asked the Lord President of the Council when he intends to publish Her Majesty's Government's proposals on the compulsory declaration of Members' outside financial interests.

The Government's views on the proposals made last month in the report by the Select Committee on Members' Interests (Declaration) will be made known as soon as possible. If at all possible I shall arrange for a debate on this report before Easter.

Will my right hon. Friend give an assurance that when the Government put forward their proposals they will include proposals to make compulsory the declaration of specific amounts of cash that are paid to Members of Parliament in pursuance of outside interests? Will he further extend the provisions to include Lobby correspondents and also the Chamber of Parliament? Unless that is done the proposal will be meaningless.

On the first point, I do not propose to recommend the House to go any further than the Select Committee has proposed. On the second point, the Select Committee is quite free now to consider Lobby journalists or anybody else if it wishes to do so.

Does not the Lord President agree that it would be desirable to discuss the whole question of Members' interests alongside, if not at the same time as, the consideration of the report of the Boyle Committee into Members' remuneration? The two are linked and it would be desirable to consider them as one subject and not completely separately.

That is a point of view that had not occurred to me. I shall consider it. Probably the majority of Members will wish the report on Members' interests to be taken before the report of the Boyle Committee is likely to be available. It may be some months before the Boyle Committee reports, because the committee is carrying out a major review.

asked the Lord President of the Council how many statutory instruments came into force in 1974; and of these how many were debated by the House or by Standing Committees.

I understand that the number of statutory instruments that came into force during the calendar year 1974 was 2,399. Of these, 51 were debated by Standing Committees and 63 by the House.

Do not those figures show that we debated a relatively small proportion of the total number of statutory instruments? Is the right hon. Gentleman aware of the comparison that his right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary made between the situation regarding our own domestic statutory instruments and EEC documents, when the right hon. Gentleman pointed out that in connection with the latter we are in the process in our existing arrangements of encompassing the Government around with a greater degree of parliamentary control than would otherwise be the case?

That is a point on the EEC documents. As for the others, we now have two Committees—the Scrutiny Committee and the Merits Committee. I think that the House has found this of great advantage, because the Scrutiny Committee recommends the ones to be discussed and the Merits Committee has enabled many more to be discussed than would otherwise have been found time for in the parliamentary programme.