Of course it was. However, it also ensured that the government was held to account. It ensured there was no way simply by resorting to a schedule that a government could get away from that kind of scrutiny. Ministers paid attention to the House of Commons. They also paid attention to their own departments.
Ministers now are sort of chairmen of the board of their department.
They do not get involved with the difficult details of running a government. The Minister of Human Resources last year got into terrible difficulty because she did not know her department. Had she been forced to come to committee of the whole and defend the estimates, as ministers before her have been forced to do, she would have known and we would have known. There would have been an opportunity for us to avoid some of the problems and some of the terrible waste that occurred because our system has gone wrong. Not only would that be good for accountability, it would be good in terms of fiscal responsibility.