Speeches by Lamb.

“It is very clear here that, in the first instance, all these announcements should be made to the House. The fact that they will come to the House later, or that you might want a Secretary of State to be there, is not the current wording of the code.”

“It may not be your interpretation, but from a plain reading of the text, that would clearly be a breach. There will be a problem here, if Ministers are allowed to have their own interpretation of what these things mean. If we look back at the Labour manifesto—”

“I would have to go back and find it again, but certainly it is covered within the document.”

“No, but “Erskine May” is.”

“It is broad, but it is also specific that announcements need to be made to the House first.”

“On that point, one reason why it is an expectation of the House is presumably because it is part of “Erskine May”, and consequently forms part of what the judicial system would consider to be the correct practice of the House were anything ever to be judicially reviewed. It is not simply up to whether the Prime Ministe…”

“We have instances where announcements were made without documents having been published to the House first. Even if you do not accept that, the general principle here appears to be that there are complications with the current arrangements because we now live in a 24-media environment. I accept that, and I accept that …”

“It may well have been published to the House first, but we did not have any announcement.”

“I think everyone would accept as a reason why a statement is not given is that Parliament is not sitting. During recess or over the weekend, if something is critical, it makes sense for it not to go to Parliament. I am a little more concerned about the statement that it would be reasonable for someone not to make a sta…”

“But the Ministerial Code says that the first instance should be to Parliament, not that it should come to Parliament on the same day. The Speaker has written to the Committee, I think, because there seems to be a pattern in which it is possible to give the excuse that Parliament does not happen to be sitting at that mi…”

“I take the point about precedents. It is useful for us, in considering this, to consider whether the general trajectory is such that the convention should be adjusted, if every Government struggle with it. We heard the figure, the ratio of announcements made to the House and to Parliament, and it has been put to us a n…”

“In which case the statistic that would be relevant here is what proportion of the most important announcements have been made to the House. The figure is not relevant; the point is the repeated breaches, where significant announcements are made at times when they really should have gone to Parliament, and when Parliame…”

“I think anyone would have felt that the strategic defence review was one, particularly given the level of briefing and the fact that journalists appeared to receive all the information about it before Parliament did. That was a fairly significant breach of parliamentary privilege.”

“On that point, Chair—”

“Following up on that last point, I studied project management quite a while back, and what you appear to have set out is the standard programme management process for dealing with projects. There is no doubt in my mind that the ONS would have originally had that in place across all its projects, because that is the sta…”

“That is to monitor when things have gone wrong, but the whole point of having programme management processes is to avoid things going wrong in the first place. Who was setting up programmes without having a clear programme management process in place?”

“There is a leadership issue there too, is there not? Obviously it is the responsibility of people working within projects to report on developments and if there are concerns in terms of progress. But it is also the responsibility of leaders to ensure they are creating a culture whereby that information will be willingl…”

“Would you not have expected it to be presented to you, Sir Robert, in terms of these being major organisational and cultural problems within the ONS? I would have thought it was pretty fundamental that it would come to your board for discussion.”

“My hon. Friend consistently refers to himself as a complete townie—a description that I would apply to myself, too. Of course, the fact that we reside in urban areas does not in any way mean that we are unconcerned by the fortunes of our fellow parliamentarians who represent agricultural areas, or indeed their communit…”

“Like everyone who has spoken so far, I congratulate the hon. Member for Chester South and Eddisbury (Aphra Brandreth). Much like the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow East (John Grady), Crawley is an urban constituency. On the plus side, I suppose that means I get to avoid the bunfight over who has …”