Sir Patrick Cormack FSA

Conservative Party | Staffordshire South

Question on Home Office Restructuring

Sir Patrick Cormack (South Staffordshire) (Con): We know that we will still have all the problems there, but we are not confident from what the Home Secretary has said that we will have the proper solutions. Does not he remember how, on one busy afternoon, the Prime Minister created the Department for Constitutional Affairs on the back of an envelope and sought to get rid of the Lord Chancellor? He then found that what he was proposing was entirely unworkable and unrealistic. What confidence can we now have that the new ministry of justice, created without proper consultation with Parliament, is going to be up to the job? Why on earth did not the Prime Minister have the respect for Parliament to come here today and explain in detail what he has in mind?

John Reid: On the process point, I have already explained the matter. In fact, at the risk of boring the hon. Gentleman, there were 10 occasions on which the previous Administration did not even deign to come to Parliament with an oral statement. On some occasions they did not even issue a written ministerial statement. They changed the machinery of government by a press release from Downing street.

The Prime Minister made a written ministerial statement this morning. I have come here in response to the urgent question. I am more than happy to go through all the elements with hon. Members in a search for consensus. Of course with any of these things there are judgments to be made. Of course there is controversy, but the idea that, by preserving the present structure, we have some benign recipe for perfect co-ordination and operations within the Home Office does not strike me as self-evidently true on the basis of history. It may have been true, but as I have said, each of the units of the Home Office already has a plan for reform. I have introduced three of them, and several were introduced by my predecessor. They are being worked through, including the National Offender Management System. All those elements will continue. This reconfiguration is not a substitute for improving the quality of each of the constituent elements. It will not involve the expense that the Liberal Democrat spokesman, the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr. Clegg), expects. It will be accomplished within the existing budgets of the Home Office and the DCA. The change will not require the expenditure of time, energy or resources that is anticipated. If hon. Gentlemen will give us time to go through that, I am more than open to discussing that continually with them.