Virtual Participation in Debate

Lord Beamish Excerpts

Tuesday 24th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Valerie Vaz]

I agree with the hon. Member. He will know how important it is for people with other responsibilities that there is a different way of voting. The motion states:

“The Speaker shall draw up and publish a scheme to permit Members who are certified by a medical practitioner as clinically extremely vulnerable (or equivalent) according to relevant official public health guidance issued in England, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland, to participate virtually in such debates as are designed for virtual participation by the Speaker.”

Why is a certificate required? Hon. Members are not children. We are not going to school with a sick note. The Leader of the House has frequently said that he has needed that for PE, even though—we hope—one of his children might well play for England at cricket. It is concerning that hon. Members who are serious and want to take part in proceedings have to produce a certificate from a general practitioner.

[Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that this is also incredibly sensitive? Many Members may have a mental condition that is possibly not known to constituents or even to family members. Why should they have to divulge that? I have no problem personally with this, but particularly with mental health conditions, people may want not to make that widely known. Why should they have to do that?

[Valerie Vaz]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I have frequently asked from this Dispatch Box, during the urgent questions and debates that we have had on this issue from the start, why on earth we should have to do that. We are all equal; we are all hon. Members. We were all elected on 12 December, equally. Why should we have to produce something to say that we wish to take part in basic proceedings and our basic democratic rights?

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[Valerie Vaz]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I know how assiduous he is in his work as the Chair of a Select Committee. That is a key point, is it not? Chairs of Select Committees cannot be here. I do not think it is our business to say who can be here and who cannot be here. All Members have to be treated equally. As the hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron) said, there is a hierarchy of hon. Members and we have strived not to have that hierarchy in this House.

Let me go back to the motion and deal with the point relating to “clinically extremely vulnerable”. This is not a happy way to deal with right hon. and hon. Members. It places them in a difficult situation. It is not that they do not want to be here, but that they cannot be here. It is about what they say about their families. They do not want to bring their families into debates. They do not want to bring their families into the limelight or to this place. They want to keep them away from it. However, hon. Members are having to say— sometimes in public, Madam Deputy Speaker—why they cannot be here and they are having to bring their families into it. I say that, because the hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay cannot be here. He tabled the amendment, along with my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant). He co-signed the amendment and he cannot be here for a very, very good reason.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

The motion from the Leader of the House refers to Members who are clinically extremely vulnerable, but I know of at least one case in my own region where a Member has not been here because her husband is undergoing cancer treatment. She cannot attend because he is very vulnerable. They live in a house that does not have an east wing to enable him to isolate from her. The motion would not cover extreme cases like hers, would it?

[Valerie Vaz]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. He hits the nail on the head and explains the difficulties for hon. Members who want to do their job but cannot. They have to make the difficult choice of whether to be here and balance family with their work.

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[Karen Bradley (Staffordshire Moorlands) (Con)]

It is lovely to see everybody bobbing up and down—we do not get to see that nowadays—and there is no call list. Goodness me, Madam Deputy Speaker, what days we hark back to! How much we want to get back to those halcyon days.

I am afraid that I was not able to hear what my right hon. Friend the Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House said, because I was unfortunately caught unawares and did not know that the debate was about to start. I am grateful to him for the debate. He knows that last week, I called strongly for a debate on this matter, but it is a shame that it was done in such an unexpected and surprising way. I was on a call with the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner and it felt discourteous to say to her, “I’m terribly sorry, but I need to rush to the Chamber because apparently I am about to take part in a debate.” I set that call up several weeks ago and I was therefore disappointed to have to say that I could not complete our discussions on important matters relating to human trafficking and slavery. I should say that I am co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on human trafficking and modern slavery.

I am also Chair of the Procedure Committee, which has issued six reports in this Session, four of which are on procedures under coronavirus. I thank all Committee members. A few have left us in the last few months, but we have a very active Committee and many of its members are in the Chamber, demonstrating that Procedure Committee members really do care about procedure.

We have worked incredibly hard to assist the House in considering what are appropriate proceedings and how we should change them to reflect the situation under coronavirus. I want to be clear up front: any recommendations by the Procedure Committee have been made on the basis of how we make the best of the situation. Nobody wants to be in this position. I keep using the word sub-optimal—my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House has quoted me on it. The position is undoubtedly sub-optimal.

Other members of the Committee will recall that in our first meeting, we said that we would have to consider proceedings under coronavirus because things might change quickly. We first convened on 2 March. By 6 March, we had the Clerk of the House and the House authorities in to give us private evidence and a private briefing. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the House was incredibly courteous in allowing time for me, as Chair of the Committee, to meet him privately to hear what the Government’s thinking was.

I remember that first briefing when Members heard, for example, “We will have to stay 2 metres apart.” It was the first time I had heard the term “social distancing”. None of us could comprehend the thought that the Chamber would have crosses on the Green Benches where we could not sit and that whole Benches would be out of bounds. None of us had any idea how that would function.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

rose—

[Karen Bradley]

I give way to the august right hon. Gentleman and member of the Committee.

[Mr Jones]

Will the right hon. Lady join me in thanking the staff and the Clerks, who from those early days have done some tremendous work to make the system the best that we can? Without that work, we could not have achieved what we have done so far.

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[Karen Bradley]

As I say, I will sit down shortly, because I want to make sure that the amendment can be moved and that we have time for the vote, but I urge my hon. Friend to consider voting for the amendment, because that will mean that my right hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham and my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay will be able to vote and speak.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

There is a simple way to move this on: the Government could accept the amendment tonight. The fact that this debate has been curtailed into less than two hours is not the House’s fault or the Procedure Committee’s fault, because the Committee has asked for a full debate on this and it has been refused by the Leader of the House.

[Karen Bradley]

The right hon. Gentleman is correct. We asked for this debate during the urgent question last week, and we asked for it again on Thursday. This debate has been sprung on Members, and I feel strongly that we need to look at the House having its say. This is a House matter. The Government have kindly tabled the motion, but it is a matter for the House to decide.

I shall conclude, because I want to ensure that the hon. Member for Rhondda can move and speak to his amendment. I urge the Government to think about how this looks in the eyes of the public when their MP can take part in a question but not take part in a subsequent debate. Yes, they can vote by proxy—we can have a debate about whether the proxy voting system works and whether it is optimal—but all of this is suboptimal. None of this is as good as it should be. Why exclude Members who could take part in debates and make important contributions simply because of—well, I do not know. I do not know why the Government are refusing to accept this, but we must give the House a proper say, and the Procedure Committee will continue to pursue the issue.

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[Chris Bryant]

Obviously I do not go quite as far as that, but when we had the firebreak in Wales—the Labour Government in Wales have dealt with all of this much better, delivering a clearer message all the time, but that is by the by—some of my constituents said to me strongly that they did not want me to come to Parliament, because they thought it would be inappropriate for me to do so as they were not allowed to travel. I make no judgment—some MPs felt they had to come, some felt that they did not, and all the rest of it—but the truth of the matter is that there are different rules in different parts of the country, and there will be different rules in different parts of England in the forthcoming weeks. It would seem to make far more sense, on an equality basis, to allow everyone to participate on an equal basis.

The Leader of the House denies this—I am sorry to be so obsessed with the Leader of the House, but I was looking forward to a long speech and we have barely had a word from him today, which is a terrible disappointment to us all—but on occasion he has intimated that we cannot really do our job as an MP unless we are here. My experience is that, of all my 19 years as a Member, this has been the toughest year as an MP in terms of the understandable demand from constituents. Most arrives by email, not from people physically coming through the door—several Members have mentioned that they have not held surgeries in person, but have been doing them online. On social media, Facebook in particular, I have been dealing with many thousands of cases every week. Some questions are not right—such as, “Is Lidl open?”, or, “How much are nappies in Sainsbury’s?”, neither of which I knew the answer to, but in a way, it has been a good thing for Parliament that many MPs have had engagement with their constituents that they never had in the previous year.

It is tough, because there is no point going on holiday this year as an MP, because frankly, at all hours of the day, we have been dealing endlessly with requests from constituents. A lot of the job we can do perfectly well from our living room, back study, outhouse or stable, depending on how grand or ungrand the house is.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

An example of that was this weekend. The annual NATO Parliamentary Assembly took place, involving individual parliamentarians from NATO countries, including the United States and all across Europe. It was all done virtually, and I was even chairing meetings on Saturday afternoon.

[Chris Bryant]

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and all sorts of organisations have been doing this perfectly well, fully engaging all their members and enabling them to take part. Members might say that it is more difficult for people to travel, but sometimes some Members in the House forget that the travel is as risky as the business of actually physically being in Parliament. Mr Speaker, you and all the staff in the building have done a phenomenal job in making this place as covid-secure as possible.

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[Chris Bryant]

I am grateful for your guidance, Mr Speaker, but let me make the point clear. I am moving the amendment in the names of the hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay and myself.

It is worth bearing in mind what Members are not able to take part in. I have heard very moving and important speeches by Conservative Members, saying that this year has seen a phenomenal suspension of liberty in this country—extraordinary. The Coronavirus Act 2020 has taken power away from individuals to live their lives as they want more than any other piece of legislation in our history. We subscribed to that because we believed that it was necessary. The Government insisted that they should require only a single vote every six months on a 90-minute debate, but the Members whom we are talking about are not able to take part in those 90-minute debates—to be honest, not many other people are able to take part in those 90-minute debates either.

If we look at the secondary legislation, we will see that, during this year, there have been 297 coronavirus statutory instruments, using powers in 106 Acts of Parliament. Why should none of the Members whom we are talking about be able to take part in any of that secondary legislation when it is depriving people of their liberty? More importantly, it is not about the Member; it is about the community that they represent—their constituency. Why should they be barred, for instance, from expressing a view about the 10 o’clock curfew in pubs, or whether their constituency should be in tier 1, tier 2 or tier 3? They are not able to take part in ten-minute rule Bills. They are not able to make points of order, which must be a terribly depressing thing for all of them—how can you live without making points of order? Ironically enough, they are able to table amendments, but they are not able then to speak to them. That is the irony of where we are at tonight. The hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay can table an amendment, but he is not able to take part in this debate because of the way that things have been structured.

I say to all hon. Members, first of all, I do not buy this argument about the perfect being the enemy of the good. Earlier today, I understand that the Government Whips tried to strong-arm the Opposition, saying, “Well, you’ll never get what you want. We’ll pull the motion.” But the Leader of the House said that he would enable the House to resolve this. The proper way to resolve this is to have a proper motion on the Order Paper when all Members know that the debate is coming and we can consider the thing properly.

Secondly, I believe that all MPs are equal—the good, the bad, the ugly. All of them are equal. It is a really important principle.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

Name the ugly.

[Chris Bryant]

Especially the ugly, yes.

[Mr Jones]

No, name the ugly.

[Chris Bryant]

Oh. Anyway, the point is that it is such a historic principle that every MP is treated equally that it is a terrible shame that we have abandoned it this year just because there is a pandemic. I do not believe that House business should ever be whipped. I think it is wholly inappropriate to do that, and I think that there has been a tendency in the past year for the Whips to interfere. Sorry, I have just seen my Chief Whip—everything that he has done has been absolutely perfect. On a serious note, I just think that more of our business should be done without the Whips’ engagement, because sometimes that would mean that it was less cantankerous.

I especially object to the idea that large numbers of proxies should be used in a vote, unless the person who is delivering those proxies has asked each and every individual Member—every single one—how they intended to vote. Let me just say to Members who would even consider the idea of voting against the amendment, which I guess is the argument that many of them are advancing—

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[Valerie Vaz]

indicated dissent.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker.

[Mr Speaker]

I do not really want to get into what we have already discussed. I want to suspend the House so that we can move on. It would be better if we did not have another point of order because I am not going to open up or extend the debate, but if it is very relevant, I will hear it.

[Mr Jones]

The Leader of the House has made time tomorrow for things he delayed today. He could make time for this debate to be extended and completed tomorrow.

[Mr Speaker]

I think we have—[Interruption.] Order. Let us calm down.

In order to allow the safe exit of hon. Members participating in this item of business and the safe arrival of those participating in the next, I am going to suspend the House for three minutes.