting that theyleft-wingo-operate with him and the group of independents loosely aligned to him in Parliament, which could create the nucleus of a left wing parliamentary opposition to Keir Starmer, perhaps buttressed by the four Greens as well that could, if not be real trouble, but certainly be a thorn in his side, a stone in his shoe.

But of course, the consequences for these rebels are quite serious. I mean, they haven't achieved anything, because Labour's not changing its position, isn't likely to, you know, it's been very clear, there's going to be a review and it's going to stick to that line. But for the rebels, I mean, one of the consequences is that, for example, they won't be eligible to get on select committees. Now, John McDonnell, for example, has served on, on select committees in the past -Treasury Select Committee.

No, no, it was Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs, I think he was on.

They won't be able to this time because they're not part of the [00:07:00] Labour Parliamentary Party, they won't have that option as independents, they won't be assigned seats.

So, there are consequences that are quite serious.

And also, if you're a rank-and-file Labour MP at the moment, you're looking at pretty intense competition. Yes. Which has just been at least marginally reduced by this. So, if you're eyeing a place on a Select Committee, you've just got a marginally easier task perhaps of getting on one now than you might otherwise have had.

But watch that space because it's going to be probably late October before they're up and running because the two-stage process of first electing the chairs and then electing the ordinary members within the different party groups has to take place and, and that's going to be a while.

Yes, the Leader of the House of Commons this week sort of was indicating that the 'Usual Channels', so the business managers, the party whips, are still in negotiations to try and carve up the committee seats between the two main parties.

Yes, the rule here is of course that the distribution of seats on select committees reflects the distribution of seats in the House, so [00:08:00] Labour will get more than half the seats and more than half the chairs of select committees, reflecting their overwhelming dominance in the Commons chamber. The Lib Dems will get a lot more than they had before, the SNP will get a lot less and the Conservatives will get a share as the Official Opposition but not as big a share as perhaps they might have hoped for.

No, and the Conservative leadership race is a bit of a challenge for the setting up of the select committees because they've announced that the leadership result will be on 2nd of November.

So, if they manage to get select committees members chosen you know, in mid to late October when Parliament comes back after party conference recess, you then could be in another round of elections as the new Conservative leader establishes his or her front bench. And it may well be that people who thought they were going for select committees get those positions and then suddenly are called to the front bench. Those who've been on the front bench now...

...plucked from the committee corridor onto the front bench in a single swoop.

Yeah, those who are on the front bench now might be demoted and they might want, therefore, to be able to go for select committee seats. So, I wouldn't expect some of the committees [00:09:00] to really get up and running and be really active until mid-late November, at the earliest, because of this.

But there is, however, a front runner in committee land at the moment, and that is the new Modernisation Committee that is going to be established as a result of Commons votes this week. And the reason that may get working a lot faster than a lot of the others is that its members are not going to be elected, they're going to be nominated in a quite old fashioned way by the parties, and we already know that the committee is going to be chaired by the Leader of the House, Lucy Powell, and all the other parties will be invited to put forward their parliamentary savants to sit on this committee and ponder the modernisation of the House of Commons. And modernisation is one of those fabulously loaded words that can mean whatever its utterer wants it to mean. So, we're keen to see where it will go, because some of the stuff is in the 'angel's fear to tread' territory of MPs second jobs and sitting hours and various other issues where there will be massive institutional resistance to any kind of change at all. [00:10:00]

Well, the official remit is going to be "to consider reforms to House of Commons procedures, standards and working practices, and to make recommendations thereon".

So, no guarantee that they'll be implemented, but this is where I think the chairing by the Leader of the House of Commons comes into play because that was the model back in 1997 when we had a similar Modernisation Committee that got things done precisely because it was a government minister chairing it.

So apparently, it's going to be a committee of 14 members, nine of them Labour, three Conservatives, two Liberal Democrats. And of course, that gave rise in the debate this week on setting up of this Committee, gave rise to a debate about the small parties, the minor parties being excluded from that Committee, having no representation on it.

And certainly, Lee Anderson, the Reform MP getting up and saying, we've got four million votes in the General Election and we're not going to be on the Committee that's talking about the future of the way this House works. So, he was pretty put out, but...

get used to it, Lee. I dare say that the odd Reform MP here or there might, might pop [00:11:00] up on a Select Committee, but the idea that they, as of right, had a place in each Select Committee, they haven't got enough MPs to be represented. No. No. No.

Yeah, even if each of their MPs was sitting on three different select committees, they still wouldn't be covering them all, and that's an untenable workload, especially when they might do other things, like want to campaign in the country or something.

Or appear on GB News.

Or appear, oof.

So that was a sort of one argument, and I do think it's interesting it's 14, it's an even number.

I would have thought you wanted a, you know, normally committees are odd numbers, sort of 11 members, 15 members. The last Modernisation Committee was 15, so they could have snuck an extra one on, but...

A Labour majority and a Labour membership that will be hand-picked by the Labour authorities. I don't think they're unduly worried about losing votes on that Committee.

No, no, absolutely not. One of the first tasks of the Committee is going to be looking at, apparently, according to the Leader of the House, is members outside employment, which flows on from a decision that was made at the same time as the one to set up this Committee this week, in that the government made great play about what it described as a [00:12:00] second jobs ban.

But actually, when you look at it, it's not a ban on second jobs at all. It's completely misnamed. What it is, is essentially a tightening of existing rules on the ability to provide paid parliamentary services or to be paid for sort of consultancy and lobbying or to be paid for providing advice about how Parliament works.

There's always been a very, very hard ban on what's known in the trade as paid advocacy, where a Member of Parliament is paid to represent an outside interest. That is one of the unforgivable sins, that was what did for Owen Paterson when he was found by the Standards Committee to have been engaged in paid advocacy and lost his seat as a result of it, in, you know, what turned out to be one of the seismic scandals.

Now what they've done here is they've said that not only can MPs not be directly paid to represent an interest, but they’ve also said that MPs can't be paid to provide general advice on how Parliament works and general advice on public policy. So, a kind of grey zone that used to [00:13:00] be there. Oh, "this wasn't paid advocacy, I was just telling them how they lobby".

That goes too.

Yeah, it tightens it up, but it does nothing for those other areas that MPs have been criticised for. So, for example, Reform MPs appearing on GB News or Labour MPs appearing on LBC and being paid for presenting programmes. It doesn't do anything to tackle what I'd call the Geoffrey Cox scenario, where, you know, Geoffrey Cox, the former Attorney General, he's also a very accomplished barrister, he has been earning really quite significant sums for legal work, not to do with his parliamentary work, not to do with his constituency work, often legal work abroad, and earning significant sums, multiple amounts of his parliamentary salary, and this will do nothing to tackle that. He will still be able to, to continue.

I imagine Geoffrey Cox's comeback to this is, this is well known. My constituents have just re-elected me, knowing that I go off and do this work, but they still think I'm a good enough MP to sit representing them in the [00:14:00] House of Commons. What business is it of yours, parliamentary authorities? If my voters are happy, where's the issue?'

Yeah, and given the tsunami that engulfs so many Conservative MPs, the fact that it is quite widely known in his constituency and the electorate still supported him…he's got an argument.

But you do wonder, actually, what would happen if a really swingeing ban came down and Geoffrey Cox or some other lawyer sitting in the Commons was told that the hundreds of thousands of pounds in additional earnings that they've been making, as well as being an MP, are no longer available to them.

Do they stay or do they go at that point? You know, it's the Clash's great question. And if there were to be a by-election in Geoffrey Cox's seat, well, it's not all that safe these days, as most Conservative seats, I'm afraid, are not.

Well, on this tightening up of the rules on paid parliamentary advice, The House is giving MPs three months to sort out their arrangements, so they've got contracts to get them cancelled, to get out of them, but, you know, you've got [00:15:00] essentially a three month grace period, which, given that Parliament's not going to be sitting through August and part of September, it takes you through to basically mid-October and, you know, there's only a few weeks of parliamentary sitting time in, in that three month period.

So, they've got time to clear the decks. And another point about this is the, another thing that hasn't been banned is the writing of books. Lots of MPs write books. Chris Bryant, now a Labour Minister in the Culture Department, has produced a history of Parliament. He's produced a book on the standards system in the Commons.

So, he's quite a prolific writer. Is he going to be told he can't write? Because writing books is one of the things an awful lot of MPs do, not least writing books that make political points as part of their political work.

It's often a way to launch yourself into leadership positions, isn't it, that you write a book setting out your political and economic philosophy, for example.

But in Chris's case, you can make an argument that he has been able to take advantage of the fact that as a parliamentarian, he's got, you know, access to information and advice and, the [00:16:00] clerks and so on, that have all aided him in the writing of those books, that he might not have had quite in quite the same way if he'd been outside Parliament.

So, again, is he, you know, being able to take advantage of his parliamentary position. Similarly, you've got problems with writing columns for newspapers, of which, you know, quite a number of MPs have done that over the years.

And that's before you get on to paid appearances in the media that fall short of being a regular presenter.

Yeah, yeah.

For example, you know, going off to the jungle like Nadine Dorries.

Yeah, I think the one area where there is consensus is that if you are, for example, a doctor, and you need to perform your professional duties for a certain number of hours per year in order to maintain your regulatory licenses, there's sort of an acceptance that that's probably fine. So, there are a number of doctors who do that.

There's also an acceptance that it's good for the Commons as well to have people operating on various professional front lines who are able to come into the Chamber and say, I can see what's going on, I tripped over it just last week. [00:17:00] Rosena Allin-Khan, for example, Labour MP, worked as a doctor again, took up a professional role as a doctor during the pandemic, and I suspect that having a first hand, from the battlefield experience, piped straight into the Commons was incredibly valuable.

So, we'll have to see what the Committee makes of it.

Other areas that they're going to focus on is the culture, procedures, working practices, maximising the time available for scrutiny of the government's legislative programme whilst also ensuring the backbench voices are heard. I mean, these all sound great mood music, but as ever, the devil will be in the detail.

But one of the things that has interested me is the degree to which this Committee in terms of its agenda and what Lucy Powell has said about it may be encroaching into the, the territory that's normally reserved for the Standards Committee. That was certainly one of the concerns expressed by some of the opposition members in the House, particularly the shadow Leader of the House, Chris Philp.

One of the reasons being, of course, that the Standards Committee has lay members on it. Again, which bring a different [00:18:00] voice and different, different arguments to the table. Now the government's position seems to be that this Modernisation Committee is not going to encroach on the agenda and the work of other committees.

It will kind of want to take it, gather it up, and sort of act as Lucy Powell described it as a task and finish committee, to try and get things done that some of these committees may have suggested in the past, to be more strategic about looking at how they all interact in terms of their recommendations and trying to get things get things implemented.

She said, often there's a glacial pace of reform, which we, we know about. But one of the reasons there's a glacial pace is because the government doesn't implement or doesn't even consider what some of these select committees recommend. They sort of sit on the shelf. So that's a good thing at one level, but ultimately it comes back to the government's position on these things.

Yeah. What they need to produce is a joined-up solution that pulls all this stuff together in an effective way. And that's where Lucy Powell's role in reshaping the Commons could be. turn out to be critical.

Yeah.

Well Ruth, is that a good point to take a break?

I think it is. [00:19:00]

And we're back. So, Mark, we were talking a few minutes ago about the fact that the Select Committee elections are not yet underway, but one set of elections that is done is the elections for the Deputy Speakers. So we have three new all-female lineup of Deputy Speakers.

First time I think ever an all-female lineup of Deputy Speakers with Nusrat Ghani as the senior Deputy Speaker, the Chairman of Ways and Means, who is number two in the speakership hierarchy, if you like, and the most public consequence of that is that she will, in due course, chair the budget debate.

Yes, she will. Just to say, before we, I was going to mention the budget debate, but before we get to that, the first ethnic minority MP to serve in the chair, so it's quite a parliamentary bit of history there. So, Judith Cummins for Labour, she's the second in the hierarchy of the Deputy Speakers. And then Caroline Noakes, which I have to say, it surprised me that she, she got in ahead of some other Conservative candidates, but the former chair of the [00:20:00] Women and Equalities Committee.

She's technically the second Deputy Chair of Ways and Means, but the third in the Deputy Speakership hierarchy.

The name that's not being uttered here is, of course, Sir Roger Gale, who in the last Parliament was added on as an additional Deputy Speaker to cover when Dame Eleanor Laing wasn't very well.

And so he sat in the chair for some months as a Deputy Speaker and was hoping, I think, to get the job officially this time around, but it appears it wasn't to be. And I wonder if perhaps the reason for that was that a lot of Labour MPs were keen on Caroline Noakes, who's perhaps more to the left of the Conservative spectrum and maybe duly, uh, duly backed her rather than the more traditional Conservative figure like Sir Roger.

I also wondered if he wasn't helped by the Biden factor. So, Sir Roger is 80, I think, or very close to 80. And in the week when there was all this sort of discussion about 80-year-olds and the viability of public office, over the course of a Parliament of five years, whether that possibly didn't help him.

But I'm old enough to remember him not quite winning the Birmingham Northfield [00:21:00] by-election back in the mists of time now.

Well, he was, he was pushing his, his campaign and he, they all had to publish a statement setting out their case. And he was arguing that he'd been on Radio Caroline. And I sort of thought, I'm not sure quite a lot of these new MPs will know what Radio Caroline is or its importance. Anyway, another set of elections that is not going to be taking place is the hereditary Peers, there are two vacancies, one for the Conservatives and one for the crossbench Peers, and they've decided in light of Labour's plans to abolish the hereditaries, that they're not going to proceed with these elections.

Normally they have to set the elections up within three months, but the House of Lords has agreed that they should extend that for 18 months, by which time I think they're assuming that the government may have got its legislation through and they won't be needed at all.

Well, a completely sensible thing to do, really, because what's the point of electing someone to serve as an elected hereditary Peer for perhaps a matter of weeks [00:22:00] before they're then swept away, so they're marched up to the top of the hill and then pushed out the door?

Yeah. It seems a rather bizarre thing to bother to do, so I'm not sure anyone will particularly object to that, except, of course, in the overall principle that some people will object to the exclusion of the hereditaries that seems to be coming down the track now.

Yeah. And something we've talked about on the podcast previously, Mark, quite a bit is Private Members' Bills and, this week we've got the presentation of Lord Falconer's bill on assisted dying.

Yeah. And, um, I think it's going to be interesting; the government has delayed the Private Members' Bill ballot for the House of Commons that would normally have taken place this week and it's delayed it through to September. Questions about why that is? And one suggestion is that possibly they would like a little bit more time to prepare their own government handout bills.

So this idea that government, if it's got some quite discreet, small sort of legislative tidying up things that it wants to do, that it rather than having a sort of government bill in government time, it might [00:23:00] hand out this legislative draft to somebody who succeeds in the Private Members' Bill ballot in the Commons and they take it through with government support, which is pretty much a guarantee of getting it onto the statute book. So the suggestion is that they might want a bit of more time to prepare these bills, decide which ones they want to hand out to the successful MPs in the ballot. That's one argument. The other is that, um, of course, it will avoid the prospect, had they had the ballot this week, avoid the prospect of those poor MPs, the 20 in the ballot, being subjected to pretty much two months’ worth of lobbying from every organisation in the country.

Continuous bombardment, phone ringing off the hook. Yeah, you come in the first five or so on the Private Member's ballot. and every pressure group in the land rings you up and begs you to try and take through their pet piece of legislation whatsoever it is.

Even people further down the list get a lot of this, so I think it's probably at least given them a little bit of peace, as well as you say, it's giving the government time to decide how it wants to try and exploit the Private Members' Bill [00:24:00] process. Now of course, in the last parliamentary session, it was actually quite a spectacular operation by the then Conservative government's Private Members Bill whip, because almost all the bills that went through were bills that had been handed out by the government.

There was a kind of self-assembly employment bill with all sorts of different measures around employment law taken through by all sorts of different MPs, you know, Labour MPs and Lib Dem MPs as well as Conservatives. And so really quite a lot of difference was made to employment law, but in kind of McNuggets rather than as one sort of gigantic all singing, all dancing employment bill out there.

Which of course had been promised in the King's Speech, but uh, but then materialised in sort of multiple Private Member's Bills, sort of sliced up.

Or at least the easy bits of it. I, I think the Labour government is still going to have a look at some stage at all sorts of issues around, um, things like zero hours contracts.

But these were mostly things to do with various different forms of leave that people could claim, and part time, a right to part time working I [00:25:00] think was one of them. So there were a whole range of things done there. This time around, I'm sure the government will have things it wants to get through, but there are also things that it might want to pick up.

The, uh, Wayne David Bill on strategic litigation against public participation, the SLAPPS Bill, the measure to allow judges to strike down legal action against journalists for investigations against the rich and powerful, effectively. That had been quite a way through the Commons, hadn't reached the Lords when the music stopped, and the election was called.

That could possibly be something that comes back almost fully formed. It's almost certain I would have thought that someone in the Commons Private Members' Bill selection will decide to pick up a bill on assisted dying. Possibly exactly the same text as the Charlie Faulkner Bill.

So, how's that going to work? We think that, um, you know, an MP picks it up, similar text, goes through the Commons and the Lords at sort of roughly the same time, and on the basis that they've basically considered the same text, does that [00:26:00] help get it over the line? I mean, the sort of suggestion is that Keir Starmer's open to this legislation, and open to it as a Private Members' Bill, you'd expect to have a free vote in the Commons.

I wonder on this, uh, that the Private Members' Bills are quite deliberately made kind of procedurally vulnerable. The idea is that they haven't been produced with the full sort of majesty of the government drafting machine behind them. They may, in some cases, be quite scrappy pieces of work. I don't think you could say that about Lord Faulkner's assisted dying bill, which has had a couple of go rounds in the House of Lords and has obviously drafted by a former Lord Chancellor who knows a thing or two about the law.

But, uh, all the same, these bills are vulnerable creatures, and it's entirely possible to imagine someone attempting to block them at Second Reading by just talking them out. If they don't have a hundred MPs to support them being pushed to a vote, then they're out then. Later on, they come back after detailed scrutiny for Report Stage, and then they can be buried by a great avalanche of amendments, if you're not careful.

And again, [00:27:00] time runs out. So, I suspect that either the government may decide that it wants to legislate itself directly and just do a government bill in government time. Or alternatively, it might supply a bit of extra government time to allow that bill to get properly considered. Possibly even with some kind of guillotine motion so that it's brought to a vote.

So, if people who are against assisted dying want to stop that legislation, they have to do it by winning a vote rather than by procedural means and just talking and talking and talking until the time runs out without the bill being pushed to a vote.

Yeah.

Which is the usual way that Private Members' Bills get stopped.

Yeah. Well, Mark shall we take a very brief break there and come back and just reflect on the government's performance in terms of Parliament, uh, so far and just a quick look ahead to next week.

And marks for technical merit and artistic impression.

So, Mark, we're back and, uh, I'm afraid you're on the naughty step. So, one of our listeners has been in touch, Lord Wolfson of Tredegar, [00:28:00] KC. And, uh, he notes that we said last week that Lord Ponsonby was a hereditary Peer. Well, it turns out, according to Lord Wolfson, that he is already both a hereditary and a life Peer.

And as Lord Wolfson says, he's his opposite number in the House of Lords and a very fine opponent. So, we got that wrong.

Yeah, mea maxima culpa, Lord Ponsonby is what you might think of as a hybrid Peer, both battery and petrol driven. And, um, so my apologies to him. Uh, oops.

Actually, as we're talking about our listeners, we've had some questions that have come in.

So, if we perhaps take touch on those before we get to, uh, thinking about where we are in terms of the performance of, of the government so far in the last couple of weeks. We've had a question about retread MPs. So those MPs who've previously served in the Commons, lost their seat, been re-elected.

We've had a question from David who says, 'Do retread MPs, those who are elected to the Commons after a period of absence, get another maiden [00:29:00] speech? These MPs have another predecessor, often a new constituency, which a maiden speech usually makes reference to.'

I think that the answer to that is, technically speaking, they don't get another maiden speech.

In practice some of them make what approaches a maiden speech which goes through the ritual which is very much expected in the Commons of saying something nice about your predecessor whether it's someone who stood down or someone that they've just defeated. It can be a bit of a challenge actually on occasion to say something about a predecessor who may not have been awfully nice to you.

I look forward to the maiden speech of the new Labour MP for Plymouth Moor View he and Johnny Mercer, the previous incumbent, had a pretty venomous election campaign against one another. But in general, it seems that actually the handover process has been pretty punctilious and polite and even friendly, with some people being perfectly happy to sort of hand over all their casework and give advice to their successor.

Positively encouraging it. Yeah.

[00:30:00] Um, well actually, our questions this week have all come from David. They're all different, but, uh, but our third David today asks about restoration and renewal. So, this is a question from David Jenkins. "Will the new Parliament have to decide what to do about repairs and renovations to the Houses of Parliament or can they continue discussing options and not taking decisions in the next five years. Is there any evidence from Labour input to committee discussions so far of their preferences or how it is to be approached?" So, I think they can probably carry on discussing in the absence of any wish to make a firm decision.

I think given the state of the national finances, as we were discussing earlier, the idea of finding several billion quid to rebuild the old Victorian part of the Houses of Parliament is pretty low down the government's priorities and they will just continue to try and hold the building together with some duct tape, spit and sawdust and hope that it doesn't burn down.

In the long term, this is probably [00:31:00] more expensive than actually doing something about it. Yeah. Not least because you need things like regular fire patrols, very abbreviated moments of maintenance in the few months every now and then when the houses aren't sitting. But in general, it's, I'm pretty sure going to be kicked into touch because it's too much of a hot potato.

And in a period of kind of almost austerity point two, it's a pretty hard sell to say, yes, but we're spending several billion on a building.

Yeah. And that we've sort of talking about something in the region of 12 billion upwards is what's needed. So, it's not, it's not small change, but there are no good options on the table at this stage.

The only way I think I differ with you slightly is I don't think they can kick it into touch, because the risks are too great. And ultimately, I think Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves have got to ask the question, do they want the House to burn down or the sewage pipe to break on their watch?

I think the symbolism might be a bit near the knuckle if either of those things were to happen.

Yeah. And, uh, I mean, you're into sort of resignation territory when those kinds of things [00:32:00] happen. That would be just, both nationally and internationally, embarrassing and catastrophic to our reputation.

And the parallel to look at is the national reaction in France when the Cathedral of Notre Dame burned down.

But that was of course was already undergoing some restoration, so they sort of made that decision. But you know, yeah, the implications in terms of everybody looking on at what on earth was happening.

And you're talking about one of the nine or ten most recognisable buildings on the planet.

Yeah, and the fact that Westminster is an iconic symbol of democracy, not just for this country, but for many people around the world.

So, I don't think they can keep kicking it into touch. I think they will want to try and do something creative around how the money is applied over a series of years, rather than sort of MPs having to vote for 12 billion up front. They might try and do it so that the votes and the amounts of money are scheduled over a longer period of time.

It makes it easier.

Like buying clothes from a catalogue in instalments. Yeah. Yeah.

But, but of [00:33:00] course, this could be quite different in this Parliament with so many new MPs who are not necessarily going to be happy with the, the working culture and the working arrangements of, of Westminster. It's not, the nicest building to work in, in many respects.

It's historic, but it's not an easy building to work in. Some aspects of it are quite unpleasant. You know, there's sort of the sewage problems, the problems with mice around your feet and moth ridden offices. It's, it's, it's pretty difficult. So it would not surprise me if some of the newer MPs took a slightly different tone and attitude to some of this.

It's a question that's dogged the last few parliaments and it's, you're right, it certainly isn't going to go away. It's a matter of political prioritisation and whether they can find a clever way of selling it.

Yep, and I think they're going to have to reach a decision in the next year. Well Mark, we're coming up to the summer recess.

Parliament's got another couple of days next week and then it will break for August. What do we make of their performance so far in terms of their attitude to Parliament?

I think the first thing to say is this has been the easy bit. [00:34:00] This has been the taking office, blaze of glory, exciting new statements, policy directions being set out by ministers.

It's all the stuff they dreamed of doing. As we were saying, yeah, next week comes that financial statement and from that flow all sorts of really unpleasant decisions that the government will have to make. They'll have to spend an awful lot of time saying no. In the meantime, most of those ministers have had quite an enjoyable time sort of setting out their territory and setting out their stall.

But there have been a few little procedural slips along the way and surprisingly from some of the more experienced people, Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, have both been in trouble for failing to deliver copies of statements they were going to make to the opposition in time for them to have something useful to say about it when they get to be discussed in the chamber.

And those are the kind of procedural slips that you wouldn't expect from people who've been around the ministerial. block. You certainly wonder [00:35:00] where the civil servants were as well in this: 'hang on a minute minister, don't we have to get a copy of this to your shadow?'

Yeah. There's also, uh, in terms of, you know, the availability of debating time and so on for backbenchers, Westminster Hall debates are not starting until September.

They could have started. They could have started. They've put those off.

So there isn't a Backbench Business Committee to decide yet because, you know, all those problems we were talking about, about electing a chair and electing the members for that committee, those haven't been done yet. But the Speaker, you know, quite easily and they could have done the adjournment debates.

Uh, he's choosing people to do adjournment debates already, so he could quite easily have had a few more debates in Westminster Hall and that would've provided a bit of outlet for some of those issues that are coming up that people want to talk about, which are particularly issues local to their constituencies. It doesn't have to be some great sweeping subject of national policy. It can be the local bypass, the A& E, the parking problems in my town centre. So, it's a bit of a surprise that Parliament hasn't taken that opportunity to just get that little bit more up and [00:36:00] running.

Yeah, yeah. And one of the things that apparently is not going to be happening is the traditional pre-Summer recess adjournment debate, which in recent years following the death of Sir David Amess, the former Conservative MP who was murdered in his constituency a few years ago, this pre-Summer recess adjournment debate, which he always participated in, has become known as the Sir David Amess debate and a number of Conservative MPs are quite annoyed that apparently that's not going to be happening next week because the government's scheduling legislation.

Well, the government clearly wants to get its legislation moving, and to some extent that's fair enough.

But again, that debate is an opportunity for MPs to raise all kinds of issues. You can speak on any subject under the sun, and a minister has to stand up at the end and say, well, I will write to my colleague about that particular problem, or I will pass on the inquiry to the relevant department.

And quite good for maiden speeches because, you know, the generic nature of it is better suited for maiden speeches rather than interventions for speeches in the [00:37:00] sort of Modernisation Committee debate this week, for example, that didn't mention Modernisation Committee and reform of the House of Commons at all.

They bore no relationship to the subject matter under discussion.

Yeah, I mean the standard maiden speech is 'it's great to be here, my predecessor did a lot of hard work in the constituency and is well remembered. Isn't it wonderful? Here's a funny anecdote about my seat. Then I'm going to sit down having been quite glad to get through it without stumbling.'

Yeah, yeah, so it would have been quite well suited to that. But plans are next week the government's going to be getting the first Second Reading of its bills after the King's Speech. So, it's got Second Reading of the Budget Responsibility Bill and the Passenger Transport Bill, as well, of course, as the the Chancellor's statement.

I think we've got to look out for does the Foreign Secretary make a statement perhaps on the controversial question of the legal advice about whether or not the Israeli government is in breach of international law and whether there'll be sanctions applied as a consequence. So, some suggestions we might hear something on that next week, but nothing [00:38:00] confirmed.

But going back to the Budget Responsibility Bill, I keep hearing from journalists that there's going to be a budget in September. I don't think there is. I think it's going to be October.

Well, for the sheer logistics of producing Office of Budget Responsibility forecasts, apart from anything else, not to mention the logistics of actually getting a budget together, especially when it's a big break from what had been done previously, do tend to suggest it's going to be later rather than sooner, and it would be quite an achievement if Rachel Reeves was able to get up into the dispatch box and deliver a budget before the Labour conference, and politically, maybe she'd rather prefer to do the budget after the Labour conference.

Yes, yes, yes. I mean, that, that's one aspect of it, isn't it? But as I understand it, the Office of Budget Responsibility requires ten weeks, and if you count forward ten weeks from after she assumed office the day after the general election, that takes you to the last day before the break for conference recess, so unless they're going to have a budget on a Friday, which seems unlikely, and delay the budget debate then till after conference [00:39:00] recess, I just think they're going to kick it into, to October.

Yeah, it looks very much that way, but the process that begins with that statement we're expecting on Monday about the dire financial position of the British state, is going to reach its most important expression in that budget because things are going to be tough. Are there going to be tax rises?

Are there going to be stealth tax rises? Are there going to be other revenue raising measures? Is there going to be extra borrowing indeed? All those questions will be watched by all sorts of eagle-eyed scrutineers when Rachel Reeves gets up to deliver that long awaited first budget.

And she might give us the budget date, you never know.

Yeah, hope springs eternal.

Well with that Mark, should we leave it there for this week? And uh, we'll see next, what next week brings.

We'll see what next week brings and we'll have a pre-Summer recess special.

Excellent, see you then.

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