I welcome the opportunity to introduce this subject for debate again. The last time that I raised it here was two and a half years ago, in January 2002. Little has changed in the interim, so I thought that it was time to return to the subject.

There is always a potential self-interest in debates such as this. Those with substantial funding may seek to maintain the status quo, but probably more common is an exchange of criticisms of the parties, as if one party—that of the speaker—is whiter than white and everyone else is tainted in their political fundraising. I assure the Minister at the start that my argument is that we are all tainted by our fundraising system.

Following the European elections, the recent by-elections and the relatively unnoticed but nevertheless significant vote that, for example, the British National party has attracted without significant political donations, I want to pick up on the wider risks to the political system. What might happen if the BNP were to succeed in attracting support from just one of the large number of multi-millionaires in this country, any of whom could choose to donate to such a party?

I will not talk about the questions surrounding Bernie Ecclestone's £1 million donation to the Labour party; the reluctance of Labour in 2001 to disclose the identity of multi-million pound donors such as Christopher Ondaatje and Lord Sainsbury of Turville; the Prime Minister's point-blank refusal to disclose details of meetings with Bernie Ecclestone, Christopher Ondaatje and the Hinduja brothers; the £36,000 donated by Enron, which the Labour party refused to return, even though US politicians donated Enron money to charity; and the circumstances surrounding the Government's decision to award a £32 million smallpox vaccine contract in April 2002 to PowderJect, whose owner, Paul Drayson, had donated £50,000 to Labour the previous summer.

Those matters have been well reported and endlessly debated. The truth is that, whatever their legitimacy or otherwise, they have led to a tainted view of donations that affects all political parties. Indeed, the criticisms that have rightly or wrongly been made of donors have led other donors to reconsider whether they want to make political donations.

I read that political parties that have received major donations in the past—the Labour party and the Conservative party—are struggling. Certainly the Labour party is struggling with the trade unions. The GMB may withhold £744,000 and fund only those Labour MPs whom it believes support its views. That is a rather questionable practice in terms of parliamentary privilege, let alone anything else. The Transport and General Workers Union will decide this September whether to withhold a similar sum from Labour's general election campaign on the same basis. Derek Simpson, the leader of Amicus, which has made donations, has said:

"If Tony Blair's not for turning, then we'll have to turn him out."

The clear implication is that the money comes with political strings attached.

Neither will I dwell on the fact that four out of five of the new Conservative peers are major donors to the Conservative party; the declaration last year by Stuart Wheeler, who gave £5 million to the previous Conservative general election campaign, that he would not make further donations to the party until it chose a new leader; and the fact that, within a month of the party choosing a new leader, a cheque for more than £500,000 from Mr. Wheeler duly arrived at Tory central office.

Some hon. Members may elaborate on those matters, but I shall focus instead on two issues that are important to the House and that I hope might cut through the party political warfare and generate wider agreement. The first, as I have mentioned, is the potential danger that the current system will allow extreme parties to receive multi-million pound donations without anybody being able to do anything about it. One multi-millionaire could make the BNP the best-funded political party in the UK at the next general election.

Secondly, we could ban such large-scale individual donations—we could do so across the board, rather than by singling out a particular political party due to its views, because that would clearly be anti-democratic—and tie political parties back to their grass-roots memberships and to the donations that they can get from members and supporters. To allow political parties to function, such an approach would imply a level of match funding by the state tied to those individual donations, but it would also reinvigorate party politics, political activity, democracy and turnout.

It is not uncommon for electors to be reluctant to vote for politicians. Indeed, the political parties were created as mass organisations on the back of the extension of the franchise precisely to do the on-the-ground campaigning to turn people out to vote. As the membership of the political parties has declined, and due to reduced resources, they have concentrated only on seats where they think they can make a difference. Many people in what are considered safe political seats receive little or no communication during a general election campaign from the political parties other than the paid-for free post delivery. Their door is extremely unlikely to be knocked, and it is in those areas that few people turn out. If we can create a system that encourages political parties to concentrate again on ordinary members and on building participation because they need to do so for funding as well as for political success, we will start to address some of the issues of political participation.

Let me first concentrate on the issue of the crazy millionaire, if I may put it like that. I will not label this particular multi-millionaire as crazy, but it is a fact that Paul Sykes has promised to commit his fortune, worth some £500 million, to the UK Independence party. The party's leader has boasted in the press that it will be able to spend £13 for every £1 spent on campaigning by all the other political parties put together. Whether that will come through I do not know, but it is clear that Stuart Wheeler is in the position to deliver such levels of funding if he chose to do so, and I suspect that the biggest impact would be felt by the Conservative party. As it has traditionally been the greatest beneficiary of individual donations and the greatest defender of that practice, that scenario may make it pause to reconsider whether it is in its long-term interests to maintain such a position.

I do not want to dwell on UKIP. Much as I disagree with the party, I do not regard it in the same light as the BNP. Imagine if another multi-millionaire took the same view tomorrow of the BNP—a crazy multi-millionaire who believed that race and not Europe was the issue of the day, who wanted to change political policy and who could see that none of the mainstream political parties was prepared to accept his views. Is that impossible? Not at all. One crazy millionaire is all it would take for the BNP to become the best-funded political party in Britain. Provided that that person was prepared to stand up and say, "Yes, I am a BNP supporter", there would be nothing under the existing rules to prevent it.

On the basis that the BNP secured the best part of 1 million votes in recent elections, how much money does the hon. Gentleman think the taxpayer should give to it?

I shall come on to my proposal, but the short answer is that I would far rather that the only money that the party received was £10 or £20 from each of its handful of members, which would imply tiny amounts of funding. The truth is that the BNP cannot generate large numbers of members giving large numbers of donations; it cannot do so on anything like the scale of the mainstream political parties.

One multi-millionaire, however, could put the BNP in the position that we saw not long ago when UKIP exploded on to the political scene with a £2 million campaign war chest for the European elections, some celebrity endorsements and some media spin and hype, largely around the notion that it could be successful. Imagine the BNP in the same circumstances. It would be all over every newspaper. The attack would be made, but that party would get publicity for what would be an equally simple and straightforward, if horrible, political message.

What if similar millions were at the BNP's disposal? We might say that it would not command great political support. However, the potential impact would not simply be on votes at the ballot box. I doubt whether BNP Members of Parliament would be elected on the basis of a well-funded campaign; I hope not, but there could be no guarantee. However, the party would be in a position to put millions of videos through letterboxes, set up giant poster hoardings and mount aggressive— and I mean aggressive—phone and direct mail campaigns.

We know that that is possible and that it can come from nowhere. The Conservative party should be only too aware of that, because it happened with the Referendum party. Sir James Goldsmith put £20 million from his own pocket into what was perhaps a vanity campaign, which gave his party huge advertising hoardings, slick party political broadcasts, millions of free promotional videos in every home and swarms of paid-for activists. That had a major impact on public consciousness. Arguably, it significantly affected the general election result, turning a Conservative defeat into a rout. With such a well-funded campaign, the BNP might well be able to take sufficient votes to affect significantly a tightly fought general election outcome.

The Referendum party campaign highlighted and deepened the schism over Europe. No one should have the power to shape political debate in that way—via the wallet. Even in the US, the rules are more stringent, although they are certainly inadequate. John Kerry, who is married to a billionaire heiress, had to mortgage his own home to fund his primary campaign.

If the BNP got up to 20 per cent. of the vote in a northern inner-city area, which is not unfeasible considering what it has been doing recently, would the hon. Gentleman think that it should get 20 per cent. of the public funding that went to that area?

No, I have argued exactly the opposite. The hon. Gentleman is obviously not listening. I have argued that funding should be tied to the ability to recruit ordinary members and supporters, who would donate on a small scale. I shall come on to the detail of that approach. Of course, if the BNP were able to motivate an army of activists and supporters and generate political support in that way, it would command the same support on the democratic principle, and we would fight it democratically. His problem is that he prefers a system that would tie funding not to 20 per cent., 10 per cent., 1 per cent. or 0.5 per cent. support, but, in a country of some 60 million people, to the support of one person who happened to have a large cheque book.

We cannot underestimate the BNP. Were it not for UKIP, the success of the BNP in recent elections would be a serious subject for debate. More than 800,000 people voted for the BNP in the recent European elections, despite UKIP's success in taking what may arguably be some of the same ground. One of UKIP's party political broadcasts featured immigration as a keynote theme, but the BNP was nevertheless able to take almost 5 per cent. of the vote. That party clearly retains the ability to attract some support, despite the fact that politicians of all mainstream parties condemn it. However, I do not so much fear the BNP's political vote; I do not think that it will ever command a huge political vote in this country, and I have great faith in the British electorate in that respect.

A well-funded BNP campaign could influence public policy and public attitudes on the ground. The party might not buy electoral success, but it could buy electoral impact. Just imagine how it would stir up racial conflict in our local communities. How many racist videos delivered door to door in Oldham or Burnley would it take to generate another race riot?

What is the alternative? I touched on it a couple of times in my responses to the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Djanogly). Incidentally, in the last couple of years, his political party has gained more than half its funding from the state—although I do not know the latest figures—so let us have no hypocritical condemnation of state funding from the Conservative party. More than £5 million a year, paid en bloc to central office, goes direct from the taxpayer to fund its political activities.

The Government are making favourable noises about change to the system. The Electoral Commission is due to report in September, which is one reason why I thought it opportune to hold this debate now. The PM is believed to be in favour of increased subsidies, but not complete state funding. I believe that there should be a cap on individual donations for all the reasons that I have outlined, but I am not in favour of a system that simply rewards the status quo. The creeping introduction of increased state funding that rewards those who are already here in response to their level of support in the House is not a democratic way of dealing with the issue. Such an approach entrenches the advantages of those who have already been elected and prevents others from entering the political framework

For example, the political research fund, which is meant to help political parties with the development of policy for general, European and local elections, is not paid to any political parties that are not represented in the House, so the Green party gets not a cent, even though the fund is meant to help with research on and development of European and UK policy, and despite the fact that that party is successful and commands a substantive vote in elections. The fund is a Westminster club payout, and that cannot be right in terms of defending democracy. The fund is useful only in defending the status quo. That is why I believe that we need to tie back political parties to their individual members. I have consistently argued that that should happen, and the time is right for doing it.

The £10 and £20 donation, the jumble sale and the raffle ticket should be the drivers of political funding, but the membership of political parties is now down to relatively tiny numbers, not least because parties have concentrated on the multi-millionaires, rather than on other individuals. That is reflected in the fact that the Conservative party has shifted its paid staff from the regions to central office; there has been a huge shift in the 10 years from 1991 to 2001. By the end of that period, practically all staff were concentrated in central office. We all know about the trend, because all the political parties represented in this Chamber do the same. We have units of people dedicated to finding the person who will give a cheque for £10,000, £50,000, £100,000 or, quite frequently in the case of the Labour and Conservative parties, £1 million, £2 million or even £5 million. Because of that trend, the use and value of the small donation has dried up.

The Conservative party ran a £20 million campaign in 1997, only £1.4 million of which was raised through small individual member donations. That is not healthy, not only because of the risks and the tainting of the political process that I talked about, but because it has festered and fostered the decline of individual membership and concentration on it. Why should the Prime Minister worry about the ordinary Labour party member and the decline in membership when Lord Levy is, by all accounts, building him a £20 million war chest, contributed not by individual members of the Labour party in general, but by a handful of very wealthy party members? It is clear what the driver is.

If we said instead that no political party may raise funds except in small amounts, we would start to see a shift back to the political parties doing what they were originally launched to do, and building up the grassroots membership, activity and support that allows them to function. However, there is an issue. It costs serious money to run a political party. A manifesto cannot appear from nowhere. Policy advice is needed, as are research and support. Above all, in a democracy, a campaign is necessary. There is no use in having the most glossy and best-written political manifesto in the country if individuals do not hear what it has to say.

The best way to provide information is for each political party competitively to deliver its points door to door, argue its case and put it against those of the other parties. By taking such action, each party would create a vibrant local democracy. People knocking at our doors and offering us a lift to the voting station would help to increase turnout, as would worried candidates saying that they will not win if we do not vote for them.

It is no coincidence that the seats that are most closely fought have the highest turnouts. The seats that are written off as safe for one party or another have the lowest turnouts, because of a lack of activity on the ground. Year by year, a lack of activity dries up membership further and local fundraising becomes less important. However, the present process has gone so far that, to put it bluntly, local parties would not be able to survive on the basis of individual donations, and that gives rise to the issue of state match funding. Some £10 million of taxpayers' money is already spent on political party support through the state. That money is tied not to local activity or membership, but to small donations to the political party of £10, £15, £20 or £25. The situation would be helped by increasing the incentive to campaign locally while ensuring that political parties, provided that they can recruit activists and supporters, can fight the scale of campaign that that level of activity and support in the country would merit.

I do not believe that the BNP could raise more than tiny sums. In fact, we know that it cannot do so. We know its fundraising record, because it now has to publish it. We accept that fundraising advantages the biggest parties, but only because they are the main parties and can recruit and retain large numbers of activists. A new political party or a party such as the Green party that can motivate and recruit could enter the political process on an equal footing if it could bring in the same support as the biggest parties and command the same number of activists.

In such circumstances, finance would no longer be dependent on the whim of one, two or three multi-millionaires; it would be dependent instead on the ability of the political parties to motivate and command individual support, with no individual having the clout to command party policy, to make leaders jump or even to get rid of a Conservative party leader. Through their contributions, individuals should be able to make a difference to the effectiveness of their party.

I say to those who oppose state funding that it is already in place, but it is not operated democratically or in a way that encourages the activity to which I have referred. Above all, the taxpayer does not receive in return for that state funding the biggest single thing that they would want—an end to the sleaziness of the multi-millionaire being able to donate and thereby command the attention of the political parties. Evidence shows that the public do not like the process of state funding, but want parties to fund themselves. However, they do not support the idea of multi-millionaires making donations. They want parties to go down the traditional route of using local activists, and we must be realistic about how that can be achieved.

The cross-party acceptance of policy development funds suggests that political parties are not as adverse to such an approach as they make out, especially the Conservative party. However, that seems to be a notably self-interested development that is not tied to genuine democracy. It is certainly unfair to political parties that are not represented here, but which campaign legitimately and have support outside this place.

I suspect that there is a mixture of views in the Chamber about the success of UKIP, but I doubt whether that is so when it comes to that party's claim that it can outspend us £13 to £1. If that is true, it cannot be right than one individual can make such a difference. Tomorrow, it could be the BNP, the Greens or even the Liberal Democrats that get that big donation. It may be the Conservative party or, as it has been recently, the Labour party. Whoever it is, it is not right for anybody to donate on that scale and to be able to influence the political outcome by a single cheque. Every day, that situation threatens us with the crisis of the BNP commanding the kind of money that each of our political parties would wish for and stirring up division in our communities, even if it does not win our support. That is its objective, and under the present political system, there is nothing whatever that we could do to stop it.

Before I call the next speaker, I remind hon. Members that I am hoping to start the winding-up speeches at 10.30.

It will not surprise hon. Members that what I have to say will in many ways echo what the hon. Member for Truro and St. Austell (Matthew Taylor) said. This is an important issue that does not receive much airing; we somehow assume that if political parties carry on with business as usual, everything will be all right. The hon. Gentleman set out several important reasons why things will not be all right. I congratulate him on securing this Adjournment debate. I only wish that rather more of our mutual colleagues were here, because this issue affects them to a substantial degree.

This Government have placed on to the statute book unprecedented legislation to make transparent who gets what money from whom. That change in the way in which we register who gives money to political parties should not go unnoticed or unrecorded. It is a substantial change for the better, but it does not in itself change the nature of how political parties receive their money, although it has been argued recently that the publication of who gives money to political parties has meant that people are less likely to give money to them in the first place.

The net effect might be the opposite of what the hon. Gentleman suggests: political parties might simply wither and die because no one will give them money. However, the opposite may be the case in the short term. As he mentioned, some well-off people could give large sums of money to political parties that no one in this Chamber considers should be represented here. One could reflect that, to date, people with large sums of money have, by and large, spent their vanity millions on buying footballers rather than on funding political parties. The large amounts that have so far been donated to political parties are dwarfed by such funding activities. We see in the newspaper this morning that one particular footballer is being purchased at four times the cost of total political donations to political parties in the past few years. Perhaps we should reflect on what might happen if certain people suddenly shifted their allegiances from Chelsea, Tottenham, Blackburn or wherever to funding political parties instead.

The figures detailing how political parties raise their money are sobering. In 2002, only 15 per cent. of the Labour party's funding came from raising money from its own members. That was a stunningly successful performance compared with that of the Conservative party, which received only 7 per cent. of its money by the same route. As the hon. Gentleman said, because of the way in which the system now operates, political parties increasingly have to rely on fundraising departments and sometimes on large donations to make an expensive business fundable.

As far as the Labour party is concerned, money from the trade unions is negotiated in a different way from donations by private individuals to the Conservative party. Recent episodes have shown that trade unions can, by balloting their members, turn on or off the money that comes to the Labour party. The same is not quite true of the Conservative party, where individuals simply write cheques out; I am not saying that the Labour party has not received money by the same route, but we need to distinguish slightly between those funding sources.

Nevertheless, the membership figures are stark. The Conservatives' 2001 election campaign was, effectively, funded by two individuals—J.P. Getty and Stuart Wheeler. The majority of that campaign was funded by two individuals, but conversely, there has been what the hon. Gentleman calls the creeping rise of public funding. This is perhaps the most curious phenomenon in the entire debate, inasmuch as there is not a great deal of complaint nationally about free election post, free hire of halls, free security at party conferences and free party political broadcasts, which together benefit political parties by some £80 million a year, about Short money, which enables the Conservative Opposition party to get about £3 million a year from public funds, or about the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 policy development fund money of £2 million a year, which is split between all the parties and is for political research.

It is interesting that between elections—I distinguish between money between elections and money for elections—the Conservative party, up to 2003, received a majority of its funding from the taxpayer. The amount was £4 million in that year, which compares with £3.5 million from private donations.

What might one do about that state of affairs? State funding looms ever larger on the horizon. In a moment, I want to think about what the future alternatives will be for political parties if we do not give that option serious consideration. A number of proposals have been floated. If political party funding comes out of the closet and is up front, recorded and clear, and if it is not provided in the rather back door way in which it is, to some extent, currently provided, a clear explanation of what that money does and where it comes from must be also up front in any discussion. There could be a system of matched money for fundraising at an individual level. It has been suggested that people might be able to specify in their tax returns that some of their tax money should go to a political party of their choice. Again, the principle that the political party has to persuade people to support it in order to receive the money rather than simply receive a lump sum seems important.

We have introduced a curriculum agenda of civic education in schools. I imagine that all colleagues in this Chamber have at some stage during the past year been invited into local schools to discuss that agenda. That curriculum is beginning to be assisted by a number of political parties—not overtly, but in a way that does not admit the existence of politics. Perhaps there could be funding for civic activities and activities that increase public awareness of the political process, but not for overt campaigning at elections. Foundations might be developed to build that sort of civic awareness and political activity, which is partisan to political parties but not in the front line of campaigning, as in Germany. All those are possible ways forward for state funding. Such a system would not simply be about a large sum of money being plonked on the table with no accountability. As the hon. Gentleman said, that is what happens now, in effect, both to large-scale donations from individuals and to state funding.

This matter is important now because there has been a precipitate decline in party membership over the past few years. If party members were hedge sparrows, we would have a major inquiry into why they had disappeared, a large amount of concern would be expressed about the imminent extinction of the species and measures would be put in place to reverse it. However, the reality of party membership in our polity is a decline of some 80 or 90 per cent. over the past two decades. In the 1950s, the combined membership of all political parties stood at some 4 million; by 1964 it was 3.3 million; and it is now 0.7 million and dropping. Far more people join single issue groups, however, and on the subject of hedge sparrows, membership of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds is greater than that of all political parties put together.

It is not that people are not interested in issues or in joining groups, but that membership of a political party has increasingly been cut out of our polity. We have all been complicit in that to some extent. If a person's CV shows any hint that they are, were or are likely to be a member of a political party, they are in effect excluded from appointment to a variety of Government or local bodies. CVs are scrutinised carefully to ensure that people are "non-political", as if such a thing existed in practice.

The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point, which I should like him to develop. If people are heading more towards single interest groups, would he suggest that caps on donations be applied to those groups, or are we heading down the American route, where people divert their funds away from political parties and put them into related single interest groups?

The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point about the Americanisation of politics, which I want to address shortly.

The rise of money going to single issue groups, coupled with the steep decline of party membership and support for political parties, means that politics is increasingly carried out through single issue groups, influencing an ever-decreasing pool of party members trying to make changes to the political process; it is as if party members came from Mars and the single issue pressure groups lived on earth. In future, political parties could be seen as shells to capture when an election is due or when electoral nominations are required for public or council bodies.

A few years ago, in a number of council areas, every party had a panel. People got on to a panel, fought a not very winnable council seat and then fought their way through a nomination for a winnable council seat and got on to the council. There were perhaps 60 or 70 people on the panel, with 20 seats. Frankly, the experience of every political party— if anyone stands up in this Chamber to say that this is not the case, I shall suggest that they are misleading hon. Members—is that anybody who turns up and is reasonably okay as far as that party is concerned will get a nomination for a council seat.

The system whereby the polity is supplied with competing choices for elections is beginning to break down. I would not want us to end up in the situation that we see in America, where parties have no existence between elections and are captured by money at elections. The nominations flow from the capturing of that money at an election period, regardless of the continuing life of the party.

Historically, the Labour party was formed as the Labour Representation Committee to secure representation for working people in Parliament, and the Conservative and Unionist Association was formed as a supporters group for people who were already in Parliament. In a sense, the two things eventually coincided, because, for a while in the 20th century, both political parties—this was also the case for the Liberals at various stages—had a substantial community presence. They became real actors in the community, organising such things as Conservative and constitutional clubs, Clarion cycling clubs and Labour clubs.

I suggest that it would be good for the health of our polity if that sense of parties being part of the community rather than separate from it were restored. I do not see why there could not be Conservative lunch clubs for older people, Labour mothers and toddlers groups or Liberal Democrat playgroups. I am not intending to show any political bias in suggesting those various activities. The main reason why such activities would not be possible at present is the combination of the precipitate decline of party membership and the marginalisation or almost ghettoisation of the political process in the democratic life of the UK.

If we go down the route of believing that there are people who know what is good for us, but are non-political, and if those of us who are political simply stand on the sidelines and look on, we will have reached the foothills of the beginning of totalitarianism. The whole point about politics is that it is a clash of ideas and different ways of doing things, and the great and the good have an idea of how to do things just as much as any political party. The idea of state funding that breathes life back into the real political process and sends political parties back into a life in the community could be an important way forward, and we should give it weighty consideration.

I am pleased to be able to speak in this debate. I support much of what the hon. Member for Truro and St. Austell (Matthew Taylor) said, except perhaps what he said in the first five minutes of his speech, when he told us what he was not going to speak about, but gave us some clues along the way.

Money in politics is not a new factor; it has probably always been there. My knowledge of Roman history is not as great as it might be, but I believe that, in certain stages of the republic, money was involved in seeking high positions. In our own history, from the 18th century onwards, money was also a factor in such matters; the rotten borough was proof of that. One of the reasons why those elected from counties were thought to be slightly purer was that counties were more expensive to corrupt, because they were larger. One might also give the example of the sale of kisses by the Duchess of Westminster on behalf of Charles James Fox. The whole atmosphere was one of money, privilege and access to power.

The Liberal party has not been entirely immune. It would be trite for me to mention Lloyd George and the sale of peerages, because he did not establish that process; he merely put it on a businesslike basis. The source of funds for political parties before Labour's time came from particular groups: the brewers would always support the Conservative party and other groups would always support the Liberal party.

The factor that changed everything was not so much the organisation of the vote, but the need to register it, which created the political organisations. That made politics something that was not the plaything of the wealthy or the powerful, but involved ordinary people in the process. That was the most important stage, and it is only about 130 years away from where we are today.

We speak glowingly of vast party membership after the second world war, and up to a point that is right, but in the Labour party in the 1960s, it took me a while to realise that my divisional party was paying on the basis of 1,000 members, although we knew jolly well that we had only 150. The reason was that it could not affiliate with fewer than 1,000 members. The Labour party figures for that period bore no relationship to the actual position, and the same may even be so now.

In the past two or three years, if the Conservative party enrols the husband, it automatically enrols the wife. Indeed, I know of a wife who is an active campaigner for the Labour party, notwithstanding that she is, on the face of it, a member of the Conservative party, because of the connection with her husband. There is always a certain artificiality in the numbers of people involved.

I was impressed to read in a biography of Enoch Powell that when he became the prospective Conservative candidate in Wolverhampton, South-West, the local party had about 6,000 members, which was more than 10 per cent. of the electorate of that area. An old minute book of one of the branches in my parliamentary division—a relatively small village—had 150 members in 1958, which was a quarter of the electorate. However, even allowing for exaggeration— the word was not "spin" in those days—in the number of members, a lot of people were involved, and they had to be involved so that we could take part in elections.

In some ways, the activist has been made superfluous. The first step in that process was putting the party name on the ballot paper. I am not against that—it is a perfectly sensible thing to do—but when the party name did not feature on the ballot paper, one had to ensure that people knew who the Labour, Liberal or Conservative candidate was, and the only way of doing so was to put out information, talk to people and put the party's position across. The moment that the ballot paper included the party name, a lot of parties would put up a candidate, but that was the limit of what they did, because people would be able to vote Conservative, Labour or Liberal as the party name would appear. That took away some activism.

When I came into politics, parties did not contest every seat in local elections; they contested only those in which they thought they had some sort of chance. When the party name was included on the ballot paper, however, most seats were contested most of the time by the main parties. Polling cards were issued only in general elections; in local elections, parties issued their own polling card to electors—another task that involved a lot of people, who had to deliver them. I do not suggest that we should return to making life difficult for the electors, but those are some of the reasons why parties do not need so many active people on the ground. When there are fewer active people on the ground, it becomes more difficult to raise money.

As both previous speakers have said, much of the emphasis in the past was on constituencies, whereas now it is London-centred, so money is being drawn into London rather than raised in the constituencies. In my early days in politics, most Labour and all Conservative parties in East Anglia had full-time agents, and the Liberal party had the ambition to have full-time agents. My constituency party has had a full-time agent since 1923, but it may be the only one in the county of Essex that has, and there may be only three or four throughout East Anglia. I do not know the Conservative party's position, but it has nothing like as many agents as it once had. Again, the focus is moving to the centre all the time.

How can we return to a situation in which the activist, the ordinary participant, is the purveyor of money, rather than big corporations, rich individuals or others? I think that we have probably come to the point at which there needs to be a linkage between local donations and state assistance. As my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Test (Dr. Whitehead) said, state assistance has been creeping in, so that the state is now probably the largest donor to all political parties. Whether that money is wisely spent, I do not know.

The other question that we should ask ourselves is: do parties need to spend as much money as they do on the political process? I am sure that we have all been embarrassed by the stuff that comes down from our head offices. At a recent election, we were supplied with large cut-out cardboard feet that were placed at the entrance to our committee rooms. Quite what the purpose was, I have no idea. The traditional colours of my party in our area are red and yellow, but on one occasion, central office suddenly started operating in royal purple. My agent had a certain destination for that material. It was put at the back of the committee room to be taken away on Thursdays.

Again, money is being spent on a scale that makes one wonder whether it is spent to any purpose. In the last election, the Conservative party had what some might consider extremely effective advertising on hoardings, although it did not do very well in the election. We had the most appalling advertising. My constituency office received a huge poster that appeared to be advertising a film at the Odeon in Colchester. It turned out to be about our party's merits and benefits. Unless one was an expert on the political process, one had no idea what it was about. Lots of money is being spent on things that are, frankly, an absolute waste of time. If we concentrated on the things that are more important— the policies and their conveyance to the people in the electoral process through hundreds of thousands of people who are engaged in it—the health of our democracy would greatly improve.

One way forward must be to limit the amount that one individual or group can donate to a political party within a certain period. That would clearly reduce the amount of money coming into the system. Careful thought also needs to be given to linking the amount of money raised by constituency parties with matching funds from the state. That is the other way forward. We need to be aware not only that we are making politics and public debates so trite with much of the advertising that is put out, but of the fear raised by the hon. Member for Truro and St. Austell and my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Test, that those who are wealthy or both wealthy and vain can intervene in politics on a scale that can distort the process for a short time at least. History teaches us that, in the end, the rich and the vain do not normally survive for long periods, but they can upset the process and put people off being involved in the whole electoral scheme.

Overridingly, we need to raise the reputation of public affairs. As has been pointed out, it seems that involvement in public affairs is sometimes held to carry some sort of stain. For example, members of health authorities and possibly magistrates might be regarded cagily; there is a whole range of such activities, even though one should naturally be proud of having carried them out. Whatever honours system we have, the greatest disadvantage is that people spend a long period of their lives serving the public on elected bodies for no financial reward. That is wrong. My party has perhaps been rather sillier than the Conservatives were about that issue. Those who have spent a long time serving their communities in local affairs should be rewarded and honoured in the same way as others, and they should not have to be nominated for an award for some other activity that they did as well.

We need to restore the repute of what we do. I am sure that other hon. Members find that, when we bring people to this House, they are invariably impressed by what happens here. It is what they read about and see on television that gives them a different point of view. We need controls on the payment to political parties, and we need schemes to encourage and reinvigorate activism in constituencies.

I agree with so much of what the hon. Member for Braintree (Mr. Hurst) has just said that I hope he will forgive me if I cavil with one of his comments. He said that he thought that activists might become superfluous. Those of us who tramped the great cities of Birmingham and Leicester in recent weeks would argue that activists are still very important to our political process.

I warmly congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and St. Austell (Matthew Taylor). This is a timely debate. It has also been extremely thoughtful—I hope that it will continue to be so—and there has been a very considerable degree of consensus. What we lack in the quantity of contributions, I hope that we will make up for in quality.

One of the reasons why the debate is timely is the forthcoming Electoral Commission recommendations, which I am given to understand we can expect in September. They will be timely for reasons that I shall address. I hope that all parties will take this issue seriously at their party conferences. We cannot wait until after the next general election to address it. I also hope that the Government will speedily respond to the commission's September recommendations.

Comment has been made about the degree of public support that there is for a measure of state funding of the democratic process. I hope that everybody has now read about the state of British democracy as it has been set out in the state of the nation poll commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust. It is one of the most comprehensive assessments of what the public think, and it has the great advantage of not having been mediated through the media. It comes to us direct; it is not given the headline treatment of the The Daily Telegraph or the Evening Standard. It states:

"Three quarters (73 per cent.) find the current system for funding political parties 'unfair' because of the risk that wealthy individuals, businesses and trade unions 'can buy influence' over the parties with their donations. As Table 3 shows, a majority would be in favour of public support for the parties through state funding to reduce their dependence on large donations. Three quarters (74 per cent.) believe there should be limits on how much people can donate to political parties. This is consistent with the high levels of public concern about sleaze under both Conservative and Labour governments found in earlier State of the Nation polls."

I hope that the Government have taken note of that.

In introducing this important debate, my hon. Friend might have implied that there was not great enthusiasm for what he was saying. That is not true; there is huge public enthusiasm for the sort of constraints that all Members who have spoken feel are now necessary. One of the principal reasons for that is the argument that the hon. Members for Braintree and for Southampton, Test (Dr. Whitehead) eloquently advocated. We must reverse the trend of centralisation in British politics. I have some figures—they are slightly out of date—for the extent to which the Conservative party has had to centralise its staffing resources. In 1997, it employed 59 regional staff and 147 central staff; by 2002, there had been a drop to 18 regional staff, while the number of central staff had increased to 172. The hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Djanogly) may be able to tell us whether that trend has continued. I am not, saying that it has happened only in the Conservative party; there has been a trend towards centralisation in all parties, because of the way in which the funding has come to the centre, notably from millionaires.

I echo the commitment that previous speakers have given to the concept of trying to match funding at local level. If our parties simply become huge machines dominated in London by those who are able to pay for such machines there, we will be in great difficulty and our whole body politic will suffer. My hon. Friend the Member for Truro and St. Austell has offered suggestions, and reference has been made to the concept of a concession on income tax. That might now be more equally spread between the parties than it might have been in previous years. Some form of match funding seems essential.

I do not think that any Member believes that they have got the answer. I am confident that the Electoral Commission will address this issue. I do not think that it will just take a prescriptive view about controlling large-scale funding of the political parties. I think that it will be interested in trying to reverse the trend away from local membership and local activists. When it looks into this matter, I hope that we will all be prepared to listen to its expertise, which comes from outside the partisan political parties, as it has considerable and increasing experience about the way in which our political system works.

I want to emphasise the suggestion made by my hon. Friend. There is a very urgent question that we have to look at. We have to address the urgent question of the dominance of the maverick, manipulative millionaires. It is a question not just for the next general election. For example, at least one of the millionaires, Mr. Paul Sykes, apparently thinks that the referendums on regional assemblies this autumn—that is when we expect them—are some dreadful Brussels plot. It appears that he is intending to invest large sums in the campaigns.

Whatever side one takes on the issue, one must agree that the problem is urgent. I am afraid that I must report to the House that the Electoral Commission restrictions on large donations do not apply as effectively to referendum campaigns as to general elections. If Mr. Paul Sykes, for example, chooses to spend a few million pounds on those referendums as a run-up to the general election, and even more so as a dress rehearsal for the referendum on the European constitution, he could buy their results. The problem is extremely urgent.

We must also consider the general election. If legislation is required, it will be important that it is put through the House as soon as possible after the Queen's Speech so that we can ensure that the general election is fought on a fair, open and transparent basis. My hon. Friend has already referred to that problem. It also appears from the Electoral Commission's current rules that it would be possible for a millionaire to escape the restrictions on donations by spending his money through several front organisations. That would be easy. Such organisations could appear to be single issue organisations, but they could in effect be campaigning for one, two or three political parties, although it is most likely that they would plump for one party. That is a real danger; our democracy could be undermined. Those front organisations could disappear after polling day, and it would be difficult to account for the money that they had spent.

I am afraid that the hon. Gentleman is blowing a hole in his own argument. Mr. Sykes does not have to give his money to a political party or to a pressure group. He could set up his own pressure group or organisation if, as the hon. Member for Truro and St. Austell suggested, he wants devote his significant fortune to doing so. Is the hon. Gentleman saying that individuals should be prevented from spending money on what they want? That is what his argument is heading towards.

I do not think that the hon. Gentleman has had the benefit of the conversation with the Electoral Commission that I have had. The commission was set up by Parliament precisely to consider the issues, and I can assure him that he should have that conversation, because there are real problems and loopholes, in relation not just to the referendums this autumn or the anticipated referendum next year on the European constitution, but to the general election itself. It is currently perfectly possible to circumnavigate the rules on individual donations. A millionaire could buy the outcome of a referendum and possibly make a major difference, in the way that my hon. Friend described, to the pattern and outcome of a general election.

I want to refer to the unfortunate hypocrisy surrounding the debate on state funding. As has already been mentioned, the principal beneficiary of the taxpayers' contribution to the political process is the Conservative party. It has received just short of £30 million since it lost power in 1997—a considerable sum. Reference was made earlier to the annual figures, and I have them from the Library. In the current year, general Short money is £3,017,307, travel expenses are £86,130, the leader of the Opposition's office costs £563,449, Cranborne money in the Lords is £413,131 and there was a policy development grant of £439,005. That makes a grand total of £4,519,022. On top of that, uniquely—this does not apply to any of the other parties in this House—several Conservative office holders have additional salaries over and above their salaries from the Commons. The same applies in the House of Lords, with a total of £282,682. That makes a total of just short of £5 million—it is £4.8-odd million.

I am sure that the hon. Member for Huntingdon, who is certainly honourable, will acknowledge that it would be hypocritical in those circumstances to have any principled objections, given that his party is the main beneficiary of state funding, unless the money is sent back, of course. The principal issue is that he who pays the piper calls the tune. If we can reverse the process of centralisation, which was so effectively described by the hon. Members for Southampton, Test and for Braintree, we can do something really valuable for the British parliamentary democratic system. If we do nothing, the dangers to which my hon. Friend refers are considerable indeed.

Time is short. The process has already gone a long way in the American direction, which I regret. Even in the referendums, or referenda, as I prefer to call them, this autumn, we may start to see an ugly twist in this tale. I hope that we will not, and that the Government are prepared to take speedy action when they get the Electoral Commission report in September.

I welcome the fact that the hon. Member for Truro and St. Austell (Matthew Taylor) has secured this debate, which, as he said, is in anticipation of the Electoral Commission presenting its conclusions to the Government on the funding of political parties later this year.

Various hon. Members referred to the wealth of the individual calling the shots, weighing in and dictating how policy in this country works, but those references are, from my perspective, a red herring and, as others have said, transient issues at best. I gave my reasons for that view in my interventions. On the issue of wealthy individuals leading to the centralisation of politics, I see no correlation between the two. Most wealthy individuals would not have much of an idea of what an agent was—at the centre or locally—or about the mechanics of political parties. If anything, recent press reports have shown that certain individuals who wanted to give money to the Conservative party insisted that their money went to the regions rather than the centre.

Of course, the public need confidence in the way in which political parties are funded. Most importantly, there should be no question of corruption. Nevertheless, we do not accept that the Government can justify spending even more public money on politicians, when political parties already receive significant public money, as hon. Members have made clear. The Electoral Commission's estimate is that in a general election year, the figure can come to £100 million, which is on top of the wide variety of direct and indirect public support already given to political parties, such as free mail shots, free use of civic premises, free broadcasts during elections and financial support for Opposition and Front-Bench services in the form of Short and Cranborne moneys. I suggest that increasing the dependence and reliance of political parties on the state could further distance politicians from the electorate because of the ending of the need to contact people to seek non-state funding.

There is no great public demand for an increase in state funding for political parties or for restricting the amount of private donations. In fact, the opposite is true. I am confident that the taxpayer's view is that public money would be put to better use by investing it in our public services rather than our politicians. The Conservative party stands by the stance that we took in our 1998 submission to the Neill committee, in which we asserted that

"state funding would undermine the voluntary activity of political parties … we believe there is a difference in principle between providing assistance to opposition parties to help them with their Parliamentary duties and providing taxpayer support for the day-to-day campaigning activities of political parties".

The crux of the matter is that the Government should not restrict what political parties can and cannot do, rather than addressing their own lack of ethics with regard to political donations. Membership of the Labour party is collapsing. The base of new Labour entrepreneurs who funded it is vanishing, and it is increasingly becoming almost entirely dependent on trade union funding. I would find it distasteful if the Government wanted to use the Electoral Commission as cover for providing political parties with millions more pounds of state funding in a bid to dilute the power of the trade unions over their own party.

I am finding it difficult to follow the hon. Gentleman's train of thought. Is he saying that he wants to return the large sum of taxpayers' money that has been allocated to the Conservative party—for its policy development fund, for example—which has nothing to do with what happens in this building?

I specifically said that I do not think that the state should give any more than it already does. Furthermore, what the state gives should be for parliamentary duties, rather than day-to-day campaigning.

I was involved in negotiations with representatives of the hon. Gentleman's party. He should recognise that the policy development fund has nothing to do with parliamentary activity; it is designed to help the parties develop their policy outwith this place. His argument therefore collapses.

I shall come on to the fund later. The hon. Gentleman makes a fair point in that regard—I give him that—but we need to address other issues relating to the fund.

Only a few weeks ago, I opposed a proposed change in the law governing trade unions and political funding. In brief, my position was that as companies are now required annually to have member approval for political donations, why should not unions also have to receive such annual consent from their members? We are firmly of the opinion that people in a democracy should be generally free to donate their money as they see fit. There are many checks and balances on political donations in this country, including controls on campaign expenditure, prohibition of foreign donations and transparency of donors. With such transparency, the electorate can make up their own minds whether to vote for a particular party.

We stand by the proposals in the paper entitled "An end to Cronyism: Conservative charter for civil service impartiality", which was published on 4 March 2002. The proposals include, first, a statutory prohibition on abuse of power by political appointees. That problem was evidenced by the Mittal controversy and Jonathan Powell's dual role of being the Prime Minister's chief of staff and being involved in Labour fundraising.

Secondly, we proposed statutory provision for the ministerial code and its enforcement. That would mean that the code was given statutory force and monitored by a body separate from the Government. The need for that was evidenced by the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers' donation in kind of a flat to the Deputy Prime Minister while he was serving as the Secretary of State responsible for transport.

Thirdly, a proper paper trail should be kept. If all official meetings and conversations between Ministers and senior civil servants were recorded, we would know the full truth behind scandals such as those involving Formula 1 and the Hinduja brothers.

Let me be absolutely clear. Is the hon. Gentleman saying that if, this autumn, the Electoral Commission recommends funding to help campaigning in the country, the Conservative party will refuse it and return it to the state health service or state education? He seems to believe that his party would be entirely wrong to accept any such money.

No, I said that the hon. Member for North Cornwall (Mr. Tyler) made an interesting point; I did not say that I necessarily agreed with it. We will consider the issue when the commission makes its findings available.

Fourthly, there should be checks on party and Government papers. If there were a body or commissioner that could check such papers and independently assess whether political donations had influenced Whitehall policy decisions, there would be far more public confidence in the legitimacy and independence of policy decisions.

The Liberal Democrats want to cap the amount that is privately donated to political parties and would rather spend £20 million of taxpayers' money, not on improving public services, but on funding politicians. The Liberal Democrats' policy for the state funding of political parties, which would apparently include the funding of political parties' campaigning activities, is to give every political party with more than 5 per cent. of the vote £2 million a year, and to allocate an additional £10 million a year between the parties in proportion to their share of the vote.

Under that system, the 2001 general election would have resulted in a yearly allocation of £6 million to Labour, £5 million to the Conservatives and £4 million to the Liberal Democrats. Essentially, the Liberal Democrats plan to fiddle state funding to get a substantial amount of money that is totally disproportionate to their number of MPs.

I turn to the policy development grant. We strongly believe that the Electoral Commission's allocation of funds is wrong. We do not understand why the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties receive the same amounts. It is questionable that the party in power should receive such funding, as it already has a variety of policy support units—not least the whole civil service—at its disposal. We are also strongly of the opinion that a minority party should not receive the same funding as the official Opposition.

We oppose the proposals, being considered by the European Commission, to introduce state funding of European political parties. We believe that in a democracy funding should not be withheld from countries that are not deemed pan-European enough or that refuse to adhere to a given manifesto. That should be up to the electorate, as they decide whom and what they support.

We also feel strongly about the anomaly in the law that means that political parties from Northern Ireland do not have to register the source of their donations. Such parties can receive donations from anywhere in the world, as long as they do not receive funds from a specified list of donors set out in the relevant Act. That is wrong.

However, I agree with the hon. Member for Truro and St. Austell on one point: his desire to see more small donations. How do we get more people involved in giving money to political parties? The Inheritance Tax Act 1984 provides that donations to political parties are exempt from inheritance tax. We strongly advocate that that should be extended to include an income tax exemption. That would encourage members of the public to get involved in party politics, while increasing funding and the membership base for parties. Ultimately, if more people give to political parties, more people will feel that they are engaging in the political process. That, not increasing state funding, should be the aim.

The hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Djanogly) concluded on a note that I would like to investigate on another occasion.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Truro and St. Austell (Matthew Taylor) on securing the debate. The issue of party political funding can lead to the bandying around of insults between parties. Far be it from me to say that I am not capable or willing to engage in such banter; I could talk for hours about my views of the funding of the Conservative or Liberal Democrat parties. Unlike my hon. Friend the Member for Braintree (Mr. Hurst), I will not mention Lloyd George; that would not take us far.

I am glad that the hon. Member for North Cornwall (Mr. Tyler) mentioned the work of the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, which recently published a report on the state of British democracy and attitudes to political parties, which gives us a flavour of public opinion on some of the issues. Unfortunately, public awareness of party political funding issues tends to fall into the usual tramlines of cash for questions, sleaze-ridden donations and allegations. We could get into a discussion about those, but that would not be helpful.

My personal view is that that is largely inaccurate and unfair with regard to political parties. My hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Test (Dr. Whitehead) made the point that political parties are not, by and large, evil or nasty institutions—far from it. They tend to be pretty essential components of a healthy democracy. If we are to have a successfully functioning democracy, we need political parties to be strong and to operate. They are of great importance, and it follows that how parties are funded is also of great importance not only to those who are elected, but to the public at large. That is why it is useful to have this debate.

The fifth report of the Committee on Standards in Public Life—now known as the Neill committee—entitled "The Funding of Political Parties in the United Kingdom", was published in 1998. That was the last large consideration of public policy on the subject. The terms of reference that the Prime Minister gave the committee were deliberately broad, so it looked into all aspects of party funding. It was a well-researched report, taking evidence from all around the world. There were 400 written submissions. It raised ethical questions about the standards of conduct in public life and also addressed specific public policy matters, including questions about the undue influence of political parties by large donors and, perhaps as importantly, public perceptions of undue influence.

The preface to the report stated that

"ignorance about the sources of funding has created suspicion".

To allay that suspicion, the committee recommended a series of measures underpinned by the seven principles of public life set out in its first report. The three most relevant were declared by the committee to be integrity, accountability and openness. I believe that Britain has a system that follows those principles very well.

The Government responded to that report with a White Paper, published in 1999, which was followed by the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000, known catchily as PPERA, which was extensively considered in both Houses. In line with the Neill committee's recommendations, the Act translated those principles of transparency and openness into practice.

The Minister said that the 2000 Act was in line with the committee's recommendations. He will recall that there was one recommendation that the Government did not accept—tax relief up to a certain limit on donations to political parties. If the Electoral Commission comes up with a similar recommendation, will the Government consider it with an open mind?

Obviously, the Government always have an open mind on Electoral Commission recommendations, as the right hon. Gentleman should know. I will come to that point later, but it is important to recap the changes we have made in recent years, which I think have contributed to a healthier state of affairs for all parties.

The new regulatory system tightly defines those eligible to give donations to political parties, and it excludes, for example, donations from abroad. All donations of more than £200 have to be from permissible donors. Donations of more than £5,000 to parties or organisations and of more than £1,000 to branches of parties and individuals have to be declared and publicly recorded. It is a matter of record that the Labour party has, since 1995, published in its annual report to the national executive committee the identity of donors who have given more than £5,000. That may seem a basic step, but it actually represents a radical change in recent years in how parties operate.

PPERA also established the Electoral Commission with much fanfare. It was given, among other responsibilities, the duty of maintaining the register of donations and ensuring compliance with the system. The outcome of the introduction of that system has been a much longed-for openness and transparency.

The hon. Member for North Cornwall and others mentioned the existence of a certain degree of state funding through the funds created by PPERA, including the policy development grant, which was recommended by the Neill committee. There are also start-up grants to enable parties to adjust to the regulatory system introduced. It is also worth mentioning the Short and Cranborne moneys that are available to Opposition parties in the Commons and the Lords respectively, as has already been put on record. That money has introduced a realistic support for those parties, given the tasks that they have to undertake in Parliament and in developing policy.

It is important to recap some of the arguments that have been aired in this useful debate. No doubt, the Electoral Commission will be listening to it, as it is due to compile a report. It is possible to argue with great strength and conviction in favour of state funding. For example, it is argued that state funding could have a purifying effect because larger donations would no longer be necessary. State funding on a substantial scale could mean that parties were no longer reliant on large donations, which could remove any allegations of improper conduct. Another argument is that state funding could allow parties to perform their essential tasks more effectively, because they could focus on the key issues rather than spend their time chasing money or looking for funding.

There is also the argument raised by the hon. Member for Truro and St. Austell and mentioned in an intervention by the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young) about the fact that, in some countries, there is a match funding arrangement under which donations from individuals are match funded either through tax relief or something similar. Paradoxically, the tax relief system encourages private individuals to donate small sums. The official Opposition referred to that matter, although I am not clear about their policy on it.

There are also significant arguments against state funding, which should not be dismissed lightly. For example, there is the argument that taxpayers should not be compelled to support parties with whose policies they may strongly disagree. We must address whether it is wrong in principle to compel taxpayers to donate to objectionable parties. Similarly, there is the argument voiced by the hon. Member for Truro and St. Austell that public funds are needed for higher expenditure priorities elsewhere. There is also the point that any public funding system will simply ossify existing party arrangements, favour the establishment and be biased against new entrants to the political realm.

I know that the hon. Gentleman is concerned about capping donations, and there is the question of whether an individual's freedom to donate should be constrained in that way, as well as that of how to balance the freedom to contribute with fairness between the political parties. I believe that the vast majority of donors to political parties are not giving money in exchange for something, but giving resources for the good of their party without any expectation of personal gain.

Most importantly, the issue that we must consider, which was raised by my hon. Friends the Members for Braintree and for Southampton, Test, is the risk that reliance on state funding may remove an incentive for a party to cultivate its grass roots membership in order to raise money. We must be careful about adopting policies that could weaken local activism and participation. Any system that is developed should encourage local activism and grass roots involvement in parties. I would be reluctant to see a system that would make political parties lazy, London or Westminster-centric and not forced by regulations to reach out to the wider country.

There is a huge range of views on this matter. We know that the Electoral Commission is doing its work and we expect its report later this year. I am looking forward to seeing that report. It is going to review previous reports, consider systems in other countries and look at the case for public funding. We need to wait and see what the commission's views are. This is clearly an important issue, which we must continue to debate in—I hope—a calm and rational atmosphere, as we have today. I commend the hon. Gentleman for finding the time and opportunity for us to debate the matter today.

This is probably the first time in recent years that I have raised further education. FE is sometimes thought of as the Cinderella of the education sector, and it is important that that should not be so, as the Minister will agree.

My attention was drawn to the issue by an event earlier this month that affects people in my own and neighbouring constituencies: the decision by Filton college to close, or substantially reduce, an IT outreach course run at four centres in the Bristol area, one of which is at Bradley Stoke, the nearest centre to my constituency. I have informed the Minister's office that I wish to raise the issue.

It is to be expected that cutting an IT course will prompt a large number of e-mails. The course has clearly been well taught: I had many e-mails on the subject within moments of the staff being told about the changes. There is some confusion about exactly what is planned—about whether the course is being cut and about whether that would happen the next day, and there are more extreme versions of what would happen. It is not quite as dramatic as some believed, but the staff were told that within a couple of months, new entrants to the IT outreach course would cease, and existing students would have some continuing service until Christmas, but that was the extent of what was planned for the courses.

I want to allow the students on the course to speak to the House and to get the Minister's response. I shall quote several of those who contacted me to express the different facets of the problem. A student wrote:

"I am extremely dismayed that this valuable commitment to lifelong learning with regard to IT is going to be withdrawn".

I should explain that although numbers are lower this year than last, nearly 1,000 students attend the course at Bradley Stoke and more than a quarter are pensioners or people with disabilities, while many others are older people—not necessarily pensioners but more mature students. I shall return later to the matter of lifelong learning, which means not focusing just on teenagers.

To give hon. Members an idea of the age range of the students, I quote another student, who said:

"I am fast approaching the age of 76 and I find the courses stimulating and apart from that it is an opportunity to meet like-minded people. The environment is good and the tutors excellent … …I am putting to use the lessons I learned".

There is a breadth of age ranges on the courses, going up to the 70s and beyond.

I want to discuss the priority or otherwise given to older students, including pensioners. Older students get a lot out of the courses. I was contacted by someone who runs IT courses for pensioners through the college. She said that they say that the courses keep their brains alert and keep them up to date. There is evidence from the Alzheimer's Society that learning activities help to delay the onset of the disease, and that older adults' memories and decision making improved when they thought the tasks they were doing were relevant or when they were held accountable for their performance. The lady who runs the courses found that to be the case with her students. She said:

"When they first joined they had difficulties sometimes in remembering, but they have considerably improved. This leads me to believe that additional funding for this age group would probably save the Health Service a great deal of money by not needing to care for so many elderly persons with Alzheimers Disease."

Part of the message from the college is, "We can't do everything. We've got to cut back on something, and that is what we are going to cut back on." But investment in that age group, and helping older people and pensioners to learn could have beneficial spin-offs in other areas and be a sound investment.

Paragraph 4.48 of the Government's Skills Strategy White Paper on the subject of provision for pensioners, states:

"We want to safeguard a wide range of learning opportunities for pensioners … we expect pensioners to benefit substantially from the arrangements for safeguarding funding for leisure learning, and that in all areas learning for pensioners would be one of the priorities to be pursued through the new planning and funding agreements."

That is significant, as the college's argument for cutting back on the course is that the group involved is not a priority group. But the Skills Strategy White Paper states that pensioners should be a priority. I appreciate that not everybody can be a priority, but the Government say that pensioners should be a priority group, and the experience of pensioners on the course in my constituency is that they have not been treated as such.

That affects not just pensioners but disabled students. One young woman with cerebral palsy is very upset about the course ending and has featured in a number of our local newspapers. She writes:

"The Flexible IT is a great environment because it is designed to be taken at the student's own pace. It helps to build my confidence."

The fact that people with cerebral palsy are actively involved in the course is obviously positive, and I am sure that the Government would be in favour of it. This is the sort of course where students who may need extra support can find it. The course is flexible, and the students can come when they need to—the staff have the time that they need. Such courses will never be profitable or carried out by a profit-making organisation, but they are still important.

A further concern was expressed about the short notice given for closure of the course—that is more about how the college handled the problem than about wider Government policy. One student said:

"Two weeks' notice is unreasonable especially for the hardworking tutors".

The college told me that it found out what it was getting from the Learning and Skills Council well into the financial year. It therefore had only a short period in which to tell staff, as it is obliged to do. The staff told the students, then the students came to me. It all seems to have happened at short notice. I do not know whether anything can be done to ensure that colleges know much earlier in the year where they stand financially, but in this case the college found out about its financial position very late.

As I have said, existing students can continue until December, but that is of limited consolation. One said:

"I can't believe that the doors will be shut in December. Now that I'm going to finish this course I would like to start another one, but I can't think about it now".

Merely to say that the course is running until December is of limited consolation to those who were getting into IT and wanting to do longer courses.

A similar point was made by another constituent:

"I have just enrolled on a course … to further my computer skills, and have now been told that the centre is closing within the next few months and I will no longer be able to complete the course".

A lot of students take a long time and do not do things neatly to schedule. That is the point of the course, so stopping on a fixed date will be a problem for them.

So far, I have stressed the social value of the course—the benefits to older people and to people with disabilities—but the course is also relevant to jobs and employment. One constituent who contacted me said:

"This centre provides excellent facilities enabling people who are not computer literate to become so. Those who have computer skills have the opportunity to enhance those skills greatly. These are skills greatly in demand".

Importantly, she continues:

"I myself am a teaching assistant within a local primary school and have found that computer competence is becoming more and more essential."

This is not just about retired folk having something to do in their spare time; it is about vital skills that benefit our children and the economy.

On the issue of relevance to the job market, another constituent said:

"The centre staff are wonderful",

and I want to put on the record the students' appreciation of the centre staff. She continued:

"The venue is accessible to people who would never enter a typical college"—

as it is an outreach provision; it is not on the college campus but at a community centre. She went on, saying that

"being able to attend has enabled me to return to the workplace with new qualifications at the age of 53. I am not alone."

Again, the importance of the course is not just for social or leisure reasons; it is relevant to the jobs market, and people who might otherwise be on the scrap heap are acquiring relevant skills.

I want to try to convey to the Minister the strength of feeling of the students. One wrote:

"I urge you to use your influence to prevent the act of educational vandalism. In this modern age it is essential that as many people as possible are given the opportunity to learn this important skill."

Feeling is very strong: the impact of the suddenness of the decision and how much people value the course is clear from that strength of feeling. The staff are enormously valued and do a tremendous job. Some will be able to find jobs elsewhere in the college, but some may face redundancy. One student said:

"Kelly and the entire team at Bradley Stoke show professionalism, commitment, dedication to quality, helpfulness and patience"—

patience is a key word: a lot of the students need someone who will be that bit more patient. It may be expensive, but it is necessary—

"in helping everyone to attain their goal and achieve a qualification which will benefit them".

Again, this is a flexible course to which people can come when it is convenient for them. Every single quote I have read out has been from a different person who has contacted me, including this one:

"The IT centre is well appointed and offers a convenient and flexible way to study and its closure should be considered at the highest levels before a firm decision is taken".

That is part of the reason for bringing it to the Minister's attention today. I appreciate that colleges have to make their own decisions, but I am asking the Minister to take a personal interest in this case.

I could read out quotations all day, but I will not. However, I have a final one from a student in my constituency on the difference that the course makes to individuals. The person started in February 2003 and, interestingly, was told by the college that its aim was to have all pensioners able to use a computer. The person finished the course, took exams and wanted to continue. My constituent has written:

"It has opened up a new life to me, and others in our Group, and must not be allowed to close. I understand from Newspaper articles the college is focused on 16–18 year olds in line with Government priorities."

There is a sense among people on the course that somehow they do not matter. Despite the fact that the skills White Paper says that pensioners are a priority, these people feel that they are not.

The college's press statement about the decision to close the course to new entrants, headed "IT outreach provision", said:

"The Senior Management Team and the Corporation have given due consideration to the financial position of IT Outreach".

It says that the numbers are down, although there are still nearly 1,000 people at the Bradley Stoke site alone, and that the college is not covering its costs. I accept that—the money that it receives does not cover the cost of putting the course on. Critically, however, the statement says that the management team has considered the financial position

"in conjunction with its strategic importance."

What that says is that the college has other priorities and that the course is not important enough to continue. People feel offended by that.

I looked at the college website to see what its priorities and values are. It says:

"One thing's for certain—whatever you want to achieve in life, Filton College will set you off on the right road! Another important feature … is the fact that we're a community college."

The website also says:

"We get out into local cities, towns and areas to run courses … hold demonstrations and events and introduce people of all ages to the concept of lifelong learning."

So, the college website says that it goes out and does things for people of all ages, and it is true that the IT outreach course is not the only thing that it does, but the website also says:

"The College embraces diversity in all its aspects, and aims to employ a workforce and to attract a student body, which reflects, at every level, the community it serves."

The community that it serves includes many older and disabled people, but where is the provision for them? A further quotation from the website is:

"The College aims to ensure that all actual or potential … students are treated equally, regardless of age or disability".

That is not true. The students are being treated unequally because of their age. If they were 17, they would be fine, but because they are older, they are not.

I wrote to the college principal, who kindly replied. He said that the college has three priorities, which come from the Learning and Skills Council and, in turn, from the Department for Education and Skills. According to the principal, the "key priority areas" are 16 to 19-year-olds, basic skills for adults and work-based learning. The course in question does not fit into those. The principal then said:

"In light of finite budgets and infinite demands"—

which we understand—

"it is necessary to reposition our business to reflect the role being asked of us."

I do not think that the college is a business; I think it is a public service. I understand that it has to consider costs and be efficient, but the principal thinks that he runs a business. I do not, and I am worried that courses that are not profitable are being dropped because the business-minded approach says that as certain people are not a Government or college priority, they are therefore not economic. That is the wrong approach to education, and I hope and believe that the Minister agrees.

We have talked about the priorities coming from Government through the Learning and Skills Council. I have mentioned already what the skills White Paper says about pensioners, but the foreword signed by the Prime Minister, the Chancellor and three other Cabinet Ministers says:

"Our ambition is to ensure that … individuals have the skills they need to be both employable and personally fulfilled."

So the Government's agenda is not just about jobs, jobs, jobs; personal fulfilment is important. The Prime Minister continues:

"We must motivate and support many more learners to reengage in learning."

That is what the IT outreach course does. He goes on:

"For too many people, learning is something that stops when they leave school. Learning new skills, at work and for pleasure, must become a rewarding part of everyday life."

One final quotation from the Prime Minister is:

"Creating a truly demand-led approach means reforming qualifications, reforming the way we fund colleges, and reforming the way we deliver training."

There is plenty of demand. There may be other sources of workplace-based training, but colleges are often the only place where courses such as the IT outreach course can be done. Where can someone who needs the extra time find such a course? I do not know.

I have a specific question for the Minister on funding. I understand that although FE colleges have been given the funding that they requested, they have been asked to do 3 per cent. more for it. Previously, if they delivered 97 per cent. of their target, they got the funding that they needed, but now they receive that funding only if, for that same money, they deliver 100 per cent. The colleges thought that they had been given long-term funding stability, but then discovered that they had to squeeze out a further 3 per cent. That is part of the reason why colleges such as Filton are considering the future of courses of that sort.

I hope that I have given a flavour of how important the course is to my constituents. They think that they should be as much of a priority as teenagers or folk who need basic skills. They think that that course is important, and I agree.

Although I am unhappy with the idea of colleges as businesses, I am not critical of the college itself. I pay tribute to the staff, who have done a tremendous job.

My constituents want to know what the Minister can do to help them. I know that if I were in the Minister's position I would respond to this debate and then go on to do something else, and might even forget about the issue. However, I urge him not to forget about the people who have contacted me. I ask him to intervene personally to try to ensure that courses of that sort, which are valued so much by my constituents, will continue to be available to them and to others like them in the future.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Northavon (Mr. Webb) on securing this debate. The issue is important; it concerns people, and most politicians are in this business because they care about making a difference for the people that they represent and for society in general.

The hon. Gentleman powerfully articulated the concerns of his constituents, and the impact and benefits that many of them felt that they had gained from participating in such courses. I agree that there must always be a place in our lifelong learning system for learning for leisure, pleasure or self-development, which is distinct from learning for employability and for direct tangible economic ends.

Over the past three years, since I have held the brief for education, I have spent a lot of time meeting adults for whom learning has not been part of their lives for many years, but who have gone back into learning later in life. I have seen how that can transform people's self-confidence and how people can experience what I describe as the dignity of self-improvement, which many of them have not had the opportunity to experience in an educational context.

As the hon. Gentleman said, it is also true that for older people, this is as much a health policy as an education policy. It can make older people feel that they have something positive to offer their communities, and that they can continue to develop into their 80s and 90s and beyond. There is strong evidence that that supports their physical and mental health.

People with disabilities should also be given the opportunity to fulfil their potential in the same way as everyone else, although that cannot always be achieved through conventional or mainstream means. There must be particular provision to enable people with disabilities to do so.

We accept the importance of that kind of learning in the context of lifelong learning. It might be worth reflecting on what has happened to the adult and community learning part of the lifelong learning budget. We have agreed a national budget with the Learning and Skills Council for 2004–05 of £207.4 million, which has increased from £206 million in the previous year. I believe that that demonstrates our commitment to safeguarding opportunities for lifelong learning that does not lead to qualifications.

We do not apologise for saying that the Government have to make tough choices about priorities on the adult skills agenda—we were supported on that issue by the hon. Gentleman's Front-Bench Liberal Democrat colleagues. It is the Government's responsibility to make those choices, and I shall explain some of the priorities in a moment. However, in that context, there must be a ring-fenced, protected place for adult and community learning—for learning for leisure that does not have a direct, tangible economic gain.

In the context of the courses in which the hon. Gentleman's constituents participated, he rightly says that people are very emotional about using a facility that they have got used to using, that they feel comfortable with, and where they feel that the staff are focused on their needs—positive and complimentary things are said about the staff. I totally relate to and understand that on a personal level, but I also accept that the college has a finite budget and that it has to make difficult decisions.

The college's argument with regard to the outreach programmes at Bristol Rovers and Bradley Stoke is that demand has fallen significantly in recent years and the courses have been running well below capacity. It has been willing to subsidise them for a couple of years, but, having reviewed matters, it feels that that is not the best use of its resources, because those resources are finite.

Liberal Democrat spokespeople and I do not differ on the human importance of lifelong learning and its centrality to the future of the country. Often, our only difference on these issues is about the pretence that the state never has to prioritise and make tough decisions and that there are never finite resources. To pretend to constituents that any country or college can be run in that way is to deny reality. That is my only real criticism of the presentation of today's argument.

The hon. Gentleman rightly asks what will happen to the learners involved. Fundamentally, that is the most important thing. Are we telling them that, as a consequence of these changes, there will be no access to IT learning in the vicinity of where they live or within a reasonable distance? That is not the case. The college assures me that learners will be able to complete their courses at the main college and then enrol on other IT courses. The college is also working with the local learning and skills council to provide a mobile digibus service that will take IT training opportunities directly to the community.

If we look at ICT provision available in the area that the hon. Gentleman represents, we find that there are other colleges. There are 15 learn direct centres and 18 UK online centres, all of which are a consequence of the investment that this Government have put into further education and lifelong learning, and specifically into ICT.

The hon. Gentleman asked me to take a personal interest. The personal interest I will take is that if that information proves inaccurate and if alternatives are not available to the individuals concerned, I will want to know about it. I cannot guarantee that every individual will be fixed up with a bespoke, on-your-doorstep service, but I am anxious that as many of them as possible continue to have the opportunity to access ICT courses within a reasonable distance of where they live.

I am grateful to the Minister for that offer. He says that it is all very well for Liberal Democrats to say that everything is a priority, but I was quoting the Government's priority. They said that pensioners should be a priority, so why are they not ensuring that their own priorities are seen through?

That is the disingenuous and inconsistent bit of the argument. Saying that the Government will protect adult and community learning as part of the skills strategy, which I have demonstrated that we have done this year, and saying that we regard pensioners as an absolutely top priority in terms of the adult and community budget, which is part of the overall lifelong learning budget, does not mean that every single existing course and centre will be kept open ad infinitum. That is the inconsistency and dishonesty I referred to. In every area, college principals have to make decisions.

I accept that colleges are public services, but like every other public service they have to be run in a business-like way. I hope that the Liberal Democrats who run local authorities expect the officers who run the departments to do so in a business-like way. I am sure that they expect that, because in the end we have to represent the interests of the taxpayers and to ensure that public money is spent appropriately. Everyone who runs institutions of any kind—not just governmental ones—have to make choices about priorities. My contention is that all the individuals affected are entitled to be emotional and upset, and to feel bad about the decision that has been made. It is his duty to advocate their interests. However, it is not right to go on to say that this demonstrates a lack of Government commitment to lifelong learning and to adult and community learning, or to ensuring that, as part of our commitment to that learning, the provision available to older people is central. The Government have ensured that nearly 1 million learners access ICT through learn direct, and a very high proportion of them are pensioners. We know that many pensioners are enrolled on college courses of one kind or another; sometimes they are doing quite basic ICT skills and sometimes more advanced courses.

My only difference with the hon. Gentleman is about the pretence that one or two centres closing is a demonstration of the situation on the ground not matching what we say about national policy. That is a very deliberate Liberal Democrat strategy. If one examines the range of alternative provision available, one finds that there are still plenty of ways that pensioners can access such provision. No Government can say that everything is a priority of national policy.

I want to put this matter in a wider context. We have said that, in terms of skills and post-16 education, our priorities on where the state should put the bulk of its resources are straightforward: the education of 16 to 19year-olds, and of those adults who do not have basic skills or do not have up to the full level 2 qualification. There is massive consensus that that is an appropriate way for the state to prioritise its resources in the context of skills leading to economic objectives. There is also a ring-fenced pot of money specifically for lifelong learning, for leisure learning, and for quality-of-life learning.

That does not mean that the only people who matter are 16 to 19-year olds or those who do not have the equivalent of level 2 qualifications. It means that we will have to get additional income from employers, and from individuals in some cases, for other areas of educational and training provision. We are being clear about where the Government intend to put the bulk of their resources.

As for the skills strategy, we have also been clear for the first time that if we are to deliver, whether on the skills agenda or on the lifelong learning one, there must be a partnership of contributions from the state, employers and individuals. As we become clearer about priorities, that has implications. Even given that clarity of purpose and that focus in terms of the respective responsibilities of the social and economic partners on the skills agenda, adult and community learning still has a special and distinct place. The commitment to protect it is not just a national one.

We have said that we expect every local learning and skills council to secure reasonable delivery of adult and community learning provision in their local communities and, as part of that, to recognise that learning makes a much broader contribution for older people than merely a narrow educational one. As I have said, it is about contributing to people's mental and physical well-being and to their sense of being part of the community and of being active citizens. It also boosts intergenerational relationships. In lifelong learning settings, people of all generations come together and learn together. In a society where there is unfortunately a lot of mistrust and suspicion between the generations, that is important.

I understand the passion and concern of the hon. Gentleman's constituents, and I will, of course, take an interest in ensuring that, wherever possible, alternative provision is made available to them. However, he should not be disingenuous and pretend that any Government can prioritise everything or that if one centre closes in one constituency, that represents a dilution of this Government's commitment to adult and community learning or to the place that learning rightly plays in older people's lives.

I am very pleased to have the opportunity to open this debate. We have had a number of debates on Sudan in recent weeks, and the issue has been regularly raised with the Prime Minister, including this morning. I hope that this will be a well-informed debate because, by my reckoning, at least five hon. Members present have visited Sudan in recent weeks. Three weeks ago, the all-party group on Sudan travelled to Khartoum, to the Nuba mountains and to Rumbek in the south. On the Thursday and Friday, we went to west and south Darfur.

We witnessed a catastrophe in Darfur, which has got worse since the rainy season set in. We saw thousands of people who had been driven from their homes and were living in makeshift, inadequate shelters. They complained of hunger, and they lacked clean water, latrines and access to basic health care. Some of the people we saw may since have died, but everyone in the camp faces the prospect of death through water-borne disease over the next few months. Aid agencies were working heroically with limited resources and personnel, but in Darfur we saw thousands of people who need our help now.

In Kalma camp, I spent time playing with a ragged, rapidly expanding group of children who followed us everywhere shouting, "Okay". We shook hands and played some silly clapping and shouting games. They showed us a mobile phone, a radio and a camera fashioned out of clay. I have been in these situations a few times, and one feels that there is hope when children can still play. It is raining now in Kalma camp, and I desperately hope that those children are still all right. They should be—after all, they are the future of Sudan. Despite all the terrible things that we saw and heard, I believe that Sudan has a future.

I want to do something unusual and praise the Government of Sudan for some important things that they have done. They have joined the rest of the world in opposing terrorism. They and the Sudan People's Liberation Army have shown statesmanship, courage and leadership in bringing their country to the brink of a comprehensive peace agreement which, in the words of the Machakos protocol, aims

"to replace war not just with peace but also with social, political and economic justice which respects the fundamental human and political rights of all the Sudanese people."

Overcoming understandable feelings of pride, as well as suspicion of the international community, they have made a huge commitment to a political settlement in Darfur. They have accepted responsibility for ensuring the security of the people of the region and have acknowledged the desperate need for humanitarian relief.

It is often said that the Government of Sudan react to international pressure. I am sure that is true, but it is even truer that they react to international partnership, as demonstrated by the success of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development at Machakos and Naivasha under the wise chairmanship of Kenyan General Sumbeiywo. The careful diplomacy of the troika—the USA, Norway and, to the Government's great credit, the United Kingdom—has also borne fruit. On our visit to the Nuba mountains, we saw the positive engagement of Sudanese armed forces and the SPLA with the excellent work of the joint monitoring commission. A growing relationship has developed out of the armed struggle that has cost two million lives over the past 21 years, enabling both sides to commit themselves to elections three years after a comprehensive peace agreement and, after six years, a referendum on whether there should be one Sudan or two.

Let us offer praise where it is due, encouragement where it is needed and criticism where it is justified. The criticisms voiced by the people of Sudan are justified, and let us pay them the respect of listening to what they have to say. Everyone on the visit was sceptical about the commission of inquiry on Darfur that was set up by the Government of Sudan. Many people in the UK would be sceptical if an inquiry set up by our Government reported first, and perhaps only, to the Prime Minister. However, the Sudanese Government inquiry reported only to the President. The chairman of the inquiry, the distinguished legal expert, Dafalla Al-Haj Yousif, said that

"perhaps Sudanese people should be allowed to show what they can do."

The Government of Sudan have an opportunity to show what they can do to relieve the suffering of Darfur. They have issued a joint communiqué with the United Nations; they have the support of countries such as the United Kingdom that have given £62.5 million for humanitarian assistance; and they have made commitments that they must fulfil. They have committed themselves to a ceasefire, to political talks—regrettably, they have stalled since 15 July—and to a comprehensive plan to enforce law and order and to protect their citizens. They are committed to provide 50 per cent. of humanitarian assistance from their own resources and to facilitate the delivery of relief and assistance. They have also agreed to accept human rights monitors, the recommendations of the commission of inquiry and the deployment of the African Union ceasefire monitoring mission.

The eyes of the world are on the Government of Sudan, but the people who can best judge how well they work with the international community to meet their commitments to their own people are the people of Sudan, who will pass judgment when they vote in three years' time. The Sudanese Government have a huge task in Darfur, but they must do much more. They, the SPLA and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement still have a comprehensive peace agreement to conclude. Discussions about security are taking place in Naivasha, after which final negotiations will be required on how the various elements of democracy will work. It is obviously important that matters are dealt with thoroughly and concluded properly. For some time now, our group and others have been aware of the frustrations of many parties and regional groups about what they consider to be the exclusion of many Sudanese people from the process. Earlier today, members of the all-party group met a representative of the SLA, the main rebel group in Darfur. I was horrified by his depiction of the Machakos and Naivasha protocols as agreements that related only to north and south disputes rather than to the whole of Sudan. I was similarly horrified by his argument that the SPLA had shown that the only way in which to achieve progress is through armed struggle, designed to bring the Sudanese Government to the conference table and focus the world's attention on the gross underdevelopment of Darfur.

As we speak, there is conflict and massive displacement of civilians in western upper Nile. On our visit, we met representatives of the Beja people from the east of the country, who expressed indignation about their exclusion from the talks. It is a tragic and appalling irony that the Darfur conflict and crisis has arisen at a time when the whole of Sudan should be looking forward to a peaceful future. It is imperative that work gets under way to engage political parties, tribes, regional groups and the whole of civil society so that they can commit themselves to the development of peace, human rights, economic and social justice and democracy for the whole country.

We have been reassured many times that a comprehensive peace agreement will be signed, but it is vital that that happens soon. It is essential that groups throughout that vast country, which is the size of western Europe, learn of their Government's commitment to upholding the rights and aspirations of all their people so that none of them needs wage war again. The last thing that anyone needs in a country that has been at war for 38 of the past 49 years is more war. We should call on the SLA and the Government of Sudan to observe the ceasefire and to get round the conference table to hammer out a peace agreement in keeping with the Machakos and Naivasha protocols. They will need the assistance of the African Union to do so, but no one will benefit from the interference of other nations that wish to pursue their own interests. If Sudan is to make the transition from war to peace, it will need all the assistance that it can muster around the world.

During our visit, we travelled south to Rumbek, where the Sudan People's Liberation Movement is working to transform itself from an army into a democratic arm of local government. Nothing exemplifies the profound need for development more than Rumbek, as we discovered in a visit of only a few hours. A huge number of young people need education, the dirt roads are full of holes and the hospital—the only one for hundreds of miles—is massively under-resourced. The prison does not have effective walls, so people are held in chains, and there is no police force in an area where thousands of people have AK47s. In addition, the women's legal service urgently needs support so that it can represent women with very young children, who face imprisonment for adultery. The problems will doubtless increase in the short term as displaced people and refugees return to their homes from other areas in Sudan and from neighbouring countries across the border.

I commend the Government on their commitment to provide £150 million in development assistance in the next three years. One way of boosting the capacity of Sudanese public services in the short term is to encourage people who came to this country in the Sudanese diaspora but who now want to return to do so, even for short periods, so that they can pass on their skills and assist with the development of vital services. Development and immigration services could combine to promote innovative schemes. Sudan has oil and other natural resources, and can export food if its people are given the chance to grow it. The Naivasha protocols on wealth sharing will ensure that some people who have never had anything will have something in future, but it is essential that that money is used well, not least so that Sudan can demonstrate that the debt relief that it undoubtedly needs will be used to meet millennium development goals and will not be dissipated. I hope, however, that there will be no question of debt relief until Sudan improves its human rights record.

In the capital of Khartoum the benefits of public and private investment are visible in tall buildings and the major roads that are under construction. We visited the city and saw an urban redevelopment scheme at the Wadi el Bashir camp for internally displaced persons, where there was a disgraceful abuse of human rights. The mud-brick homes of people who had fled from conflict up to 20 years ago and who lived on the margins of the city with day-labouring jobs had been demolished, the inhabitants reduced to living in shacks on top of the rubble. Latrines had been demolished in a hot country at the start of the rainy season, thus inviting a cholera epidemic. There was no discussion or consultation; there was only an armed guard on a bulldozer to enforce compliance. Democracy cannot come too soon to Khartoum.

I have been speaking for a fair amount of time, but I want to return to Darfur, where I hope the children are still able to play. I shall represent some more voices of the people who may still be there. One old man wept by his home of grass and twigs that was about the size of a coffee table. A woman was trying to live under a thorny bush. Another woman who had given birth two days previously was sick, as was her child, and they were trying to live under a piece of plastic sheeting stretched over some grass and twigs. One woman's baby had been injured as she fled through the trees from a helicopter gunship. A man showed me where the Janjaweed had shot him. Some Arabs told me how the Sudan Liberation Army had driven them from their homes. Some people told me that they are all Muslim, but that their tribes include Arabs, Africans and people who are somewhere in between. A village leader told me that they all wanted to go home, but could not do so until it was secure, and that they would not be pushed to return until they were convinced that it was safe. Some people told me that they would never return to their villages, because if they did so they would never feel safe again.

One man acknowledged that the heart of the problem is the age-old dispute between pastoralists and nomads to which there must be a negotiated solution. Another man said that it is a complex situation. One woman simply said to the international community, "Please help." The situation is extremely complicated, but we must help. The Government, Members of Parliament and, indeed, our constituents can all do so. Yesterday, the Disasters Emergency Committee' rightly launched an appeal for Sudan. I profoundly hope that the entire population of the United Kingdom will respond to that appeal and provide resources and money so that people on the ground can ensure that services are delivered to some of the most needy people in the world.

The all-party group believes that parliamentarians can play a part. We all have constituents who contact us about international development issues, and their interest is most welcome. There is huge interest in international development and the problem of world poverty. We all have databases and lists of people whom we can contact. The all-party group will write to other MPs tomorrow to ask them to urge people in their constituencies to contribute to the DEC appeal. Such a transaction is, by its very nature, private, but we hope that MPs will have an idea of how much their constituents will contribute to the DEC appeal and that they will tell the all-party group. We could then say to the Government, "You are doing a great deal and have done a tremendous job of diplomacy. You are investing a great deal in development. Indeed, you are making the largest cash investment of any country in the world. You certainly outflank the other countries of the European Union, which need to do a great deal more. However, we want you to do more." We would appeal to the Government to make a contribution double the amount that MPs predict their constituents would contribute to the DEC appeal.

We can all do more to help the people of Sudan, and we must do more in the long term to assist the country's development . There is hope, and this is a crucial time for us to be involved in a positive and constructive way.

Before I call the next speaker, I remind hon. Members that the winding-up speeches are due to start at 3 o'clock. Several hon. Members are trying to catch my eye. If speeches are kept reasonably short, everyone who wants to participate in the debate can do so.

Thank you, Dame Marion. I congratulate you on becoming a dame. I also congratulate the chairman of the all-party group on Sudan, the hon. Member for Lancaster and Wyre (Mr. Dawson), on securing the debate so soon after our return from the country. I thank him, too, for being a brilliant chairman and for giving a speech that left little to be said, although I am sure that we will all say a lot.

My immediate reaction to the situation in Darfur is anger. I have said it before and I will say it again: since I was elected in 1997, this is the second time that there has been a major humanitarian crisis in Sudan and that makes me very angry. There are so many similarities between what is happening now and the situation in Bar al Gazal in 1997, which I witnessed. Even the Sudan Liberation Army appears to have connections, however tenuous, with members of the Sudan People's Liberation Army—it is certainly talking to them—who operated in southern Sudan and were among the combatants in the civil war there over so many decades.

There is a relentless flow of arms into African countries, especially Sudan. Wherever one goes, one sees little children in possession of arms whether or not they are child soldiers; arms are in all the villages. There are similarities between the Murahaleen in southern Sudan, who are definitely supported, aided and abetted by the Government of Sudan, and the Janjaweed in Darfur. They are nomadic, Arab tribes, who are armed and supported by the Government of Sudan. That might be denied, but it is reasonable to assume that what happened in southern Sudan is also happening in Darfur.

The Secretary of State is not present and nobody appears to have read the International Development Committee's very good report and investigation into the factors leading to crisis in southern Sudan in Bar al Gazal in 1997, yet similar things are happening in Darfur. Members of the all-party group find it strange that no one seemed to bother about what was developing in Darfur; all the signs were there but no one took any notice. As the hon. Gentleman said, there is fighting in Malakal in the upper Nile region. Could the same situation develop in upper Nile, as we are trying to deal with the problem in Darfur?

I am intensely angry that no development aid is going into Sudan, which is the size of Europe. It is as if we said that because there is civil war in Italy, for example, we must not give aid to the UK. That is the scale of things. For there to have been no development assistance or projects in those parts of Sudan that are not at war, is a very great error by the international community.

I am angry, too, because when we were in Sudan no one seemed to claim responsibility. The non-governmental organisations said, "Oh well, we knew but no one was listening", and the peace-process negotiators said, "We were concentrating on the peace process and we didn't know that things would be that serious in Darfur." The United Nations set-up that the group visited in Sudan denied all responsibility for or knowledge of what was going on. That was very depressing indeed for members of the all-party group; someone, somewhere could have alerted the United States and the UK negotiators even if the Government of Sudan had not been alerted or did not know what was happening. The situation has been going on for years. Why were they not alerted, and why did they not know?

As the hon. Member for Lancaster and Wyre said, the peace process is excellent; we are so thrilled with it. The agreement is for all the people of Sudan. It promises elections in three years and that all regions will be involved. It will affect all the people of Sudan; it will help the people of Darfur and of upper Nile. Why was it not sold to all the people while this process was going on? As the hon. Gentleman said, the exclusion of people in other parts of Sudan from the peace process while negotiations were going on was a great mistake.

The crisis in Darfur is portrayed as genocide, ethnic cleansing and as Arabs versus Africans. People rightly remember Rwanda, and want something to be done about the situation. People like simple solutions and soundbite descriptions, but everyone who has been to Sudan knows that the situation is hugely complicated. No matter how complicated it is, the fact remains that tens of thousands of people have died already, hundreds of thousands will die if the aid does not get through to them, and a million or more are displaced. Living conditions are appalling, as the hon. Gentleman said.

The Sudan Liberation Army, which was formed only in 2003—it is less than two years old—claims that it had to take up arms against the Janjaweed because the traditional attacks by the nomadic Arab tribes against the pastoral Africans were getting worse, and it alleged that that was being supported by the Government of Sudan. That has gone on for decades. When I visited the displaced people's camp in Khartoum, I saw people from Darfur who had been there for nearly 20 years. Everyone must have been aware of what was going on and of the fact that it was escalating. The SLA claims that the Janjaweed are armed and encouraged by the Government of Sudan. As I said earlier, it is difficult not to believe that, because the Murahaleen in southern Sudan were certainly armed and encouraged by the Government.

When a SLA-led rebellion occurred, the Government of Sudan tried to put it down in a heavy-handed way. My reading of events is that the reaction was too heavy-handed, the Janjaweed were left to let rip, and the Government lost control of the situation and desperately needed help from the international community to deal with the crisis.

What must be done? There is no question but that aid must be provided to save lives. We must make the Government of Sudan stick to their commitments. Their written commitments, which are three pages long, are excellent, and contain all the things that need to be done. Some 50 per cent. of the aid needed will he contributed by the Government of Sudan, the transport of aid will be facilitated, the militia will be disarmed, and villages will be policed so that people can return to them. Please God let that happen, and let us help the Government of Sudan to make it happen.

The international community should also make its contribution, not just in aid but with more monitors and peacekeepers. We saw an excellent and impressive example of peacekeeping conducted in the Nuba mountains under a Norwegian general, General Wilhelmsen, who should be congratulated on the operation that he is undertaking there.

Can the African Union do the same thing? We are worried that the African Union peace monitors might not be strong enough or experienced enough. Is the international community prepared to strengthen the monitoring process in Darfur, once there is a proper ceasefire as opposed to a verbal one?

We must also sell the peace process to the rest of the Sudanese. As the hon. Member for Lancaster and Wyre said, we saw little pockets of wonderful things. We visited a clinic run by Médecins sans Frontières in a village in the Nuba mountains. It was brilliant and well run, and I would have been happy to work or be a patient there. Likewise, there has been a huge improvement in Rumbek since we were there two years ago. Things are beginning to happen. Admittedly, it appeared that the work was being done by non-governmental organisations, and it needs to be rolled out throughout Sudan. Another example was an excellent school in Rumbek run by UNICEF, so there are signs of development.

What we need is a Sudanese Marshall plan agreed by the United Nations, international donors and the Government of Sudan, because we must help. The hon. Member for Lancaster and Wyre mentioned the diaspora, and I have to plug my charity, Afrimed, which was founded by Zeinab Badawi. It is working on that issue, trying to get people from the diaspora to go to Sudan to give help for a few weeks or months.

I make a plea to the Minister to consider the needs of the Arab nomadic tribes in Sudan. It is all very well to dismiss them as monstrous, raiding and killing Janjaweed or Murahaleen, but they are not doing it just for fun. Global warming, which is our responsibility, is causing the desert to spread south in Africa, and people are running out of land on which to live and pasture their animals. It is difficult for them, and times are getting worse and worse. If we do not address their problem, there will be more strife and struggle as tribes from north Africa move further south, trying to get better conditions for their families and animals. We all know that a lack of development and diminishing land causes more war, that wars lead to more poverty, and that poverty leads to more war. The situation gets worse and worse.

Unless we address the issues, throwing aid at humanitarian disasters will be pointless. I know that that sounds cruel, but without long-term plans to help, our crisis appeals and humanitarian aid will mean only that people die more slowly. We must follow aid with proper development. Failing to act on the wider issues would mean that we could be as guilty of the charge of genocide as anyone. We must act.

Thank you, Dame Marion. I will take careful note of your strictures on time.

I am delighted to follow the chairman of the all-party group, my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Wyre (Mr. Dawson), and the vice-chairman, the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Dr. Tonge). I cannot follow their passion, as I shall be talking about the security situation, but I sign up completely to the emotional way they put their case, the accuracy of which I know to be only too apparent, having visited Darfur in particular and Sudan in general.

I have two quick appeals to make to the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin), and then I will comment more generally on security. One point comes directly from the meeting this morning with the representative of the SLA, which my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Wyre mentioned. That representative made it clear that the talks with the Sudan Government could not take place in Addis Ababa because the SLA representatives had not been able to get their passports properly verified. Could that be sorted out quickly? The fact that they had Eritrean passports probably did not help, but they need to get to Addis Ababa very quickly. Without those talks, there will be no opportunity for a ceasefire or any way of bringing meaningful peace to Darfur.

We should also ask the SLA to make it clear on the ground that it is opening up the land that it appears to control to humanitarian aid. The worrying thing we learned from the NGOs was that they knew very little about the land under SLA control. We should also make it clear to the Government of Sudan that we believe, having visited the camps—I visited Kass, which is between el-Geneina and Nyala—that any attempt to move the internally displaced persons, for whatever reason, without their full consent would be totally reprehensible. From what we saw in Khartoum, I would say that the Government do not have a good reputation. People are scared to death, and the last thing they want to be told is that they must move, even if it is for their own security. They do not believe it, and I think they have every reason not to.

I shall quickly mention the wider security situation. As my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Wyre and the hon. Member for Richmond Park said, we saw some very good things. The situation in the Nuba mountains showed that ceasefire monitoring could be effective. There is quite a complicated arrangement there between the three organisations: the verification monitoring team, the civilian protection monitoring team and the joint military commission. I shall not go through what each of them does, but within reason they pull together and seem to be an effective force on the ground. They are not great in number. The JMC, the organisation with which we spent the most time, numbers tens, not hundreds, of people, but because it can call on airborne movement it can get to places quickly, and it can work with other bodies, such as the CPMT, to examine outrages. All the evidence that both sides presented to us suggested that there had not been any serious outrages.

If the arrangement can work in Nuba, it can work elsewhere. The problem that I foresee, as has been mentioned by the hon. Member for Richmond Park—who is my hon. Friend in this respect—is the difficulty of transferring what works in Nuba to the north-south dialogue and to Darfur. I have not yet written my report, so my colleagues cannot disagree with me on that, but I hope they will see where I am coming from. I am worried because we are moving from a scheme that seems to work to a situation in which the UN is being asked to take over in the Nuba mountains at the same time as it takes over the north-south monitoring of the ceasefire.

We need the arrangements in place sooner rather than later. A worrying thing, which we have seen in Rumbek, is that there have been outbreaks of fighting among people who had previously been on the same side, just because there is no effective policing and there is not as yet any form of monitoring of who has weapons, what they are doing with them and whether they can be persuaded to hand them in. We need such arrangements in place sooner rather than later, and that is as true in Darfur where we urgently need the ceasefire to take effect. We are all led to believe that there is a ceasefire, but it did not seem that way when we were there because the Government were still on the ground with their helicopter gunships, and it seemed that bombing was still continuing, even if to a lesser extent. The SLA is still there and has not given up its land.

We need monitoring troops on the ground, and we need not just military personnel, but civilians—a mixture of the two. When my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for International Development returned from his visit to Khartoum, he understandably made great play of the fact that we would be paying for those monitors. It would be good to know what progress is being made on that. The sad thing that emerged from our trip a fortnight ago was that there seemed to be little evidence of real people coming in and little evidence that the expertise available from the Nuba mountains was being drawn on, other than with regard to what was happening as a by-product of the complications that we witnessed. We need the expertise in the Nuba mountains to be brought in, and we need real people, although not in huge numbers, who know what they are doing. That is the pressure on the African Union.

We already have a different process in the Nuba mountains from that in the north-south dialogue, and a third group—the AU—is being asked to undertake the monitoring in Darfur. The possibility for confusion and, dare I say it, disagreement over who pays, who does what and who makes sure that it is done properly is obvious for all to see.

It is on that point that I make my plea to my hon. Friend the Minister. We need to get the security situation sorted out sooner rather than later. Yes, we saw starving people and people who will die from disease, but the overwhelming cry from the people in the camps was, "We want security. We will not go back until we know that our land is safe." We saw the burned-out villages, so we can understand that.

We have to secure those people where they are at the moment, and give notice of the fact that we will make sure that the countryside is returned to peace. We must ensure that that carries on in the longer term. That is an enormous effort, and we are doing that not just in Darfur, as my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Wyre says: we also have to consider the Shilluk Kingdom and the Red sea area, where tensions, and the Balkanisation of the country, are sadly all too evident. At the same time, as my hon. Friend rightly says, we have to pump in humanitarian aid, not just as a Government but as individuals.

I, too, pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Wyre (Mr. Dawson) for the way in which he secured the debate and has led the all-party group on Sudan. As he rightly says, the pictures that have horrified the entire world in recent weeks have been of a humanitarian disaster, but underlying and causing that is an acute political problem. I am pleased that my hon. Friend the Minister with responsibility for Africa is responding to this debate, because I think that he can give some assurances on the political points. They are the ones on which we will need progress if there is to be a long-standing solution to the problems in Sudan.

Quite often, we can remedy the immediate humanitarian disasters, and the country will stagger on, although the real problems that underlie what has happened have not been resolved. We have to make absolutely sure that our sympathy for, and response to, the plight of the victims of the crisis in western Darfur does not detract from a determined search for a political settlement.

Everyone present here and at previous debates on the subject is clear that the particular problem underlying what has happened in western Darfur is the attitude and activities of the Sudanese Government. There is also the difficulty of the long-running civil war in Sudan, which is the longest running in the world. If we think about it, the current generation in Sudan is probably the last that can remember a time when the country was at peace. If it does not seize the opportunity to restore some kind of peace, there will be a generation that has never known a country with any stability.

I went to Sudan shortly before the all-party group visited, and had quite a different experience—although we probably came to similar conclusions—because I came from the south after travelling around some other east African countries. I spent a lot of time with people from the SPLM, and saw and heard about a lot of problems similar in type to those in Darfur, although they were on a much smaller scale. I also saw the continuing humanitarian problems in the south, which are getting worse because of the lack of peace, stability and a political process that will enable reconstruction and development.

Our country had a historical role in Sudan, and we therefore bear a heavy burden of responsibility for support in the current troubles. I pay tribute to the Government for being at the forefront, both in providing humanitarian aid and in their political involvement in the peace process. I want to make a couple of suggestions on what my hon. Friend the Minister could do to take that forward.

I very much hope that my hon. Friend and the Government will continue to provide a high level of support to Sudan to make sure that the peace holds. That refers partly to the provision of aid. It is not just humanitarian aid; it is transitional aid to support the peace process. I saw a country that had gone backwards and that was in a state of complete devastation; I do not think that I saw a single stone-built house during the whole time that I was there. I also did not see a single drop of tarmac. People were ploughing the fields with little hand hoes. I bought one in a market and brought it back. The agricultural revolution has been the introduction of a few ox ploughs.

In the middle of all that, some very able people, including some very able women, were preparing plans for what will happen once peace is established. They desperately need training, support and capacity building now, so that as the peace process proceeds they can start to put things in place. Although I understand that there are issues to do with providing development aid when there is conflict, the time has now come to move on from that. I ask the Minister to consider providing transitional aid and—perhaps more importantly— political support in order to regain the momentum in the peace process, and to ensure that that turns into proper peace programmes, so that the country can find a way out of what seems to be an increasingly fractured situation.

Colleagues have asked the Minister to ensure that there is proper monitoring of the peace. I also ask him to do that; it would be helpful if he set out how that would be done. Whoever provides that, it must be effective and properly resourced. I heard good reports from the south about the high regard in which the monitoring in the Nuba mountains was held. The monitoring needs to be not just north-south but east-west, in places such as the Shilluk kingdom and other areas where there have been profound difficulties. People need to feel a sense of security if they are to return home and do simple things such as planting crops. They must feel some confidence that they will be there to harvest and store their crops.

I am sure that my hon. Friend the Minister will tightly hold the Sudanese Government to the agreements that they have made about the way that they will behave in western Darfur. When I raised issues about western Darfur in southern Sudan, people said, "Well, that is the way that the Government behave." There was a profound sense of mistrust and insecurity. It has taken quite some time for the Sudanese Government to acknowledge their role in what has happened, and it is important that they are not allowed off the hook as the weeks pass. I hope that my hon. Friend will give some assurances about that.

I saw horrifying things when I was in Sudan, although I did not see quite the scale of things that colleagues saw in western Darfur. My hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Wyre gave eloquent voice to some of the hardships that people have suffered. As we are politicians, we understand the relationship between politics and humanitarian difficulties, and I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will give assurances about securing a peace process that is political and that delivers real and lasting peace to people in Sudan so that they can rebuild their lives and their country.

I am happy to follow the hon. Member for Northampton, North (Ms Keeble). She made a measured contribution. I congratulate the chairman of the all-party group on Sudan, the hon. Member for Lancaster and Wyre (Mr. Dawson), on keeping the focus on this issue both inside and outside this Chamber, and on piling the pressure on us as individuals about what we can do and on our Government and the international community. We need to keep the focus on Sudan and Darfur as the humanitarian crisis worsens.

Other Members also made valuable contributions. My hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Dr. Tonge) raised the issue of climate change and desertification, which others have not mentioned. She highlighted the fact that even if the conflict were not taking place, we would have to tackle that substantial issue, for which we bear a degree of responsibility because of the pollution that we are creating.

It was appropriate that the hon. Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew) should have reminded us of the SLA's responsibility for ensuring that access is provided to the areas that it controls; parties other than the Sudanese and the Janjaweed are involved as well. I thank the Minister and his colleagues for making the additional funding available for Sudan—that is welcome, timely and appropriate. Members were right to draw attention to the launch of the appeal, which is now under way.

Certain people have characterised the Government's policy on Sudan as one of quiet diplomacy. Does the Minister think that a fair description? Perhaps the quiet diplomacy has been for public consumption, but I hope that behind the scenes there has been some loud and not so tactful diplomacy with the Sudanese Government. Regrettably, whether there has been quiet diplomacy or something much more vocal, the humanitarian crisis seems to be worsening and deepening in Darfur. Many leading commentators are now referring to genocide, although that may be a simplistic way of encapsulating the situation. I understand that the US Congress may be debating this matter at this very moment. It will come to some conclusions, during the next few hours or days, on whether genocide is taking place.

Many parties, including the Liberal Democrats, have called for a tough Security Council resolution that would include sanctions in Sudan if there were no immediate improvement in the situation. I stress that the improvement should be immediate, because if ethnic cleansing is going on—and the satellite photographs suggest that it is—leaving it for a few more days is hardly an option: the ethnic cleansing might then be complete and the Sudanese Government or the Janjaweed might get their way. If the Government are not willing to go public on supporting a much tougher resolution, what further measures are they considering? The Secretary of State for International Development said on 14 July that

"we shall have to return to the Security Council to take further measures"—[Official Report, 14 July 2004; Vol. 423, c. 1394.]

When he sums up, will the Minister set out precisely what further measures the Government have in mind if there is no immediate progress?

It is regrettable that Darfur has not been included in the peace process. When we debated this issue on 9 June, the Minister stated that the Government's position was

"to ensure that the catastrophe in Darfur does not destabilise all the good work that has been done in the past couple of years to achieve a settlement between the north and the south."—[Official Report. Westminster Hall, 9 June 2004; Vol. 422, c. 88WH.]

Nobody would want to jeopardise the peace process between the north and the south. However, separating the two—allowing the peace process to progress but the ethnic cleansing to proceed in Darfur—has perhaps been a mistake.

I want to ask the Minister a specific question. Given that the situation in Darfur is worsening and that there is growing evidence of the Sudan Government's involvement in supporting the Janjaweed and in carrying out a policy of ethnic cleansing, does he believe that any peace can be achieved in Sudan if all areas of conflict are not included in the negotiations? Has the Minister had time to look at the Human Rights Watch report that came out yesterday? It says that it has in its possession official Sudanese Government and local government documents, dating principally from February and March, that clearly set out the Sudanese Government's policy, or at least the measures that the Sudanese Government intend to be taken on the ground. They relate to including the Janjaweed in some of the security committees and facilitating the return of some displaced persons to their original homeland and blocking the return of others. A strong body of evidence suggests that we cannot take at face value anything that the Sudanese Government say about their intentions, because back in February and March their intentions in relation to the activities of the Janjaweed were made clear in those documents. I hope that the Minister will comment on that.

Other Members have commented on the level of monitoring and the number of staff on the ground. There are something like 60 UN monitors and 300 peacekeepers from the African Union. Does the Minister consider that to be sufficient? Does he think that there is a case for a much larger presence and for human rights monitors to be dispatched to the region? If he does not think that that action should be taken immediately—in the next 24 hours or the next seven days—is anything being done to set things in motion should that become a necessity in the next few days or weeks?

The Government have made the welcome announcement of additional aid to the region. Although it is not part of the Minister's brief, I hope he will be able to say what safeguards are in place to ensure that that aid arrives in the right place and is not diverted. Perhaps there should be some conditionality between delivering the aid and delivering on the peace agreement.

Does the Minister think that there is a role for the UK in preparing a contingent of peacekeepers and monitors to be deployed if it is decided that genocide is taking place? It would not necessarily be for immediate deployment, but the planning involved in such measures takes weeks, months or possibly longer. What efforts are being made now? Is dialogue taking place with other European Union or NATO countries, or in any other forum, on that option?

The final issue that I would like to raise is oil. Looking at diagrams of the concessions in the Darfur area, it appears that there is significant potential for oil production. For instance, the Chinese National Petroleum Corporation has a substantial concession in southern Darfur. To what extent does the Minister believe that oil revenue considerations are playing a part in what is happening in Darfur?

The progress that has been made so far on the peace process is welcome. Its applicability so far to the Darfur region, however, is in doubt. I urge the Minister to continue to exert any pressure that he can from our Government in any international forums to make the Sudanese Government, and the other offending parties in this crisis, aware that the international community will not stand by and watch what is happening without taking appropriate action, which could involve military action if there is no resolution.

Thank you, Dame Marion, and congratulations on your recent and deserved recognition. I join other colleagues in congratulating the hon. Member for Lancaster and Wyre (Mr. Dawson) on securing this debate, on presenting his and, to an extent, our findings with such eloquence, and on leading our delegation to Sudan with skill, charm and unfailing good humour. He will accept that he was assisted enormously by one person who has not been mentioned, but should be, and that is the co-ordinator of the all-party group on Sudan, Sultana Begum. She did a magnificent job; there was a thoroughly convivial spirit for virtually all the visit and it was an extremely worthwhile exercise.

Briefly, I would like to say something about the north-south accord and its prospects, and then focus my remarks on Darfur before hearing the Minister. The north-south accord is of course vital. Of course we attach importance to it and of course we are investing an element of hope in it because we know that without that process, disaster for the whole of Sudan is the alternative. That said, and an investment of hope though we have placed in it, there are real concerns about the fragility of the process.

I would like to ask the Minister what assessment he has made of the threat all the way along the line to the implementation of the north-south peace process as a consequence of those elements in Khartoum which are frankly opposed to the peace deal altogether; and what assessment he has made of the additional factor of policy incoherence and a lack of capacity on the part of the SPLM/SPLA. Does he share the concern that militias will continue from time to time to be used by elements of the ruling party to undermine cohesion in southern Sudan, especially around the oilfields? If he does share that concern, will he provide some idea of how the Government intend to address the issue?

I would like to focus on the situation in Darfur, where several colleagues spent two days. The plight of people existing—I will not say "living"—in IDP camps in Darfur was probably more harrowing a sight than any I have witnessed in my adult life. There are 1 million people so displaced, but when one sees the people concerned one realises that they are existing in pathetic little shacks held together variously by pieces of stick, string or feeble plastic. As I think the hon. Member for Lancaster and Wyre said, those tents or shacks are commonly the size, in terms of length and breadth, of only a modest coffee table, and they are not very high either. It was common for us to see eight people in a paltry shack, of whom five or six would be children.

In the course of the visit, the hon. Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew) regularly drew our attention to the fact that there was a proliferation of families headed by females. There would be no male in the family, as he had been killed, was engaged in conflict or was elsewhere displaced, and one saw women in the most desperate circumstances seeking to keep body and soul together.

In essence, there are two major features of the process, insofar as public policy is concerned: the humanitarian response of civilised and concerned Governments, and the foreign policy response. On the subject of humanitarian responsibility and commitment, I will continue the non-partisan approach that I have adopted hitherto and say that the Government's humanitarian record is very good. I congratulate the Secretary of State for International Development on that today as I have done on previous occasions.

The British Government can hold their head high and be proud of the fact that they are the largest cash contributor in humanitarian terms and, after the United States, the second largest overall contributor. Good work is being done and, according to eyewitness accounts, humanitarian aid was starting to get through to the people who needed it. Food and some modicum of primary health care were being provided, and enormous credit is due to the NGOs for facilitating that effort.

On the humanitarian front, the problems are as follows: first, other Governments are ready and willing to explain at length why they are not doing more than they are doing—by implication, pointing to areas of the world where they are doing more than we are doing. I find that explanation, given by many EU ambassadors, singularly unpersuasive. In particular, the otherwise engaging and eloquent French ambassador was especially irritating on that front, talking about countries to which the French are contributing.

My response to that is that I am not interested. The crisis in Sudan is there, the challenge is now, the scale is enormous and the contribution that we can make as an international community by providing the aid in a spot that probably exceeds anywhere else in the world in the scale and immediacy of its need is so great that talking about other places is not good enough.

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that in Sudan, uniquely, aid is extremely expensive? Food that costs $200 a tonne to buy costs $1,000 a tonne by the time it is transported because the logistics of providing aid in Sudan are so complex, so there is a real need for volumes of aid and money.

Certainly, volumes of aid and volumes of money are of the essence. That is part of the first aspect of the humanitarian deficit to which I alluded a moment ago. I said that there were two categories of problem. The first category is inadequacy of resource. The second is a logistical obstacle to the delivery of the aid. We continually hear reports—since I returned from Sudan I have seen others on UN and other websites—of local authorities that continue to demand travel permits despite the international commitment that the Government of Sudan have made to facilitate NGO access and delivery of humanitarian aid.

In addition, there is a genuine anxiety about Khartoum's 90-day registration plan, which makes many NGOs reluctant to increase the size of their asset bases in Darfur for the simple and understandable reason that they have no idea whether those permits will be renewed in due course. If anybody thinks that the humanitarian crisis will be significantly alleviated, let alone resolved, within 90 days, then they are, frankly, in need of medical attention. There is not the slightest prospect of that happening. That is why I am so concerned.

Let us talk about the foreign policy side of the equation. We are blessed—I say that sincerely—by the presence of a Foreign Office Minister. I understand exactly where the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Dr. Tonge) is coming from on the subject. I think that because we are both humanitarians, we would both be inclined, when push comes to shove, to continue with humanitarian aid—even while recognising the downside of simply propping up a regime or slowing the process of death—because the alternative is even worse.

I understand why the hon. Lady has regularly made the point that aid is nothing like enough, and that it is self-delusory to suppose that it is anything like enough simply to chuck aid at a situation that is exacerbated and compounded not by natural disaster but by man-made design. That is what has happened in Darfur, in particular, and across Sudan.

In essence, one must decide whether one believes that quiet diplomacy—I pick up on what was said by the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake)—or remorseless pressure is the best means by which to achieve progress in Sudan and, in particular, in Darfur. Of course that simplifies the argument, but the fact that there is complexity in Sudan, including in Darfur—the fact that it is not a straightforward Arab versus black African conflict—does not in any way absolve us of responsibility from trying to reach an overall judgment about the approach that is likely to be most productive.

I put it to the Minister that—I say this on the strength of my visit—pressure, pressure and more pressure on the Government of Sudan seems to be of the essence, both if we are to get commitments from the Government to behave themselves and if those commitments are to be monitored and fulfilled.

I remember meeting Minister Ismail, the Foreign Minister, who is generally regarded as something of a dove in that regime. As is often the case with Foreign Ministers, he is charged with the responsibility of making the Government's case in the international media. Of course, he was engaging and articulate and had responses to our inquiries—he would be an extraordinarily ineffectual Minister otherwise. That said, I found his arguments unpersuasive. He spent several minutes complaining to us about the BBC's representation of his Government's policy. His comments were thoroughly uninteresting, unpersuasive and typical of a Government on the run, making a patchy attempt to defend a not very good record.

The Sudanese Foreign Minister also spent a considerable amount of time telling us that his Government would simply walk away if the pressure became too great. In case that argument is still prominent in the counsels of the Foreign Office, I want to make the argument to the contrary. If the Government of Sudan were to be dissuaded from pursuing the north-south peace agreement simply because they were subjected to heavy pressure over Darfur, they cannot have much of a commitment to the peace process.

The international community cannot allow itself to be bullied into not taking a robust approach to the Government of Sudan on the grounds that, if we do, the modicum of progress that has been made will somehow be discontinued or suspended. We must be prepared to look the Sudanese Government in the eye and say that there is a carrot for their country—the provision of decent development assistance over a period to foster the peace process and to reconstruct the country—but that the international community is entitled to insist on vastly better behaviour.

We need a much more robust United Nations Security Council resolution. As the Minister knows, that is what the United States Administration, Secretary of State Colin Powell and others favour. The resolution must unequivocally condemn the Government of Sudan for the horrific human rights violations that have taken place in Darfur. It must insist that those human rights violations be independently, publicly and internationally investigated, that a guarantee be given—there was grave doubt in my mind about this when we visited Darfur—that people in the IDP camps will not be obliged to go home until the region is secure and it is safe for them to do so, and that the Government of Sudan will do all that they reasonably can to disarm the Janjaweed and other militias that are killing, threatening, raping and otherwise abusing the human rights of the civilian population.

We have a choice: do we take an approach of quiet but weary resignation or one of up-front and dynamic representation of what we believe to be right? I am an admirer of a humanitarian and activist foreign policy. We are debating Sudan and Darfur, and I will not in any way be deflected from that subject. I know that I will get into trouble with you, Dame Marion, if I do. Suffice it to say that I am one of those who greatly admires the Prime Minister's stance on Iraq. I wish to take this opportunity to say that the Government must be prepared to do all that they can, within the United Nations, to intensify pressure for change. If that means indicating that, without change, a robust sanctions policy that does not operate to the detriment of the population but is deliberately and calculatedly targeted at those who are preventing progress will be applied to the Government of Sudan, so be it. If that means considering deployment of a UN protection force as a last resort, so be it. If that means contemplating a much more forceful approach than has been deployed so far, so be it. We cannot allow a situation in which, over a period of months, hundreds of thousands of people die who would not die if there were a definite peace, an adequacy of human rights monitors, a proper supply of ceasefire monitors and a disarming of the militias.

I admire the hon. Gentleman's passion and commitment. Is he concerned that in advocating that stance he may play into the hands of groups such as the SLA, which would like to escalate the situation further?

I have no desire to do that, as the hon. Gentleman knows. I am not saying that we are at the point at which military action should be taken, because there are problems with that, but it should not be ruled out.

I conclude by urging the Minister to press the Government of Sudan on one specific indicator of good faith: the inquiry into the commission of human rights abuses by Government bombing on the one hand and collaboration with Janjaweed militia on the other. If we do not press for a clear commitment of independent scrutiny on that front, we cannot hope for the wider progress that we need to see and that the people of Darfur deserve.

We have had a constructive and useful debate. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Wyre (Mr. Dawson) for giving us the opportunity to discuss this important issue and for the measured tones in which he introduced the debate. I thought that the debate was all the better informed for the fact that about four or five hon. Members present have first-hand experience. I shall deal briefly with some of the points raised—I was asked a large number of questions, not all of which I shall have time to respond to—and then set out what I want to put on the record.

Several hon. Members asked about African Union peace monitors and the example of the Nuba mountains was mentioned. The British monitor, Mr. Rob Symonds, who is now with the AU in Darfur, helped to set up the joint monitoring commission in the Nuba mountains, so he has a lot of experience and will be able to bring some of it to bear in Darfur.

I was asked by the hon. Members for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) and for Buckingham (Mr. Bercow) whether the Government's policy was one of quiet diplomacy. It is not. No casual observer of our pronouncements and activities over the past six months could think that our policy is confined to quiet diplomacy. We have made representations in public and private to all the parties at all levels of the Sudanese Government. I shall take the opportunity to say something about that again in a minute.

One or two hon. Members touched on the role of the Sudan Liberation Army, and they were right to draw attention to that, because it is sometimes overlooked. The SLA is a major player and has been attacking food convoys, taking hostages and stealing vehicles, even as the humanitarian operation has got under way. Its role should not be overlooked, although inevitably we have to focus on the role of the Government of Sudan.

My hon. Friend the Member for Northampton, North (Ms Keeble) said that in the end there must be a political solution and that it is not just a humanitarian issue. I entirely subscribe to that. We shall certainly do all that we can to bring the parties to the conference table. Talking of that, my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew) said that the SLA was complaining that it had had difficulty getting the Eritrean passports of its members acknowledged. That is the first that we have heard of that issue. We have been doing all that we can to encourage the SLA to make its demands at the conference table rather than as a precondition to going to the conference table. It has raised a number of points with us but not that one, and I note it with interest.

My hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Wyre and others have been gracious in mentioning the role of the UK. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Buckingham for saying that we can hold our heads up high. None of us wants to be complacent; we all know that nobody has done enough or was on the scene early enough, but we have done more than most. We can, as the hon. Gentleman said, in the global scheme of things, hold our heads up high.

We have played a leading part in trying to resolve the crisis. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for International Development visited Sudan, including Darfur, in June; the Foreign Secretary has had conversations with the Sudanese Foreign Minister, the most recent of which was on 12 July; our ambassador in Khartoum, Mr. William Patey, has for a long time been making daily representations to the Sudanese Government at all levels on all the issues that we would wish him to raise—both political and humanitarian; the UK special representative, Alan Goulty, who has just returned from the region, had a meeting with President Bashir very recently; and I have had two long conversations with the Sudanese Foreign Minister, most recently at the African Union summit in Addis Ababa the week before last.

The United Nations Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, and the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, both visited Sudan at the end of June, and during those visits the Sudanese Government made a number of commitments to improve the security situation and humanitarian access. They agreed to deploy more police to Darfur, to disarm the Janjaweed, to resume political talks, and to remove all obstacles on visas for NGOs. There are signs that they are—albeit belatedly—taking steps to honour those commitments. We have been pleased to see improvements in humanitarian access and the fast- tracking of visa applications for NGOs. Sudan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs has instructed its embassies to facilitate visas for NGO staff for Darfur within 48 hours of application and to exempt them from all fees, and foreign aid workers in Darfur are now exempted from restrictions on movements of foreigners.

On the security situation, the Sudanese Government have announced the deployment of an additional 6,000 police from outside Darfur, and claim to have arrested 40 or so Janjaweed and begun the disarmament process. The UN has reported that some police have started to arrive in Nyala, el-Fashir and el-Geneina, and that there has been some limited removal of militias from areas around IDP camps in el-Fashir.

Together with the US and our EU partners, we have made it very clear that UN Security Council action will be needed if the Government of Sudan do not honour the commitments that they have given—so the international community will continue to monitor the situation closely in the coming days. Meanwhile, discussion of the US draft Security Council resolution and of the possibility of targeted sanctions continues. Given the urgency of the crisis—

Will the Minister give way?

If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I have been asked to deal with a lot of points, and I think that other hon. Members would like me to put on record the Government's position.

Given the urgency of the crisis, it will, of course, be crucial to ensure that any Security Council action has a quick and positive impact on the ground. It is also important to ensure a balanced approach to the problem, as violations of the ceasefire continue on all sides. There are some signs that Janjaweed activity may be decreasing, but it is too soon to conclude that that is a genuine trend. In any case, rebel activity continues.

We consider the full deployment of the AU-led ceasefire commission to be key to improving the security situation. The deployment of ceasefire monitors in the Nuba mountains has, as hon. Members have observed, had a positive effect on the situation there, and we hope that the deployment of the AU monitors in Darfur will have a similar effect. As hon. Members may know, we have contributed £2 million to the initial setting-up costs of the AU monitors and the EU is making available €12 million.

It is early days, but more than 60 monitors and staff are in place in Darfur, and others are based in Chad and Khartoum; the UK monitor, Mr. Rob Symonds, arrived in el-Fashir last weekend. The AU plans to expand its presence next to el-Geneina and Kebkabiya. It has two helicopters in Darfur, and a third is on its way. Forty-nine vehicles are being fitted out in Khartoum before being flown to Darfur. Further aircraft are expected shortly. Access to fuel is problematic in such a remote area, and that is being addressed. The AU is also working on force protection arrangements and plans to deploy between 200 and 300 men for that purpose. The AU is already operational. Several investigations have taken place and we will take a close interest in the results of those.

Given our concerns about civilian protection and the human rights situation, we are also in close contact with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. As hon. Members have said, there have been massive human rights violations by the Sudanese Government and the Janjaweed militia, which may constitute war crimes or crimes against humanity. The report speaks of forced displacement, the arbitrary killing of civilians and rape. It is deeply disturbing, as is the recent report from Amnesty International. We and our EU partners have made it clear that reported attacks against civilians should be thoroughly investigated and the perpetrators brought to justice. We are also supporting the deployment of UN human rights monitors.

On the humanitarian situation, there has been significant progress on access and Sudanese Government procedures, although some constraints remain. The UN is now accessing some SLA areas for the first time. In all areas, small pockets of internally displaced people have been found. Disease is a growing concern throughout the region; as the rains have started, there is much to do and very little time.

My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for International Development announced on 13 July that DFID was setting aside a further £28 million for the remainder of this financial year. That brings the total UK humanitarian assistance for Darfur to £62.5 million, which, as hon. Members have said, makes the UK the second largest bilateral donor—after the US—and the largest cash donor to the crisis. The size of that response highlights the UK's commitment to Darfur and to Sudan as a whole. However, the UN is still reporting a funding gap of $140 million. We continue to press other donor Governments, including our EU partners, to increase their contributions.

We are in close contact with the UN as well as NGOs on the ground. The focus must now be on building capacity. The UN is almost halfway through its 90-day action plan and it is continuing to scale up its operations. As my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton, North said, only by addressing the underlying causes of the conflict will a sustainable solution be found. The political talks that got under way in Addis on 15 July concluded two days later having made little progress. The rebels set a number of preconditions before they would enter into a substantive dialogue and we are encouraging them to make their demands at the negotiating table and not outside it.

The peace agreement that emerges from Naivasha offers the best hope for the whole country. By offering the prospect of a truly decentralised federal system, it should help to address some of the root causes of the conflict in Darfur and elsewhere. Clearly, there can be no comprehensive peace in Sudan without a resolution to the crisis in Darfur, but with the peace talks at Naivasha at a critical stage, the international community must continue to push hard for progress on both issues in parallel—in particular on implementation, which someone asked me about a moment ago. We assess that there is the political will on both sides—north and south—to make the agreement work, but we recognise that it will require very detailed international pressure.

In the brief time available, I have tried to put on record what the Government are trying to do to deal with what we all acknowledge to be one of the worst humanitarian crises of recent times.

I want to stress the importance of engaging other groups and organisations and civil society in that peace process. At meetings in London and certainly in Sudan, the fear that groups are becoming more and more alienated has come over loudly and clearly. We certainly do not want more groups to take up the armed conflict route that the SLA has followed.

My hon. Friend makes a very powerful point.

I am grateful for the opportunity to have this Adjournment debate on the case of a whistleblower, which I have found very disturbing and with which I have been dealing for almost four years. It might help the understanding of the case if I give some background information.

When Jim Hemingway first came to my advice surgery in autumn 2000 I had little idea that a case that seemed relatively straightforward would result in the bullying and victimisation of an employee of Leeds Metropolitan university simply because he chose to be public-spirited and to save the taxpayer a vast amount of money that would otherwise have been spent on items for which it was never intended.

Mr. Hemingway is an associate lecturer and unit manager of the film and moving image part of Leeds Metropolitan university—formerly the northern film school—which is one of the two great universities in Leeds. He worked there for almost 15 years, but in autumn 2000, he became concerned that European social fund moneys paid to the northern film school were not being used as they should have been. He was especially concerned that a firm of consultants had claimed 10 per cent. of the moneys for which it had successfully applied as its consultancy fee, something that was expressly excluded under the terms of the application.

On 29 August 2000, the Government office for Yorkshire and the Humber wrote to Leeds Metropolitan university, after it had received a letter from Jim Hemingway, saying that it had been brought to its attention that the consultants' costs may have been claimed as part of the ESF applications and that the consultants were not eligible to do so. It asked the university to clarify the position. The consultancy referred to, based in Warwick, was called J & AB Associates, and on 28 April 1998 it invoiced northern film school for £16,152.96, which was 10 per cent. of the ESF moneys successfully claimed during that budgetary year.

In his memorandum of 21 March 1997, the then head of the film school said:

"We need to remind ourselves that we cannot claim consultants' fees from ESF, so in any spreadsheet it would need to be seen as a contribution towards production costs",

not as a consultancy fee. I stress that Jim Hemingway was not at the NFS in 1997. In subsequent meetings at the northern film school in Jim Hemingway's presence, topics such as how to hide the consultancy fees were discussed. That first alerted him and provoked his action to expose the mis-spending. In early autumn, Leeds Metropolitan university replied to the Government office that invalid consultancy costs had not been claimed from the European social fund money.

On 16 February 2001, I met the regional director of the Government office in Leeds to discuss Jim Hemingway's concerns that he was not satisfied with the accuracy of LMU's response to the question of consultancy. Three months later, the response was found to be incorrect. The regional director sent auditors into the northern film school after an initial meeting with Jim Hemingway to discuss his concerns. The auditors found that the funding for the whole of two northern film school projects should be repaid—a total of £162,419—and that decision was accepted by Leeds metropolitan university.

In August 2001, Government office officials met officials from the Department for Work and Pensions's European social fund division and the special investigations unit to discuss possible further action to take against Leeds Metropolitan university. On 5 September, the Government Office wrote to Leeds Metropolitan university saying that it would need to look at other ESF-funded projects at northern film school. The reply, dated 24 September, said that LMU would, of course, co-operate with any further investigation and on 30 November officials from the Department for Work and Pensions ESFD and the Government office met the vice-chancellor and deputy vice-chancellor of LMU to discuss the measures required to restore Government office confidence in its audit and control procedures for ESF-funded projects. The aim was to ensure that the problems found in three ongoing and one completed northern film school projects were not replicated in other LMU ESF-funded projects and that LMU's internal audit procedures, which had clearly not picked up those problems, could be checked by the Government office to ensure that they were adequate. I should add that Leeds Metropolitan university has other ESF-funded projected totalling some £7 million per annum.

By the end of April 2002, it was clear that the amount that needed to be repaid as a result of Government office scrutiny, totalled £389,706 and that Government office officials were working closely with Leeds Metropolitan university's internal audit to achieve the aim of restoring confidence in the monitoring procedures. In early July that year, the Government office told LMU that the way in which it calculated overheads for ESF claims was unacceptable and that those costs would have to be recalculated. That resulted in a further repayment of £129,398. Leeds Metropolitan university had to repay more than half a million pounds—£519,104 to be precise.

So the public have good reason to thank Jim Hemingway, a man who risked his job to blow the whistle on practices at the northern film school that had implications for the whole of Leeds Metropolitan university and to stop the improper claiming of taxpayers' money and the reclaiming by the Government office of that money. Jim was, therefore, concerned when he started being victimised at work by line managers and other senior staff at the northern film school. On 24 July 2002, he contacted the Government office to say that, despite his name not being leaked to LMU, somebody at the northern film school had clearly found out, or guessed from the Government office line of approach, that it was he who had informed the Government office of concerns over ESF funding at NFS. Jim asked the Government office to help him by contacting the then vice-chancellor to request him to stop the victimisation. I agreed that a meeting should be held on 13 November 2002, initially between the vice-chancellor, myself and a Government office official, followed by a meeting with Jim Hemingway and a third employee of the university, should the vice-chancellor agree to that extra meeting. The aim was to try to persuade the vice-chancellor to resolve the problems now facing Jim Hemingway as a result of his brave judgment to go outside the university to raise his justified concerns over ESF funding.

Why, then, did Jim Hemingway not use internal procedures at LMU to raise his concerns before contacting me as his MP? The answer is simple. Jim wanted to raise the issues that concerned him through LMU and never had any real wish to bring the matter outside the university. However, when he searched the LMU website before approaching me, he could find no mention of any policy about whistleblowers or public interest disclosures within the university.

Shortly after the meeting in November, Jim told the human resources employee relations manager of LMU that he could not find any internal policy on whistleblowing and asked whether such a policy existed. The employee relations manager told Jim that there was no such policy, but that he had raised Jim's particular case with the assistant dean for policy and resources at the faculty of health and the environment. A few days later, it transpired that such a policy did exist. Part of that policy explicitly precluded others from being informed of the name of the potential whistleblower. Yet, the employee relations manager had already told the assistant dean about Jim Hemingway, although he later denied ever having done so.

The prospect of the employee relations manager being made responsible for the conduct of the grievance procedure that Jim had instigated after being victimised and bullied by senior staff made it clear to him that he would not receive what he felt would be an honest hearing. Those involved in the bullying and victimisation were to be the very people involved in stages one and two of the grievance procedure. He had little confidence, therefore, that it would fair and equitable.

Since 2002, Jim Hemingway has consistently been bullied and victimised by members of staff, usually those in managerial positions above him, so that his working life has been made intolerable. That is why he wanted to tell the then vice-chancellor of the university exactly what was going on, and how his course leader and the assistant dean of the faculty had treated him after somehow finding out that he had been the whistleblower. The vice-chancellor's advice to Jim at the 2002 November meeting, at which I was present, was to continue with his grievance against his course leader despite Jim's intention to withdraw it.

Already concerned that he would not receive a fair hearing, Jim was alarmed to discover that the assistant dean did not even make notes of the preliminary stage of the grievance with the course leader, especially since the course leader totally contradicted herself in her written statement. The assistant dean allegedly forgot what had been said, although Jim's notes of that meeting, which were put immediately on file at his trade union, Unison, could easily have reminded him.

The main source of Jim's complaint about the procedure was that the assistant dean also forgot to tell the course leader not to speak about the grievance to other members of staff who were witnesses in the case, which she proceeded to do; that happened, despite its being one of Mr. Hemingway's main requests to the assistant dean before he would proceed. Jim and his witnesses felt intimidated, especially when the course leader asked people to change their statements. In spite of the fact that Jim's trade union, Unison, was involved during the grievance, the result of the flawed grievance procedure was that the case against the course leader was unproven.

I have good reason to believe that the course leader used her position to manipulate staff and students for her own political ends and at the expense of the courses that she was meant to manage. I have many examples of statements, as well as e-mails and memorandums, from students and staff who supported Jim's case. The Minister may have that file after this debate.

The story of Jim Hemingway's whistleblowing is not uncommon. There is the celebrated case of Paul Van Buitenen, who is now a Dutch MEP. He worked for the audit department of the European Commission and exposed corrupt practices that brought down the Commission EUROSTAT in 2001. That famous case had a much higher profile and involved a great deal more money, but the principle remains the same. If someone employed by a large organisation risks their career to expose the misuse of funds and is then penalised for doing so, that cannot be just or right.

Jim Hemingway's case revealed not only the weaknesses of the internal auditing system at Leeds Metropolitan university, but the lack of any coherent and consistent policy within LMU to protect people like Jim. I call on the Minister to instigate, in response to my debate, a nationally approved policy for all higher education institutions in England, which deals with public interest disclosures or whistleblowing, so that in future people like Jim can be assured that they can report genuine abuses without risking vilification and bullying—and, in some cases, the loss of their jobs and careers. Public bodies should be pleased that people like Jim exist—people who, out of a sense of public duty, report their concerns irrespective of the cost to themselves. I hope that the Minister will assure me today that he will investigate the possibility of developing such a policy, which will be standardised throughout the country's universities.

I also want an assurance that the Minister will request that Leeds Metropolitan university rewrites its grievance procedure to ensure genuine impartiality. That could mean outside arbitration being used in the resolution of disputes between employees. That arbitration could be in the form of an individual from another university or from a faculty in the same university who was completely unrelated to the faculty subject to complaint. What is important is that such a grievance procedure is seen to be fair, just and equitable by all sides in any dispute. That was plainly not the case with Jim Hemingway.

I have been careful this afternoon not to mention the names of individuals involved in this case apart from the person central to it, Jim Hemingway. There is, however, one individual who deserves to be mentioned by name. Dave Wright was the Government office official who carried out the audit so carefully, found the moneys that had to be repaid and ensured that all parties were kept informed at all times. He should be commended for his excellent work in following up Jim's concerns and in helping the university to ensure that such a problem can never happen again.

Why do I need to raise this case again after two years, when the whole ESF question has been dealt with and the moneys improperly claimed have been repaid? I need to do so because my constituent has continued to pay the price for his honesty by continuing to be the victim of bullying by his superiors. The university denies that Jim Hemingway has been victimised, but the evidence contradicts that. Will the Minister read the file that I intend to give him after the debate? Will he or his officials be prepared to meet Jim Hemingway?

My aim today has not been to vilify or castigate one of Leeds's great universities. All eight Leeds MPs are proud of Leeds Metropolitan university and its older sister the university of Leeds. We wish them continued success. I pay tribute to LMU's previous vice-chancellor, Leslie Wagner, and to the university's new vice-chancellor, Simon Lee, who I know will proudly carry the university forward.

The film school now has new management. I hope that there is still a place in the school for people of integrity, like Jim Hemingway. I hope that, having improved their internal audit procedures so that the ESF issue can never arise again, the vice-chancellor and the whole university will improve their internal grievance procedures along the lines that I propose. I hope that the Government will look at a common system for dealing with whistleblowers in English higher education institutions. Only in that way can we ensure that our great universities, so important to the future of this nation, go from strength to strength.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, North-East (Mr. Hamilton) on securing this debate and on drawing my attention to this case. It typifies the work that he has done on behalf of his constituents. His personal involvement is a great credit to him.

I emphasise that I have not been involved in the details of the case. I became aware of it only in the context of this debate. My officials have since talked to Leeds Metropolitan university and to the Government office for Yorkshire and the Humber to find out more information for the purposes of the debate. I hope that my hon. Friend will accept that I am unable to respond about some of the specific details that he raised.

It is worth putting this case in context. Staff complaints in the post-1992 university sector, which includes LMU, are dealt with through the universities' own procedures. The Government have no role to play in this area, as we have no involvement in appointing staff in higher education or agreeing their conditions of service. Responsibility for ensuring that concerns are addressed directly and with appropriate discretion rests solely with the institution concerned. Universities are, of course, subject to employment legislation in relation to their employees. As employers they are also subject to the requirements of the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998, which was implemented to protect whistleblowers, such as Jim Hemingway, whom my hon. Friend rightly commends for his actions.

The Government are not involved in the internal employment issues of autonomous independent universities such as LMU. I am, however, able to make some comments on this case on the basis of information that I have received. First, LMU has a policy that reflects the provision of the Public Interest Disclosure Act. It put that in place in 2000 and revised it subsequently. I am told that it is available on the university's website. I heard what my hon. Friend said about the problems that Jim Hemingway had in finding that information. I understand from the university that Mr. Hemingway did not submit his complaint to the officer designated to deal with public interest disclosures. My hon. Friend explained why that was the case, but the result is that his case has not been dealt with through the university's usual procedures or in line with the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998, which was introduced to protect individuals like Mr. Hemingway. My hon. Friend said that that was because Mr. Hemingway was not aware of the policy when he made his complaint. I accept that point, and concede that that is a cause for concern that we need to address.

From the information that I have received, I understand that the concerns raised by Mr. Hemingway have been taken very seriously. Both the relevant Government office and my hon. Friend commended Dave Wright for his work, and the university has thoroughly investigated Mr. Hemingway's initial concerns about the inappropriate use of European social funds. The issue is relevant, and it was entirely proper for it to be raised. What happened was wrong. The problem has been resolved, as my hon. Friend said, to the satisfaction of the Government office and the university.

Mr. Hemingway's concerns were validated as a consequence of the investigation, which led to a significant recovery of public funds. That is a positive result. I understand that the investigation also led to another positive outcome, in that it prompted the university to revise its funding procedures to bring them into line with the policies and criteria required. I also understand that since Mr. Hemingway's meetings with the vice-chancellor of LMU and the dean of Mr. Hemingway's faculty, the university investigated Mr. Hemingway's other concern that he was being victimised at work because of his actions.

I have been informed that the university has taken remedial action in the past two weeks to assist Mr. Hemingway. I cannot go into further details about the specific nature of that action because it involves another individual who also has rights and is employed by the university, but I believe that my hon. Friend has already been informed about that development. I hope that the university's actions will enable Mr. Hemingway to pursue his chosen career with confidence and that they will lead to a satisfactory outcome of this difficult case.

Let me reassure my hon. Friend that the Government are committed to ensuring that people who declare any malpractice at work are protected from persecution. That was the whole point of the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998. I was Minister for Employment Relations, Industry and the Regions when we introduced that Act, which sent a clear signal to all that the Government were taking the issue seriously. We continue to take it seriously. The Act promotes the public interest by protecting whistleblowers from dismissal and victimisation in specific circumstances.

The Act owes a great deal to the charity Public Concern at Work and its tireless advocacy of the whistleblower's cause. I am aware that the higher education sector is committed to ensuring that staff feel able to raise matters that could be of public concern. Universities, like other public bodies, have a duty under the Act to conduct their affairs responsibly and transparently and to take into account the requirements of their different funding bodies. They also have a responsibility to take account of the Nolan Committee's recommendations on standards in public life.

As the Nolan Committee showed, there is a clear link between whistleblowing and accountability—an issue that many organisations understand. Staff are often aware of things being wrong where they work, and we must enable people to speak out about misconduct in organisations without their being punished. There can be no accountability in the workplace if staff remain silent through fear of repercussions, and enabling staff to speak out within their own organisations is a benefit to those organisations. The Committee of University Chairmen has taken on board the Nolan Committee's recommendation, and has produced a guide for members of governing bodies on establishing whistleblowing procedures in higher education institutions. Unions also have a critical role to play by supporting and advising their members.

It is clear from my hon. Friend's remarks that he believes that the higher education sector is not doing enough in this area. Indeed, his first of five points to me was that we should have a nationally agreed policy. I have already said what the Government's role is in relation to staffing issues in higher education. On the specific requests to instigate a national policy on public disclosure for higher education institutions and to ask Leeds Metropolitan university to revise its policy, I have no remit. On grievance procedures, on which I took legislation through in a previous life, my hon. Friend knows that from October every workplace in the country will be entitled to have a grievance procedure, including a three or four-step procedure. That is as far as the Government can go to ensure that such issues, which are proper to internal discussion, fall into line with accepted practice.

I have no remit to fulfil those requests; they are not matters for the Government. As I have said, it is inappropriate for me to dictate to universities the detailed matters of their internal employment relations policies and practices, provided that they are in line with employment law. However, I can commit to contacting the relevant representative higher education bodies about the wider issue that my hon. Friend has raised. Universities UK and the Association of University Teachers are examining staff complaints in higher education in order to develop new internal machinery to deal with complaints from staff that are currently not covered, or that are inadequately covered, by employment law, courts or tribunals. Although that might not cover whistleblowing cases, it should address wider staff complaints. I will bring this matter to the attention of those bodies, although I cannot prejudge the outcome of the process, as it will be subject to discussion between the two bodies in the sector, the employer and the unions. However, those developments will have an impact on universities' existing policies.

I am confident, from my hon. Friend's account, that the university is fully aware of the issues raised by this case. Like other higher education institutions, it will have to take account of future developments in the way it handles staff complaints. If staff cannot find reference to the internal procedure on, for example, public disclosure, it is in the university's interests to rectify that. I was pleased to hear my hon. Friend pay tribute to the two splendid universities in Leeds, and I am sure that they will take full notice of the issues that arise from the case.

My hon. Friend asked me to commend Dave Wright, which I have done in passing, but am happy to do again. He is a splendid official and has performed particularly well in this case. My hon. Friend asked me to take the file and read it, which I will. He asked if I would meet Jim Hemingway. I would be happy for my officials to meet him, if that is what my hon. Friend wants, but it would be wrong for me as a Minister to become involved. I must emphasise that that meeting could not lead to any direct intervention in the case by the Government or my Department.

I shall reiterate the main features of the case that my hon. Friend mentioned. Jim Hemingway is still in employment and has not been dismissed. There is a difference between the university and the employee about whether he has been victimised. I hope that the actions during the past two weeks of the new vice-chancellor—although there is no criticism of the splendid Leslie Wagner, the previous vice-chancellor—have addressed some of the concerns. The crucial point about individuals such as Jim Hemingway, who did the right thing from a sense of public spiritedness, who was absolutely correct and who as a result saved the taxpayer large dollops of cash that were being misdirected, is that they should be applauded at every stage. We are determined to ensure that legislation is there to protect people in his position.

Leeds Metropolitan university is a good university that is concerned about its employment relations record. Everything that I have seen since becoming involved has suggested that it is determined to learn any lessons that it can from the case. There may be some disagreement, but Leeds Metropolitan university wants good employment relations in the same way as my hon. Friend and I want them.

I congratulate my hon. Friend on raising the debate, and I hope that I have reassured him on some of those points.

Thank you, Dame Marion. You have a distinguished career as a Select Committee Chairman, but I have not before had the pleasure of serving under your chairmanship in Westminster Hall.

I am pleased that the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, the hon. Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin), is in his place. He has a distinguished past as a campaigner on several causes: my researchers unearthed an early-day motion from 1988 in support of Kenny Richey—I shall refer to his case later—on which the Minister's was the first name to appear. The Minister is now above such things as early-day motions, but it is reassuring to those of us who have not yet ascended to such dizzy heights, and may never do so, that someone of the hon. Gentleman's convictions has managed to get where he is.

The debate should be an opportunity to discuss in broad and general terms the Government's policy and practice in relation to representations made to foreign Governments on behalf of United Kingdom citizens facing the death penalty abroad. My interest in the subject was initially engaged as a result of my involvement in the campaign to save Kenny Richey, a fellow Scot, who is currently on death row in Ohio. In February, courtesy of Amnesty International—the appropriate entries have been made in the Register of Members' Interests—I visited Mr. Richey and met representatives of the consular office in Chicago, who were helpful and supportive. I place on record my gratitude, and that of Amnesty International's representatives, for the assistance that the consular office gave, at the time and subsequently, to Mr. Richey.

Before I went to Ohio, I was instinctively opposed to the death penalty, as many who would call themselves liberals—with a small "1"—are, but without getting too excited about it. I came away feeling very differently: if I am an anti-death penalty zealot now, it is as a result of what I saw and experienced in Ohio, and I make no apology for that. Capital punishment is inhumane and dehumanising for all concerned with it. Even if we in this country tolerate it in other countries, it diminishes us all.

I give credit where it is due and acknowledge that the Government have made significant progress in relation to death penalty cases involving British citizens. It is proper that we should contrast it with the record of their predecessor. In 1995, the then Prime Minister, John Major, flatly rejected appeals to intervene in the case of Nicholas Ingram, who was sentenced to death in Georgia. Clive Stafford-Smith, a lawyer who has substantial involvement in death penalty cases, said subsequently that he believed that had the British Government intervened in that case, Nicholas Ingram would still be alive. That illustrates graphically how important it is for the Government to get the policy right. "Life and death" is a term that is bandied around pretty glibly in this place, but this is one of the few issues we have to deal with whose outcome genuinely is a matter of life and death.

I welcome the fact that in relation to the two British nationals currently on death row in the United States, Government representatives have been increasingly proactive in the past six months. Kenny Richey and Linda Carty have had visits from consular representatives, which contrasts most favourably with the consular support that was made available in the cases of Jackie Elliott and Tracy Housel. I hope that the increased level of consular activity is indicative of a more proactive Government policy. It is as appropriate as it is welcome. The Government have a policy of opposition to the death penalty. We do not extradite people to countries where they might suffer. The level of consular support is entirely appropriate and is a much more practical and direct demonstration of the Government's wider policy.

The Government have intervened to improve the medical treatment that Kenny Richey has received and I hope that consular pressure will be maintained to ensure that promised improvements are delivered. A system that keeps inmates locked in their cells for 23 hours out of every 24 will never be healthy. After 17 years on death row, Kenny Richey's health is suffering. He suffers from diabetes and sleep apnoea. When I visited him, he was using a home-made false tooth that he had fashioned from a plastic teaspoon. The health care offered by the Ohio state authorities to Kenny Richey is an affront to humanity. We would not be slow to object if it were a practice in a developing country and we should not be slow to object to it being practised by our friends in the United States.

While I acknowledge that great strides have been made in the Government's approach, some significant improvements could still be made. That was brought home to me during my discussions with organisations such as Reprieve and Amnesty International about the Kenny Richey case. In the course of my involvement with the Kenny Richey campaign, I have noticed that certain Foreign Office phrases tend to be repeated fairly frequently. It is often stated that the United Kingdom is against the death penalty

"in all circumstances and will make representations on behalf of British nationals facing the death penalty at whatever stage and level is considered appropriate."

The words "considered appropriate" are perhaps the key to unlocking any differences that we may have.

I hope that the Government will consider in more detail what they believe to be the appropriate stage and level at which to become involved in death penalty cases. Obviously, each case stands on its own facts and circumstances and each case is different, but I hope that the Government will take an overarching approach. They have a policy on clemency and involvement in clemency pleas. I am not sure whether that is a matter of record but, if not, I should be interested to know whether the Minister will undertake to publish it.

The people with whom I deal who have been involved in death row cases are consistent about the Government's involvement in one respect. The earlier the British Government's intervention, the better and more effective it will be. The general thrust of what we have heard from the Government in the past is that they are reluctant to become involved in an evidentiary legal process of another country. In the first instance, we can understand that that is a perfectly legitimate worry, but when we are dealing with subsequent and appellate stages the validity of that objection somewhat diminishes. There is a different case to be made for involvement at the later and appellate stages as opposed to when a court is hearing evidence in the first instance when matters of reliability and credibility are at stake.

Human rights campaigners mainly accept that the Government are right not to become involved in the early stages. However, other avenues are open, and one that I have recently been involved with is the submission of amicus curiae briefs. They enable the Government to make it clear to the court that we are opposed to the use of the death penalty. The views of the United Kingdom Government are listened to and respected abroad. We could and should do more to take full advantage of that, and I hope that the Minister will explain the reticence that is sometimes apparent when an opportunity presents itself to register our opposition to and concerns about the death penalty in this way with different courts. I am aware that the Government filed an amicus brief in the case of Krishna Maharaj, but why is that the only case in respect of which they have done so? What criteria do the Government apply when deciding whether to file an amicus brief? Why do the Government never comment on the disquiet they—or, indeed, members of the British public—have about particular judgments? Reiterating our opposition to the death penalty in the abstract is one thing, but the Government have an obligation to draw attention to an unsafe conviction where that is suspected.

As well as getting involved at an early stage, it is vital that the Government's consular representatives act in the most effective way. There is a need to build relations with the correct people as soon as possible; that will depend on who in the state can grant clemency—the governor or the board of pardons and paroles, for example.

I turn briefly to people who hold dual nationality. Tracy Housel and Jackie Elliott were both dual nationals. Kenny Richey is a dual British-American national. There is some concern that the Government are more restrained in cases involving dual nationals. In February, the Prime Minister wrote to me in relation to Kenny Richey that

"under international law we have no right to demand consular access to dual nationals in the country of their other nationality".

That is undoubtedly the case, but can the Minister confirm that dual British nationals will receive the same assistance from our Government as anybody else who has British nationality, and will he accept that a dual British national is as British as anyone else, and as such deserves the same representation?

Capital cases are notoriously protracted. Kenny Richey has been on death row for 17 years. Not only can they be long drawn-out processes; they are also incredibly unpredictable. Decisions can be made in just a few days, or they can take a year. Therefore, can the Minister guarantee that the Foreign Office is always vigilant so that it can act quickly when decisions are made? What monitoring processes are in place? I was pleased to see in a letter from Baroness Symons dated 21 June 2004 that the Foreign Office has drawn up a

"comprehensive lobbying strategy, taking into account the possible outcomes of Mr Richey's appeal".

Will that now be common practice, and does that strategy include the direct intervention of the Prime Minister, should it be necessary? It will surprise no one that I have reservations about the judgment and character of the Prime Minister. However, the fact remains that in the United States in particular he is held in very high regard, and I have no doubt that he would be listened to if he were to make it his practice to lift the phone to speak to a state governor, or whoever else is appropriate, in order to ask for clemency, or to draw attention to any doubts about the safety of a conviction or to make any other representation. I have no doubt that that would be a telling intervention, far beyond anything that the Minister or I would ever be able to achieve.

As cases involving British citizens reach the end of their legal channels and clemency becomes the only possibility, the Government should be prepared to become vocal and visible in defence of British citizens. It is important that consular representatives be present at court hearings and that they are known to be present. The United States authorities, in particular, should be aware that our Government are monitoring cases extremely closely and have an interest in their outcome.

I shall consider briefly the way in which the Foreign Office works with those representing British people on death row. Clearly, the Government's first priority should be to work with the legal representatives of the citizen in question, especially in the country where they face execution. Surely, however, that co-operation need not be exclusive, but can be extended to those representing the inmates in this country.

Such cases inevitably attract press attention and other media involvement, and there is a role for organisations such as Amnesty and Reprieve. They have a wealth of experience and knowledge on which the Government could draw. What steps will the Government take to work constructively with such organisations and to see them as an asset, rather than a threat? I hope that the Government accept that it is in the best interests of British citizens facing the threat of execution that they should work constructively with such organisations and defendants' legal representatives in this country. Is the Minister content that such relationships exist between those organisations and the Foreign Office?

I am anxious to allow the Minister as much time as possible to reply.

The hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Carmichael) has raised an important issue, in which, as he kindly acknowledged, I have taken a personal interest over the years. He raised the form of words that we use, and funnily enough the first sentence of my brief says that the UK opposes the death penalty in all circumstances. We consider it a cruel and inhuman punishment, and no credible academic study has demonstrated any deterrent effect. Also, as we have learned over the years, this country has executed a number of innocent people. I recall that, of the 18 people convicted in connection with terrorist offences in the mid-1970s, all of whom turned out to be innocent and in whose release I played a part, 10 would have hanged had we had the death penalty at the time. As Kofi Annan has said:

"The forfeiture of life is too absolute, too irreversible, for one human being to inflict it on another, even when backed by legal process."

The UK removed the death penalty from its statute books in 1998, although it had not been carried out here for many years. The UK has also ratified protocol 13 of the European convention on human rights, which prevents use of the death penalty in all circumstances, including times of war. The UK is an advocate of worldwide abolition of the death penalty. Indeed, promoting its universal abolition has become one of the most important elements of our human rights policy.

The hon. Gentleman asked that we consider in particular the death penalty as it affects British nationals. I shall outline the general issues first and turn to the case of Kenny Richey later. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Cunninghame, North (Mr. Wilson) announced to the House on 27 February 2001, the Government's policy is to make representations at whatever stage and level is judged appropriate from the moment that imposition of the death penalty on a British national becomes a possibility. That change reflects the fact that, in certain cases, the previous policy of waiting until all legal avenues have been exhausted was perceived as coming into play too late to have an impact. That was especially the case in the United States, where, as we know, the legal process continues up to the person reaching the door of the death chamber. Our policy extends to all categories of British national, including dual nationals in the country of their second nationality—people to whom we are not automatically entitled to provide consular assistance.

Seventy-eight countries retain the death penalty. Our lobbying efforts on behalf of individual British nationals in any of those countries are in addition to the more general lobbying that the Government regularly undertake to abolish capital punishment. Although international law does not prohibit the death penalty per se, it imposes certain limitations on its use. For example, it should not be imposed on juvenile offenders, and all those sentenced to death should have the right to seek commutation of the sentence. I assure the hon. Gentleman that if the death penalty were imposed on a British national in violation of those limitations, we would be active in raising those issues at an early stage. If cases do not raise issues of international law, our lobbying focuses on our abolitionist position.

I have been asked when it is appropriate to make representations. The approach depends on the individual case and the country concerned. The timings and nature of representations are determined by when and how they would be most effective, and we take great care not to do anything that would be counterproductive or prejudice the outcome of legal proceedings. In the US, for example, discretion on whether to seek the death penalty lies with the prosecution. We therefore seek to engage with the prosecution at the earliest possible stage and persuade it not to seek the death penalty in the first place.

In other countries, such as the Philippines, the death penalty is mandatory for certain crimes and the judge has no option but to impose a death sentence. Our representations may focus on the possibility of clemency or commutation of the sentence, once all legal avenues have been exhausted. In all cases, we ensure that our representations are appropriate and that we are not doing something that would be better dealt with by the individual's legal representatives.

We are aware of 11 British nationals currently on death row overseas. A further six face charges that may attract the death penalty. In the last year alone, the Government made a number of representations on behalf of British nationals facing the death penalty. In the United States, for example, the British consul general in Houston wrote to the district attorney supporting a request from a British national's legal team for additional time to prepare a repeal case. In Nigeria, the British high commission has made representations to the attorney general and the state governor of Lagos about a British national sentenced to death for murder. The governor in that case has the power to grant clemency once all appeals have been exhausted. In Malaysia, the Foreign Secretary and the British high commissioner made representations to various members of the Malaysian Government requesting that they commute the death sentence for a British national convicted of drug offences. In all cases, we keep in close touch with the lawyers of the national concerned and our interventions are made in consultation with them.

We have developed other ways to help. First, in the Foreign Office consular directorate, the department responsible for assisting British nationals in distress overseas, we have created the post of human rights adviser, and we have seconded a specialist with a background in international human rights law to the FCO. The adviser takes the lead on all death penalty cases involving British nationals and seeks to ensure that we do everything that we appropriately can to prevent the death penalty from being sought or carried out.

Secondly, in 2002 the Foreign Office established a pro bono lawyers panel. The panel brings together some 60 UK solicitors and barristers who are experts in human rights and/or criminal law, and who are willing to work for free on behalf of British nationals facing trial proceedings overseas where there are human rights concerns, and that includes British nationals facing the death penalty. Obviously, those lawyers cannot themselves represent their clients in court, but they can operate effectively in an advisory capacity, working alongside a local lawyer. We have, for example, appointed a member of the panel to assist the British national sentenced to death in Nigeria.

While I welcome what the Minister says about local representatives in the country concerned making representations, they are presumably the same people who will be making representations on behalf of British interests in relation to a whole range of matters. If the representation were to come directly from Government in London, it might have a more substantial impact.

I was talking about pro bono lawyers helping the local lawyer, but I also mentioned a case in Malaysia in which the Foreign Secretary and the high commissioner made representations. That sometimes happens, when we judge it appropriate.

We also consider what role the EU might play in helping to prevent a death sentence from being carried out on a British national. The EU is active in lobbying for worldwide abolition of the death penalty, and we work with it.

I welcome this opportunity to set out what we have done for Kenny Richey to date, and what we might do further, depending on the outcome of his appeal. It is worth noting that he became eligible for British nationality only in May last year, owing to an amendment to the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002. By that time, he had already been on death row for 16 years as an American national. Mr. Richey is now a dual British-US national and, as the hon. Gentleman said, British consular staff have been successful in requesting the right to see him. Mr. Richey is now able to raise his welfare concerns with us, which we follow up on his behalf.

Members of the British consulate in Chicago keep in regular contact with Mr. Richey's trial lawyers, and co-ordinate with them any representations made on his behalf. They are from a highly respected firm, and we have every reason to believe that they are professional and competent in their handling of the case. The British consul general recently raised our concern and interest in Mr. Richey's case with the Governor of Ohio, Bob Taft, and informed him that if Mr. Richey's appeal for a retrial is successful, we will lobby him further on Mr. Richey's behalf. Under the Ohio judicial system, the governor is empowered to grant clemency in death penalty cases once all proceedings have been exhausted. He has said that he will be open to further representations.

The hon. Gentleman asked about amicus curiae briefs; we are carefully considering the recent request for the Government to submit one in Mr. Richey's case, and we are consulting his trial lawyers about that. The hon. Gentleman also asked about the Government's criteria for deciding whether to submit such a brief. We take into account factors such as whether our intervention would assist and the nature of the legal issues involved. The hon. Gentleman asked whether the Prime Minister would consider intervening personally. We will consider that at the appropriate time, but that is still some way off.

We recognise the important role of non-governmental organisations in promoting worldwide abolition of the death penalty and the campaigns that they run on behalf of individuals facing the death sentence. Their efforts are often instrumental in highlighting irregularities, particularly in those cases that may, in turn, feed into Government or EU co-ordinated representations. We value and respect the work of NGOs and are keen to work with them to co-ordinate efforts wherever possible. However, it is important to note that NGOs and Governments will take different, but often complementary, routes to achieve the same aims.

In conclusion, I reiterate to the hon. Gentleman that the Government are committed to working towards worldwide abolition of the death penalty and will do all that they can to help any British national, including Mr. Richey, who faces the death penalty.