The three speeches/headings immediately before

1. 1 earlier: Lembit Öpik

   I agree that targets should not be enshrined in legislation. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that a classic case in point is the mandate from the Government to the banks to lend more? Despite all that enormous pressure, the banks still are not lending enough to small businesses. Changing the law will not change that attitude.

2. 2 earlier: Charles Clarke

   I do not agree with the hon. Gentleman. I am in favour of an elected second Chamber, but I believe that the Labour party has made major advances in addressing that issue. The difficulty is that there is no consensus on what the change should be. There are some people who, perhaps like the hon. Gentleman and me, favour an elected second Chamber; there are some who favour a unicameral system; and there are others who favour an entirely appointed system. We have not made a change because there is no consensus, and it is not right to criticise the Labour party in that way.

   We have not dealt properly with arrangements for peers' remuneration and allowances, but we should do so. In addition, the public would appreciate knowing that the timing of a general election will not be subject to the considerations and manipulations of crude party politics. That means legislating for fixed-term parliaments, which almost all other comparable countries have. That could still be done in the final Session of this Parliament and, I suggest, could be considered on a free vote. Certainly, we on the Labour Benches have good reason to know, following the experiences of both 1978 and 2007, that for a Labour Prime Minister the ability to choose the date of the general election is not always an unalloyed blessing.

   Though I believe that the measures to clean up politics should be pursued on an all-party basis, without partisanship, and that they could be, I believe that they would have a major benefit to Labour since it is Labour, as the governing party, which in my opinion has suffered most from the public's declining confidence in the conduct of our politics, and it is our job to try and put that right in a non-partisan way.

   Finally, it may be claimed that, in the short parliamentary Session ahead of us, there is no space to deal with the additional measures that I have proposed. If that case were to be made, I would suggest dropping some of the other measures proposed-in particular, those that appear to enshrine in legislation and so subject to interminable and expensive legal contention goals and targets that ought to be the normal business of government. Those seem to come from the "new Bill of Rights" or "NHS constitution" school of thought, which would benefit only lawyers' bank balances and render government more ineffective.

   It should, for example, be possible for the Chancellor of the Exchequer to subject the Secretary of State for Education to the normal fiscal disciplines, without having recourse to a fiscal responsibility Act of Parliament. Our correct and important ambitions in relation to child poverty and international development will not be strengthened by statutory requirements, nor will precise performance targets for health or education be helped by statutory underpinning. Those approaches owe less to good government than to a premature expectation of defeat in advance of the general election.

3. 3 earlier: Simon Hughes

   Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the Labour party has failed abysmally to reform the second Chamber, which is the largest entirely unelected second Chamber in Europe, if not the world? Rather than a draft Bill to tinker with it, if the Government really wanted to be seen as reformers, they ought to get rid of the hereditary principle and have an elected Chamber on the statute book before the election.