Pairing

Lord McLoughlin Excerpts

Monday 23rd July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lidington]

First, my right hon. Friend the Member for Great Yarmouth, as the Minister without Portfolio, is a member of my ministerial team in the Cabinet Office, so I think it is perfectly appropriate that I should be answering the urgent question from the right hon. Gentleman.

The right hon. Gentleman asked a number of specific questions. First, let me say that my right hon. Friend the Member for Great Yarmouth was not at any point aware that he was paired with the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire. Indeed, that is the normal state of affairs when a colleague is paired: they do not know with which particular Opposition Member they happen to be paired. That is a matter dealt with by the usual channels, through the respective Whips Offices. My right hon. Friend was asked to vote shortly before the Divisions that have caused this particular controversy. As has been said both by him and by my right hon. Friend the Chief Whip, he should not have been asked to vote. An error was made within the Government Whips Office, for which my right hon. Friend the Chief Whip has taken responsibility, hence his public apology to the right hon. Gentleman, as Liberal Democrat Chief Whip, and to the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire. Every other pair that evening was honoured, so the error meant that the right hon. Gentleman was not notified beforehand, because there was not some sort of deep-laid plot to deny the pairing arrangement. Neither the Prime Minister nor the Leader of the House were consulted about the matter. The Government policy remains, as I said earlier, that pairing is an informal and voluntary arrangement between the political parties. We do take the issue of pregnancy pairing particularly seriously, for the very reasons that have led both the business Committee and then the Procedure Committee to highlight this as something that the House ought to address. That is why we will be taking forward the debate on proxy voting in September.

[Sir Patrick McLoughlin (Derbyshire Dales) (Con)]

Will my right hon. Friend confirm that the broken pair did not alter the result of the vote and the Government would have still won the vote? Will he confirm that when these things happen the House has to learn lessons from them, but it must be wary of trying to scrap the whole system, as that would mean that Select Committees in this House would not be able to work and a lot of the work that takes place outside the confines of the Chamber would be impossible to continue?