Speeches by Lamb.

“I do not believe that either the Speaker or any member of this Committee has given any indication that we believe that a subsequent statement to the House means in any way that the failure to make the first announcement to the House is forgiven.”

“On that point, I do not see the relevance of the fact that the Ministers have a press conference organised or that they have gone off to visit somewhere. The convention is that the House has to be informed first. If the House has not been informed, in those circumstances, they should not hold the press conference or th…”

“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—”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“On that point, Chair—”

“I am very grateful to the hon. Member for his kind remarks. Given that we are talking about democratic engagement and encouraging greater participation, does he agree that there are few better ways of encouraging people to engage with the system than getting them into student politics at university?”

“I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh North and Leith (Tracy Gilbert) on bringing forward the Bill. Devolution has been an interest of mine for a very long time. It was the topic of my master’s dissertation and my first job outside politics, so I am thrilled to be back dealing with it all again as a me…”

“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…”

“My hon. Friend has highlighted PACAC’s work scrutinising elections. As Parliament’s Select Committee that is overseeing this part of the process, we produced recommendations on behalf of the United Kingdom as a whole. Given that the Bill will devolve to Scottish Government representatives more delegated legislation pow…”

“I will try to keep my remarks brief. I start by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow East (John Grady) on making many fine contributions today and still managing to find time to pass his own Bill. This is an area of personal interest to me. I made the terrible choice 20 years ago to go into politics, bu…”