The Parliamentary Secretary, Office of the Leader of the House of Commons (Mr David Heath)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Weaver Vale (Graham Evans) on securing this debate, and on securing such a sparkling attendance by colleagues for a late-night Adjournment debate. Since entering the House in 2010, he has shown consistent interest in reforming early-day motions, most notably by tabling—with tongue in cheek, as he said— an early-day motion entitled “Early-Day Motions” in July 2010.
I ought to begin by saying that there are, rightly, limits to the Government’s responsibilities for the matters under debate. That was not always so. Between 1994 and 2010, the Government had a very large element of control over whether motions tabled by Back Benchers could be debated on the Floor of the House. The Government were thus the proper recipient of requests for debates on or arising from early-day motions. I seem to recall that that was often a feature of the weekly business question.
Since the welcome advent of the Backbench Business Committee following a decision of the House in June 2010, it now rightly falls to that Committee to decide what subjects will be debated in Back-Bench time and what form motions for debate should take. Of course, the Government, and particularly my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House, continue to examine early-day motions as barometers of opinion on public policy and matters meriting debate.
When the Procedure Committee last considered early-day motions in 2007, seven categories or purposes for early-day motions were identified: first, to express opinions on matters of general public interest, often to assess the degree of support among Members; secondly, to continue a political debate, for example by criticising the Government or the Opposition; thirdly, to give prominence to a campaign or the work of some pressure group outside the House, and I will return to that in a moment; fourthly, to highlight local issues, such as the success of a local football team, the achievements of constituents or the need for a bypass; fifthly, to pray against a statutory instrument subject to the negative procedure, both to draw attention to opposition and to encourage referral of the instrument for debate; sixthly, to criticise individuals, including other hon. Members, whose conduct can be criticised only on a substantive motion, and I think that the hon. Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn) has raised that matter before now; and seventhly, to set out detailed criticisms, such as of a company or body, under the protection of parliamentary privilege.
As the above categories suggest, the scope for early-day motions is wide. Individual hon. Members’ freedom to table them is great. EDMs can be viewed in some ways as a safety valve when Members find their ability to express views limited by the availability of time or by the rules of the House.
Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
I am grateful to the Deputy Leader of the House for outlining that helpful list. Does he agree that many of those categories also apply to business questions every Thursday, when hon. Members ask for statements or debates on subjects close to their hearts in the full knowledge that no such statement or debate will follow but because it enables them to make a point? That is what the EDM does, but it has the additional feature that many Members can sign up to it, which enables them to make a point and show that it is widely supported. Would that not be a loss to hon. Members?
Mr Heath
It was for precisely that reason and connected reasons that the Procedure Committee in the previous Parliament decided against recommending the abolition of EDMs or their substantive reform. However—there are several “howevers”—a major area of discontent for many years, as reflected in the Procedure Committee’s report in the last Parliament, concerned the lack of connection between EDMs, whose ostensible purpose was to set down a motion for debate in the House on an unspecified day, and the provision of time on the Floor of the House. The House has taken a major step to respond to this problem with the establishment of the Backbench Business Committee, as I mentioned at the outset.
Robert Halfon
To be fair, the Backbench Business Committee is slightly different, because any MP can ask for a debate regardless of whether they have tabled an EDM. As I have suggested to my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Graham Evans), is not the answer—I say this as someone who supports EDMs—to change their name to “MPs Books of Petitions” and to publish them online? That way, no one would be misled over whether they might be debated.
Mr Heath
I will return to that point in a moment. Yes, the Backbench Business Committee considers any matter brought forward by Back-Bench Members, but it has shown its willingness to enable EDMs to be debated. It demonstrated that by providing time for a debate, on 10 March last year, on an EDM concerning the work of UN Women.
Drawing on a Procedure Committee recommendation in 2007 that was endorsed by the House on 25 October 2007, the Committee also enabled an EDM to be tagged as “relevant” to the debate on parliamentary reform, which took place in Westminster Hall just over a year ago, on 3 February 2011. The Committee can also draw on EDMs to provide evidence of the breadth of support among Members for a subject of debate, as it did in the case of the Fish Fight campaign. Were they to be named something else, their effectiveness at introducing subjects, with the support of Members, for the Committee to consider would not be reduced. It is a fact that EDMs have that function.
Although the Committee has fundamentally changed how business in the House is determined—and changed it for the better, in my view—some myths about EDMs linger on, although the hon. Member for Weaver Vale exploded some of them this evening. We are concerned about the propensity of pressure groups effectively to mislead our constituents into thinking that EDMs are something that they are not—an avenue to a procedure in the House—and to suggest that there is a magical number of signatories on an EDM that will cause it to be debated, which of course there is not.
That notion has persisted over the years, despite the absence of evidence to support it. It might be expedient for some pressure groups and lobbyists to perpetuate that myth and to raise false expectations among our constituents. We have all received e-mails stating that such-and-such an EDM is of critical importance and that we must sign them—I, as a Minister, cannot sign them any more, so I have a ready excuse, but I know that other Members sometimes feel pressurised by that sort of campaign.
The new House, selected in 2010, seems to have many more Members sceptical about the value of adding their names to EDMs. The average number of new signatories per week fell from 3,704 in the last financial year of the previous Parliament, to 1,965 in the first financial year of this Parliament. More Members have decided to adopt a policy of not signing early-day motions—I think we heard an example earlier. Indeed, I understand that Members can record that view with the Table Office. Above all, the Backbench Business Committee has demonstrated through its work that the link between early-day motions and debates is not a crude numbers game. For those reasons, I hope that all Members agree that the myth of a magical number of signatories should be confined to the dustbin, where it belongs.
The hon. Member for Weaver Vale identified a further problem—others have amplified it—in the triviality of some early-day motions. He referred to what he saw as some examples of early-day motions that devalued the currency. I certainly do not want to comment on any individual cases, but I agree with him that it seems highly questionable whether some early-day motions are appropriate, and that Members should pause for thought about the reputational and cost implications of their actions.
Sir Peter Bottomley
Might not the same thing have applied to William Wilberforce when he first had the rather revolutionary idea of abolishing the slave trade, or Samuel Plimsoll and his idea of painting a white line on the side of ships so that they would not be overladen with sailors who would otherwise go down to Davy Jones’s locker?
Mr Heath
If I may gently say so, I think there is a difference of kind between those causes, which I think most people would consider to be serious causes, and the fortunes of the local football club on a Saturday afternoon. I think there is a difference, perhaps, in scale of import between those topics.
Sir Bob Russell
Perhaps I can ask the Deputy Leader of the House to consider these examples: the Gurkha rights campaign and the Royal British Legion’s military covenant campaign, on which I tabled early-day motions, or indeed early-day motion 1—I think—in 2009, which I also tabled and which the then Conservative Opposition thought was so brilliant that they brought it to the House and we had a vote on it.
Mr Heath
There is no doubt that some early-day motions are of considerable importance in the topics they raise. What I think the hon. Member for Weaver Vale was saying is that there may be better ways of bringing those matters to the House than the current system. There are also things that, frankly, I would be amazed if the House spent its time debating in real life, as opposed to the application that an early-day motion purports to be.
There are ways in which the issue could be dealt with. The hon. Gentleman suggested that limits might be imposed on the number of early-day motions that an individual Member could table or sign. Those are matters for the Procedure Committee to consider, should it decide to do so, but numerical limits, which were also suggested in an intervention, might be seen as an unexceptional constraint on hon. Members’ freedom of action. The implementation of a limit might encourage the syndication of motions. Limits would certainly provide an incentive for hon. Members to ensure that they used their right to table or support motions wisely, but at a cost, in terms of the limitation of their action.
Chris Heaton-Harris (Daventry) (Con)
Will the Deputy Leader of the House give way?
Mr Heath
I am extremely grateful to the right hon. Gentleman, who rather pre-empts the final comment that I was going to make. I was going to ask him and his Committee to take this matter forward. I now know that when I make that request, the answer will be in the affirmative, for which I am grateful.
Chris Heaton-Harris
As there is now time, will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Chris Heaton-Harris
I am a Member who refuses to sign early-day motions, as I believe they are the tool of a very poor lobbyist. Will the Deputy Leader of the House reflect on whether a campaign is devalued if a vast number of Members do not sign the relevant early-day motion? If I were someone who signed these things, I would dearly like to sign early-day motion 2637, on diabetes care, which has achieved only 27 signatures. I would say that the EDM devalues that campaign, rather than adding to it.
Mr Heath
I really cannot give way again, because we are coming to the end of what is normally an Adjournment debate between one Back-Bench Member and a Minister, and tonight we have had a cast of thousands.
The hon. Member for Weaver Vale mentioned the cost of early-day motions. The House service estimated that the cost of administering EDMs in 2009-10 was approximately £1 million. The annual cost may have fallen somewhat as a result of the decision not to print the weekly compilation of EDMs, but those costs should certainly give hon. Members pause for thought before they table motions.
One possible solution is the one suggested by the hon. Gentleman, who proposed that EDMs should only appear electronically. The cost estimate to which I referred earlier indicated that about three quarters of the costs of EDMs were attributable to printing. It is clear that the database is now the main means by which people outside this place, as well as many inside it, access EDMs. My own view is that the time is fast approaching when more categories of business papers can be made available primarily or exclusively in electronic form—I imagine that some will gasp with horror at that suggestion, but I believe that it is one way in which we can actually save the taxpayer money—and that early-day motions may be in the vanguard of change in that regard.
I think the debate has demonstrated that the time may soon be ripe for the Procedure Committee to look again at the subject of early-day motions, and we have just heard its the Chair, the right hon. Member for East Yorkshire (Mr Knight), say that he would be more than happy to put the matter to the Committee. It is for the Committee and for the House, rather than the Government and this Minister at the Dispatch Box, to specify the appropriate procedure. If proposals for reform were presented—either along the lines advocated by the hon. Gentleman, or in another form as a result of the Procedure Committee’s considerations—it would be for the House to decide on the appropriate solution following a debate in Back-Bench time. In the context of a reformed House with more control over its own affairs, it is not for the Government to present proposals for change in this area. However, the hon. Gentleman has raised an important issue relating to the way in which we as a House conduct our business.
Perhaps I might surprise the hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) by telling him that I now have time to allow him to intervene, if he does so quickly.
Dr Lewis
What a marvellous Deputy Leader of the House we have! I just wanted to record the fact that my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris), who opposes the signing of EDMs, secured my signature, along with those of more than 100 other hon. Members, to a letter that he wanted to send to the press. If it is good enough to send a letter to the press, it is good enough to get a large number of MPs’ signatures on an early-day motion.
Mr Heath
The hon. Gentleman has done very well to get his intervention in.
Let me end by thanking the hon. Member for Weaver Vale for raising the issue. We have had an interesting debate, and I look forward to hearing the views of the Procedure Committee in due course.
Question put and agreed to.