Proxy Voting

Andrea Leadsom Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Andrea Leadsom (South Northamptonshire) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and I will be quick.

I thank very much my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House, the right hon. Member for Walsall South (Valerie Vaz), and the Chair of the Procedure Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley), for what I think is a real improvement on proxy voting for parental leave. It is great to see that someone no longer has to prove, when their tummy is out there, that they are actually pregnant and it is not just a cushion. That is very valuable.

On the other hand, I have to say that I am a bit disappointed. As the right hon. Member for Walsall South said, we had many debates in this place, and there was a Procedure Committee review of parental leave a long time ago. That was always done on the expectation that if it worked, we would include it, but also potentially expand it. I see that the Committee’s latest report says, “We don’t want to expand it because if somebody is very ill or recently bereaved, for the purpose of transparency, that would have to be disclosed.” I am sorry; I just do not accept that.

I think that this is a missed opportunity. We have had some colleagues in this place who have been desperately ill. They are not allowed to vote by proxy. They are just going to have to turn up or be paired. What really sparked this change was the inadvertent breaking of a pair when a colleague was off on maternity leave. I do think it is a grave disappointment—

[Karen Bradley]

rose—

[Andrea Leadsom]

I give way to the Chair of the Procedure Committee.

[Karen Bradley]

I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend for the work that she did to get us to this point. May I just assure her that the Procedure Committee is committed to looking at proxy voting once we are through the pandemic? What we wanted to do at this stage was to ensure that we had a report that allowed the Government to bring motions forward on parental leave and that dealt with proxy votes during the pandemic, but I give her my absolute commitment that we will look at this again and consider whether it is right to expand proxy voting beyond parental leave once we are back to—let us hope—business as normal at some point soon.

[Andrea Leadsom]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for that reassurance. Even so, were somebody to be very ill now with cancer or some other awful thing, they would, under the current circumstances, be very tempted to say, “This is related to the coronavirus pandemic.” My right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) said that people are swinging the lead. I do not think people are swinging the lead, but I do think that, since we have what is in effect a very lax system of self-assessment for any illness related to the coronavirus pandemic, for someone who was recently bereaved or, indeed, very ill with something that was nothing to do with the pandemic, that would be the way to remain enfranchised in this place. Surely, that cannot be right.

Very briefly, on proxy voting during the coronavirus pandemic, I am concerned that we are not really able to socially distance in a properly fit way. Instead of using our passes in the Lobbies, I would love to see us perhaps using them in Westminster Hall, where it would be much easier for people to remain apart from one another. We do have bottlenecks. It is very difficult for the doorkeepers to keep us all away from one another when there are bottlenecks as we are filing through the Lobby, even after using our passes, so I would like to see that change. However, I welcome all these changes, and I congratulate all those who have sought to improve the system.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Thank you, Andrea Leadsom, for showing huge time restraint.