Recall of MPs Bill

Debbie Abrahams Excerpts

Tuesday 21st October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful argument about the disgust that many of our constituents still feel about politics and politicians, and about the importance of the Bill. Does he think that the measures relating to accountability and in particular to MPs adjudicating on themselves are strong enough?

[Stephen Twigg]

I will come to those issues in a moment. The straightforward answer is no, I do not think those measures are strong enough. During the Committee stage we need to strengthen them significantly.

Labour supports recall. Our manifesto commitment in 2010 stated:

“MPs who are found responsible for financial misconduct will be subject to a right of recall”.

We need a system that improves accountability and gives more power to the public to hold their representatives to account between elections. That is a matter of fairness. People go to work each day and they know that if they break the rules, if they behave inappropriately at work, they may face the sack. The job of a Member of Parliament should be no different. If we are to regain the trust of the people, we cannot place ourselves outside or above this basic principle.

However, the system of recall needs to reflect what the job of a Member of Parliament is. We are not delegates to this place. We have a representative democracy, in which Members of Parliament are sent to represent their constituencies, and sometimes that involves making difficult decisions. A balance has to be drawn between giving people the opportunity to recall MPs for misconduct, and allowing MPs to make difficult decisions. For misconduct, recall makes sense. For holding MPs to account for their voting record, general elections are the appropriate mechanism. We will support this Bill on Second Reading, but look forward to strengthening it in Committee.

We believe that the Bill is an unacceptably minimalist interpretation of the right to recall. For example, as the Minister set out, one of the triggers in the Bill is when an MP is suspended from the House of Commons for at least 21 sitting days or 28 calendar days. Had this rule been in operation over the past 25 years, there are only two occasions on which Members of Parliament would have been caught by this proposed change. As my hon. Friend the Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Mr Roy) pointed out, for the Members of Parliament who were caught up in the “cash for questions” scandal in the 1990s, because of the nature of the punishment they faced, recall would not have been triggered.