Overseas Voters Bill

Debate between Andrew Bingham and Christopher Chope

Friday 23rd January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Bingham (High Peak) (Con)]

I suspect there is an inevitability about voting online and that one day it will come, although we do not know what will happen. My hon. Friend mentions someone voting online when they are abroad, and if they are resident abroad that is easy to determine. What about if someone was on holiday or having a gap year or whatever—I do not mean a week in the sun, but a longer period of time? Would they qualify for online voting abroad as opposed to a proxy or postal vote? I can foresee difficulties in quantifying who would qualify.

[Mr Chope]

Clause 3 would apply only to British citizens who were ordinarily resident overseas, not those who happened to be on holiday. The latter group would be brought in only in the event of our extending internet or online voting to the United Kingdom electorate, and it is important to distinguish between those two groups. It is much more complicated to deal with people voting while on holiday than with those who are resident overseas.

Drugs (Roadside Testing) Bill

Debate between Andrew Bingham and Christopher Chope

Friday 10th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend is right, but he has read reports that these roadside devices will be used to provide evidence of guilt in themselves. As a lawyer, not to mention as a politician, I would be rather concerned about that, because I think that trying to streamline the processes in such a way could lead to an enormous amount of injustice. On the most recent sitting Friday we heard that quite a lot of criminal records are inaccurate. If the criminal records are inaccurate, how can we be sure that a roadside device for indentifying whether someone has excess alcohol in their system will be 100% accurate?

In response to my hon. Friend’s reasonable concerns, I would argue that we should keep the existing system for detecting alcohol, which has proved successful and resulted in a significant reduction in the number of people driving with excess alcohol in their system. We should keep the system of a roadside test and apply the same screening principle to people suspected of having taken drugs or whose driving is impaired as a result. We should then ensure that there is a cast-iron, rigorous system at the police station for ensuring the accuracy of those tests.

[Andrew Bingham (High Peak) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a compelling case and I agree with much of what he says. We hear of the dangers of passive smoking, so if a person has been in the presence of someone smoking cannabis and has ingested the fumes passively, might that not show up in some tests? Can we be assured that someone would not be found to have taken drugs when there had been a passive intake, rather than a distinct taking of drugs?

[Mr Chope]

I am afraid that my hon. Friend leaves me speechless, because I know nothing anything about how people can be contaminated by others smoking cannabis and so cannot comment on that. Perhaps he will in due course make a further contribution to the debate and explain a little more of his background knowledge—and how he acquired it. To be candid, I do not know the answer to his point.

Whatever the answer is, it should be within the capabilities of the Home Office’s scientific branch to reach a conclusion within an eight-year time scale, as it has already been working on this for eight years and we are now talking about another two or three years. If all the promises that have been made are treated in the same way in future, we will still be debating this in five, six or seven years’ time. Meanwhile, people will continue to be killed and maimed on our roads as a result of drug-driving. Drug-driving kills or injures people on our roads every week. I know that the Government and the Minister responsible for road safety take the issue seriously. They talk the talk, but can we please ensure that we introduce roadside drug-testing systems sooner rather than later, which means before the end of this year?