Parliamentary Reform

Debate between Caroline Lucas and Peter Soulsby

Thursday 3rd February 2011 Westminster Hall

[Caroline Lucas]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. Having been at the seminar, which was very useful, I completely agree with him that that work by the Procedure Committee has started. I want to make it clear that nothing that I say this afternoon is in any way critical of what the Procedure Committee is doing—it does fantastic work. As we know, just this week it published findings of an inquiry into the release of information by Ministers, with a set of recommendations with which I wholly concur. My point is that the amount of work that we are potentially talking about in terms of the reforms that we need cannot be tackled by the Procedure Committee alone, so I completely agree with the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson) about considering a mechanism complementary to the Procedure Committee—something that would run alongside it but would have more capacity to deal with some of the wider issues that we are talking about.

[Sir Peter Soulsby (Leicester South) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing the debate. May I take this opportunity to apologise for the absence of the Chairman of the Procedure Committee, the right hon. Member for East Yorkshire (Mr Knight)? As the hon. Lady may know, he had all the symptoms of flu yesterday afternoon. For his sake and for ours, he has wisely gone home, but he asked me to stand in for him. As she will have noted, other members of the Procedure Committee are present, and the right hon. Gentleman asked me to respond at the end of the debate on behalf of the Committee.

[Caroline Lucas]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that clarification.

Let me say a little about some of the specific proposals that I would like us to consider, not in the expectation that all hon. Members will agree with them, but just to put some ideas out there about how things could be changed. One change could involve electronic voting. I know that there will be a sharp intake of breath as I say those words. I have looked back at previous times when we discussed the issue in the House, so I do not expect an easy ride on it, but this is a time when we could consider it again, not least because it has been estimated that £30,000 of salary could be saved every week because of the amount of time that MPs waste while waiting to cast votes. We are talking about an hour and a half or more extra because of the way we vote. To put it another way, if a vote takes about 15 minutes and if, in the previous Parliament, there were about 1,200 votes, that means that an MP with an 85% voting record would have spent 250 hours just queuing up to vote. Those are hours that taxpayers have paid for, and I argue that they could be better spent studying amendments, scrutinising Bills or helping constituents.