Private Members’ Bills: Money Resolutions

Mark Harper Excerpts

Monday 21st May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Afzal Khan]

Absolutely. I agree with the hon. Gentleman that the Government can table the money resolution but not then have to agree with it.

The Government have changed their line. Last week, the Leader of the House said:

“money resolutions will be brought forward on a case-by-case basis as soon as possible.”—[Official Report, 10 May 2018; Vol. 640, c. 894.]

There is clear water between saying the Government will always table a money resolution and saying that this will be considered on a case-by-case basis. What has changed since 2015? We have had the disastrous 2017 election, when the Government lost their majority.

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

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Afzal Khan]

Let me make some progress and then I will be happy to give way. Too weak to defeat my Bill on a vote, the Government are hiding behind a procedure that they know is wrong. The convention is also that money resolutions are brought forward in the order that Bills pass Second Reading. Members will have seen on today’s Order Paper that the Government have tabled a money resolution for a health and social care Bill. It is the second Bill the Government have leapfrogged over mine. The Prisons (Interference with Wireless Telegraphy) Bill was given a money resolution at the beginning of May, even though its promoter came out 13th in the ballot, whereas I came out third.

The only logic to when the Government are bringing forward a money resolution is: what will help them avoid challenge? We know many on the Government side are willing to vote against them on my Bill, both for principled reasons and because reducing the number of MPs will mean that some Conservatives will lose their seats—turkeys do not vote for Christmas. Based on the 2017 general election results, 34 Conservative MPs are set to have their seats abolished or to lose to Labour at the next election, with the list including six Cabinet Ministers and six other Ministers. The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, the hon. Member for Norwich North (Chloe Smith), who is in charge of my Bill for the Government, is set to lose her seat to Labour if the current boundary proposals go ahead. The Government’s motives are clear: this is not about principles, but about electoral maths. This is not just happening with my Bill; money resolutions are part of a pattern of this weak Government abusing Parliament to avoid scrutiny and challenge.

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[Andrea Leadsom]

I want to come on to talk about some of the excellent PMBs that are finding their way through—[Interruption.] In specific response to the hon. Lady, money resolutions are brought forward at the appropriate time, and it is for the Government of the day to initiate those money resolutions.

[Mr Harper]

As a member of the Public Bill Committee, I listened carefully to what the Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich North (Chloe Smith), said. She did not say that the Government would never bring forward the money resolution. She said that she thought it appropriate given the Boundary Commission’s work, which is quite a long way down the road, to wait until it produced its reports to Parliament and the Government would then reflect further. That seems to me to be a perfectly sensible course of action that should command widespread support in the House.

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[Valerie Vaz]

I appreciate the hard work the hon. Gentleman does on the Procedure Committee, but sadly it is not up to me; I wish it were—I would like to support him.

Thirdly, how do the measures in the Bill differ from the Government’s instructions to the boundary commissions? What would the Bill actually do? It was the ninth Bill of the Session presented and passed its Second Reading by an overwhelming 229 to 44 votes on 1 December. It is an important Bill because it would give instructions to the boundary commissions different from the previous constrained instructions. It would do several things to those constrained instructions. Clause 1 would alter the change in the size of the House of Commons made by the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2011 from 600 to 650 Members and provide a fixed allocation of 18 constituencies in Northern Ireland, with the remaining 632 in Great Britain. Six hundred is an arbitrary figure. Where is the evidence that the number of constituencies should be reduced to 600?

Clause 2 would change the current UK-wide requirement for constituencies, excluding the four island seats, to be within plus or minus 5% of the electoral quota and establish new quotas, one for Great Britain and one for Northern Ireland. In each case, there would be a requirement for constituencies to be within plus or minus 7.5% of the relevant electoral quota.

[Mr Harper]

The hon. Lady says that 600 is an arbitrary number, but so is 650. However, there is an important difference: 600 is not an arbitrary number; it is the number that Parliament put into law for a boundary review that it legislated for in 2011. Is it not right that we allow the boundary commissions to finish their work so that the House can consider their reports before deciding what steps to take next?

[Valerie Vaz]

It is an arbitrary figure—it was plucked out of thin air without reference to any evidence. It might have been agreed by the House, but there was no evidence. The Bill would retain the status quo. It would also require the quota to be based on the total number of voters derived from registers of parliamentary electors published for the 2017 general election, or the most recent election thereafter. This would allow the 2.1 million electors registered after 1 December 2015 to be included in the review.

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[Mr Khalid Mahmood (Birmingham, Perry Barr) (Lab)]

It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin).

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton (Afzal Khan) for securing a debate on this very important issue after the House voted overwhelmingly in support of his private Member’s Bill. It is unfortunate we have had to have this debate because of the Government’s wrongful persistence. I thank you, Mr Speaker, for allowing last week’s Standing Order No. 24 application and for granting this debate. It is extremely important that we are able to discuss this issue.

Having listened to the Leader of the House speak of all the great things she has awarded Parliament and this Chamber, of the Bills she has allowed and of how gracious she has been, I should perhaps be on bended knee to await her grace and favour. I am aghast that I should even be here to question this situation.

Unfortunately for the Leader of the House, we are not in China. We are the longest-serving democracy in the world. We are the mother of Parliaments. Parliament is supreme, and her job as Leader of the House is to convey those things—not to block, and not to stand for the Executive rather than listen to the voice of this Chamber. In her speech she mentioned only what has been put forward by the Executive and the reasons why she is still not able to say, “Yes, we will grant this money resolution because it is the overwhelming will of this Chamber that we do so.”

I do not want to deviate too much on the boundary change issue, to which the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex and others have alluded, but these are the figures on which the boundary commissions have been working: 46,107,152 people were registered to vote in 2011; and in 2017, 46,826,481 people were registered to vote, a 2.67% change. This year’s electoral registration figure is 46,148,035, which means the number of people able to vote has reduced.

The big issues for the boundary changes are, first, the number of people actually on the electoral register and, secondly, how registration has happened over the past eight years and how this Executive have made it difficult for people to register to vote. That is the real problem that the Leader of the House needs to address, and she has not yet done so.

Members on both sides of the Chamber have mentioned the cost factor. The Government say the cost of Parliament is too high. Will a Government Member stand up and tell me how many Members have been appointed to the other place since 2010? What is the cost of those appointments?

[Mr Harper]

Owing to the cost-saving measures implemented both in this House and in the other place, the cost of the other place has actually reduced and not gone up over time, notwithstanding the increase in the number of Members.

[Mr Mahmood]

More wishful thinking, rather than trying to address the question.

[Mr Harper]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Mahmood]

No. The right hon. Gentleman cannot tell me how many people have been appointed. He cannot tell me the cost of the people who have been appointed. Members of Parliament have a specific role. Unlike Members of the other place, we serve the interest of our constituents and we look after their needs. Our constituents come to us at our surgeries. My constituents continually come to my office, which is open five days a week from morning till afternoon—my office has some of the highest caseloads in the country. As has been mentioned, Members of the European Parliament will soon no longer exist, and we will take on their work load. This is not an issue of arbitrarily trying to reduce the size of the House by 50 Members. To be a proper democracy we have to be held to account. To be able to move forward, we have to think about how we address the needs of the people we represent.

The Government’s proposals would dilute the democratic process, which is why the private Member’s Bill of my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton is important. The Bill would address the size of constituencies and the number of Members. There would be a 7.5% deviation in the size of constituencies, so the boundary commissions need proper, accountable figures. A census should be taken so we have the right sort of numbers that we can trust. The Bill would allow young people to come on to the electoral register, and the registration mechanism needs to be properly addressed to allow that to happen. That is a key issue.

Another key issue is the number of people we have appointed to the other place and the cost of doing so, and the right hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) could not answer my question. Democracy has a cost, and democracy is not about saving money. It is important for our people that they are democratically represented. That is what this country is about; it is not about making the House smaller and smaller, which would mean people cannot get to their Member of Parliament. On top of that, our constituents have to deal with austerity cuts on a day-to-day basis. We have seen a huge number of people coming forward about that, and now the Leader of the House tells us that austerity will now apply to private Members’ Bills because we do not have the money.

I could tell the Leader of the House about the issues in my constituency and how the Boundary Commission for England has completely torn asunder the communities in my constituency, but that would take much more time than Mr Speaker wishes me to have, so I will heed his advice.

The Leader of the House needs to be mindful of understanding the issues. She needs to look at granting a money resolution, as is the will of the House, and she must allow sufficient time for the Bill to be passed.

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

I want to address most of my remarks to the motion before us. I will touch briefly on some of the points that have come up about the substance of the private Member’s Bill, but I will keep those remarks relatively tight, Madam Deputy Speaker, so as not to stray from the subject of the motion.

First, I want to pick up where my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) left off. He is absolutely right that the Government have the responsibility to bring forward money resolutions and to initiate the spending of money. If we think about it, there is a very good reason for that. In the case of Back Benchers bringing forward a private Member’s Bill under which they propose spending money on a popular cause, people will of course find that very welcome. Members of the public quite frequently like money being spent on good causes. However, if every private Member’s Bill spent a significant amount of money, although each individually might not have a huge impact, collectively they would do so.

That is one of the good reasons why the Government, when bringing forward Bills under their own programme, have to balance the individual measures not only in relation to the good that they do for the money that is spent, but, as my hon. Friend said, in relation to the ways and means—that is, the taxes that have to be levied to pay for those measures. It is therefore right that the Government initiate the spending of money and ask this House to assent to it. That important constitutional principle is worth maintaining.

[David Linden]

rose—

[Mr Harper]

Of course I give way to my fellow member of the Public Bill Committee.

[David Linden]

The right hon. Gentleman is speaking at length about the Government having to be careful about how they authorise spending of money and how that money is planned to be spent. Does he have the same feeling about the £1 billion that was bunged to the Democratic Unionist party after the general election?

[Mr Harper]

I have not really been speaking at length—I had only been speaking for about a minute when I generously gave way to the hon. Gentleman. The Government do have to spend public money wisely. As they said, spending money on the people—the people—of Northern Ireland, who had to suffer over many decades from the impact of terrorist violence and a divided society, is a perfectly proper spending of public money. I, for one, am very pleased that we have got to a situation where the public realm in Northern Ireland is much more peaceful and the communities are living much more closely together. Dealing with some of that legacy of the past is a very welcome and very proper thing for the Government to spend public money on.

[Jim McMahon (Oldham West and Royton) (Lab/Co-op)]

I fully appreciate that there is a cost to putting right some of the legacy of the troubles in Northern Ireland, but why was that not an issue for the Government before the general election?

[Mr Harper]

I do not want to be taken off the central point that I was making, Madam Deputy Speaker, much as the hon. Gentleman tempts me.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

Order. For the avoidance of doubt, the right hon. Gentleman is correct. This is a very narrow debate and we must keep to that.

[Mr Harper]

I am grateful, Madam Deputy Speaker. I was responding to the intervention by the hon. Member for Glasgow East, but I do not want to be taken off the point.

It is proper that the Government have that role of financial initiation. It is also clear that there is a convention that the Government will bring forward a money resolution, but it has not been an invariable convention. There have been a number of examples—the Leader of the House set them out—where Ministers have not brought forward money resolutions. I was intrigued by the point made by the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael). The private Member’s Bill brought forward by my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) on a European Union referendum was not given a money resolution despite the fact that the then Prime Minister was very keen on doing so. There have been plenty of examples of private Members’ Bills not being given money resolutions.

I repeat what the Leader of the House said, as did the Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich North (Chloe Smith)—that the Government simply want to wait for the Boundary Commission’s report. One of my hon. Friends, I think, asked whether it could report earlier. It cannot do that because the primary legislation means that it can report only between September and October of this year, and that is what it is going to do. Given that we have been having boundary commissioners look at the parliamentary boundaries since, in effect, 2011, I do not think it is unreasonable that we allow one of those reviews to reach completion and allow this House to make a decision before we then consider what to do. The position that the Leader of the House has set out is not unreasonable. I think the central thrust is absolutely right.

I wanted briefly to touch on some of the points that were made in the debate, before you were in the Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I will not dwell on them at length because they touched on the substance of the Bill introduced by the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Afzal Khan). The first is about the timing of his proposed review and about the members of the public who are not on the electoral registers under the arrangement that the current boundary review is considering. That sounds superficially like an attractive point. However, detailed analysis of the changes in the registers between the start of that review and a review that he would like to trigger showed that the distribution of voters across the country was fairly consistent, and so there would not actually be a significant impact on the distribution of constituencies across the country.

To Members who find that a huge point, I simply reiterate that the general election last year was carried out with boundaries that were drawn based on electoral registers that date from 2000, which was a point strongly made by the Chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin). If they are worried about voters who were not on the electoral register in the last couple of years, they should surely be concerned that the current boundaries do not take into account voters who have gone on to the register in the last 18 years. That is a much bigger injustice. Allowing the current review to continue and this House to take a view on it is much the best thing to do.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

If Members are worried about the number of people appearing on the register, is that not a flaw in the argument that we should change to 10-year cycles rather than five-year cycles?

[Mr Harper]

My hon. Friend is exactly right. I favour having more frequent reviews—one a Parliament—that are much smaller and less disruptive, rather than less frequent reviews that are much more disruptive because so much population shift has happened. That is a better balance. Indeed, that was what the House decided when it passed the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2011.

The hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) talked about the House of Lords. The Prime Minister’s nomination of peers was very modest; I think it was 13 in total. If we look at the votes on Brexit legislation, I do not think anybody could suggest that it was anything to do with that, given that most of the votes the Government lost in the other place were by significantly more than that number. They were modest and very reasonable proposals.

There is a very real point about the size of the other place. My understanding is that they themselves recognise that, and I know that work is under way to look at reducing the size of the other place. I hope that some consensus can be reached, so that it can be shrunk. I say somewhat immodestly that I am very pleased when we debate this issue, because as some Members will remember, I made modest proposals to reform the other place by shrinking it quite considerably and making it more democratic, although they did not find favour with the House. Indeed, I do not think we received a huge amount of support from the Scottish National party in getting that legislation through Parliament. As much as SNP Members protest now, they were not supportive when it would have been helpful.

My final point, to come back to the debate at hand, is about what private Members’ Bills should be used for. My hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset touched on this. I do not think they should be used for significant constitutional measures. Detailed debate on those should take place on the Floor of the House, as we did with the 2011 Act. My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope) put his finger on it when he suggested that most private Members’ Bills do not need money resolutions because they should not be used for significant areas of public policy that involve spending significant amounts of money. That properly should be the role of the Government, not private Members’ Bills. Private Members’ Bills most often should not require money resolutions because they should not require huge amounts of money to be spent; they should properly be for things that do not require the expenditure of huge amounts of money. We would not then be having the sort of argument we are having today.

In conclusion, the Government are right. The Leader of the House’s arguments are very reasonable. She has undertaken to keep this matter under review, and I do not think we can say fairer than that.

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

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton (Afzal Khan) on securing the debate and on being successful in the ballot.

Private Members’ Bills are important and have been responsible for some major social change in this country. The Sexual Offences Act 1967, which legalised private consensual sex between males over the age of 21, was a private Member’s Bill promoted by Leo Abse. Sydney Silverman’s private Member’s Bill became the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965, which suspended the death penalty in Great Britain, excluding Northern Ireland, if I remember correctly.

Major social change has been made in this country through private Members’ Bills. Sometimes, including in the case of those two Bills, Governments have preferred to use private Members’ Bills to make those changes, rather than to legislate for it themselves. Not as famous as those two Bills was the Christmas Day (Trading) Act 2004, which I successfully piloted through the House, to limit larger shops from opening on Christmas day. If anyone asks you, Madam Deputy Speaker, why they cannot shop in a large hypermarket on Christmas day, you can say that it is my fault.

The traditional route for private Members’ Bills then was to get selected in the ballot and then argue the Bill through on a Friday. I remind new Members that in those days, we had the formidable Eric Forth in the Chamber, who was the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst. I successfully fought him for a few Fridays, and then we did a deal to get my Bill through. It is an important way for Back-Bench Members to get legislation on to the statute book. That was the traditional route, but we now have a blocking move by the Government. When Members put in for the private Member’s Bill ballot in future, they will have to think about whether the Government will ever give the Bill a money resolution.

[Mr Harper]

I am listening carefully to the examples of private Members’ Bills given by the right hon. Gentleman; the thing they all had in common was that they did not involve spending large amounts of public money. I suspect that most of them did not require money resolutions, and that is the proper role for private Members’ Bills