Proxy Voting

Karen Bradley Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

By your leave, Mr Deputy Speaker, I will try to answer that question. Mr Speaker or the Chairman of Ways and Means will set out the proposals, but, yes, there will have to be limits and, yes, therefore call lists, except that many Westminster Hall debates do not have so many people involved that we would face getting up to the limit.

[Karen Bradley (Staffordshire Moorlands) (Con)]

I wanted to put on the record that at the meeting of the Procedure Committee earlier we agreed to a short sharp inquiry into the use of call lists and time limits. We encourage all hon. and right hon. Members to contribute to that inquiry.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am very grateful for that and I know that Members will be glad that such an inquiry is taking place.

Ultimately, we have a system that is working and balances the need to ensure the safety of Members and staff, while providing a robust voting system to allow the delivery of the legislative programme and the key decisions affecting our constituents. I therefore commend the motions to the House.

[Valerie Vaz (Walsall South) (Lab)]

I, too, will address both motions in my response. I thank the Leader of the House for tabling them, and a special thank you to the Chair of the Procedure Committee and its members. They have worked incredibly hard to get many reports out in double-quick time, so that we can continue with this.

The Committee’s report is the fourth of the Session and was published on 10 September, but the launch of the first inquiry seems a long time ago, after the House resolved on 1 February 2018:

“That this House believes that it would be to the benefit of the functioning of parliamentary democracy that honourable Members who have had a baby or adopted a child should for a period of time be entitled, but not required, to discharge their responsibilities to vote in this House by proxy.”

We have had a number of debates and, as I set out from the Dispatch Box on 18 July 2018, 13 September 2018 and 22 January 2019, Her Majesty’s Opposition, the Labour party, support the principle of proxy voting for parental absence. I am not sure when baby Sixtus was born and whether the Leader of the House indulged in proxy voting at the time.

The motion provides for the new Standing Order for voting by proxy for parental absence. It is not temporary or time-limited. It accepts the Procedure Committee’s recommendation that

“provision for proxy voting for parental absence be made in the standing orders of the House”.

The new Standing Order makes a number of amendments to the original proxy scheme, allowing proxy voting for the Chair of the Backbench Business Committee, in addition to the others. It removes the provision for the exercise of a proxy vote for Members who have suffered a miscarriage, quite rightly replacing the wording with

“in circumstances where there have been complications relating to childbirth”,

which may include postnatal depression. It removes the restriction on proxy voting in a Division

“on any motion in the form specified in section 2(2) of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011”—

if we want to vote for an early general election, we may do so by proxy. Those were all recommended by the Procedure Committee in its report.

In the proposed Standing Order, the certification process touched on by the Leader of the House becomes the responsibility of the Speaker alone. The Procedure Committee’s report found:

“The requirement to produce certificates of pregnancy or adoption to demonstrate eligibility for a proxy vote has proved onerous.”

The Committee suggested that such certificates were “unnecessary”, which I also suggested during the debates—people do not have to prove that they are pregnant or having a baby. It is up to the Speaker to decide whether to remove the certification process. I agree with that recommendation.

I was to provide evidence to the Procedure Committee in March, but the pandemic set in and I was unable to do so. It was arranged for 15 July, but I think the evidence was incorporated into the Committee’s other report, “Procedure under coronavirus restrictions”. As a result, the evidence was not included in this report, but I know that the written evidence is on the website. I hope it was taken into account. I have to pay tribute to the Clerk of the Committee, who has been assiduous. I have known him from other Committees, and my thanks go to him.

[Karen Bradley]

I wanted to say absolutely, categorically, that the right hon. Lady’s evidence was very informative and informed our report. She was right that the evidence is published under a different inquiry, but it very much helped to inform us in this inquiry.

[Valerie Vaz]

I thank the right hon. Lady for that.

Turning to proxy voting during the pandemic, the second motion amends the Standing Order on voting by proxy to allow proxy votes

“for medical or public health reasons relating to the pandemic”

until 3 November 2020.

The Procedure Committee report found that

“the system of remote voting used in May was a more effective means of handling divisions in the House under conditions where the division lobbies could not be used in the traditional way and where a large number of Members were unable to attend for public health reasons.”

Her Majesty’s Opposition put that in our written evidence for the Committee on 9 July 2020, when we said:

“The electronic remote voting system was a practical and necessary measure which allowed Parliament to continue in unprecedented circumstances during the pandemic. The decision to end electronic voting on 2 June 2020 was”—

I am afraid—

“undertaken without consultation or consideration of Members”,

or of their democratic accountability. It was replaced by the proxy voting system, which was clearly inferior to the safe and efficient remote voting system that did not fail once.

In its report, the Procedure Committee found that the current system of proxy voting for coronavirus absences

“is barely adequate, is potentially unreliable and imposes disproportionate administrative burdens on staff.”

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrea Leadsom (South Northamptonshire) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and I will be quick.

I thank very much my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House, the right hon. Member for Walsall South (Valerie Vaz), and the Chair of the Procedure Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley), for what I think is a real improvement on proxy voting for parental leave. It is great to see that someone no longer has to prove, when their tummy is out there, that they are actually pregnant and it is not just a cushion. That is very valuable.

On the other hand, I have to say that I am a bit disappointed. As the right hon. Member for Walsall South said, we had many debates in this place, and there was a Procedure Committee review of parental leave a long time ago. That was always done on the expectation that if it worked, we would include it, but also potentially expand it. I see that the Committee’s latest report says, “We don’t want to expand it because if somebody is very ill or recently bereaved, for the purpose of transparency, that would have to be disclosed.” I am sorry; I just do not accept that.

I think that this is a missed opportunity. We have had some colleagues in this place who have been desperately ill. They are not allowed to vote by proxy. They are just going to have to turn up or be paired. What really sparked this change was the inadvertent breaking of a pair when a colleague was off on maternity leave. I do think it is a grave disappointment—

[Karen Bradley]

rose—

[Andrea Leadsom]

I give way to the Chair of the Procedure Committee.

[Karen Bradley]

I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend for the work that she did to get us to this point. May I just assure her that the Procedure Committee is committed to looking at proxy voting once we are through the pandemic? What we wanted to do at this stage was to ensure that we had a report that allowed the Government to bring motions forward on parental leave and that dealt with proxy votes during the pandemic, but I give her my absolute commitment that we will look at this again and consider whether it is right to expand proxy voting beyond parental leave once we are back to—let us hope—business as normal at some point soon.

[Andrea Leadsom]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for that reassurance. Even so, were somebody to be very ill now with cancer or some other awful thing, they would, under the current circumstances, be very tempted to say, “This is related to the coronavirus pandemic.” My right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) said that people are swinging the lead. I do not think people are swinging the lead, but I do think that, since we have what is in effect a very lax system of self-assessment for any illness related to the coronavirus pandemic, for someone who was recently bereaved or, indeed, very ill with something that was nothing to do with the pandemic, that would be the way to remain enfranchised in this place. Surely, that cannot be right.

Very briefly, on proxy voting during the coronavirus pandemic, I am concerned that we are not really able to socially distance in a properly fit way. Instead of using our passes in the Lobbies, I would love to see us perhaps using them in Westminster Hall, where it would be much easier for people to remain apart from one another. We do have bottlenecks. It is very difficult for the doorkeepers to keep us all away from one another when there are bottlenecks as we are filing through the Lobby, even after using our passes, so I would like to see that change. However, I welcome all these changes, and I congratulate all those who have sought to improve the system.

--- Later in debate ---

[Karen Bradley (Staffordshire Moorlands) (Con)]

I, too, will attempt to keep my remarks short.

I thank my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House for accepting most of the recommendations in my Committee’s report. We do support the motion on the Order Paper. Although the amendment was not selected, my right hon. Friend will have noted that it did not try to change the motion; it would merely have added to it something on other forms of voting.

I pay tribute to my predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Sir Charles Walker), because his incarnation of the Committee was the first to look at a version of proxy voting for parental leave. Had it not been for the work done by his Committee at that time, we would not be where we are now. I also pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller), who was the Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee at the time and part of the team that pushed so hard to make sure that proxy voting for parental leave could be brought in. I reassure my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House that there was unanimous support for the recommendations on parental leave in our report, and we are grateful that the Government have taken most of those recommendations forward.

The Committee members do differ when it comes to proxy voting for coronavirus. I am afraid that the majority view—I will be clear that it was a majority view; not everybody on the Committee feels the same—was that the proxy system for coronavirus is substandard. The majority view was that it is a very unwieldy system and is possibly open to abuse—that point was made by some Committee members; indeed, my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) would have found friends in our debate on that—but it was also felt that it is simply unreliable and not robust. We know that the queuing is not properly socially distanced. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the House is right to say that that is a matter of individual responsibility, but it simply is not possible: we see perhaps 500 Members queuing up and, inevitably, there end up being logjams, delays and points at which people are too close to each other. People are worried and scared—not just for their own health but for the health of the staff of the House of Commons. If we do not have our staff here, we cannot operate.

The majority view of the Committee was that we had a robust system of voting. The remote voting system that we used on our phones worked. It works consistently in the other place, which has been using it, and it is quick and simple. I do not accept that Members would not attend this place; Members want to be here. We want to take part in Committees and we want to take part in proceedings. We want to be here and be part of it. Some simply cannot, but we can see that it is not possible for all of us to be here. We are limited to 50 in this Chamber, and many Members feel that they are putting their health at risk to take part in a Division. They may really want to be part of that, but they have not been able to take part in the debate because there simply is not space for them.

[Andrew Griffith]

As a member of the Committee, I would like to pay tribute to the chairmanship of my right hon. Friend. It is true, nevertheless, that we as a Committee were unable to reach consensus. We had a strong consensus—consensus I was proud to be part of—on the issue of parental leave, but we were not as a Committee able to reach consensus on the appropriate means of voting. I would just urge my colleagues on the Committee and the Leader of the House to ensure, as we continue to address this issue, that the full House has a chance to express its view. It is so profound that it is really not something I suspect we are likely to be able to reach full consensus on in the Committee.

[Karen Bradley]

I absolutely agree. The point of my amendment was to give the House an opportunity to have its say. I personally believe there is a majority now for a return to voting by phone, not because people do not want to participate, but because it is robust and sensible. It gave more time for people to be able to do their job as an MP, and it meant that we were the safest and most efficient Parliament. I have to say to my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House that we were held up across the world as a Parliament leading on how to manage the pandemic and keep Parliament going, and it looked like a very retrograde step to move away from that.

[Owen Thompson]

On that point, I can give as an example the fact that we had the Japanese Parliament talking to the Procedure Committee about the processes we had implemented. It was looking at what we had done, but during that process, we had to say, “We’re very sorry, but actually these leading processes that we implemented have since been turned off. They were great; however, we’re not using them anymore.” There are some Members who still cannot take part, but if we were to have such a vote it would be the first time all Members would actually be able to take part, because they were not able to do so last time.

[Karen Bradley]

Absolutely, and I would reflect that. I gave evidence to the Procedure and House Affairs Committee of the Canadian Parliament, and exactly the same points of view were put forward.

Another point about the system we have at the moment, with the large number of proxy votes, is that the power is held in the hands of the Whips. Hundreds of votes are held by the Whips. I know my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House will say that a Member can give their proxy to anyone they wish, but that is not what has happened. Whether we like it or not, constitutionally, it is not perhaps the best look for this Parliament, and it is something that many right hon. and hon. Members are desperately uncomfortable about.

I want to be very clear that the moment we can go back to the Division Lobbies and use them in the traditional way, I will be the first person to request that we do so, but until we can do that—until we can vote safely in the Division Lobbies, in a way that is safe for our own health and that of the staff in this place—I ask my right hon. Friend to consider giving this House a chance to have another say on whether we want to return to remote voting.

--- Later in debate ---

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

I will endeavour to be brief, and to pick up a number of points that other Members have made. First, I support the motions on the Order Paper, and I welcome them. Perhaps I can be of help to my right hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley), the Chairman of the Procedure Committee, on the point that my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom) made about coming back to the arrangements regarding other reasons not to be here. One of the things I can perhaps offer, as a former Chief Whip, is that these things are connected. For example, when someone is absent for parental reasons, the fact that they can now have a proxy vote actually makes it more challenging to enable other colleagues to be absent for other reasons, particularly ill health. That is because pairing involves colleagues from both sides of the House, and it was often those who were not here for maternity or paternity reasons who enabled other colleagues to be paired with them.

On the question of delay, I would counsel that if we are in this for the long haul, the Committee might wish to attend to that matter—maybe not to reach a conclusion but at least to look at it—earlier, and to see whether we need to address the point about people who are seriously ill earlier. Another point is that, culturally, pairing is not well understood outside the House. It means that when two people who are going to vote on opposite sides cannot be here, they effectively cancel each other out. Our voting is more visible now, however, because there are apps to enable people to see how we vote, so if we think that it is not really acceptable for someone who is very ill to just not vote, we need to put in place a mechanism whereby they can vote, so that people who are seriously ill are not required to turn up here in person. It may be that things have moved on and that, because we have made one set of changes, we need to make the other set of changes because they are more difficult to implement.

Let me pick up on the point that the hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Tommy Sheppard) made. It is not often that I defend members of the Scottish National party in the House, but I will defend those who are not here. In my experience, it is easier for many Scottish Members to get here by plane than it is for me to get here from the Forest of Dean—certainly in terms of the time that it takes. I do not believe that there is a significant number of Members in this House—I am afraid that I disagree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) on this point—who do not want to be here. In my experience, Members of Parliament work really hard to get into this House, and they want to be here. I certainly love my constituency and I love being at home, but I would not trade it for being in this place.

None the less, we do have to recognise the issues facing many of our colleagues—either because of their own health or because of their shielding responsibilities, or, as the Leader of the House mentioned, the variety of reasons around childcare. A parent may be in their place here, but if their child is in a bubble and a child in that bubble has coronavirus, that bubble will get sent home and that parent may not have access, particularly at short notice, to childcare. Someone will have to stay at home to look after their children, so they may not be able to get here. That will mean not that they are not dedicated, but that they are having to balance their responsibilities as a Member of Parliament and a parent, as many of our constituents have had to do during the pandemic. We need to recognise that if we want a diverse range of Members of Parliament, of different ages, different backgrounds, different financial requirements, and people who are parents, we need to ensure that they can all participate in this House as Members of Parliament. I think that what the hon. Gentleman said was perfectly sensible.

On remote voting, the Leader of the House and I could probably have a competition over who was most keen on in-person voting—I am not sure which of us would win that competition. I always champion in-person voting when people suggest that we should move to modern electronic mechanisms. That is because, certainly for members of the major parties—the Labour and Conservative parties—it is a fantastic opportunity for Back Benchers to engage with Ministers. I say to every Back Bencher that if they ever want to keep Ministers accountable and accessible, never move permanently to remote voting because they will never see a Minister in this place again. For constituents who wonder what the benefit is for them, I say that in-person voting is so valuable because we can then raise their issues directly with Ministers quickly and efficiently. When Ministers do not have their civil servants present, they can sometimes see the point of something without someone persuading them that the issue is not worth solving.

The whole point about that is that we can access people. The problem at the moment with the way t we have to vote is that we cannot just go and grab a Minister. If Members are to be properly socially distanced, they have to be 2 apart, or perhaps a little less if they are wearing a face mask, but a complex, difficult conversation is impossible in those circumstances. I am afraid, therefore, that I do agree with what is in the report.

From my experience, because Members want to use that opportunity to talk to each other, they are torn between socially distancing and creeping closer together. I do agree with what the hon. Member for Edinburgh East said: we need to set an example. Even if, individually, we try to set an example, it is not always possible when there are hundreds of colleagues getting very close. I am not saying that I am perfect at it, but sometimes I try to shoo people away because they are getting too close. It is difficult. As a fan of in-person voting, I think we need to think about setting a good example and looking at remote voting.

[Karen Bradley]

Not only is it not possible for a Member to find the Minister that they need to find in the queue in a socially distanced way, but they are not able to do so privately, because they are in a queue of hundreds of people from all different parties. With the best will in the world, even though I have great friends from all parts of the House, I may not want to discuss some issues in front of them.

[Mr Harper]

My right hon. Friend makes a very good point. All I ask the Leader of the House to think about is the fact that the big advantage of in-person voting—my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough and I are in massive agreement on this point—is the access that Back Benchers get to Ministers. That is simply not deliverable in the present circumstances. Perhaps it is a little bit, but certainly not to the extent that it was. Regrettably, because I love in-person voting, I do think that during this period, which I fear will be lengthy, the Leader of the House should at least think about that and put in place some procedures that will mean that we can bring in remote voting if we need to. In particular, if we are forced to take more stringent measures—I hope we are not, but it is entirely possible that we are—we may need to look at it.

On remote voting, and then I will conclude to allow the Leader of the House to get in, the other point that struck me in the report was about areas of local lockdown. I agree with him that if someone is in an area of local lockdown, there are ancient privileges for Members of Parliament to be able to come here, but we also have to set an example. If someone is in an area where we are telling constituents that they must not go to work if they can work at home, although there may be reasons why Members of Parliament feel that they should be here, this would set a dreadful example and look very much like, “One rule for us and one rule for our constituents”. If a Member is in one of those local lockdown areas, as something like a fifth of the population are, we want them to do what they are encouraging their constituents to do, and in those circumstances, they cannot be here and participate. I think we need to think about how we deliver that, and those points are made powerfully in the report. Although I am a traditionalist on in-person voting, I urge the Leader of the House to look at it going forward.