Electoral Registration and Administration Bill

Debate between David Heath and John Hemming

Wednesday 27th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Heath]

It does seem to be a much more complicated issue than I expected when I stood at the Dispatch Box. My understanding is that under the present arrangements parties can register more than one emblem, for example to demonstrate regional or national differences within a single party, so I do not think that that is a problem. That is my understanding, unless I have completely misunderstood the intention behind this. I will write to the hon. Gentleman to clarify that point.

The hon. Member for Caerphilly referred to other elections. This applies only to parliamentary elections because we have already made the necessary changes in secondary legislation to address the issue for most other elections that are affected by the change. We cannot do that for UK parliamentary elections without primary legislation, and that is why it is in the Bill today. It will complete the process, so that we no longer have that discrepancy. I hope that that satisfies the hon. Gentleman.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause 18 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clauses 19 to 21 ordered to stand part of the Bill.



New Clause 1

Personation

‘In section 60 of the Representation of the People Act 1983 (Personation) after subsection (2) insert—

“(2A) The Secretary of State shall introduce regulations by statutory instrument to facilitate actions by electoral registration officers, their agents and others, including candidates and their agents in elections, to—

(a) prevent, and

(b) detect personation.”.’. —(John Hemming.)

This Clause would enable action to be taken to prevent or deter personation.

Brought up, and read the First time.

[John Hemming (Birmingham, Yardley) (LD)]

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

Backbench Business Committee

Debate between David Heath and John Hemming

Monday 12th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Heath]

The hon. Gentleman says that I have singularly failed to answer the question, but I have answered it several times; he simply does not like the answer I have given. There is a subtle distinction between not answering and others not accepting the answer. As I have said, the answer is that this is the opportunity we have before the elections.

The Procedure Committee will not report before the elections are due, and I do not want to put any further pressure on it to complete its report in a hurry, because these are very important matters on which we want the full benefit of its advice. It is no good crying after the event if it proves that we have made an error in our election of Members to the Backbench Business Committee. That is why the House has been given the opportunity today to consider whether it wants to make the changes that I have suggested.

The motion achieves that—

[John Hemming (Birmingham, Yardley) (LD)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Heath]

Yes, but this will be the last intervention for some time.

[John Hemming]

On that point, the problem so far in getting Procedure Committee debates on to the Floor of the House has been the Government allocating time for the Backbench Business Committee so that the Committee can allocate time to debate a Procedure Committee report. If the Government were to promise to allocate time immediately to debate a Procedure Committee report, there would be no difficulty in getting that through in time for the elections.

[Mr Heath]

There is one small difficulty with that, which is that the Backbench Business Committee is precluded from putting forward time for amendments to its own constitution. That is why it has to be a matter for the Government, and why we are providing time today, and would provide time in future, to consider the results of the Procedure Committee report.

The motion achieves what I have been describing by a simple endorsement of the principle that parties should elect members of the Backbench Business Committee each Session, and thereafter when a vacancy arises, in a secret ballot of all Members from that party by whichever transparent and democratic method they choose, following the same approach as that agreed for other Select Committees on 4 March 2010. In consequence, we are, if the House agrees, removing the provisions in Standing Orders for elections of members of the Committee other than the Chair. The amendments in the name of the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) and others would remove the provisions whose purpose I have described and retain the current arrangements. Given what I have said, it will be no surprise that I will not support those amendments, but it is open to the House to do so if it wishes.

The second element of the motion relates to the Chair of the Committee, and I have already indicated why I believe that it introduces a beneficial change. The Government believe that it would not be appropriate for a Member from the governing party, or parties, to be nominated for the Chair of the Backbench Business Committee, because that might give rise to the Government’s appearing to seek to influence a key position in the House in an improper way. Having an Opposition Member chairing the Backbench Business Committee headlines the Committee’s independence not only from the business managers—of whom I am one, on behalf of the Government—but the influence of the Government party generally. My right hon. Friend the Member for Saffron Walden (Sir Alan Haselhurst) stood for the post of Chair in 2010, when the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Natascha Engel) was elected, and his wisdom and experience have subsequently been deployed in his service as Chair of the Administration Committee. However, conventions evolve over time, and we think the time is now right to recognise that the Chair should be held by an Opposition Member.

At the same time, we are taking the opportunity to remedy an anomaly in the Standing Order that was identified by my hon. Friend the Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson) and referred to by the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire during the debate on 15 June 2010—namely, that at present no Member can be nominated for the Chair unless he or she belongs to a party with at least 11 Members of this House. I acknowledged on that occasion that my hon. Friend and the hon. Gentleman had identified a possible defect in the Standing Order that needed to be considered, and I am pleased to move this motion to remedy it—[Interruption]—despite the protestations of the hon. Gentleman who, it seems, is never satisfied. We propose to replace it with a provision that requires cross-party support of comparable strength but allows Members from minority parties to stand for Chair of the Committee.

Finally, the motion makes provision for hon. Members from parties not represented on the Backbench Business Committee to participate in its work. The motion allows the Committee to invite an hon. Member who does not belong to a party represented on it to participate in its proceedings, including deliberative sessions, but not to vote. It would be for the Committee to decide whether to invite one hon. Member for a Session or a shorter period or to invite different hon. Members to different meetings. [Interruption.] The Government believe that this effectively addresses minority party concerns—although clearly, according to the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire, it does not—in a manner consistent with the principle that the composition of the Committee should reflect the party composition of the House. The hon. Gentleman protests from a sedentary position that it does not reflect it because he wants full membership of the Committee, but that is not the way in which this House has determined its membership of Select Committees, whereby such membership reflects the composition of the House as a whole. It seems to me that that principle of proportionality is something that the House would wish to maintain, because otherwise it becomes open to the House to distort the composition of the House as represented in the membership of its Select Committees, and I am not sure that the Backbench Business Committee should be separate from that consideration.

We made it clear in our response to the Procedure Committee, which was published last month, that we do not agree with the proposal for full membership for a minority party Member. Our proposal allows for the participation of hon. Members from different parties, as and when the Backbench Business Committee considers it appropriate, whereas the amendments would provide for only a single hon. Member to participate. That is why we oppose the amendments tabled by the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire and others.

The amendments tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (John Hemming) would apply the principle of whole-House elections to the election of a minority party Member. That is instructive about the conduct of this whole debate. Were the amendments tabled by the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire and the amendments to them tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley successful, the larger parties in the House would determine not only which Member from the minority parties would appear on the Committee, but which party would be represented. That would put the larger parties in the inappropriate position of deciding whether it should be a Member from the Democratic Unionist party, the Scottish National party or Plaid Cymru who was selected for the position. That amply demonstrates what is wrong with the current system of elections.

In conclusion, the motion will change the elections for the membership of the Backbench Business Committee and how Members participate in its work in a way that enables the Committee to continue to work effectively. It will make those changes at the right time—in fact, the only possible time—before the membership is settled in the next Session. The motion will facilitate the Committee’s effective operation in the future and I commend it to the House.

Bill of Rights

Debate between David Heath and John Hemming

Thursday 17th March 2011 Westminster Hall

[Mr Heath]

I think that we would be in the same position that we are in now, with the present interpretation of the absolute parliamentary privilege that we enjoy in the comments that we make in this House. I do not see that there would be any difference if we were to extend our statutory interpretation of proceedings to include correspondence in the way that the hon. Lady suggests. However, let me not attempt to pre-empt a serious debate that will inevitably need to happen in preparing the statute on which this Bill will be based, both in terms of the pre-legislative scrutiny and then our scrutiny of whatever is proposed.

[John Hemming]

I may not be right but I am thinking of the Strauss case, which was about a letter from a Back-Bench MP to a Minister about cables. I believe that at the time the Standards and Privileges Committee recommended that the House should consider that case to have privilege, but the House voted—albeit not unanimously—not to treat it as being privileged.

[Mr Heath]

My hon. Friend brings me on to a very important point about the attitude of the House to date. He is eager to change that attitude, but the House has not yet shown a predilection, to use his own word, to do so, because in the past the House itself has not regarded attempts to interfere with or to frustrate a constituent’s communication with their MP as a breach of privilege. “Erskine May” records cases where threats have been made against a constituent by his employer in respect of communications with the constituent’s MP and either the House has declined to refer the matter to the Standards and Privileges Committee or the Committee has found that the actions alleged did not amount to a breach of privilege.

My hon. Friend addressed the situation in Australia, where the position in the state of Victoria is slightly different from that here. There was a 2006 case in the Parliament of Victoria, in which the Parliament upheld a privilege complaint from Michael Leighton, the Member for the electoral district of Preston. In that case, the complaint was that a constituent who provided information to Mr Leighton relating to an issue that he had previously raised in the Parliament later received a solicitor’s letter threatening legal action if Mr Leighton repeated certain allegations in the Parliament. That illustrates that there might be particular circumstances in which interference with communication between an MP here and a constituent might be regarded as a contempt of the House, although it does not demonstrate that communications between MPs and constituents should generally be regarded as being protected by parliamentary privilege.

However, there are two points that we must remember about the Victoria case. First, the threat to take legal action against the constituent was specifically in respect of any allegations that might be repeated by the Member in the Parliament of Victoria and it was therefore an indirect attempt to constrain the Member’s freedom of speech in the Parliament. I have to say that that bears some level of similarity with my hon. Friend’s case against Withers, where the House acted quite properly in his defence, or perhaps it would be more correct to say that it acted in defence of his constituent.

The second point, or rather the second difference between the situation here and the situation in Australia, is quite important in the context of this debate. It is that parliamentary privilege in Australia is defined in the Parliamentary Privilege Act 1987, so Australians do not rely on the Bill of Rights as we do. In addition, there is a definition of “proceedings” in that Act, which is

“all words spoken or acts done in the course of, or for the purposes of or incidental to, the transacting of the business of a House or of a committee.”

I think that my hon. Friend is arguing that we ought to have some similar provision here and we will need to look at that issue when we consider the matter of parliamentary privilege more widely.