Do governments use their control of the parliamentary agenda to influence the allocation of plenary time and devote relatively less time to important legislation? Using an original dataset comprising all plenary debates during two parliamentary sessions each in the British House of Commons and the German Bundestag in which all (legislative and non-legislative) debates on matters of national importance are identified, one can find no support for this claim . Both in absolute and relative terms, more legislative time is allocated to important legislation under centralized agenda control in the House of Commons . If one additionally considers non-legislative debates, the relative shares of plenary time devoted to important topics is similar . However, in absolute terms, more than twice as much time is allocated to important topics in the House of Commons than in the Bundestag .