Private Members’ Bills: Money Resolutions

David Linden Excerpts

Monday 21st May 2018 Commons Chamber

[David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)]

I commend the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Afzal Khan) on securing this debate, and thank you, Mr Speaker, for granting time for us to debate this issue under the auspices of Standing Order No. 24. I am disappointed that it has had to come to an emergency debate, but let us be honest: it is the Government’s pig-headedness on this issue that has brought it to the fore. I say that as a member of the Public Bill Committee that is considering the boundaries Bill, which is in political purgatory.

The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, the hon. Member for Norwich North (Chloe Smith), has shown nothing but utter contempt for the will of Parliament, which agreed unanimously to the Bill’s Second Reading. I must say to the Leader of the House that the spectacle of a Minister sitting in Committee doing her papers and saying nothing demeans her office and shows what little respect the Government have for Parliament. Far from Parliament taking back control, we see Ministers simply taking the proverbial. Rather than behaving like a humbled minority Government, Ministers are constantly riding roughshod over parliamentary democracy. They have simply not come to terms with losing their parliamentary majority. I say that humbly as someone whose party lost its majority in the Scottish Parliament in 2016.

The UK Government started by buying off the Democratic Unionist party but continued to give it Opposition Short money, and they continue with the charade of DUP Members sitting on the Opposition Benches. To my recollection, the only time the DUP has not voted with the Government was on the Women Against State Pension Inequality Campaign, when the House unanimously passed a motion saying that the women of the 1950s generation should be looked after. The Government ignored that, and thereby continued to perpetrate an injustice against the 1950s WASPI women.

After setting up their grubby confidence and supply agreement with the DUP, the Government began to gerrymander Select Committees, after a lengthy delay in their being set up. The Procedure Committee, of which I am a member, has had to launch an inquiry into the establishment of Select Committees, because of the Government’s actions.

The Government have said that they will just abstain from or, indeed, ignore all Opposition day votes. Is it not remarkable that the Government chose to break that self-imposed convention only when it came to the motion on the release of data about the injustices perpetuated against the black faces of the Windrush generation? The first time the Government chose to take part in an Opposition day vote was to prevent that information from being published.

The real anger in this place today relates to the boundaries Bill, because Ministers want to reduce the number of MPs while they increase the payroll vote of trade envoys and Parliamentary Private Secretaries. Ministers want to reduce the number of MPs while they simultaneously stuff more people into the House of Lords. On Friday last week, when all eyes were on a royal wedding, Labour and the Tories quietly put out the news that they were ennobling another 12 peers on £300 a day. We have the grotesque sight of Corbynite Labour comrades donning the ermine while people in Glasgow are going hungry as a result of British Government austerity.

In recent months, the Government have filibustered debates on votes at 16 because—I do believe this—a clear majority of MPs in this House now supports votes at 16. The Government are too scared to put the issue to a vote. That is exactly what happened to the private Member’s Bill introduced by the hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton (Jim McMahon). Now, we have the deeply worrying development of the Government withholding of money resolutions for Bills that they could not defeat on Second Reading. Rather than killing the Bill, the Government could at least give it a money resolution and allow it to be debated in Committee. That would allow Committee members to consider the Bill, clause by clause, and amend it if necessary. If at that stage the Government do not support the Bill, they can vote it down on Third Reading.

All these people in the House talk about Parliament taking back control, but I am not really seeing a huge amount of evidence. The Government are already running out of steam—so much so that one transport Bill has been carved into four separate Bills, simply to beef up the legislative programme. We have a Government who are running scared of Parliament, whether by not recalling Parliament to debate Syrian air strikes or in the form of a zombie Parliament with endless meaningless general debates, which make this place look more like a university debating society.

The reality is that Westminster is a place of limited democracy, and the British establishment has rapidly run out of steam. I say to the Leader of the House that Scotland can be governed differently and efficiently, with a fairer Parliament that has the powers of independence, and the powers to conduct the legislative process in a way that is respectful of not only its Members but the people we seek to represent. The sooner we are free from this, the better.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I will not give way again because time is short, much as I would like to give way to the hon. Gentleman.

The point of the constitutional differentiation—the separation of powers—is that, as long as the Government command the confidence of this House, they are the sole proposer of expenditure.

[David Linden]

rose—

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I will not give way again.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

Of course we are sovereign, but we are sovereign in that we have the ability to dismiss the Government.

The separation of powers is very important. If we allowed the House to do all that the Government try to do, we would in effect not have an Executive. We would simply have Committees of the House trying to run the whole Government, which would be completely impractical and a novel constitutional experiment. For very good reasons, we have the Standing Orders we have. The hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) rightly said that we can change our Standing Orders—we can change Standing Orders Nos. 48, 49 and 50 so that money resolutions are not needed.

[David Linden]

rose—

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I have so little time—I apologise.

The House has decided not to change its Standing Orders because it recognises that the constitutional settlement works well. The British people give a mandate to the Government. That mandate is represented through this House. That Government then come to this House seeking to push through their agenda. The House holds them to account and supports or opposes their expenditures. We would be turning our constitutional settlement on its head if we decided that the powers of the Executive are to revert to the legislature. We are here to seek redress of grievance and to hold to account. We are not here to mimic, replace or take over the functions of the Government. Therefore, it is our role to say to Her Majesty’s Government: “You are right. You are preserving the constitution. You are following the constitutional norms.”

My hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) made a point about conventions. The one he mentioned is observed more in the breach than in the observance. It has been ignored on many occasions because it is not a rule of this House or of the constitution. That an application for expenditure lies with the Government is not only a rule of the constitution, but a cornerstone of it. Let us preserve our constitution.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)]

This has been a wide-ranging debate. The hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Afzal Khan)—I congratulate him on introducing the debate—spoke about the reduction of the number of seats and directly about his private Member’s Bill bringing the number to 650, which has slightly muddied the waters when we look at money resolutions.

My hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) put it better than I possibly could when he quoted the facts. There is a responsibility on the Government to put in place the checks and balances on how legislation comes forward. As has already been said, we are but weeks away from a boundary review decision being taken in this House. The Government’s position is not to dismiss out of hand the Bill of the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton, but to say that now is not the time to bring it forward, as we should wait until this decision has been made.

We are a very long way down the line. The Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act was first debated in 2011. I was elected in 2010, so it seems to have travelled through my eight years in this Parliament. Obviously, there is much doubt about whether the order will pass with the proposal to reduce the size of the House to 600 seats. It is a crying shame that, among all other things, we may still end up in a situation whereby we have such unequal seats.

Those who have done election monitoring with the OSCE will know from the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe that the maximum difference between seats should seldom exceed 10% and should never exceed 15%. Of course, we are in a situation whereby there are such differences. Let us look at two seats that I picked at random: Wirral West has an electorate of 55,995 and East Ham has an electorate of 83,827. That is a difference of 33%. This is not the time to debate the Bill promoted by the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton. Amending the legislation to review the situation every 10 years does not really sit with the point about updating the registers every five years, but I do not want to get too involved with actually debating the Bill.

[David Linden]

This is the first speech from the Conservative Benches that has actually touched on what is contained in the Bill. The whole reason that Opposition Members want the Bill to go to Committee is so that we can consider it clause by clause. At the moment, we do not have the power to do that because of the Government’s actions.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I say very gently to the hon. Gentleman: patience. Later this autumn, the House will vote on the proposal for 600 seats, as was laid down in statute when the review was pushed forward to 2018. There remains to be very significant work, which may or may not have to be done depending on the outcome of that result. The hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) has intervened a couple of times to ask what happens if that proposal is voted down. I believe the point he is making is that it is laid down in statute that the number of seats has to be reduced to 600 so, even if it is voted down, what are we going to do?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)]

I want to address most of my remarks to the motion before us. I will touch briefly on some of the points that have come up about the substance of the private Member’s Bill, but I will keep those remarks relatively tight, Madam Deputy Speaker, so as not to stray from the subject of the motion.

First, I want to pick up where my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) left off. He is absolutely right that the Government have the responsibility to bring forward money resolutions and to initiate the spending of money. If we think about it, there is a very good reason for that. In the case of Back Benchers bringing forward a private Member’s Bill under which they propose spending money on a popular cause, people will of course find that very welcome. Members of the public quite frequently like money being spent on good causes. However, if every private Member’s Bill spent a significant amount of money, although each individually might not have a huge impact, collectively they would do so.

That is one of the good reasons why the Government, when bringing forward Bills under their own programme, have to balance the individual measures not only in relation to the good that they do for the money that is spent, but, as my hon. Friend said, in relation to the ways and means—that is, the taxes that have to be levied to pay for those measures. It is therefore right that the Government initiate the spending of money and ask this House to assent to it. That important constitutional principle is worth maintaining.

[David Linden]

rose—

[Mr Harper]

Of course I give way to my fellow member of the Public Bill Committee.

[David Linden]

The right hon. Gentleman is speaking at length about the Government having to be careful about how they authorise spending of money and how that money is planned to be spent. Does he have the same feeling about the £1 billion that was bunged to the Democratic Unionist party after the general election?

[Mr Harper]

I have not really been speaking at length—I had only been speaking for about a minute when I generously gave way to the hon. Gentleman. The Government do have to spend public money wisely. As they said, spending money on the people—the people—of Northern Ireland, who had to suffer over many decades from the impact of terrorist violence and a divided society, is a perfectly proper spending of public money. I, for one, am very pleased that we have got to a situation where the public realm in Northern Ireland is much more peaceful and the communities are living much more closely together. Dealing with some of that legacy of the past is a very welcome and very proper thing for the Government to spend public money on.