Jack Straw - Commons leader

ePolitix.com audio: Listen to this interview in MP3 format

 

 

Question: Where is thinking leading on modernisation committee's investigation into strengthening the role of backbencher?

 

Straw: We're coming to the end of the evidence sessions at the moment. We've had some very good evidence from particularly younger members of Parliament about how they see this place. We're looking at how we make the business of the Chamber more topical, with particularly the newer members saying, well look here, the burden of constituency work regardless of party is now very much higher than it was - it's very boring and tedious to spend six hours in the Chamber waiting for a debate and then discover you're not going to get called.

 

I may say it always was boring. There's this irony about the change in technology too, 25 years ago when I was sitting on the backbenches waiting to be called, I could get on and do my correspondence and no-one would notice. Now an awful lot of correspondence is done electronically and at the moment the rules don't allow members to take in PDAs and things like that, so we're looking at a range of big changes and relatively small ones to encourage greater participating in the Chamber, greater involvement in the formal business of the House, making debates more topical, and trying to ensure too that what happens in the Chamber is more relevant for people's own constituents.

 

Question: Can you give any examples?

 

Straw: When I was at the Foreign Office we were quite keen on ensuring that key issues which had, say, broken over the previous weekend were up for questions when we had our monthly questions on the floor of the House, but often that wasn't the case because the questions had been put down effectively five days before, and they were then subject to a ballot, so it was luck of timing and luck of the draw as to whether an Iran crisis or something like that was going to be a subject of questioning to the House, and there are plenty of examples like that.

 

It's also the case that because of the rather formulaic way in which non-legislative business is handled, we have for example five days in the year on defence, and defence is a very important issues, but whether it's the most sensible use of our time to spend five full days on defence, two whole days on European council meetings, but have no specific programmed foreign policy debates.

 

We have them, but whether we have enough short debates, where the pace is much quicker I think is another matter, and I think all of us have to recognise that  before the televising of Parliament and before this revolution that's taken place in the last 10 years in 24/7 news, this place really was the cockpit of the nation, but that has changed, and if we don't debate here issues that are in people’s minds at the time, it's not that they don’t get debated, but that the focus shifts to the television and radio studio, to the websites, to the newspapers.

 

Question: We have conducted some polling about how MPs spend their time - it shows they spend 76 per cent of their time on constituency business and 18 per cent in the Chamber. What are your thoughts on that?

 

Straw: It doesn't surprise me. I think even if one went back 28 years when I came into the House, I would have spent a smaller proportion of the time in the Chamber than outside. What is different between now and even 10 years ago is the weight of constituency business, the expectations on members of Parliament, the fact that people are now much less deferential, have a much more acute sense of their rights, and can communicate with their members of Parliament much more quickly through email adds to those pressures.

 

Question: Are you concerned modernisation of Commons has been overshadowed by Lords reform?

 

Straw: Not really, they're two parallel tracks. The modernisation process has not suffered because we've got Lords reform going. To some extent the fact of reforming the Lords since 1997 has acted as a spur to the Commons, for example the Lords does have more topical short debates than we do. They have speakers lists, so today in the modernisation committee when we were talking about changes to make debates more interesting, to make the Chamber come alive more, we were drawing on the Lords experience.

 

Question: One of the things that came out of the Lords reform debate seemed to be that members were more worried about the balance of power between the Executive and Parliament. Is this something the next prime minister needs to take action over?

 

Straw: We've been taking it on board in the last 10 years and it will be for the next prime minister to make his own decisions about that. But we're in a paradoxical situation. The Commons particularly, Parliament as a whole, has become much more assertive in the last two or three decades, the scrutiny of the Executive is much greater than it was -you can measure that quantitatively, there's been a phenomenal increase for example in written questions, in select committee scrutinies.

 

You can also measure it qualitatively. Ministers have to be much more alive to the standards that are set here and the last detail of what they're doing can be subject to scrutiny. That simply wasn't the case when I was working in the government say 30 years ago. At the same time the public believe, and they have some justification for this, that government is becoming more powerful. That's partly because of changes in technology and the external threat of terrorism makes government seem more powerful.

 

So you've got to continually adjust the balance of power between the Executive and Parliament. The point I make to my ministerial colleagues is that effective scrutiny is a route to good governance, and therefore indirectly to the popularity of the government. If you start to cut corners, you then lose support.

 

Question: How are public bill committees working so far?

 

Straw: I think it's too early to say. We've only had a few of those because the public bill committees have only operated in respect of those relatively few bills which had their introduction in the Commons after January 1 this year and had also not been subject of pre-legislative scrutiny. There are many more, some quite controversial bills, which were introduced in the six weeks before Christmas.

 

We made a deliberate decision to introduce this new system slowly to ensure that it would build up, and I'm very keen we use the experience over the last few months to ensure that in the next parliamentary session the new system really takes off.

 

Question: The modernisation committee has taken evidence about the changes in media coverage of Parliament. The growth area in political reporting comes from the blogs. What do you think of this in terms of a change in the way people find out about Parliament and politics?

 

Straw: I think it's great - in the old days before televising of Parliament, there weren't quite sensors, but people who put together the gallery reports, or the sketch writers could be very powerful. The gallery reporters were very straight, so you got in the broadsheets a page summarising what was happening in Parliament and that was good. The sketch writers were very powerful individuals because that was a prism through which the public saw members of Parliament, and so some of the sketch writers, people like Norman Shrapnel controlled public perceptions of individuals, earlier generations of sketch writers could make or break the careers of an individual member of Parliament.

 

So it was not that there was some golden age when we were out of the clutches of the press, and I think this direct access is very good - people taking a real interest in things. The downside is that people may, whether it's on their computer or the parliamentary channel or otherwise, they will look at the half-empty benches which is often the case and always has been the case, they'll read stuff in the papers about members of Parliament having, quotes, £200,000 of allowances and then they'll say we're all lazy.

 

Whatever party members represent, almost all of them work extraordinarily hard and as it happens, given their qualifications, and what they could be doing, most of them are working for less than they could be elsewhere. So that's a problem, trying to create a more rounded impression of this place is important.

 

Question: The Lib Dems and the Tories have spoken about the need to modernise party conferences, suggesting they are currently closed to ordinary people who can't take a week off work - do you think they will survive as they are?

 

Straw: Don't know. They've got shorter in recent years - a lot of effort has gone into changing the format - they are better now. Twenty or 30 years ago, the days of unbelievably turgid debates in smoke-filled halls are over, so things have got better, we had Bill Clinton coming to talk to us on one occasion.