Prisoners’ Right to Vote

David Nuttall Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Harper]

No one would have realised, listening to that, that the right hon. Gentleman was ever a member of the previous Government, who also accepted that the law needed to be changed, and accepted the judgment. I have looked carefully at the media reports, and all I can see is an expression by the Government, relating to what they are going to say in a pending legal case, that they must comply with the law. I would not have thought that explaining that the Government had to comply with the law was particularly revelatory. In fact, the right hon. Gentleman shared our view when he was in government. He was quite right to draw the House’s attention to the fact that the Prime Minister is exasperated. I suspect that every Member of the House is exasperated about this, but we have no choice about complying with the law.

The fact that the previous Government failed for five years to do what they knew was necessary has left our country in a much worse position, both because of the possibility of having to pay damages and because case law has moved on. The only thing that would be worse than giving prisoners the vote would be giving them the vote and having to pay them damages as well. That is the position that the previous Government left us in.

I shall now turn to the right hon. Gentleman’s questions. I made it clear in my statement that Ministers were considering how to implement the judgment, and when decisions have been taken they will be announced to the House at the Dispatch Box in the usual way. No decisions have been taken, and I am therefore unable to answer any of his questions at this time. The previous Government took five years to do nothing when they knew that something had to be done—in exactly the same way as they behaved in not dealing with the deficit. This Government have been in office for only a matter of months, but yet again our two parties are having to deal with the mess left behind by Labour.

[Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)]

Will the Minister explain how the damages figure of millions of pounds has been arrived at, bearing in mind that nobody has yet had a payment? If ever we are forced into paying out damages, I suggest that we knock them off the payments that we have to make to Brussels.

[Mr Harper]

My hon. Friend should know that the European Court of Human Rights is based in Strasbourg, and that this is nothing to do with the European Union. The two issues are completely separate. We have been a signatory to the European convention on human rights for the best part of 60 years. Indeed, British lawyers helped to draft it after the second world war. There are currently more than 1,000 pending cases, and there is a real risk that judges will award millions of pounds in damages to be paid by our taxpayers to prisoners who have been denied the vote. That risk has been left to us by the inaction of the previous Government.