Recall of MPs Bill

Debate between Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town and Lord Norton of Louth

Tuesday 10th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Norton of Louth]

My Lords, I have considerable sympathy with this amendment, and the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, has come up with an ingenious way of bringing it forward. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, indicated, it raises an important issue of principle, which is the freedom of choice of the electors. This is something to which I keep referring and it is why I opposed attempts to ban dual mandate. My view is that if electors wish to put somebody into assemblies, it is entirely a matter for the electors. It might be impractical, but that is not for us to say. It is for us to allow electors to do that. So I agree with the point that the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, made. It may be that the court says, “You have committed an offence”, but if the electors feel it is important that that person should be returned to represent them, then it is entirely a matter for them.

We keep bringing forward rules that restrict the freedom of electors. We should be looking at it the other way, trying to open up our process as much as possible and leaving it up to electors. If they want somebody to represent them, that is a matter for them. Leave it to the electors. Do not impose restrictions on them. For that reason, I have considerable sympathy with what the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, is trying to achieve. Certainly, I am all in favour of reviewing that provision and perhaps even widening it, for the reasons I have given, to look more broadly at how we can protect electors in making the choice that they wish to make, having whom they wish to elect and not being restricted in that.

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

My Lords, as my noble friends have spelt out, the Bill raises the interesting question not just of the interplay between this process and that of the election court but also of what I think is the Government's slap-dash drafting of the Bill, with their cut-and-paste from other legislation, without actually thinking through the best way of dealing with allegations of wrongdoing. As I have said, and as the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner of Kimble, has echoed, we do not want ever to see this Bill used. We hope that MPs will never find themselves in the position of triggering a recall petition. However, if it happens, we need to be sure that the most appropriate mechanisms and penalties are available to suit the particular misconduct. We may have it in this Bill, but we may not; it may not be right. Indeed, on the reverse side, it might be much better for other misconduct to trigger a recall petition rather than straight expulsion, as my noble friend Lord Dubs suggested. The proposal of a report to consider this in the round and come forward with proposals on that basis seems eminently sensible. I hope that the Government will support this amendment.

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[Lord Norton of Louth]

My Lords, I, too, very much welcome this amendment. It is a step in the right direction. I have just one question for my noble friend. Why was the consultation to which he referred not undertaken before the Bill was introduced?

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

I am going to be a little more generous than the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, and thank the Minister for listening to the debate on the amendment that we moved in Committee. He will not be surprised that we are delighted with this. Not only is it the right answer in itself, but I also think that it will reduce the demand for postal votes. That will save the resources of the petition officer—their time, their staff and their money—because there will be less need for people to apply for postal votes. So we are very happy to support this government amendment.

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[Lord Norton of Louth]

My Lords, I, too, support this amendment for the reasons we discussed in Committee. I argued then that the number of signing places should be expanded and the period of time in which you can sign reduced. The Government have got half way there, so I hope that they will now go the rest of the way as well, for the reasons that have been well advanced.

Like other noble Lords, I cannot understand the rationale for eight weeks. As the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, said, it is much longer than an election campaign. In the case of one election, the Prime Minister announced it and it took place four weeks to the day after that. However, here we are saying that twice as long should be available for people to reflect on whether they should sign a petition—eight weeks. Why on earth should anyone take eight weeks to think about whether they should sign a petition or not? The news about the Member being eligible will be out quickly. It will be in the news and, as has been touched on, it will then cease to be newsworthy after a matter of days, if that. Why are we going to linger for weeks with people sat at polling stations twiddling their thumbs waiting for people to turn up and sign? I can see no argument for that length of time. It is not even as if we are still in the period where it took days for news to reach people and they then had to rely on some slow means of transport to get somewhere to actually sign something. Even if we were in that period, they could do it in less than eight weeks. Why nowadays, with instant communication and the ability to get to one of potentially 10 places to sign fairly quickly, do we need as long as eight weeks? It may be an arbitrary figure, but why eight rather than, say, six?

The noble Lord, Lord Howarth, said that he is flexible and that it could be four or five weeks. I thought he was, if anything, generous in saying three weeks. Why on earth would you need three weeks to reflect? Are you going to call the family together to hold great deliberations about whether you should sign it or not? Once you know about it, you think about it and then you decide whether you are going to make the effort to go and sign the petition—you go and sign and that is it. That could be quite easily achieved within a period of three weeks and, to be honest, one could achieve it with a much shorter period.

As I said, the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, is being quite generous in putting down that figure. Had he not put down his amendment, I would have put one down to reduce the period and would probably have chosen an even shorter period. The argument for his amendment is eminently rational. It does not raise any serious issue of principle in terms of recall per se, so I see no reason why the Government, having moved on the number of places where signing can take place, could not be moved just as easily on this. It makes perfect sense. There is also the practical point that was touched on about people having to staff the places at which signing can take place. There is a cost to the public purse, and we should not lose sight of that.

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Howarth of Newport has made a good case for considering whether and why eight weeks is somehow the perfect period for the petition to run. We remain unclear on the question that my noble friend Lord Hughes raised as to why the Government chose this period—a question to which they never gave a clear answer in Committee. As I said before, two weeks, as it was then, did seem too short a period if it was to include the run-up to the signing period—in other words, the time to get the signing issues out and for everyone to get to know about them as well as the signing period itself.

The Electoral Commission thinks eight weeks is, in its words, a relatively “long signing period”. Certainly, in democratic terms, two months is a long period for an MP to be effectively out of the Commons and fighting to retain his or her seat. However, the period does have to be sufficient for people to know about it, to hear the debate and to come to a view, and three weeks probably is too short if it is to cover the whole of the public awareness period—I do not like the word campaign—as well as the actual signing period. Amendment 12, as it stands, might not be the right one, but it will be very interesting to hear whether the Government can give us any reason why they chose eight weeks and, even more interestingly, whether they are willing to consider some movement on this.

Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill

Debate between Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town and Lord Norton of Louth

Tuesday 5th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

My Lords, Amendments 54 and 74 are in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Royall. We support an independent registrar, which means independent of the industry as well as working independently of the Government. However, the matters over which the registrar must judge, the standards that he or she sets and the objectives set for the office have an importance to Parliament and to our standards and expectations. We believe that that requires an organic link to Parliament, not just to the Government of the day.

We think it appropriate that that link is to the elected House, which by its nature is responsive to the outside electorate and their concerns and interests. We recommend that the Minister, in making the appointment, should consult the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee of the other place and that, in similar mode, the registrar should report back to that committee on an annual basis.

We recognise the strength of the other amendments in this group, and we trust that the Minister will similarly do so and agree to take these away and bring back his own amendments on Report. I beg to move.

[Lord Norton of Louth]

My Lords, the principle in Amendment 74 of the registrar reporting is important. In my view, though, rather than reporting to a particular committee, it would be more appropriate to oblige the registrar to produce an annual report to Parliament itself. If it were going to be confined, I would not just confine it to the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee of the other place; I hear what the noble Baroness says, but there would also be a case for the Constitution Committee of you Lordships’ House being included as well. My preference would be for a report to Parliament, but I wholly support the principle that there ought to be a report. As the noble Baroness said, bringing the registrar within the scope of Parliament is entirely appropriate.

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[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

The words “relevant select committee” could be used.

[Lord Norton of Louth]

On that point, legislation does write in the name of committees or the equivalent, so it is quite possible to do that.

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

Not only does the noble Lord, Lord Norton, supply me with his wonderful Hull students to help me with my work, but he comes up with answers to my questions, for which I thank him.

What seems like a small amendment about writing the committee in is an important signal. I am sorry that we keep hearing the words “not persuaded” from that side. Having had the earlier discussion about Part 2 of the Bill, we very much hope that the Government will be persuaded by what they hear. I had hoped that some of that might have bled into Part 1 of the Bill and that the Government might have been persuaded by some of the things we said. However, we will leave it here, although we may want to come back to some of it at a later stage. For the moment, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Electoral Registration and Administration Bill

Debate between Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town and Lord Norton of Louth

Monday 14th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Norton of Louth]

My Lords, I will make a couple of comments on the amendment. I am a bit wary of it. I rather shared the view of the Electoral Commission in their evidence to us:

“The Commission is clear, however, that any change should only be made if there is firm evidence that it would be of significant benefit to electors. At present, the evidence on weekend voting provides an insufficient basis on which to reach a definitive conclusion”.

Therefore we would need a far stronger evidence base before proceeding. Moving to this for the next election would be rather an experiment, on a bit too grand a scale. We need much better evidence before proceeding.

I raise a more general point that I have variously developed before. I am always concerned that discussing such proposals can amount to a form of displacement activity by politicians. Voter dissatisfaction and apathy have little to do with the process of voting. If people are motivated to vote, they will vote. To motivate people to vote we need to address policies and political behaviour. Politicians cannot say, “It is not us, it is the system”. I fear it is us. We need to be addressing that and doing so in a sustained manner. With amendments of this sort, however well intentioned—clearly they are, and there is a case for discussing it—my worry is that it actually risks masking a much more important debate that we need to have. We need to open it up on a much wider scale. There is the obvious point that if we make a change of the sort proposed by my noble friend this is perhaps not the appropriate time or Bill to do it. We have already messed around this afternoon with the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill. I do not think that we need to be messing about now with the Fixed-term Parliaments Act.

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

My Lords, this is always an interesting one; it feels so natural that it must be easier to vote over two days than over one, and at a weekend. On the face of it, the proposal seems very attractive. However, following on from the noble Lord, Lord Norton, in all the doorstep work I have done—and I have done a fair amount—it has never been a complaint that I have heard. Although it sounds quite attractive, I have never heard people saying, “Why don’t we vote at the weekend?”. However, perhaps we should look to France. When we were discussing the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, I think noble Lords were saying that we should follow France, which votes on a Sunday. Much more importantly, of course, they voted socialist on a Sunday, so we should definitely follow what France does.

It sounds attractive but we are perhaps in a closer place to the Government in that we await some evidence about whether this merely sounds attractive and easy, or whether it would do what I think all of us want and increase public engagement and accessibility for voters, which we are going to come on to in an important amendment shortly. What we need is evidence and some more thought on this, and we will then happily look at it. If evidence is brought to us that this would increase both turnout and engagement, we would respond quite positively. However, at the moment, we are slightly lacking that evidence.