Modernisation Committee
19 May 2026
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Committee House of Commons
00:05 - 01:32
Speaker 3
Thank you. Well, welcome to today's session of the modernization committee. This is the first oral session of the committee's inquiry into use of time, particularly focusing on backbench business committee and petitions committee debates. Thank you for our two witnesses for coming today. Thanks to Bob Blackman, the most recent chair of the Backbench Business Committee during the twenty twenty four, twenty six session.
So thanks, Bob. And Jamie Stone, also the most recent, but current chair of the petitions committee as well. So thank you both for coming. Now I know that, in particular, Bob needs to be somewhere later on, so hopefully, we can make some progress with this quite quickly. With that in end, I'm gonna ask the first question, Bob, which comes to you, really, which is in your fifteenth anniversary report, you referred to the rights committee's description of Thursdays as the, quote, the backwater of the parliamentary week.
And we've all experienced busy Thursdays, but to be fair, we've also experienced Thursdays that are not that busy. And I just wanna start off by asking you whether you think the answer to moving them from being a backwater is by relocating backbench business to another day, or are there things that we can do to encourage stronger attendance and engagement on a Thursday?
01:32 - 02:16
Speaker 2
Well well, thank you, sheriff, and thank you for that introduction. I think the Thursday is not necessarily a backwater in my view. The reality is, certainly over the last session, backbench business debates have gone right up to the moment of interruption almost inevitably. And often, time limits have had to be introduced for speakers. One of the problems we experience, to be fair, is that we frequently get government statements and, obviously, urgent questions, which then push the the debates to be shorter in terms of time, which is very frustrating for for for colleagues when they they got long long speeches or reasonable length speeches, and they get constrained to three or five minutes.
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