Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill
Debate between Chris Bryant and Peter Tapsell(14 years ago)
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Chris Bryant
Of course; I did not mean to be ungenerous to the hon. Member for Broxbourne, as I think he well knows. I was praising his ambition, which need not be for the greasy pole—it might be for other things in life.
The right hon. Member for Louth and Horncastle (Sir Peter Tapsell)—
Chris Bryant
Well, the hon. Gentleman should be. He carries himself as if he were right honourable—if not most reverend as well.
Chris Bryant
Yes, he delivered his remarks with a magisterial largesse—[Interruption.] No, I was not going to say laissez faire.
The hon. Member for Louth and Horncastle made some extremely good points, and I hope that many Members will reject the Bill on Third Reading for precisely the reasons he advanced. One of the arguments I have tried to make throughout is that I fully understand why many hon. Members feel that, following the expenses saga in particular, we need to be very humble about the authority of the House and individual Members. However, we should not throw the baby out with the bathwater. We should be proud of our representative democracy and the system we have. It does not work perfectly. There are things that have to be improved. As in the church, there will always be things that are semper reformanda. However, we should not in the process suddenly start to say that the whole of the political system is corrupt, wrong and rotten, and that therefore we have to start all over again.
I differ from the hon. Gentleman on one point. He said that the system is not much different from that in 1945, 1918 and 1850—
Chris Bryant
Well, my point remains. Neither in 1815 nor in 1850 were miners able to vote, because they did not qualify under the franchise. In 1885, they were allowed to, but women were not. One can make significant changes to the system, although I think the hon. Gentleman holds a different view from me about reform of the House of Lords. That is where I agree more with the Government Front-Bench team. I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman had any particular tadpoles or nincompoops in mind—I can see some images flitting across his mind now, which suggests he had some specific people in mind.
The hon. Member for Broxbourne referred directly to the argument that the Deputy Prime Minister made in January in favour of cutting the House of Commons to 500 Members and the number of Ministers to 73, but of course that is not at all the proposal before us. The right hon. Gentleman has adopted neither measure. It might be that having picked one tune on “Desert Island Discs” on Sunday, he changes his tune entirely when it is replayed on Thursday. That is clearly the situation we have at the moment.
Our system has changed over the generations because it has not been considered right and proper that Ministers thought of their salary or pension as just a tiny part of their remuneration for being in hock to the Crown and that all the other monopolies and benefits accruing by virtue of how they operated their ministerial office brought in far more money. It was Edmund Burke who, in 1782, first introduced changes that meant that Ministers of the Crown had to rely on the properly arrived at financial provisions, rather than on the previous system which was completely and utterly corrupt. As Macaulay said of the 18th century:
“From the noblemen who held the white staff and the great seal, down to the humblest tidewaiter and gauger, what would now be called gross corruption was practiced without disguise and without reproach.”
Many in previous generations exercised their ministerial functions solely on the basis of financial corruption. Ministers accumulated enormous fortunes by virtue of being Ministers. It is right and proper that we do not have that system today, and if anybody in the British political system does accumulate, by virtue of their political office, an enormous fortune, there is something going wrong—IPSA must have allocated everything that we have all claimed to just one individual Member.
There was substantial change in 1831 through the Select Committee on the Reduction of Salaries. It suggested a completely different structure, which ended up with William Pitt the Younger, when he was First Lord of the Treasury, earning just £5,000 by virtue of that post, although he had other posts that earned him some £4,300. Today, that would be a considerable amount of money for ministerial office, but at the time MPs were not paid at all.
Today’s system relies on two pieces of legislation from 1975, the Ministerial and other Salaries Act, and the House of Commons Disqualification Act, to which the new clause in the name of the hon. Member for Broxbourne refers. Both specify that the number of Ministers shall be 95. The Ministerial and other Salaries Act also lays out how many Cabinet Ministers, Ministers of State, Whips and so on there can be, and it is my simple contention that if one wants to limit the number of Members and ensure that the proper legislative scrutiny function of this House is performed, one has to cut the number of Ministers.
Chris Bryant
That is right. If we really are to have new politics—that rather amorphous term to which the coalition agreement alludes—it must accept something that we the Opposition were too reluctant to accept when we sat on the Government Benches: that Parliament, when it is free to do its job, does its job better than when it is constrained.
The constraints are multiplying. The number of parliamentary secretaries is not quite growing daily, as the hon. Member for Louth and Horncastle suggested. He made it sound as if they were breeding and reproducing. The number is not growing daily. However, it is certainly true—
Chris Bryant
Ah! Parliamentary Private Secretaries. Indeed, I was going to come to the point about PPSs, because the hon. Member for Broxbourne was absolutely right to say that they are included in the ministerial code of conduct. It is a bit odd that a list of PPSs is still not available to the public. If one goes to the Cabinet Office website, one finds that the most recent list refers to July 2009. There is a list on conservativehome.com, which is a website that Government Members might consult sometimes, detailing 22 Parliamentary Private Secretaries, but as I understand it there are considerably more than that. The Government should be straight with the House and tell us precisely how many people are really on the payroll. By payroll, I do not mean that PPSs are in receipt of moneys.
The ministerial code of conduct, which incidentally every PPS should have been provided with and signed, although I suspect that most have not, makes it absolutely clear:
“Parliamentary Private Secretaries are expected to support the Government in important Divisions in the House. No Parliamentary Private Secretary who votes against the Government can retain his or her position.”
I say again that this House does its job as a reviewing, revising and legislative body when it is freest from the shackles of patronage, but with the numbers of Ministers and PPSs having grown, there is already an unnecessary constraint on the real power of this House to do its job.
We have talked about what happens on the Government Benches, but what also happens is that the Opposition feel that they have to match the ministerial team—and of course, the PPS team—man for man and woman for woman, so we end up not with 95 Ministers but 190. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) is saying from a sedentary position that Labour did the same—yes, and I have already said that we were too slow to accept these points. However, there is a big difference. He is supporting a Bill to remove 50 Members of Parliament while keeping the number of the Ministers the same, which means that Ministers will form a larger percentage of the House.
When one includes Ministers and PPSs on the Government side and their shadows on the Opposition side, one ends up with a large number of people who are not entirely free to speak their mind because they are bound by collective responsibility. There are many things to be said in favour of collective responsibility: nobody wants to be run by a shower who are completely and utterly unable to organise themselves and exercise some discipline. However, we also need a significant number of people on the Back Benches who are able to deliver their verdict on legislation and to vote at all times entirely with their conscience.