God love 'er.
She had a whole concept with a bill to be brought to the House that was essentially going to cut social welfare payments. She wanted to argue this, this, and that. She had three elements set up for argument. She had planned it in such a manner. Halfway through what she felt was the most important part, it was guillotined, and she lost her chance. Basically, she said, she spent too much time on one part, which was not as important as the other part. When she assumed office, she still thought it was a good idea to do, so she thrust this upon the Conservatives. They were initially pretty angry, but a former Conservative MP at the time, from 1997 to 2015, named Andrew Lansley, was quoted as saying:
I may be wrong about this, but I think it would have been slightly utopian to have imagined that business could proceed without any form of programming. Programming in itself in the House is not regarded as an evil thing, as long as it delivers what Members are looking for.
It is also for the House leaders, of course, which you mentioned earlier, and I respect that.
He was the leader of the House Commons, and in a government memorandum presented to the Procedure Committee, in 2013, after leaving opposition, he stated:
On the basis of the debates and votes on programming over the last 15 years, there now appears to be a clear majority view in the House that, in principle, programming is beneficial to the scrutiny of legislation.
That's why we included this in the discussion paper. We thought that because this came from both sides, it's now being used effectively.
Sir Roger Sands, a former clerk of the United Kingdom House of Commons, also endorses it. There's another quote, if I may.
Margaret Beckett,by the way, whom I mentioned, was the former leader.
Going back to the clerk, his last known public appearance was in 2014, to give evidence to the governance committee. You have the Labour side, you have the Conservative side, and now you have a former clerk himself, Sir Roger Sands, who said:
I am against an approach to procedure which results in debate being conducted as a process of arm-wrestling rather than real engagement; and I think when we had open-ended debate on legislation that was what tended to happen far too often and guillotining
—that is, time allotting—
was the way you broke through. You stopped the arm-wrestling and it was almost the only way to do it.
One of those politicians, with the Liberal Democrats, said to me when I talked to him—and I apologize if I get it wrong, but I paraphrase—that when programming came in, it introduced an element of debate for grown-ups. They were able to distribute the debate process over a period of time following second reading such that they were able to predict when it would end. In other words, they said to the government that if you're going to cut this short, you're going to do it on a timetable we know so that we can plan for it. In some cases, the House leaders did agree, but when the House leaders agreed, which we can do now, which is true, they decided to institute this programming measure by which they were going to do it, and it became much more predictable.
I'm providing that to the debate only because I thought it was something to think about. That's really the reason we put it in this discussion paper. In the study, if we get there, if I get evidence to the contrary, I think we'd all agree that we would get rid of it if we felt that it weren't useful, but I think there's strong enough evidence to look at it—not to institute it, but to look at it and study it.
We can have those witnesses, those people I just mentioned.... One of them, the former Labour person, told me that she is willing talk to the committee by video conference and tell us about their experience in 1997, when they brought it into effect.
I want to thank you for your time.