The art of asking a question

Decided that I would go along to the statement on incapacity benefit and try and ask a question. Snag is that not everyone who wants to ask will be lucky but the chances of success are greater if you have been bobbing up and down on previous occasions (this indicates that you want to speak) without success.

Unfortunately there were also a couple of questions I was keen to put to Hilary Benn during International Development questions - including one on the problems of vulnerable children post tsunami. It was a bit of a dilemma - being called in International Development questions would reduce my chances of being called during the ministerial statement. So, as always with these things I had to chance it. I realised that my chance of a DfID question was limited when the Speaker called Jenny Tonge but I did manage to get in on the statement and ask about people who had variable health conditions (eg mental health) and the lack of understanding of employers so was the Minister going to provide some sort of incentive to encourage employers to take on someone with a known health problem. Minister was surprisingly sympathetic and seemed to fully understand the problem but am not sure that they are doing enough to resolve it.