Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Daniel Kawczynski Excerpts

Monday 25th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

Well, the hon. Gentleman should be. He carries himself as if he were right honourable—if not most reverend as well.

[Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)]

He was magisterial.

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[Chris Bryant]

I agree. That is why I have been trying to argue that Members such as the hon. Gentleman who have taken a long-standing interest in constitutional issues should feel free not necessarily to vote with their Front Benchers. I know that he has already exercised that right on several occasions.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

The hon. Gentleman says that having a large group of PPSs will make it more difficult to hold the Government to account, but some might argue that when Mr Blair was Prime Minister it was the rebellion among PPSs threatening to resign that finally forced him to go.

[Chris Bryant]

I know too much about that episode to want to divulge exactly what went on. The hon. Gentleman is a PPS now, is he not?

[Daniel Kawczynski]

Yes.

[Chris Bryant]

Right, but he is not yet listed on any publicly available list of PPSs. [Interruption.] Well, I am sure that the country is grateful and that people will welcome the hon. Gentleman with acclaim and instantly start putting up red and white bunting in honour of his historical associations with Poland.

My point is that the payroll vote has increased. It has increased because of the dramatic increase in the number of PPSs, which partly happened under our rule but I think is happening again at the moment. The increased payroll vote is not just because of that, though. It is also because of unpaid Ministers. I was an unpaid Minister for a while and sympathise with the Deputy Leader of the House, who is one now. We now also have a particularly interesting concept, which is a Liberal Democrat Whip who is not even an unpaid Minister but an organiser of the Liberal Democrats, but who is sort of on the payroll as part of the ministerial team. Clearly, because their job has the word “Whip” in it, they are expected to vote with the Government at all times.

In addition, a vast extent of patronage is still available to Prime Ministers. They can make Members chair an ad hoc committee or ask them to be a delegate to some conference here or there. The whole business of patronage can be profoundly dangerous to how we do our business. I have already referred to how that applies to Opposition parties.

I will be warm towards the Government briefly and say that they have made some moves to remove one element of that patronage, which we had suggested before and for which I remember fighting when Robin Cook was Leader of the House. They have done that through the election of Select Committee Chairs. That has been entirely beneficial and I support it fully. I can see at least one Committee Chair in his place, and he is a splendid chap. He might not have become Chair of that Committee if it had been a matter of patronage, or if he had become Chair by virtue of patronage, he might not have felt so free to use his voice in these debates over the past few days. He has pointed in the direction of the new politics, but we can still go much further.

Of course we must consider the financial costs of ministerial office that can be saved, although I do not want to go too far down the populist route attached to that. Sometimes it is valuable to have Ministers who are properly supported and can do their job well. When I was in the Foreign Office it had only three Ministers in the House of Commons, which made it very difficult for foreign delegations to be met by a Minister from the Foreign Office. I do not know whether that did the United Kingdom any favours. I do not wish to adopt every populist measure that is thrown in front of us, or to kick it in the net, but I do want to ensure that the House has sufficient Members with Back-Bench independence to be able to hold the Executive to account.

Many of those who have made the most significant contributions to the House over the centuries have not only never sought ministerial office but actively declined it, from Andrew Marvell, who turned down office on five or six occasions, to Plimsoll, Bradlaugh and a series of others. They made dramatic changes to the lives of many ordinary people in this country, and they did not need ministerial office to do it. They were able to do it from the Back Benches.

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[Mr Heath]

Again, the hon. Gentleman seeks to draw me back to debates that we have had on other parts of the Bill. However, I repeat that I do not think that there is a simple arithmetical relationship between the number of Ministers in the Government and the number of Members in this House, other than the view, which is my view and that of right hon. and hon. Friends, that we need to reduce the scope of Government patronage. That is something in which we are already engaged.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

My hon. Friend made a very important point a few moments ago about the staggering number of special advisers that the previous Labour Administration had. I believe that they even had one for timber products and for rain forests, as well as having special envoys for Cyprus and for Sri Lanka. It is slightly hypocritical of the Labour party to accuse us of patronage of this kind when there was so much in their Government.

[Mr Heath]

Well, the hon. Gentleman must not tempt me into spelling out in graphic detail the degree to which what the Labour party is now saying is the opposite of what it did in government, but of course it is the case.