Clause 104 - Short title and extent
Childcare Bill
10:45 am
Tim Loughton (Shadow Minister (Children), Health; East Worthing and Shoreham, Conservative)
Further to that point of order, Mr. Amess. I repeat the Minister’s great thanks to you and Mr. Benton for the excellent way in which you chaired the Committee. What a pleasure it has been to serve on it in the new spirit of concord ahead of the Christmas season.
I thank my hon. Friends, in particular my hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton, who was dragged kicking and screaming on to the Committee, but who has performed in no uncertain terms, as one would expect. I also thank the Opposition Whip, my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous), who managed to arrange the timings in an excellent way. I note the debut performance by my hon. Friend the Member for Putney (Justine Greening), who has already shown herself to be astute in child care matters and many other things relating to the House, and we look forward to great things to come. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Miss Kirkbride) for bringing her experience to bear.
I also extend my thanks to Labour Members, and, in particularly, to compliment the Government Whip. As you will notice, Mr. Amess, we are in danger of finishing our proceedings before the nominated time. The Committee was conducted with no guillotine and no knives on the timing of clauses, which does not happen very often. As our proceedings have shown, leaving matters to proper debate and allowing hon. Members with an interest in them to choose how long to debate them does not mean that we use up all the time on peripheral arguments at the beginning; it merely means that we have greater freedom. The Committee has been an excellent example of how we can achieve proper debate and scrutiny of a Bill in good time, without the necessity for Government Whips to place extra requirements on us.
The Committee has been an innovatory experience for me. I have spent eight and a half years in this place, and this is the first Committee on which I have served in which Labour Back Benchers have been so engaged in the proceedings; it is certainly the first in which a Labour Back Bencher has actually sought to defy the Government Whip and abstain on a vote. We were worried when the hon. Member concerned did not appear at the nominated time this morning and thought that her mystery non-appearance was directly linked to the great courage that she had shown last Thursday. She may yet end up on the Committee that considers the Crossrail Bill as a reward for her boldness.
Even the hon. Member for Doncaster, North (Edward Miliband) has occasionally managed surgically to remove himself from his Blackberry to engage in debate and raise the standard of class war, which is apparently fashionable again in the Labour party, courtesy of the Deputy Prime Minister. We welcome seeing more of that.
I also thank the staff who worked on the Bill, in particularly the Clerk. At times, the way in which he grouped 30 amendments and a new clause together for discussion has defied brevity, but we managed to struggle through.
It is a shame that the Government have not accepted any of our amendments, not even the grammatical ones or the ubiquitous “musts” instead of “mays” and “shalls”. We will be in the dark about much of the Bill until the full regulations appear, but the Minister has been mindful of that criticism and has endeavoured to give us information whenever she could. However, we look forward to some Christmas presents in the new year.
I am grateful to the Minister, who said that we have penetrated and probed the Bill, but we have not been left as satisfied at the end of the exercise as we might have been. However, the new year will bring a fresh breeze from the Government, who may look more favourably on some of the amendments that we endeavoured to push through, with which they had to agree on principle, if not in word. I look forward to the final stages of the Bill in the House, and I hope that further accord will manifest itself in the Government admitting that we were right on more than one occasion.
In the meantime, I trust that everybody enjoys a very good Christmas and will reflect on the wisdom of the words from hon. Members on both sides of the Committee.