Modernisation Committee
Oral evidence: Backbench Business Committee and Petitions Committee Debates, HC 152
Tuesday 23 June 2026
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 23 June 2026.
Modernisation Committee members present: Sir Alan Campbell (Chair); Markus Campbell-Savours; Wendy Chamberlain; Bobby Dean; Daniel Francis; Rachel Hopkins; John Lamont; Cat Smith.
Procedure Committee member present: Cat Smith.
Questions 62-99
Witnesses
I: Sir David Natzler KCB, Former Clerk of the House of Commons and Clerk to the House of Commons Reform Committee 2009-2010, Paul Evans CBE, Former Clerk of Committees in the House of Commons and a former Clerk of the Backbench Business Committee, Dr Louise Thompson, University of Manchester, Dr Tom Fleming, UCL Constitution Unit.
Written evidence from witnesses:
– Paul Evans CBE: Written evidence - BBB0021
– Dr Louise Thompson: Written evidence - BBB0004
– Dr Tom Fleming: Written evidence - BBB0017
Witnesses: Sir David Natzler, Paul Evans, Dr Louise Thompson and Dr Tom Fleming.
Q62 Chair: Welcome to today’s Modernisation Committee sitting. This is the third oral evidence session of the Committee’s inquiry into Backbench Business Committee and Petitions Committee debates, in the wider context of how we use time in the Commons.
I am delighted to welcome a panel of experts and academics. Welcome to Sir David Natzler, former Clerk of the House of Commons and former Clerk of the House of Commons Reform Committee; Paul Evans, former Clerk of Committees in the House of Commons and former Clerk of the Backbench Business Committee, who joins us online; Dr Louise Thompson, senior lecturer in politics at the University of Manchester; and Dr Tom Fleming, associate professor at the UCL department of political science and deputy director at the UCL constitution unit. You are all very welcome indeed; thank you for giving us your time.
First, I want to talk a bit about the allocation of time. In your view, should the Backbench Business Committee be allocated more time on days other than Thursdays? What impact do you think that might have?
Dr Tom Fleming: I think it would be a good idea for more Back-Bench business to take place on days other than Thursdays, for two reasons. I think the scheduling on a Thursday—the Wright Committee originally warned against that becoming the dominant pattern, but it has—has an impact on turnout, given the desire of some MPs to get back to their constituencies.
A further knock-on consequence is that it has an impact on the types of motions and topics that get brought up. I think there is a bit of pressure against bringing up votable motions that might lead to Divisions at a time when Members do not really want to be kept around for that. That has meant, over time, a drift away from having those sorts of motions. One of the things the Wright Committee thought would be advantageous about Back-Bench business was there being a chance to vote on concrete propositions rather than general debates on a topic. Moving it to other days, and not just the first Monday after a recess, given other issues there, would perhaps allow more and varied attendance, and more varied types of motions. I do not think it should never be on a Thursday, but having a greater variety than at present would be valuable.
Q63 Chair: Thank you. David, do you want to comment?
Sir David Natzler: I totally agree. The Wright Committee’s idea was to have votable motions. I do not think we were not naive; we know that votable motions mean that Members have to be there, especially if a party Whip is applied. It is hard to imagine the Whips wanting votable motions that were constant free votes, especially if they are on the sort of interesting subjects that the Wright Committee envisaged might be debated. There are conflicts there, in the Members’ time and the Whips’ desire to—I don’t know how you would describe it.
Chair: As a former Chief Whip, I know exactly what you mean.
Sir David Natzler: To keep a bit of discipline.
One thing you might think about on the votable motions is whether there is an argument for deferring votes. If that is the problem, you can still have the debate on the Thursday, or any time you like. You could then say that it is important, if there is a difference of opinion, to know what the House thinks, as opposed to a flabby motion, so let us have a vote at some other point.
Q64 Chair: Would it be problematic to have a limited attendance on the Thursday and ask all Members of the House to cast votes in a deferred Division the following Wednesday?
Sir David Natzler: I don’t think it would. Maybe that is getting beyond the point. In Delegated Legislation Committees, very few people attend and talk about a statutory instrument, and then a few days later there is the possibility, at least, of voting on it in the House. Ditto prayers, if a prayer is brought in, and so on. Members will still, no doubt, take advice from the Whips on which way to vote if it is a party matter. If it is not a party matter, but one on which they want to vote, they do not need to have attended the debate. That would be an unrealistic expectation.
Chair: Not to get into a dialogue here, but on a number of motions, including Government legislation, there is a minority of people in the Chamber at any one time, yet we ask everybody to make the decision.
Dr Louise Thompson: I agree that there is obviously a Thursday problem, which definitely affects attendance at debates, and it is compounded by the squeezing of debates on a Thursday. It affects not just the Chamber but debates in Westminster Hall, so opportunities to have debates on another day would be a good option to try, to see whether it changes attendance.
That is also a reason why, in the evidence I submitted with Cristina Leston-Bandeira, we suggested using Westminster Hall more flexibly. One reason why people often request Chamber debates is because they have a long list of speakers, so if they are either not turning up on a Thursday or there is no space to turn up on a Thursday, that is a bit of a problem. An option might be to move those debates to Westminster Hall, where they will be in a better time slot.
Q65 Chair: We might come later to the number of people who come in for the Petitions Committee debates. It is slightly odd that you get lots of people in Westminster Hall for that but very few people in the Chamber. That is a really important point; thank you. Paul, do you want to come in on the question about Thursdays?
Paul Evans: I do not think I have much to add to what has been said already. There is clearly a trade-off for the Government and Members about using the day. Since the Wright Committee reported, it has become more of an expectation that Members will be free to travel back to their constituencies on Thursday, so the problem has slightly increased.
If you were to have debates on other days of the week, it would possibly be advantageous to think about having shorter debates rather than three-hour debates—perhaps one and half hours—on topics of more immediate interest, and possibly on votable motions. That might be possible to fit around. Quite often, through no fault of their own, the Whips organise something on Mondays, Tuesdays or Wednesdays that peters out or is not full enough. A little more creative thought about fitting Back-Bench business in at other times might be worth thinking about.
Q66 Chair: It is obviously difficult to predict what Tuesdays and Wednesdays might turn out like, because gone are the days when the Whips would go around collecting people and putting them in to ensure things run until 7 o’clock or whatever.
The other issue, which we might touch on later, is Mondays straight after a recess, when invariably you are going to have two, three or more statements. We have had particularly important Back-Bench business debates—all Back-Bench business debates are important—that have been squeezed and pushed to the end of day, and quite frankly it looks terrible. But that is really interesting; thank you for that.
Sir David Natzler: Could I add something on votable motions, which I have been thinking about? The Wright Committee wanted—I will not say it was obsessed with—votable motions because that was not happening on Thursdays; it was Government-led debates. Often a relatively junior Minister was asked to stay behind on Thursday and present a boring piece of Government policy that nobody wanted to debate.
But I think you can go too far to the opposite extreme. I am conscious, from working with the GLA, that they have lots of votable motions, and they keep on expressing what they say is the opinion of Londoners—usually by a majority of, I think, 13 to 11, which is their standard majority—and they know that that is a bit fusionless. It doesn’t really express anything. In that sense, if you are voting on a motion and you know what the outcome of the vote will be, it is perhaps better not to bother to do it. You should do that when you do not know or when serious amendments come forward. On some things, we may be a bit purist and unrealistic in the search for votable motions.
Q67 Chair: Thank you for that. Let me stay on the allocation of time. I will turn away from Thursdays and towards how many days Back-Bench business should get. Thank you, Tom, and your colleague Professor Russell, for your evidence, in which you suggest that a certain number of days per month, rather than a sessional basis, is a better way forward. Can you tell us why you think that is so?
Dr Tom Fleming: The current situation, in which a certain number of days are allocated per Session, was originally premised on the idea that a Session takes roughly the same amount of time—about a year. There are two problems with the sessional allocation, and I should say that this affects Opposition days as well, because the same principle applies. One is that there is no guarantee that, in a Session that runs longer than a year, you will get additional days. The second is that you have no guarantee that those days will happen with any particular regularity. If it is only on a sessional basis, you could go several months without the spirit or letter of that rule being broken.
Having a shorter period—saying, for example, that there should be four Back-Bench days in every four sitting weeks, rather than a month—you would know that they are going to happen and that they are going to do so with a certain amount of regularity. Of course, in the last Session and in previous long Sessions, the Government have voluntarily given more days than they are formally required to, but there is no guarantee that they will always do that, so it seems useful to give Back-Bench time and Opposition time that sort of protection, rather than it being reliant on the good will of future Ministers to extend those days voluntarily.
Q68 Chair: Louise, do you have a view on that?
Dr Louise Thompson: No one we have spoken to in our research has mentioned the allocation—the numbers themselves—as being problematic. I agree with what Tom said about longer parliamentary Sessions and the benefits of getting something written down. We have seen with Opposition day debates that even when things are partially written down, some things continue to rely on informal arrangements. I am thinking of the allocation to smaller parties, which is worked out informally—sometimes it works and sometimes it does not. There is always a benefit to getting it down in writing.
Q69 Chair: It can work both ways, can’t it? When you put it down in writing, it becomes more static. I will let you in on a secret: the Government is sometimes looking to give days to Back-Bench business, because they do not have anything ready at that point in time. Paul, do you want to come in?
Paul Evans: I was going to agree very much with your last comment. I think a monthly allocation is an interesting idea, but one can get too hung up on being over-specific in Standing Orders. It is sometimes worth stating a principle in a Standing Order and hoping it is applied fairly and justly. However mathematically precise you make it, it can always be overridden by the Government if it chooses to. For example, in Standing Order No. 10, relating to Thursday sittings in Westminster Hall, the phrase is that they “shall be divided as nearly as practical equally” between the Liaison Committee and the Backbench Business Committee. I think that is quite a useful way of proceeding. It has its risks, because a Government determined to defy the spirit of the thing can ride roughshod and give less. I am not sure it is a big protection to have it written down.
Q70 Chair: Thank you. David, do you want to come in?
Sir David Natzler: I think the numbers, frankly—I wrote the report in 2010—are fairly random. There are all these nines and eights and 26s and 29s. It is not difficult to work out where the numbers come from. My memory of the negotiations in 2010, when we were bringing the thing into play, is that it could have been two less or four more. As Paul says, the month thing would make everyone feel better, but it could then be ridden roughshod. There could be a motion to disapply it, if that was urgently needed. It would be a waste of the House’s time, unless you think there is a real evil there. There are 20 Opposition days, as opposed to what I think used to be 26 supply days back in the ‘50s and ‘60s. There have always been these numbers around, but—I was going to say they are not biblical, but perhaps they are. I mean, they are not—
Paul Evans: They are not carved in stone.
Sir David Natzler: Indeed. They are not brought down from Mount Sinai. They are fairly random, but if there is not an abuse, I think one can be too prescriptive—I agree with that.
Chair: Not wanting to be too biblical, there are ways of moving in mysterious ways, which is called the usual channels. If you have the usual channels working properly, you can overcome some of this.
Sir David Natzler: Yes certainly.
Q71 Wendy Chamberlain: As the Chief Whip of the third party, which had three Opposition days in a Session that ran for nearly two years, I have great interest in what we have just been discussing, but I will move on.
At the moment, as part of our evidence, we are getting information from other Parliaments on how they address petitions. The submission from Scotland has been interesting, because the Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee looks at each of the petitions and determines which ones should be put forward to requests for debate. Dr Thompson, I believe that you and Professor Leston-Bandeira have suggested that Chamber time be allocated on that more qualitative case-by-case assessment. Can you tell us a bit more about that?
Dr Louise Thompson: We are wary that if petitions debates moved to the Chamber, there would be a requirement for a threshold of so many signatures, which in our view brings all sorts of problems about which debates would benefit. It would tend to be the more organised groups. There are lots of examples of petitions debates that have worked well that fell well below the threshold, but the Petitions Committee made qualitative judgments about the value of having a debate. We suggest that there should not be too many petitions debates—having three or four a year would be plenty—and that they should be special moments in the parliamentary week, where the Petitions Committee feels that there can be value added to those petitions by having them debated in the Chamber.
Wendy Chamberlain: That would be in addition to the current threshold of 100,000 signatures meaning a petition automatically receives a debate.
Dr Louise Thompson: Yes, because the Committee still has to make judgments about which ones will go forward and which ones below the threshold might need to have a debate anyway, even if they have not met the threshold. It might mean thinking about broader, more generic debates that affect a wider range of people, perhaps on petitions that have signatories spread widely across the country. It might be ones that overlap with requests that are already coming from Back-Bench MPs through the Backbench Business Committee or the Speaker’s ballot for debates in Westminster Hall. It would be about there being the need for a debate and demand from MPs as well, which would mean it would really benefit from having Chamber time. That would not be all petitions debates by any means.
Q72 Wendy Chamberlain: Paul, I have a clarification query. When you were in your previous role as Clerk of the Backbench Business Committee, was the Petitions Committee in existence? Would you have looked at what the Petitions Committee and the Backbench Business Committee were doing to ensure that there was a lack of duplication?
Paul Evans: In my time, there was not a Petitions Committee. Gradually the Backbench Business Committee took over the petitions process before the Petitions Committee was created, but we did not have this particular dilemma in my time.
Q73 Wendy Chamberlain: Is there anything else you want to add from that Backbench Business Committee experience?
Paul Evans: It is clear that some debates on petitions have been really interesting and have engaged the national attention, so it seems only right that they might be better taken in the Chamber.
To go back to our earlier discussion, part of the point of taking debates in the Chamber is having them on votable motions. When a debate on a petition in Westminster Hall is packed—the one I remember most vividly is about the legalisation of marijuana, but there have been plenty of others—the words can be spoken, and people can be engaged and watch it, although the Public Gallery is disappointingly small for that purpose. So the debate takes place, but it would be more dramatic in the Chamber. You would then have the question of whether you allow petitions to be debated on a substantive motion—I do not know. But clearly, some petitions debates are more exciting and interesting than some Backbench Business debates, and we should acknowledge that.
Q74 Wendy Chamberlain: There is absolutely no doubt that sometimes, if people are only engaging with Parliament through Petitions Committee debates, having signed a petition, the bottom line is that beyond the Minister’s response, there is no requirement for further Government action. The public expectation on that can be quite difficult to manage.
Paul Evans: That takes us into the different area of how the Petitions Committee might do more follow-up on petitions, but yes, it is certainly true.
Q75 Wendy Chamberlain: Thank you. Tom or David, do you have any further thoughts on this question?
Sir David Natzler: I am not speaking for the Wright Committee, but going back to those years, we said that petitions needed to be geed up. That took five years—in fact, it took the coalition Administration setting up their No. 10 website, which we took over five years later. Credit to them for that, because we were falling over ourselves with undue complexity in trying to set up a website. It has been great.
Where I disagree with Paul is that I do not think that something should be in the Chamber because it is more dramatic, better attended or, even, more interesting. That belittles Westminster Hall. I do not think that there being high levels of attendance at a petition debate means that it is automatically better off in the Chamber, where, incidentally, the debate would look a lot emptier to anyone watching it. There was a recent debate on legislation in Westminster Hall—
Chair: We speak of little else.
Sir David Natzler: Indeed; we have to read something in these long hours. The debate was ultimately about the Terminally Ill Adults Bill, and it was suggested that so many people attended, that it should have been in the Chamber. Reading it, I thought, “Why? All the people are here, there’s room for all the Members and it’s a wonderful space for debating with about 15 people, which the Chamber isn’t.” If you are going to get 200 people and a lot of kayaking and all, fine, have it in the Chamber, but you can have really good events in Westminster Hall. We do not want to play that down.
Secondly, yes, I agree—I think you were talking about the Scottish Parliament system—that the Petitions Committee should be empowered, and I think are empowered, to make qualitative judgments. They make those anyway. I read two successive Westminster Hall petitions debates last year, both of which were engendered by Chris Packham, the “Springwatch” presenter. One was about driven grouse, which is a subject of great interest to a lot of people, but in a way, it was a useless debate, because there was nobody on the other side and Ministers had nothing to say. There is that danger. If you are a celebrity or—he is more than a celebrity—a leader in your world, you can get 100,000 people to sign to get a debate, but there needs to be a qualitative judgment on whether it is actually something we want to debate, or just something we feel strongly about.
Wendy Chamberlain: Or something we agree on. Tom, do you have anything to add?
Dr Tom Fleming: The only thing I would add is that I agree with the other speakers that it would be useful to have some of these debates in the Chamber. One thing it would be useful to guard against is a perception among petitioners and the public that those are in some way better or more important, so there being pressure for their petition to go to the Chamber rather than Westminster Hall. I know that the Petitions Committee already does a lot of active communication with petitioners about these things, but if you use the criteria that Louise talked about, which I think are sensible, making sure that they are widely understood, rather than it seeming like a prize for the somehow “better” petitions or ones that have a more important outcomes, would be valuable.
Q76 Wendy Chamberlain: Paul, you suggested providing a couple of BBCom days to petition debates or using Adjournment debates to debate petitions. Will you tell us a bit more about what you believe the benefits of that would be?
Paul Evans: Again, this is about my belief that you can have a good debate in a shorter time, if there are topics that need to come up. The half-hour Adjournment debates at the end of the day are the property of one Member and one Minister and, although important and useful, they could take place perfectly well in Westminster Hall, for example. We could swap that idea around a bit and say that on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, for example, the half-hour is extended to an hour and it is allocated to a petition, or something like that. That would be one idea. It would get the petition headlines, and that would be useful. It would get the ministerial answer. And with a bit of discipline, a significant number of Members—maybe a dozen if you are lucky—can take part in a debate over an hour. That was one thought.
It is a qualitative judgment. I very much take the point that we should not diminish the importance of Westminster Hall. Back at the turn of the century, when it was being set up by the Modernisation Committee, I was pretty sceptical about Westminster Hall, but I think it is one of the most successful innovations that the former Modernisation Committee came up with; I think that was brilliant. So we mustn’t diminish it. As David pointed out, the nature of Westminster Hall and how it works produce a different kind of debate, which, again, is a positive aspect of it.
I do still think that BBCom should not be timid about looking at its list of potential topics and saying, “Actually, this one, from the Petitions Committee, is more interesting, more exciting, and likely to command wider public interest than some of the others we have, and we will give it time on the Floor of the House.”
Q77 Wendy Chamberlain: Thank you. Is there anybody else with other thoughts on potentially more creative ways of delivering more Petitions Committee debates?
Dr Louise Thompson: This is more a word of caution from when we were thinking about the matter and putting our evidence together. If you have petitions debates in the Chamber, one issue is going to be that there is less likely to be a fixed time for them. That is compared with Westminster Hall, where everything runs much more to plan. If you are bringing a lot of petitioners down to Parliament to watch these debates, that could be an issue. It also links to the Thursday problem about how business times can change—
Wendy Chamberlain: It’s a Backbench Business Committee problem, too, because often, dare I say it, topics are being brought forward by Members from third sector organisations and so on, and they are working very hard to bring people with an interest to Parliament. So it is a fair point.
Q78 Bobby Dean: I am thinking about allocation of time again and the rise in prominence of statements and UQs. Some of you have given commentary on that already, but could you remark on the general trends you have seen in both the volume and usage of UQs and statements? I am happy to go to Sir David first.
Sir David Natzler: Well, yes, just as the oldest—it’s a totally different world, in a very short space of time, and it was completely not foreseen by the Wright Committee in 2010 or 2009; maybe we should have. Mr Bercow’s discovery of the urgent question changed the parliamentary calendar. I have nothing more to say than that, really. I am not saying it is good or bad, but it certainly has happened. I assume it’s reversible, but I don’t know when. Things do change unexpectedly, but I get the impression that the House likes UQs.
Q79 Bobby Dean: Could you elaborate on the relationship with, for instance, Backbench Business Committee debates? I know that one of the original visions was that it would be quite responsive to topical issues. Do you think people just see UQs as a better avenue for that, because you apply for a Backbench debate and you might not get heard for months because the waiting list is so long, whereas you know that a UQ is going to be heard on the day?
Sir David Natzler: That I don’t know, and I wasn’t aware of that proposition. I imagine that to get a UQ, there is still a reasonably high bar. It may not seem so to the Ministers who have to answer, but there are not 10 a day, and they have to be urgent or topical. They are not just about driven grouse—sorry, I am obsessed with driven grouse. UQs are not just on an interesting subject; they do have to hang on the peg of something having happened or being about to happen. But I have heard people say that Members reckon, “Oh, I can get a UQ on that.”
Q80 Chair: It is more topical, isn’t it? It is sometimes difficult to get topicality into a debate about petitions. Especially if you are doing a limited number of petitions, either in Westminster Hall or in the main Chamber, to make them topical is quite difficult, but UQs are immediate.
Sir David Natzler: To some extent, we went through this with topical debates. If you remember, they did not have to be topical—it was just a means of limiting Ministers’ prolixity because they were time-limited in how long they could speak—but they were called topical debates. They were a Modernisation Committee idea. Topical questions are not, of course, topical; they are just given without notice. They may just be the ones that did not get reached in the list.
We should be cautious about the word “topical”. I was just reading a big article about universities and their troubles. Is that topical? Nothing has actually happened, but it is happening all the time and for those to whom it is happening it is pretty topical—it could and indeed will last for months or years. It could be about anything in the social security system. Topical does not have to mean that it is a headline in today’s newspaper. Jack Weatherill’s interpretation of urgent questions was that the issue had to be on the “Today” programme—it was as simple as that—and if it was not on the “Today” programme, it was not urgent.
Q81 Bobby Dean: You make a good point. Members can be quite creative in how they apply today’s news to the subject matter they want to raise.
Paul Evans: Urgent questions have grown enormously in the last 10 to 15 years. It is ironic that although urgent questions are triggered by a non-Government Member asking them, the Minister has first dibs on them because they give the response to the question. It is Government time eating back into the allocation of time for the Opposition—although that is rare—and more frequently to Back Benchers. That is unfortunate. Not only has the number of UQs grown, but so has the time allocated to them. Back in the day, when David and I were boys, a UQ would get 10 or 20 minutes of discussion. They were modelled more on an oral question with supplementaries in normal question time than on the statement style that we now have.
There are several ways we should encourage a rowing back on this proliferation of time devoted to UQs. We could perhaps tighten the criteria or set a time limit on how long a UQ can continue for. However, the way UQs are eating into important business—whether Government or Back Bench—is a problem that needs to be addressed. All business is Back-Bench business. Where the evil is greatest is on days when there is programmed legislation and much of the time is then wiped away by UQs or statements before it. It is a topic that needs addressing as UQs have enlarged and grown and need to be reduced somehow.
Dr Tom Fleming: There is a case for looking at how the time spent on these could be constrained or reduced. They cause two different problems: one is that they squeeze the time for later business; the other is that they make the starting time of later business less predictable. That is obviously not ideal for Members. However, it is also not ideal for members of the public who want to pay attention to a debate on something that they care about. There is a risk that suggesting the time for UQs should be constrained or curbed sounds like trying to curb opportunities for scrutiny. However, Paul is absolutely right that there is a trade-off here in that other Members of the House also have an interest in business later in the day having a decent and predictable amount of time spent on it.
Chair: You can make the same argument about statements. There was a time when statements were 45 minutes—some were never going to be 45 minutes, and they were not, but many statements were about 45 minutes. Now they run until everybody has been taken, which is different.
Wendy Chamberlain: If I can just make an observation, the other challenge is the reduced numbers of Members putting in to speak in the substantive Government business. That is, first, because they wonder whether they will get any time at all; and secondly, because if they do get any time, it will be much reduced because a time limit will be applied from the offset.
Chair: Let us move on to the question of scheduling and bring in the Chair of the Procedure Committee, Cat Smith, who is guesting with us today. You are very welcome, Cat.
Q82 Cat Smith: Thank you for letting me guest on your Committee. Before I turn to some questions on scheduling, I would like to pick up on something. In the last Parliament, I was Chair of the Petitions Committee, and there was a real difference being drawn out there about the different people who start petitions. There is a massive difference between third sector charities that start petitions, their experience of Parliament and what they see as success, and the sort of people who almost accidentally find themselves starting petitions. The ones that come to mind are 3 Dads Walking and parents who have lost children to allergies after being exposed to foods they were allergic to, and their perception of what a good petition and success looked like.
It strikes me that you also have a real variation in how petitions are used in different Parliaments. Certainly, at the end of the last Parliament, before the general election, there were many petitions that I saw grouped together to meet the threshold—Louise, I think you were touching on that—because you have that flexibility in order basically to fill slots in Westminster Hall. In this Parliament, we are seeing petitions used a lot more, and there is almost a queue—petitions are being debated when they have almost stopped being topical because of the length of time it takes to get a slot in Westminster Hall.
It strikes me—I do not know whether you would agree—that there needs to be some flexibility in whatever system we come up with, because each Parliament always looks very different from the last. We might design a system that works really well for 2026, but in 10 years’ time, are we going to do Parliament very differently and have very different expectations? I just wonder whether there needs to be that flexibility. It is an open question to anybody—or maybe nobody wants to pick it up.
Sir David Natzler: Louise is the expert on petitions, but yes, you are right. Things look very different every 10 years, and we do not change the system fast enough to keep up with that or recognise what is happening. The main thing is that there is someone—the petitioner—who is watching what does happen.
Having read quite a lot of Backbench Business in preparation for coming here, it is quite different from what I thought, and it is changing. Incidentally, it is much better than people might say, I think, after reading them—I include Adjournment debates and everything—but I do not suppose many people do.
You are the Committee that perhaps can do that, but be aware of what is actually happening, not what you think is happening because of what your colleagues tell you. It may be different.
Q83 Cat Smith: Turning to my questions on scheduling, for BBCom and petitions debates—this is an open question to everyone—what do you think the benefits of the Chamber are versus Westminster Hall and vice versa?
Dr Louise Thompson: This was one of the big questions that underpinned the research that Cristina and I have been doing on Back-Bench debates and petitions debates. We absolutely do not want to suggest that Westminster Hall is ever a second-best option. It is a really valuable place to hold debates.
The big difference, from what we have found in our research, is that Chamber debates tend to be much better at raising awareness of an issue, breaking the stigma around something and using the visibility element. Debates in Westminster Hall are more valuable in terms of the sort of things that would be raised, having more specific proposals rather than very general debates.
We found that Government Ministers are much more likely to make—smaller, obviously—policy commitments during Westminster Hall debates than in the Chamber. I am not saying that never happens in the Chamber—it does—but Chamber debates tend to be more of a platform for other things, from what we have noticed.
In relation to petitions debates particularly, debates in Westminster Hall tend to be less partisan, and that proximity of MPs and Ministers to the public is a special thing that you do not get in Chamber debates. Certainly, people we have spoken to who sat in the Gallery during a Westminster Hall debate have said that they really value that. It is a powerful thing to sit there so close to MPs and a Minister and actually hear your case and your stories being talked about. That is something you just do not get in the Chamber.
Alongside that, there is the interaction you get with Ministers afterwards—there are all those lovely photos of people on the stairs in Westminster Hall. There was a brain cancer debate last week and there was a lovely photo of all the people who had attended. You get that conversation much more than with debates that happen in the Chamber.
Q84 Cat Smith: Does anyone else want to come in on that?
Dr Tom Fleming: We have already covered some of the things in the earlier discussion, but another distinction between them that is useful in different ways is the point about predictability that Louise has made already. If you have members of the public coming to watch a debate that they triggered, having the debate start and end at times they know will be roughly right is very valuable.
Paul Evans: I was just going to pick up on Sir David’s point about how slow we are to catch up with changes in the culture of the place and what brings in the customers—in other words, the viewers who want to hear what Parliament has to say about a topic. Petitions strike me as an example of that. They have been enormously successful on their own terms, so limiting them to three hours on a Monday afternoon perhaps feels a bit stingy, and there may be more opportunities to debate them. I am generally in favour of having more short debates. The belief that everybody has to say everything, even though some things have already been said, is not a positive aspect of how we manage Parliament. Trying to find more room for petitions and for shorter debates in Westminster Hall and the Chamber would be a positive ambition to have.
Q85 Cat Smith: Louise, in your evidence you set out that you believe that the Backbench Business Committee should control the entirety of business in Westminster Hall, because at the moment it is split between different systems. Could you explain a bit more about that?
Dr Louise Thompson: I should clarify that we were not suggesting that the Backbench Business Committee takes over the allocation of petitions debates or Liaison Committee slots; it is more that we think the Backbench Business Committee should look after the slots in Westminster Hall that are currently allocated through the Speaker’s ballot. It is partly that Westminster Hall has evolved, and if you were designing it from scratch, you probably would not have had these two systems in place.
Certainly, when we have spoken to people, there is a lot of confusion, particularly among new MPs, about what the different routes are to a Backbench debate. It is not really clear what the value is in going through one route compared with another. The Speaker’s ballot is much less time-consuming; they get, from what we understand, a lot more applications, and it is very quick and easy. A Backbench Business Committee application is obviously more time-consuming, and you have to go and find a list of speakers, but ultimately, certainly if you are applying for a Westminster Hall slot, you are getting the same thing at the end of it. It feels like there are two processes that are ultimately for an identical kind of debate.
Alongside that, we have very much felt that, certainly in the last couple of Parliaments, the Backbench Business Committee has been much more a processor of debates. It runs a waiting list system where more or less everybody who arrives presents a request and goes on the waiting list. That is very different from BBCom in the 2010 Parliament, when it saw itself much more as a kind of representative of Back Benchers and was a bit more of a decision maker. Having more flexibility around the slots in Westminster Hall would give BBCom the space to use things a bit better and perhaps mix up debates so you do not have to have certain slots at certain times on certain days, and the whole system would be easier and more transparent.
Q86 Chair: Was the 2010 system better than having a long waiting list?
Dr Louise Thompson: It is more that, at the moment, it feels like you come before the Committee, you present your case and it is a very long process to just get on a waiting list, but you could have already put yourself in the Speaker’s ballot anyway. Certainly, MPs we have spoken to say that they will go through the Speaker’s ballot first and only if they are unsuccessful several times will they then go to BBCom, so it feels like they are both doing the same thing.
Q87 Bobby Dean: There have been a couple of points made by both Paul and Dr Louise that make me wonder whether the issue is at all procedural or whether it is cultural. There seems to be a sense that we must be fair to MPs, and they must all get to have their own say; everyone gets to say the same thing repeatedly in the debates, and all Back-Bench applications are basically going to be approved, unless for some reason, they are null and void. Is it a process question that we are seeking to answer, or is it more on Speakers and Committee Chairs to be a bit more judgmental about who gets to say what and what a quality debate looks like and to manage that rather than just allow everybody to have their say and their piece, no matter what happens?
Dr Louise Thompson: I think it is a bit of both. It is a process thing about what is the value of going before BBCom and what is it going to do with your representations? Alongside that, it is the Backbench Business Committee thinking what is its own purpose. Should it really be thinking about what is the value of this debate? What is not coming before Parliament already? How can we maximise the value by maybe linking up with things? There are probably MPs putting in identical topics in the Speaker’s ballot as well as MPs presenting similar topics to BBCom, but nobody knows what anybody else is doing. If you go before BBCom, you do not know if other MPs are putting in the Speaker’s ballot for the same thing. It just feels like there is a lot of repetition and it could all be streamlined.
Paul Evans: To answer your question, Chair, it was better in 2010, yes. The 2010 to 2015 system made more judgments, more choices and sometimes made hard choices about which debates deserved priority. There was not the concept of the waiting list. The fight pretty much started anew every Tuesday afternoon, and it was perhaps planned only three weeks in advance. There are advantages to that system, and I would reinforce what Louise has just said about making choices and avoiding this system, which we have sort of slipped into, where everything is decided by a raffle and by luck rather than by judgment.
When Westminster Hall debates were originally conceived, in the imagination of its designers it was going to have Government business in it. It was much more evenly split. It turned out the Government did not want to use Westminster Hall for non-controversial business, for reasons that I cannot explain. It became totally Back-Bench time—more Back-Bench time than the designers of Westminster Hall originally envisaged. We have not addressed the question of how to use that time more creatively or more fruitfully head-on in time. The idea of the Backbench Business Committee taking over the balloted debates is no bad idea at all. Broadly, I think it is worth experimenting with.
Sir David Natzler: Can I perhaps come in on that? I read Louise and Cristina’s book. There is a danger in believing that because something is incoherent, it is also chaotic. It is certainly incoherent, and you can do the experiment by picking up Hansard and reading through a week of Westminster Hall debates. I could not tell you, because I have forgotten, how each one of them was chosen. In the old days, the Member would say, “I am most grateful to Mr Speaker”, or, “I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee”. Often, they do not bother to say that now, so you have no idea how this debate has appeared. There is just the usual apology for any absence; despite the APPG members all promising they would turn up, most of them have actually buggered off—they have gone elsewhere.
You read these debates thinking that they have just arrived in some funny way. Is that a bad thing? It is not just the Speaker but the Chairman of Ways and Means who has a particular interest in Westminster Hall. The fact of the ballot, if we call it that, or the means by which they choose who is to have these endless slots, both in the Chamber and in Westminster Hall, does give the occupants of the Chair some disciplinary power over Members of the House, which they would be sorry to lose. I can say that, but I do not know if they would feel the same—you can ask them.
In other words, I think there is a system of reward, sometimes. You are very likely to come out well in the ballot if you do something helpful relating to the House’s business. In other words, if you do not persist on something else, if you did not get reached or if there was a cock-up of some sort. The idea that this can all be run by a single Committee is, I think, a little bit Soviet. The idea that there are quite a lot of centres of authority—and there are lots of centres of authority here—should also apply to the distribution of Back-Bench business.
Q88 Daniel Francis: I heard what was said earlier about trying to avert the perception that some petition debates might be more prestigious than others. If the Petitions Committee was given time in the Chamber, what do you think the criteria and the threshold for that might be?
Dr Tom Fleming: Louise has already laid out various thoughts, which I agree with, but the key point I would take from it is that having an arbitrary numerical threshold would be a mistake and would feed into the idea that more popular or more widely supported debates are the ones that get into the Chamber. It should be based on what is distinct about the Chamber and what is distinct about Westminster Hall, and what sorts of debates should therefore happen in each place.
Paul Evans: I very much agree. I think the 100,000 floor might be kept, but beyond that I would not advocate using numbers as the determining factor. In very shorthand, is it a debate of national importance or concern, or is it a debate of specific concern—a more narrow debate? That would be my first sift criteria if I were trying to design it.
Q89 Daniel Francis: Do you have a view on oversubscribed debates? We have had a couple. I am not quite clear how we got there, though. There was the famous SEND debate when there were no seats in the room and people were trying to stand up. I do not know whether it was because people had not advised that they wished to speak. There are two recent examples where there were too many Members for the seats in Westminster Hall.
Dr Tom Fleming: That seems to me a case for trying to find a bigger room, but not necessarily for those debates being in the Chamber. The building has real material constraints. However, that is not an argument for that debate needing to be in the Chamber just because more MPs want to take part. That is not the main criterion you would want to use when evaluating this.
Dr Louise Thompson: My colleague Cristina found in her research that, in terms of petitioners and what they are looking for in a debate, high attendance of MPs did not make much difference to how they perceived the value of a debate. It was more about what happened—whether their concerns were acknowledged, and that kind of thing.
On Westminster Hall sometimes being oversubscribed, in the past there has been an overflow room that is used for visitors when the Gallery is full. One other thing we found is that it can be quite difficult to anticipate which debates are going to be well-attended and which are not. There have been times when people have been taken by surprise by how many people have attended a debate. We mentioned the migraine debate in our evidence as one of those. The MP running it was so surprised by how many people attended that her own office staff could not go along to watch the debate that they had helped to prepare for because the Public Gallery was so full. However, as Tom says, that does not necessarily mean that debate should be in the Chamber.
Sir David Natzler: Could I just say one thing about Backbench Business generally? Reading it—unlike Louise, I am not backed up by a huge university department full of postgraduate researchers and so on—I was struck by how much time was taken up by non-Back Benchers. The idea is that Back-Bench time is for Back Benchers, but there is also the third party, or the third and fourth parties—I am being cautious, but I do not mean just the two Front Benches. Quite a lot of time is taken up by a Minister and an Opposition spokesman. I think it is quite big for some of them to get their day in the sun in these debates.
Q90 Wendy Chamberlain: What usually happens is that at the start, the Chair in Westminster Hall will see what time they want to bring in the third party spokesperson, and then gives an indication of the time that people should take and whether they are going to apply a time limit.
Sir David Natzler: At least when I used to clerk Westminster Hall, there was a ration on the time taken by Front Benches of all sorts. If you are talking about Back-Bench debates, it is just worth thinking about what proportion is not Back Benchers talking at all, and it must be statistically discoverable. That is not to say that you do not want the Minister, and probably the Opposition and third party spokesmen. None the less, it is something that occurred to me.
Paul Evans: If I may add to that, if you look at Congress, where they do not have Ministers, you will see that there is an advantage to having Ministers. Back Benchers are always doing the debates, and I must say that they often seem completely pointless, because they are just arguing with each other, rather than eliciting a Government view. There is a balance. The Government and Opposition parties’ views are a significant and important part of what the conversation is about as well. That is just a slight counterweight.
Q91 Daniel Francis: A 30-minute debate is like an Adjournment debate in which only the Minister can respond, not the Opposition. What is your view on the rationale between that and a 60-minute debate? In a 60-minute debate, Back Benchers do not get to partake very much because the time is taken by the Opposition spokespersons.
Sir David Natzler: I think you just said it.
Q92 Daniel Francis: I think the difference between a 30-minute debate and a 60-minute debate is probably that only two other Back Benchers would get in.
Sir David Natzler: I think you can do the maths.
Paul Evans: A 90-minute debate is more plausible, I think.
Chair: I want to move on to something we touched on about managing demand.
Q93 John Lamont: Sir David, can I go back to something you said earlier in response to how time is allocated in Westminster Hall on the Tuesdays and Wednesdays and by the Chairman of Ways and Means through the Speaker’s ballot. You suggested that sometimes people get preferential treatment in that ballot. Did I misunderstand what you were saying: sometimes if you do a favour or something helpful in other aspects of the working of the House, you might get a slot?
Sir David Natzler: No, I did not mean to present it as such a crude quid pro quo. I am not the person to answer this question, but you can ask the Speaker’s Office how the ballot is conducted. I do not know what answer you will get. I have not seen it. I have never seen a ballot.
Q94 John Lamont: There is not really a ballot—is that maybe what you are insinuating?
Paul Evans: It is a modified ballot.
Q95 John Lamont: It’s a stitch-up.
Sir David Natzler: It is a remarkable coincidence that the parties go A, B, A, B, and then sometimes C as to who gets the half-hour Adjournment. There could of course be several ballots, as I mentioned. There are slots that have to be filled and there are people who apply. It is up to the Speaker how to conduct it, 100%, and the Clerks have nothing to do with it, which is why I can now speak a bit out of turn. But you should ask the Speaker and his staff if you want to know what happens.
Q96 John Lamont: That is very helpful. I did wonder how it worked, but you have clarified that for me. Thank you.
Both the Backbench Business Committee and the Petitions Committee experience very high demand. How do you think that demand might be managed more effectively? Tom, do you want to go first?
Dr Tom Fleming: I would go back to Paul and his encouragement of the Backbench Business Committee to take a more active role in prioritising and selecting, rather than simply things being added to the back of a queue. There is obviously the potential for a hybrid of that: one week you allocate a slot in a particular way and the other week you have more of a queue system. Or you could have reserves. One argument that I think one of your previous witnesses made against the idea of not having the queue is that when suddenly a slot emerges at short notice, it is useful to have something you can drop into that. If Government business that was expected on a given day does not happen, that does not necessarily mean you have to have a queue, but you could say, “For the next four weeks we have chosen these four debates, and these two that are on a reserve list could be dropped in at short notice if the sponsoring Member is happy to do it.” That would seem a way of ensuring you are not simply shepherding things into an orderly line but deciding what the House should actually discuss in the next four weeks.
Paul Evans: I think it is very hard to regulate demand. To an extent, it becomes self-regulating. I think the pattern has been fairly consistent through Parliament since 2010, but it tails off from the middle of the Parliament onwards and the demand begins to slow. That is predictable.
At its most extreme, the Backbench Business Committee could decide more strategically to say, “We are going to have six international affairs and defence debates, and six social security debates”, or something like that. And it could say, “When they’ve been taken, they’ve been taken, and that is the end of it for this Session.” That would be a very extreme version, but I think they could do a little more to think about where the gaps are and to have a general and preferably public view on what kind of balance they are trying to achieve between different areas of debate. That would have a dampening effect on, as it were, random demand for debates. But those are quite hard suggestions. They are quite radical ones. I do not see any other practical way of reducing demand except by taking away the waiting list or saying that the waiting list is cleared at the end of a set period—three months or a parliamentary term or whatever. That would perhaps mean people saved up their applications for a more timely moment, rather than just bunging them in and waiting to see what happens.
Q97 John Lamont: Do you think there might be a case for limiting how many applications someone can make or support? Or perhaps someone could only support applications if they had spoken in the previous debates they had applied for. A lot of MPs support applications and then do not participate in the debate if it is successful.
Paul Evans: If the secretariat had sufficient resources to count those things, the Backbench Business Committee could be free to apply such criteria. They should publish them, rather than exercise them silently. Yes, they could certainly develop a set of criteria that might help limit demand in those ways you suggest.
Dr Louise Thompson: I will not repeat what I said earlier about BBCom becoming a decision maker, but that is obviously one way of dealing with it. It is probably about having more joint debates and more overlap between debates. On petitions, it is perhaps the Petitions Committee and BBCom being in more regular communication, so they can identify where there is overlap between petitions and MPs’ interests.
I think Natascha Engel said in a previous session that, when MPs apply for BBCom debates, they should say whether it is relevant to an e-petition at the moment. That would be one way to do it—managing it by bringing people and MPs’ debates together a bit more. Select Committee inquiries are another area where you can see that overlap at times, and that works really well with petitions in particular.
Sir David Natzler: Forgive me, I have to get to Scotland. The Wright Committee imagined that quite a lot of this stuff would be taken up by Select Committee debates. We were obviously completely wrong. Select Committees do not seem to want to have their reports debated. The slot for Chairs to make a statement is quite popular, I gather, but there are no resolutions coming forward. Some Select Committees produce their reports and then that’s it. They have had a reply; they do not want to have a debate. Knowing how wrong we were about that—the mood was that Select Committees were disappointed they could not get their reports debated—now that they can get them debated, they do not seem to want to, and I don’t know why.
Q98 John Lamont: Is that because of the slot they get given? I know from Committees I have served on that, when the opportunity to have a debate has been there, it is usually on a Thursday when we would often be rushing back to our constituencies. Maybe it is because they have not been given a prime-time slot.
Wendy Chamberlain: If I could come in, John, is part of it the turnover we have had in MPs in recent elections, which means that people do not actually know?
Dr Tom Fleming: Could I add one thing to the suggestion about keeping track of Members who support a debate and then do not attend? It might be a little unfair to limit their later opportunities, especially with the current queueing system. The time gap between when they said they would like to support a debate on this topic and the point at which they discover the day that debate is going to happen could be quite long. It does not seem obvious that MPs are making a commitment to show up, given how the system actually works.
Chair: David, if you need to go.
Sir David Natzler: I am sorry; it is very discourteous.
Chair: Not at all; it is not discourteous. Thank you for your time.
Sir David Natzler: I am spending the night in Lancashire on the way.
Chair: Thank you very much for your time and evidence. Does anybody else want to ask a question?
Q99 Markus Campbell-Savours: Do the Backbench Business Committee and the Petitions Committee have an opportunity to work together? Dr Thompson has already touched on that. Do Mr Evans or Dr Fleming have a view on whether there is scope for more co-ordinated working between the two Committees?
Dr Tom Fleming: I don’t have a great deal to add to what Louise said, beyond saying that it would be valuable to keep a distinction between debating specific petitions that members of the public have written and supported, and selecting debates that MPs have proposed, with that selection perhaps being informed by what petitions have been out there. Maintaining that difference would be to avoid the risk that people who have supported a petition see a debate linked to it but maybe the motion is worded in a way that they have not supported. Avoiding the risk of taking away a petitioner’s sense of agency in deciding what is discussed is worth bearing in mind if there were such co-ordination.
Paul Evans: They are able to work together now if they choose to do so. It should be encouraged; they should talk to each other, particularly if the issue of trying to get petitions debated on the Floor becomes a live one. That would certainly require co-ordination.
Chair: Louise, do you want to come in on that?
Dr Louise Thompson: I don’t think I have much to add. The Petitions Committee worked with Select Committees more frequently in the past, though there is a bit of a lull now. There are some really good examples of when that worked well. Mortality rates in maternity care is one example where the Petitions Committee identified something that the Health and Social Care Committee was already working on, and the two came together. It does not necessarily have to be a debate. In that case, it was Petitions going before the Select Committee to give evidence. It is about trialling lots of different options, not necessarily thinking the only outcome of joint working is ultimately a Chamber or Westminster Hall debate.
Chair: Does anybody else want to ask any questions? Thank you very much indeed. That has been a long session but very helpful to us. Thank you not only for being here today but for your written evidence.