Business of the House
Mark Harper Excerpts(4 years, 7 months ago)
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Mr Rees-Mogg
The hon. Lady says from a sedentary position that it is general knowledge. Just because something has been in the newspapers, it does not make it general knowledge. It was attributed to me in a Cabinet meeting. Cabinet meetings are confidential. The files will be released under the 30-year rule in the normal way. I reiterate the Government’s position, as expressed by the Prime Minister:
“I have the highest respect, of course, for the judiciary and the independence of our courts, but I must say I strongly disagree with the judgment, and we in the UK will not be deterred from getting on and delivering on the will of the people to come out of the EU on 31 October, because that is what we were mandated to do.”
That is the Government’s position and that is my position.
The hon. Member for Walsall South said that we had been “spinning” our disagreement with the judgment. No, we had not. It was not spin; it was a straightforward statement by the Prime Minister, but with the highest respect for the judiciary. It is reasonable to disagree with somebody whom you respect. Dare I say it, Mr Speaker, sometimes I have disagreed with you, but that has never reduced my respect.
The hon. Lady raised the cost of Prorogation. If we remain in the European Union after 31 October, which the Opposition want, it would cost us £250 million a week. Any cost of Prorogation pales into insignificance compared with the extravagance wished upon the hard-pressed taxpayer by those on the Opposition Benches in their proposals.
Then we have the extraordinary view from the Opposition that our actions are not in support of parliamentary democracy. Government Members want a general election. What is more democratic than that? What sort of tyrants are we that we are willing to go to the British people and say, “Ladies and gentlemen, you choose: do you want my right hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson) or the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn)?” We know why the Opposition are running away from a general election and are so scared of it. They do not back their leader, let alone think that the country will. We know that people think our leader is a great, inspirational, charismatic figure. We trust the people and the Opposition do not.
Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)
I have a question about tomorrow’s business, but if you will allow me a small indulgence, Mr Speaker, I would like to refer to a matter that the shadow Leader of the House mentioned. She said that she would be grateful if you allowed the full judgment of the Supreme Court to be read into the record. I second that because the summary judgment contains an inadvertent error. I was listening to the esteemed President of the Supreme Court yesterday while I was eating my toast and marmalade, and I almost dropped said toast and marmalade when I discovered that, according to Lady Hale:
“Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg, Leader of the House of Commons and Lord President of the Privy Council, Mr Mark Harper, chief whip… attended a meeting of the Privy Council held by the Queen at Balmoral Castle.”
I must say, I could not recollect having done so. I would be grateful if the Lord President of the Privy Council confirmed that it was indeed my right hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood (Mark Spencer), who is the most excellent current Government Chief Whip, who attended the meeting. It would save me a lot of grief from those constituents who have written to me, wondering why I was attending upon Her Majesty at Balmoral castle.
The serious point about the business of the House tomorrow is on the motion to approve the conference Adjournment. If the Opposition are churlish enough not to be generous and support that motion, and the House sits next week, perhaps my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House could find time for a debate on the Labour conference’s extraordinary decision today to have a policy of no immigration controls, which would allow literally anyone from anywhere in the world to come to Britain, use our national health service, have unlimited benefits and vote in our elections. That policy deserves wide promulgation. I feel sure it will see us well in any forthcoming general election.
Mr Rees-Mogg
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend, and it seems that there was some confusion over forests. He is of course the Member for the Forest of Dean, and my right hon. Friend the Chief Whip is the Member for Sherwood forest, where, I seem to remember, Robin Hood spent his formative years. My right hon. Friend’s point about the Labour party policy is why we want a general election; it would be wonderful to put that fantasy world to the British people and I am confident about what they would choose.
Business of the House
Mark Harper Excerpts(5 years, 1 month ago)
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Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)
It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting), who set out his case very well. I will talk first about the business of the House motion, before discussing amendment (a) in the name of the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn), which Mr Speaker has selected. I will then also pick up on one or two points that have been made so far in the debate.
My real problem with the business of the House motion is that my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin) is attempting to take a controversial Bill—I mean, it is fundamental to the debate that we have been having for the past three years—and, to put it politely, to ram it through the House in a day. My right hon. Friend did not even give sufficient notice of the fact that he was going to do so. That is why my amendment, which I accept Mr Speaker has not selected, proposed a relatively modest change to allow us to debate the business of the House motion today, and then to debate the Bill tomorrow. At least hon. Members would then have had an opportunity to see the Bill, consider it and think about sensible amendments. That would have meant a better process and a reasonable balance. However, I accept my right hon. Friend’s injunction that there is a timetable to this process and that it would have been slightly otiose to have taken months to consider the Bill.
I am not going to dwell on the Bill in great detail, but I will mention it to provide one illustration of why I do not agree with having just a few hours today, with little notice and little opportunity to amend the Bill. One of the fundamental aspects of the Bill was drawn out by the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry), when she referred to clause 1(6) and (7). These subsections—and the structure of the Bill—refer to the time limit and the extension that may or may not be sought by the Prime Minister, and they mandate the Prime Minister to put before the House a motion that specifically mentions the length of the extension. Hon. Members will understand why I think that is fundamentally flawed, and therefore why the Bill needs more debate, if they think about the extension that the Prime Minister just sought. She sought a straightforward extension of a certain fixed length, but what the European Council actually gave us in return was actually a much more complex matter—a two-part extension with a number of conditions. The way in which the Bill as currently drafted does not really enable that complexity to be put before the House and properly debated.
Sir Oliver Letwin
Everything else that my right hon. Friend has said so far that I do not agree with was accurate, but I do not think that his final point was accurate. It is perfectly possible within the structure of the Bill for the Prime Minister’s motion to explain conditionality on the date because it can add to the motion that is given in form. Also, there is specific provision in clause 1(6) and (7) for the EU to come back with its view, whatever it is. The Prime Minister then has to bring that to the House. Obviously, in bringing it to the House she will need to describe what the EU has said about the conditionality. I do not think that there is any problem with that. The problem that my right hon. Friend has is a deeper one about timing and consideration, and that is a separate matter.
Mr Harper
I have listened to my right hon. Friend. I will not spend too much longer on this issue, because I will then be straying into a debate on the Bill. Having just looked at the Bill again, I do not think that my right hon. Friend is accurate, but the fact that he and I—both reasonably competent readers of Bills—have reached different conclusions about the same words proves my point that we need longer to debate the Bill, to test amendments and to understand exactly what the House is being asked to agree.
My right hon. Friend also talked about the role of the other place. This House often does not spend long enough debating legislation and then—it is a process I deprecate—expects the House of Lords, at a slow pace and in more detail, to improve it. I note that the Leader of the House was unable to give any information on what the plan is at the other end of the building, and I do not know whether any information has reached her from the Leader of the House of Lords—
Mr Harper
My right hon. Friend shakes her head, so we do not have that intelligence. My understanding is that an attempt similar to this one will take place in the other place. It might not be called a business of the House motion—I am not as familiar with the terminology used in the other place—but the intention is effectively to ram the Bill through in a day. My right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset suggested that the discussions he has had indicate that a large majority of the House of Lords was content with the Bill in advance, which does not suggest to me that it will receive significant scrutiny. Indeed, it sounds as though it is not going to get any scrutiny at all.
Mr Mark Francois (Rayleigh and Wickford) (Con)
Has my right hon. Friend heard the rumour that Government Whips in the other place are not planning in any way to stop the Bill being rammed through in a day? In fact, it has been suggested in some quarters that they might even be seeking discreetly to assist it.
Mrs Main
Before the political point that was just made, my right hon. Friend was making the extremely valuable point that the House of Lords is a revising Chamber. We do the Lords a great disservice if we do not give them adequate time to advise and revise. This House will have very little time to take advantage of all the expertise in that House if its Members are not allowed to do their job in a proper fashion.
Mr Harper
I completely agree, but my major point was that I do not like the process whereby we do not consider Bills properly and then expect the Lords to do all the scrutiny. Certainly, when I was taking constitutional legislation through this House a number of years ago, as Minister for Political and Constitutional Reform, I tried to ensure that we had sufficient time to debate it properly, because for important constitutional matters, and particularly for this matter, which is effectively about enacting the result of a referendum of the people, it is important that it is elected Members who make the final decisions, not Members of the other place. My principal point on the substance of the business of the House motion is therefore that it provides insufficient time to allow proper scrutiny of the Bill.
The hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry), the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart), my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) all referred to precedent. I think that a dispute broke out on the SNP Front Bench, because the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire acknowledged that this process was indeed a precedent, and the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West then tried to differentiate it and say that it was not really a precedent, arguing that Brexit is such an unprecedented process that we cannot draw any lessons from the use of this procedure. I think that they are mistaken.
I think that my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset and my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green made very reasonable points. As a former business manager, I think that future business managers will note that Members from a number of different parties have accepted this as a legitimate process. It is perfectly true, as the shadow Leader of the House said, that Clerks would not allow anything disorderly to take place. That is correct, but a majority in this House can override Standing Orders and ram things through, and it is convention and self-restraint that stop Governments using their majorities in inappropriate ways.
Members on both sides of the House ought to reflect on the fact that if in future a Government with a significant majority choose to use that majority to override the usual conventions and procedures of the House and ram through pieces of controversial legislation in a day, those Members cannot complain that the Government are behaving inappropriately. I would deprecate that behaviour and would not want any part in it, but the people will be watching these proceedings and following this precedent. I am pretty sure that someone will try to use this precedent again at some point, and Members may regret supporting it today.
David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)
The right hon. Gentleman is speaking about the importance of honouring conventions, which are one of the things that govern this House, but is there not a degree of hypocrisy in the Government making that argument? So often in this Parliament we have seen the Government, who refuse to accept that they are a minority Government, riding roughshod over conventions such as granting Opposition days and taking cognisance of Opposition day motions passed by the House.
Mr Harper
I accept some of the arguments that the hon. Gentleman makes. I have not been a member of this Government; I have not served as a Minister under this Prime Minister. Certainly when I was a Minister and when I was responsible for scheduling the business of the House as the Government Chief Whip, we did vote on Opposition days, and when we had a longer Session we gave the Opposition the appropriate number of days. I often argued that we should restrain the use of our majority, to ensure that we behaved properly. There is some substance in what the hon. Gentleman says. There has been, to some extent, an equal and opposite reaction by the Opposition, who have explored mechanisms such as use of the Humble Address because they have been frustrated that the Government have not responded appropriately to Opposition days. The Government should reflect on that.
But in a way, that rather proves my point, which is that if Members behave in this way today and ram through a piece of controversial, contested legislation without a consensus in the House, they should not be surprised if in future a Government with a majority use this precedent and behave in the same way. When those Members are arguing against that, they will find the arguments they are making today being thrown back at them, and the force of their argument will be undercut.
Kevin Foster (Torbay) (Con)
My right hon. Friend is making an interesting speech. This procedure has been used in the past for legislation on Northern Ireland or even the Emergency Powers (Defence) Bill in 1939, but does he agree that it has always been when it was desperately important to get legislation through and there was a broad consensus on it—not, as we see today, when there is clearly a debate to be had about whether something is the right thing to do?
Mr Harper
I agree. My hon. Friend mentions Northern Ireland. I listened carefully to the point made by the hon. Member for North Down (Lady Hermon). Measures on Northern Ireland security matters and others have been expedited through the House because there has been a generally accepted need on both sides and between the usual channels that there is a need to do so. We have taken legislation through this House and the other place on a single day. She gave good examples of recent measures for which that has taken place. I understand that it has taken place with agreement between both Front-Bench teams, but she makes a perfectly reasonable point. I looked carefully at the most recent example of that, and I could not see any particular urgency or need to do that in a single day. It was agreed by the usual channels, but it may not necessarily be in the interests of Back-Bench Members, and particularly those from Northern Ireland, who may wish to have developed arguments about that legislation more fully than was possible. She made a good point.
The final point I want to make about the business of the House motion itself is in relation to the point made by the shadow Leader of the House on the detail of the legislation. She referred briefly to the Bill and made some points that I will not debate now, because that is properly to be done later. However, just as in the exchange between my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset and me, I do not agree with the points she made about the Bill, but the fact that, again, two people who understand the processes of the House can come to opposite conclusions about the words in the legislation just proves to me that we should have more time to debate it.
Moving on, I want to say a few words about amendment (a), which you have selected, Mr Speaker, in the name of the right hon. Member for Leeds Central. It is not about today’s business, but an attempt to secure time on Monday. From listening to him, I think the plan is to have another session of indicative votes, and I want to say one or two words about that before I conclude. He, I think accurately, quoted the words in the Prime Minister’s statement yesterday that
“the Government stands ready to abide by the decision of the House”
in the event that the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition are unable in their talks today and perhaps later to agree on a unified approach.
I do not disagree with the Prime Minister doing so, but that precedent should have been followed rather earlier. It still remains the case that, so far in this process, the only proposition on which the House has voted with a majority is the so-called Brady amendment, which received a majority of 16 on 29 January. I am disappointed that the Prime Minister did not take the instruction of the House on that occasion and successfully prosecute a renegotiation of the withdrawal agreement to amend the backstop. I accept the result of the referendum, but for me it is very important that the whole of the United Kingdom leaves the European Union together and does not split apart.
Lady Hermon
The right hon. Gentleman mentions the backstop. May I just remind him and other Members of the House that all the arguments—all the bitter arguments—about the backstop will become totally irrelevant if we do not approve the Prime Minister’s Brexit deal? We need the Brexit deal to be signed and approved by this House in order to have an implementation period, and it is only at the end of the implementation period that a backstop even becomes a possibility—a possibility—not a necessary or a requirement at that stage. We need the Bill.
Mr Harper
I note very carefully what the hon. Lady says. I have opposed the Cabinet’s withdrawal agreement and political declaration twice because I think the backstop is a fundamental problem with the agreement. After the last couple of weeks of votes in the House and the Government’s response to them, I came to the conclusion that the most central, overriding promise I made at the general election was to deliver Brexit, and I reluctantly came to the conclusion that I needed to support the withdrawal agreement in order to deliver Brexit, so I agree with her on that point. I behaved in that way on Friday, and I wish more of my right hon. and hon. Friends had done so, so that we could have got the withdrawal agreement over the line to secure that outcome.
The final point, in concluding my remarks on the amendment in the name of the right hon. Member for Leeds Central, was to ask him where we are hoping to go on this. I notice he referred to compositing motions, which is very much a Labour thing to do with sticking motions together. It seemed implicit in what he was saying and what one or two others have said, such as the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse), that there is an assumption that if we take a number of propositions, none of which would secure a majority in the House, and glue them together in this compositing process—I am not sure that is a verb, but it sounds as though it is—
Mr Harper
The right hon. Gentleman is confirming that. I think that at Labour conferences compositing is a verb. There is an implicit assumption that, by gluing the motions together, we will automatically add up all the numbers and somehow magically majorities will pop out of them, but I just do not think that is very likely. I was looking at the various propositions, and I note that all of them received fewer votes in favour of them than the Cabinet’s withdrawal agreement received on 29 March. They all received fewer votes than the Brady amendment. None of them had a majority. Indeed, there was a majority against the motion in the name of the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West, who is not here now, of 101, so it is more unpopular than the withdrawal agreement.
Dr Sarah Wollaston (Totnes) (Ind)
Does the right hon. Gentleman accept, however, that if the Government were to Whip for their own withdrawal agreement and future framework, and to combine that with the undoubted support for putting that deal to the people, that would be the simplest way for the Prime Minister to get her deal through Parliament with an absolute guarantee of showing whether it was the will of the people?
Mr Harper
No, I fundamentally disagree, for this reason. I will give the hon. Lady a couple of examples. First, I suspect that there are many people—I do not know this, but it is my assumption—who supported the Cabinet’s withdrawal agreement and political declaration who, if we attached a referendum to it, would no longer support it, because those of us on the Conservative Benches made a commitment to implement the result of the referendum. Indeed, when the hon. Lady stood for election on these Benches, she made the same commitment, I believe. The public made a decision—it was a once-in-a-generation decision—to leave the European Union. That is what I want to deliver, and I promised not to have another referendum. If we added on a referendum, people who have currently supported the proposition would no longer support it. I for one will not vote for another referendum.
There is also something that I have spotted. It is no surprise to me that those who want to remain in the European Union want to have a binary choice between the Cabinet’s deal and remain, because they have spotted that the proposition put forward by the Government is very unpopular in opinion polls. They have also noticed that many people who campaigned for leave do not believe that it is really leaving, and they think that if that is the binary choice presented to the public, it will be the best opportunity to get remain. They do not want a referendum with a range of choices. For my part, the only referendum that would be even vaguely justifiable is one that accepted that the public had asked to leave and simply gave them the choices of how to leave. That might be defensible, but nothing else.
Mrs Main
I am sure that my right hon. Friend is aware of this, but I want to put it on record that when the hon. Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston) pressed her amendment on having a people’s vote, it got 85 votes. Revisiting the matter, as she did just now, does not make it more popular.
Dr Wollaston
What the right hon. Gentleman seems to be confirming is that the withdrawal agreement and future framework does not represent the will of the people and is rather unpopular. In that circumstance, surely it would be better to check what the public support is, once we know what a known deal is. As he will know, if there were agreement to a confirmatory vote, a referendum would require an Act of Parliament, and during the passage of a referendum Bill it would be this House that determined what the questions would be. It would not be for us to set the question in advance of that; it would be open to debate.
Mr Harper
Indeed, but given that a number of Members of this House have made it quite clear that they do not want to deliver the result of the last referendum, I am not sure that a fair choice would be presented to the public or that they would be given the full range of options.
Let me conclude with a message for those on my Front Bench. I do not know where the discussions with the Leader of the Opposition are going to go, but all I would say is this. Having looked carefully at the indicative votes, I would issue a word of caution. If the Government end up trying to deliver a withdrawal agreement and political declaration that tries to deliver something that has been opposed by a significant majority of their own Members of Parliament—75% of Conservative MPs voted against a customs union and common market 2.0—it is not going to end well. I urge the Government, even at this stage, to reflect on that and perhaps change course.
Proxy Voting
Mark Harper Excerpts(5 years, 3 months ago)
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Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)
As Government Chief Whip, I had responsibility for managing the pairing system, so it is a matter of some regret to me to listen to the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson), as I have done previously, and talk about her experiences and how she and other Members lost confidence in the pairing system. I would rather that confidence had been regained, but given that it has clearly not been, these proposals are welcome and I support them. I also welcome what the hon. Lady and others said about extending the provisions to cover shared parental leave. We have legislated for that arrangement for those outside the House; it seems to me that, if we are making provision inside the House, we should do so on that basis.
My final point is a note of caution. Perhaps this is to be built into the review mechanism, but transparency cuts both ways. I listened carefully to what the hon. Member for Wolverhampton North East (Emma Reynolds) said about the criticism she received for not appearing to be doing her job when she was quite properly absent from the House, but I would caution that pairing can sometimes be valuable in allowing Members to be absent for reasons they do not wish to be transparent about. I listened to my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley South (Mike Wood) explaining his absences. If a Member is ill, they may wish to be transparent about it, but often Members cannot be here because of family circumstances—children, parents or other family members—and we should be conscious of the need to enable them to be absent in a way that does not force either them or their family members to put into the public domain the reasons for their absence.
Rachel Reeves (Leeds West) (Lab)
It is important to stress that no one has to take a proxy vote; it will always be voluntary, and Members could continue with the pairing system. Like other Members, when I was on maternity leave, the campaigning group 38 Degrees emailed my constituents and said, “Where was Rachel Reeves?” The answer was I was on maternity leave with a very young baby, but it did not bother to check its facts. Many of my constituents thought I had just not bothered to turn up.
Mr Harper
The hon. Lady’s experience just confirms what I have thought for many years about 38 Degrees and the way it campaigns against Members. I have always found that robust pushback and setting out the facts to my constituents have been very helpful. I take her point seriously. I would caution only that as we look at the results of the pilot, we should bear in mind that there are many circumstances in which colleagues may need to be absent, sometimes for reasons that they do not wish to share, and that no one in any other workplace would ever have to make public. I want us to ensure that we do not implement a system that makes it more difficult for people to keep private things that should remain private.
Just in practical terms, if the pairing system is to work, we need enough colleagues who are not here to be available to pair with. The hon. Lady was right to say that no one would be forced to use the proxy voting system, but if we end up with proxy voting it will become increasingly difficult for pairing to proceed, and colleagues may therefore find that they are forced to use the system in circumstances where they do not wish to draw attention to the fact that they are not able to be here. That is the only cautionary note that I wanted to add to the debate. I am very supportive of the specific proposals.
Private Members’ Bills: Money Resolutions
Mark Harper Excerpts(5 years, 11 months ago)
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Mahmood
More wishful thinking, rather than trying to address the question.
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.
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
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?
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
Business of the House
Mark Harper Excerpts(6 years ago)
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Andrea Leadsom
I am very fond of the hon. Lady, but that was quite an ungenerous response to a three-and-a-quarter-hour marathon. Let us be clear: in a statement, there is a personal reply to every single question, which does not happen in a debate, so that was actually commendable of the Prime Minister.
Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)
I listened carefully to what the Leader of the House said. The Prime Minister set out in her statement, and in her replies to the questions from Members, the very clear reasons why she did not recall Parliament last week for a debate and a vote before the decision for military action was taken. I accept her decisions for doing so, but I do think that the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) has a point when he says that the precedent set in 2011 for a statement by the Prime Minister followed by a debate is a good one. Having listened to every question in today’s statement, my judgment is that a full day’s debate tomorrow, opened by the Prime Minister and followed by the Leader of the Opposition, would lead to a very clear judgment by this House that would strengthen, not weaken, the Government’s position.
Andrea Leadsom
Again, I feel like I am on shaky ground here, because as you will be aware, Mr Speaker, the Government did offer a debate for tomorrow, but I think that you already had applications for Standing Order No. 24 debates for tomorrow.
Treatment of House of Commons Staff
Mark Harper Excerpts(6 years, 2 months ago)
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Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Andrea Leadsom
As I have already mentioned, I certainly agree with the hon. Lady. It was the aspiration of the working group to cover all staff working in Parliament, including staff of the House, in our independent complaints procedure from day one, and I share her concern that we should now take steps to ensure that it does as soon as the independent policy is up and running, which we intend to be the case within three months from now.
The hon. Lady will recall that the working group has made it clear that we will deal with historical allegations, and it will be for the detailed policies and procedures of the new working group to establish how exactly that can be done. The Clerk of the House of Commons has made it clear today that he will look to reassure House staff that any historical allegations will be properly dealt with.
The hon. Lady mentioned that sanctions must be independent. That has been a core part of the work of the working group. We are now looking carefully at how that impacts on the work of the independent Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards and the Standards Committee itself, on which there are both parliamentary and lay members, and that work is ongoing. In fact, I am looking forward to meeting the Standards Committee later today to start those discussions.
The hon. Lady mentions consent training. The working group was very clear that all people, not only those who employ staff in this place but those who come into contact with others, should be very clear about what constitutes consent and precisely what does not. I can assure her that I am very keen to provide the carrot to ensure that people want to take up that training, but, as the working group agreed, we did not have the levers at that time to make it compulsory. Finally, I totally share her desire to see all staff here treated with the dignity and respect that everybody in this place deserves.
Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)
May I welcome what the Leader of the House said about her short inquiry? It seems to me that a good test for her to adopt would be to see that the House does what all organisations should do, which is make sure that everybody who works here, whether for Members of Parliament or the House, have the same processes and can expect to be treated according to the same high standards. I urge her to bring in that measure as soon as she can.
Andrea Leadsom
I completely agree with my right hon. Friend, and I can assure him and all hon. Members that that is the working group’s aspiration and my personal goal.
Independent Complaints and Grievance Policy
Mark Harper Excerpts(6 years, 2 months ago)
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Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart), who is in a more reflective mood than the one he sometimes displays in the House, as befits this serious subject matter. He dealt with the topic seriously, so it is a great pleasure to follow his comments. I add my support to the motion moved by the Leader of the House and the report and proposals that back it up.
Several colleagues have referenced the events of last year that triggered this piece of work and set of proposals, but I want to put something on the record. Shortly after I became Government Chief Whip in 2015, there were several issues in the House, so I started this area of work with all the parties in the House to see whether we could improve how the House dealt with such issues. Parties obviously have their own processes, but for various reasons they do not command the confidence of Members. Conservative Members certainly were not entirely comfortable with processes that were controlled by political parties, and that view was also expressed by people who work in the House and those outside.
Even if a party-run process is fantastic, it simply would not command confidence, and it was clear in the views expressed to me by colleagues, from my conversations with Members from other parties and from the representatives of our staff who came to see me that a House process covering all Members of Parliament on a cross-party basis would be the best way to proceed. We started to set some of those processes in train, and it was to my disappointment that the European Union referendum intervened and terminated the career of David Cameron and, indeed, my career in government and that we were unable to bring those processes to fruition.
I was therefore very pleased—although not about why the Leader of the House had to put these processes in place—that she responded so strongly to the events that took place last year, both in Parliament and outside it. I was very pleased that the processes were put in train on a cross-party basis and that all parties took part. I am also pleased that we have come up with such a comprehensive report, which I have taken the trouble to study. I think that it will be a step forward.
Before I move on, I put on the record my thanks to my right hon. Friend the Minister for Apprenticeships and Skills, who served as my deputy when I was Government Chief Whip. She would be too modest to say this herself, but while working with me, she led on many of these issues in that office. Government and, I think, Opposition colleagues know that she takes these matters very seriously. When she responded at the Dispatch Box to an urgent question—I think it was the one in response to the events at the Presidents Club—she made it very clear what her views were and how strongly she feels about these matters. I wanted to ensure that my thanks to her were on the record for the work she did as Deputy Chief Whip.
Although it is clear from the things that have been talked about publicly and from the responses to the survey that the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire mentioned that bullying and harassment can affect all members of staff, it affects female members of staff more severely than others. If we are to get more women to be Members of Parliament and to work in this House and be treated as equals, it is incredibly important to deal with this issue. Having taken up a position as co-chair of Women2Win, which tries to get more women to be Conservative Members of Parliament, I strongly support our taking further steps in this area, because it will encourage more women to be Members of Parliament.
I want to say a word or two about fairness. When the report was produced, there was some comment outside the House about the proposals meaning that the investigation of disciplinary matters would take place in private, without everything being published. That is like most workplaces. In most workplaces, when somebody makes a complaint about another employee, those matters are not published in national newspapers. I have always thought in this House—this was true when we were going through the difficulties with expenses—that a very good test is for Members of Parliament to be judged at least by the standards that we expect of everybody else. A good test is that the processes that we use to look at complaints about bullying and harassment should be the same sort of processes that exist in modern, up to the minute, leading workplaces. In those workplaces, one would not expect everything to be published in a national newspaper.
I welcome that the report refers to the need to recognise that sometimes when there are examples of bullying and harassment, there are patterns of behaviour and we need to ensure that other people have the confidence to come forward. Sometimes, it is only when people are aware that there is an issue with someone’s behaviour that they are willing to come forward. The report reflects that, but it is a difficult balance to get right, when we want to protect confidentiality to protect those who might be unfairly accused.
It is also the fact, which I think has been recognised publicly, that Members of Parliament do not employ large numbers of staff. If a complaint is made against a Member of Parliament and they are identified, it would not be difficult for newspapers to identify which of their members of staff had probably made the complaint. Having a disciplinary process take place in the full glare of publicity is not helpful for the Member of Parliament or for the complainant. The balance that is struck in the report is welcome.
I want to respond to what the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) said about the Standards Committee. Her issue about MPs marking our own homework would have been a reasonable point before lay members were added to the Committee on Standards, but the fact that lay members are on that Committee should give the public confidence that the MPs on it cannot just decide things on the basis of standards they consider appropriate. The lay members bring a very valuable outside perspective to the Committee.
Caroline Lucas
I am on slightly thin ice here, because I am not 100% sure of my facts, but I am fairly sure that the lay members do not vote. Although I entirely agree with the right hon. Gentleman that having them there is a great step forward, I still have concerns that MPs will be seen to be voting on their colleagues, even if we have had a perfectly independent and good procedure up until that point. I still think that is a weakness.
Mr Harper
We just need to think through how this works. The ultimate sanction of either expelling a MP or suspending them for a period where the recall provisions would kick in would be a decision for the House, not for the Committee on Standards—the whole House would be voting on it. Obviously, the House would be furnished with the report from the parliamentary commissioner and the report from the Committee on Standards. The valuable change we made when we introduced lay members was making MPs aware that, even if the MPs on the Committee had taken a certain view, the lay members can have their views expressed in the report of the Committee.
Mr Harper
I see the Chairman of the Committee nodding, so I have got that right. That provision gives both the wider House and members of the public confidence that the information put before the House is not just the views of MPs; it is also the views of lay members of the Committee. That brings a useful check on our views about what is and is not appropriate behaviour.
Mr Jenkin
My right hon. Friend is right to say that having the lay members present when decisions are made gives the Committee on Standards more authority, but there is something odd about the Committee adjudicating on rules and evidence—that should be done by a lawyer. These decisions would have much more authority if they were handed to the Committee by someone with the right juridical experience and standing, and the Committee was told, “This is the judgment. If you overturn this, you are overturning a respectable legal opinion. On your own head be it.”
Mr Harper
I listen carefully to what my hon. Friend says and put a fair bit of weight on it, given that he chairs the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, but I do not entirely agree with that. I have taken the trouble over the years to read the reports of the Committee on Standards, particularly the serious ones, and the reports of the parliamentary commissioner. The thing that has always struck me—I do not know whether other Members have thought this—is the thoroughness with which the parliamentary commissioner has looked into serious allegations. I have often thought to myself, “If you were ever tempted not to uphold the very high standards of behaviour, you really would not want to be subject to that level of scrutiny, because it is fairly exacting.”
I do not know whether Members have looked at these reports, but I can tell them that the parliamentary commissioner goes into things in considerable detail. The reports that are put before the Committee on Standards by the parliamentary commissioner are very thorough and detailed. There is a perception outside the House about the view that MPs on that Committee take, but when I have read its reports I have always felt they have been very balanced, tough and fair. When one reads them, one finds that it is not clear that there is any bias coming into them from the party views of the MPs. I have always thought that system is a pretty good one. As I have said, the only gap in it was rectified by the addition of lay members, who bring that useful outside perspective and check. But I listened carefully to what my hon. Friend said and I am sure it will be reflected upon by the House more widely.
Mr Jenkin
We have had one case in which the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards and the Committee on Standards reached one view, but when the same issue was then challenged in the courts a judge took a much harsher view. That completely undermines the authority of the system we have, and we need a much more legalistic approach to the adjudication of rules and evidence, whatever punishments the Committee may have decided to hand out.
Mr Harper
I hear what my hon. Friend says. I do not entirely agree with him, but I do not wish to deviate from this debate into a wider discussion of standards.
My final point is about training and culture. The hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire made a sensible point about MPs’ backgrounds, but I wish to pick up on his slightly prejudicial comment that assumed that everybody on the Government Benches has a privileged background, which is entirely not true. I will not bore him with the fact that I was the first person in my family to go to university, my father was a labourer and we had certainly not had any Members of Parliament in the family before—I just want to challenge the hon. Gentleman’s prejudices—but he made a sensible point: MPs have a very varied set of backgrounds. Some have run their own businesses and employed significant numbers of people. Some, like me, have worked in a business for others, and I have experience of managing teams. Others will come to the House having never managed anybody before in their lives.
Members obviously come to the House at a variety of ages and with a variety of other experiences. We are all then plunged into employing members of staff. As the Chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin), said, Members come to the House with the very best of intentions but often do not have the required skills. We therefore need to improve the training on how to employ and manage people and on the expectations that we set. We also need to provide HR support not only proactively, so that Members are better trained and supported, but so that we have somebody to ask questions if there are challenging issues that we are not comfortable dealing with. That would be valuable.
I welcome the recommendation that training should be part of the induction process for new Members. I do not think there is a massive gap between the position of the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson) and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex. I think that everybody should go through the training, but the challenge is that we can mandate that everyone goes to a training course and physically turns up at the room, but we cannot mandate that they will listen attentively and change their behaviour after doing so. It seems to me that the people who are least likely to go to the training are probably those most in need of it.
As the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire said, the challenge is to persuade people that they should go on the training course, listen and change their behaviour. The proposals to which the hon. Lady referred on publicising whether people had been on the training course, so that there is peer pressure and people feel they should go and so that the staff they might wish to hire put pressure on them, are a good idea. Nevertheless, for new MPs, it should be part of the standard set of training that every Member undertakes, so that we set the expectations correctly.
That leads me to the second part of my final point, which is about the culture of this place. I have listened to the debates we have had on this issue over the past few months and thought about my own working career. I was perhaps fortunate to work for two businesses that took management and how they treated their people very seriously. I went on training courses on how to manage people and set expectations and on what was expected. Staff members were empowered to speak up, and it was recognised that speaking up on a whole range of issues—whether how we ran the business or how people behaved—was the right thing to do. That set the right sort of culture, which is not always the case.
I have thought through some of the comments that have been made over the past few months. Examples of behaviour have been given and people have said things like, “That sort of behaviour was acceptable a few years ago, but things seem to have changed.” I thought back to when I started my working after leaving university, which is tragically a lot longer ago than I care to remember, in 1991. I thought through some of the specific examples we have read about, and whether they involved Members of this House or people outside it, we heard people say, “This sort of behaviour used to be acceptable.”
I was thinking back to when I started work 27 years ago, and I concluded that, actually, those sorts of things were not acceptable. The difference between then and more recently is that people used to get away with behaving like that. What has changed is not that certain behaviours are no longer acceptable—actually they never were acceptable—but that people cannot get away with them now, and that is right and an improvement. What we are trying to deliver with the training and the change of culture is that everybody accepts not only that those sorts of behaviour are not acceptable, but that no one will let people get away with them.
Mr Harper
If my hon. Friend will forgive me, I am just going to conclude.
If the report of my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House does nothing else but that and changes the culture, it will have taken us a huge step forward. I am very happy to support the motion and to commend it to the House.
Several hon. Members rose—
Government Policy on the Proceedings of the House
Mark Harper Excerpts(6 years, 7 months ago)
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Mr Carmichael
I can see how this is going to proceed, and it will not be as I might have hoped. I had hoped we might raise the debate a little bit higher than that. The hon. and learned Lady is well aware that there are 12 Liberal Democrat Members of Parliament sitting in this Parliament, and if she cares to consult the record she will find that we play a full and constructive part in the proceedings of this House.
Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)
To be fair, I can see that there is a decent turnout of Liberal Democrats today. However, in the important debate about the national health service to which the right hon. Gentleman specifically refers, the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb), who is their health spokesman, confirmed—I am quoting here from Hansard—that he was the “sole Liberal Democrat present” in the debate and felt it his “duty to intervene”. So in a debate in which the Government were fully engaged, only one Liberal Democrat could be bothered to turn up in Parliament.
Mr Carmichael
I can almost read the Whips’ brief that has gone round about the Opposition day debates—“Don’t make this about the Government, because this is not strong territory for the Government. Make it all about the Liberal Democrats or the opposition parties.” With all due respect to the right hon. Gentleman, whom I like and regard as a friend in many senses of the word, if not the political one, I am not going to play his game. Today’s debate is the Government’s opportunity to tell the House clearly and unambiguously how they intend to approach their business for the duration of this Parliament.
There is a further context to the Government’s approach on 14 September that the House should bear in mind. On Monday 11 September, they brought forward the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill, including some quite remarkable Henry VIII powers, which many in this House and beyond see as a marginalisation of Parliament. On Tuesday 12 September, they brought to this House a motion to give themselves a majority on all Public Bill Committees, contrary to all previous practice in this House and the formula relied on for many years.
Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)
I am grateful to you for calling me early in the debate, Mr Speaker. I will reciprocate what the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) said about me—I have been friendly with him, except perhaps in a political sense—but I think he rather overstates his case. Let me run through his argument. First, he describes a particular decision about two particular Opposition day debates, and suggests that that will be the Government’s practice going forward. The only evidence that he presents is a single tweet by a single political journalist, quoting unnamed sources about the Government’s behaviour going forward. It seems to me that the practice has been—it certainly was when I was Government Chief Whip—to consider what we do about Opposition day motions on a case-by-case basis.
Mr Carmichael
The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. There have been only those two debates so far. It was for that reason that, at business questions on 14 September, I gave the Leader of the House the opportunity to refute what was in the Huffington Post article. Had she chosen to do so, we would not be here today.
Mr Harper
The right hon. Gentleman says it was about his right Friend’s question. It was a question, but the point is it was about a tweet. Hon. Members would not expect my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House to comment on every single press comment about the House and dignify them all with a response. To come back to the point I was making when I took the intervention, the Government cannot be expected to have a blanket policy for what they do about Opposition days. We look at the motion on the Order Paper.
I have got into trouble in the past. When I responded at the Dispatch Box to Opposition day debates, I was often criticised because I used to do that dreadful thing of actually looking at the words on the Order Paper that the House was being asked to agree or not. I would be told that they did not really matter—what mattered was the debate we were having, and the general principle, and that we did not worry about the words. Well actually, the words are important and the right stance for the Government, each time there is an Opposition day motion —indeed any motion—before the House is to look at the words on the Order Paper and then make a judgment about whether they wish to support or oppose them. I will come to the specific motions that were being considered in a moment.
Lady Hermon (North Down) (Ind)
May I take it from what the right hon. Gentleman has said that from now on, when a DUP Member makes a comment in an Opposition day debate—as they did in our first Opposition day debate in this Parliament—that they are not minded to support the Government at the end of the day in a vote, the Government will not be persuaded by the DUP, will not be dictated to by the DUP, but will actually call a vote? Is that what the right hon. Gentleman is saying?
Mr Harper
No, it is not what I am saying. I am saying what I said in my own words. Let me go to the decision that I think the Government took on the motions; then the Leader of the House may comment in due course.
What the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland said, in his pitch to Mr Speaker yesterday and in his debate today, was that in both debates the Government argued against the motions that were on the Order Paper. Before today’s debate I carefully read the debates to see whether that was right: I do not think it was. In the NHS debate, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health did not argue against the motion on the Order Paper. What he actually said was that it was bogus, because it did not address some of the fundamental issues. [Interruption.] This is exactly as I said, Mr Speaker. As soon as attention is drawn to the motions on the Order Paper, which the House was being asked to agree, people do not like it. That is the fundamental point here, and one I am sure my right hon. Friend considered before he made a decision about the way that Government Members should vote.
Mr Robert Syms (Poole) (Con)
One of the most precious things in this House is a party deciding when it will or when it will not vote. That is up to a party, or indeed up to a Government. This is the first time I can remember an Opposition complaining that they are not being defeated by the Government.
Mr Harper
It is interesting, because when I read the debate it was of course the Opposition spokesman, the shadow Secretary of State for Health, who asked the Government not to divide the House on the NHS motion. The Government then proceeded not to divide the House on the motion, and now all we get is a load of complaints—which seems to me remarkably strange.
Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)
Does my right hon. Friend draw any comfort, as I did, from the fact that the party once of Campbell-Bannerman, Gladstone and Lloyd George has now decided to predicate the national debate on information that it ascribes to something called the Huffington Post?
Mr Harper
My hon. Friend makes a very good point, which requires no elaboration from me.
A couple of things struck me about the motion on the Order Paper about the NHS. First, it made very selective use of statistics. For example, it talked about the number of nurses and midwives joining the Nursing and Midwifery Council register, which is an important figure, but of course not directly applicable to the number of nurses working in the NHS, which the Secretary of State correctly pointed out had increased by 12,000. So it would not be right to oppose a motion that had some factually correct statistics in it, but they were not relevant to the argument about the number of nurses and midwives actually working in the NHS.
The final part of the motion talked about ending the public sector pay cap of 1%, and of course my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, who excellently wound up that debate, made the point that for the forthcoming financial year, the Government would allow the pay review bodies more flexibility anyway, so it seemed rather pointless to be engaging in that debate.
I have no complaint about the Labour party, but this is what parties do in opposition. It put in the words at the end that suggested that NHS workers should be given a fair pay rise, which I think would probably command support across the House, including from myself and my hon. Friends. The debate, of course, is about what constitutes a fair pay rise—what is affordable. But to think we were going to fall into the trap of voting against a motion that would just then enable lots of Labour MPs to put out leaflets saying that we were against a pay rise! They are playing a political game. We know what the game is. I am going to be very fair: it is what we would do if we were in their position. It is not our job, though, to fall into their trap and make their lives easier. Our job is to get on with governing and making the right decisions, which is exactly what we did.
Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)
I am a new MP and I am still getting to know my way around, but I did not expect my new role to be reduced to being a member of a talking shop. Does the right hon. Gentleman not agree that not allowing a vote on the Opposition debate reflects a deep disregard for parliamentary democracy?
Mr Harper
I would have more sympathy with the hon. Lady if she had actually bothered to turn up to listen to the debate in the first place, which, according to her own colleague, she did not—[Interruption.] Well, according to Hansard, the Liberal Democrat health spokesman, the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb), said on the record that he was the only Liberal Democrat present and that he felt he had to intervene. If that is inaccurate, perhaps the right hon. Gentleman should correct the parliamentary record. It is not my job to be responsible for the accuracy of the parliamentary record of the right hon. Gentleman. I note he is probably the only Liberal Democrat MP not here today.
Wera Hobhouse
I was in the debate: please check the record. I was there and I was very disappointed that we could not vote.
Mr Harper
I do not dispute the hon. Lady’s thing. All I can say is that I was quoting from Hansard, when the Liberal Democrat health spokesman said:
“I feel that as the sole Liberal Democrat present it is my duty to intervene.”—[Official Report, 13 September 2017; Vol. 628, c. 862.]
If that is inaccurate, that is a matter for the right hon. Gentleman and he should correct the record. That is not my responsibility.
On the motion on the national health service on the Order Paper, my right hon. Friend the Health Secretary laid out the facts about the importance of a strong economy in paying for the health service. He laid out a lot of important facts about our record on the health service, but actually he was not arguing that we should vote against the motion at all. He frequently said it was a bogus motion and that he did not want to engage with it, so I do not think that that can be said.
Mr Harper
Yes I do. I read the motion very carefully. It said that the Government should abandon the 1% pay cap; and my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, in her response to the debate, made it clear that the pay review bodies for the next financial year would have more flexibility—so, in effect, she confirmed that part of it.
The second part of the motion referred to NHS staff getting a fair pay rise. We all agree that NHS workers—indeed, public sector workers generally—should get a fair pay rise. The point of political debate is to ask what “fair” means. We have to balance affordability for the economy, what public sector workers need to get paid for recruitment, retention and morale purposes, and what those in the private sector, who pay taxes to pay for our public services, are being paid. If we read the motion, I think we find it was completely consistent with the Government’s policy, which I suspect is exactly why the Secretary of State for Health did not feel it was sensible to urge Conservative colleagues to vote against it.
Lady Hermon
I am very grateful indeed to the right hon. Gentleman for taking a second intervention. He obviously was unable to hear my first intervention, so may I just repeat my question? If the 10 DUP MPs indicate during an Opposition day debate that they are not going to support the Government, will the Government vote on the motion?
Mr Harper
I am grateful for my colleagues’ support. I suspect the Government will make their decisions on Opposition day motions on a case-by-case basis, when they have looked at the words on the Order Paper.
The second very important motion on the Order Paper that day was about the higher education regulations relating to tuition fees. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education set out the case powerfully on the substance of the proposition before the House on the need for tuition fees. She contrasted it with the position in Scotland, which does not have tuition fees. In Scotland, fewer children go to university, fewer poor children go to university and universities are not properly funded—not a position I want to see in England. She laid that out clearly.
It was also the case that the regulations were laid before the House on 15 December 2016 and came into force on 20 February this year, so voting against them would have had no effect whatever. There was an argument at the front of the debate when the shadow Secretary of State for Education tried to pretend that it was somehow the Government’s fault that the measures had not been debated. She said that the Opposition had prayed against them but had not had time for a debate. Well, I looked at the record, and there were three Opposition days between the regulations being laid and coming into force on 20 February. Those days were Wednesday 11 January, Tuesday 17 January and Wednesday 25 January. On any of those occasions, the Opposition could have used their time to debate the regulations. If the House had voted against them on any of those occasions, they would not have come into force. The fact that the Opposition chose not to do so is their responsibility, not the Government’s.
Chris Bryant
As Government Ministers constantly reiterated, the whole point of secondary legislation was that if the Leader of the Opposition called for a debate not in Opposition time, the Government would provide the time and the vote in Government time. That is precisely what they should have done. They are the people who broke their word—not us.
Mr Speaker
Order. Large numbers of hon. Members are proclaiming from a sedentary position the self-evident truth that it was not their decision to call the election—a perfectly valid piece of information, but entirely useless for the purposes of this debate. The important point is that Members must be able to hear each other speak in it.
Mr Harper
Of course, it was technically the decision of this House to have the early election. The Prime Minister brought the motion before the House but— thanks to the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011, which I had a little hand in—it was, of course, the decision of the House to have the election.
My point stands. There were three opportunities when the House could have voted down the regulations. The Opposition had the time and chose not to debate them. The point is that the regulations had already come into force when the House was faced with the debate on 13 September, so voting against them would have had no practical effect. It would have been a completely pointless exercise to have a vote that would have had no effect. It is not, as the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland said, the House being a talking shop. Procedures about when we have to vote on secondary legislation are set out in the statutory instruments legislation and the parent Acts; those time limits had expired. That is the Opposition’s fault because they had three opportunities in January when they could have used their time to debate the matter, but they chose not to do so.
Mr Carmichael
If, as the right hon. Gentleman suggests, a vote is a nonsense, surely that is an argument for going ahead with it, not for avoiding it.
Mr Harper
It is an arguable point. I have made my argument and the hon. Gentleman has made his, as he will no doubt do again later.
There were two good reasons why the Government chose, looking at the words on the Order Paper on 13 September, not to divide the House. I do not think that sets a precedent for the future. The Government will make those decisions when they look at future Opposition day motions. The right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland is making a mountain out of a molehill. I suggest that the House waits to see what happens on future Opposition days before it gets itself so worked up. We have had a good gambol around the subject but I do not really think that the right hon. Gentleman has made his case to the satisfaction of Members more generally.
Mr Speaker
The right hon. Gentleman has concluded his speech, for which we are grateful. I call Valerie Vaz.
Valerie Vaz
I will not give way, because I am conscious that many Back Benchers wish to speak, and I will shut up in a minute.
There were many points of order about the tweet from the journalist—I need to protect my sources, but it was Paul Waugh—stating that this is what would happen, and the matter was also raised in business questions. The Leader of the House then said, “Don’t believe everything you hear on Twitter.” I can understand that for the President of the United States, but the Leader of the House also tweets. Are we to believe her or not?
The most important point is that the Leader of the House gave no clarification or explanation as to why Parliament is being treated in this way, or on finding a way forward. We are now in the spill-over and the House needs this to be explained. Will the Government continue to treat Opposition motions as decisions of the House, as though they were wearing an invisibility cloak? Will the Leader of the House resolve this with Mr Speaker and find a way forward on substantive motions of the House?
Valerie Vaz
No, because I am nearly finished, and the right hon. Gentleman has had plenty of time.
This makes a mockery of Parliament. Parliament is a forum for debate, discussion and amendments, as seen in the example given by the excellent Minister, Phil Woolas, who listened to the House, even though he was ambushed by a celebrity, and changed his policy—whether or not that was the right thing to do. Nevertheless, he said, “I have listened to the House.”
Finally, in the preface to “Erskine May”, the guide to the law, privileges, proceedings and usage of Parliament, there is a dedication to you, Mr Speaker. It entrusts you with the great responsibilities of guardianship of the parliamentary system. You have done that many times in this House, and in granting this debate. I ask you to convey to the Government that they must abide by that dedication.
Pete Wishart
I will move on to Opposition day debates, because I know that is the intended topic of the debate. I do not really understand the Government’s position. Opposition days are a real feature of Parliament. I have been in the House for 16 years and I have always enjoyed Opposition day debates. There is always a bit of tension and there are always good speeches, and they tackle subjects that Governments would not normally bring to the House because they might just get embarrassed —subjects with which they might be uncomfortable. They play an important function in the House, and it is really important that we do not lose sight of their role. The most important thing about Opposition day debates is that they have a conclusion: some sort of decision on the motion is taken by the House. The day that the Government play fast and loose with that arrangement is the day that we really devalue Opposition day debates. We have Backbench Business debates and Adjournment debates. We do not need glorified Adjournment debates; we need real debates that hold the Government to account, and on which we can make a decision and then move on, respecting that decision.
We accept that the votes in question are not binding on the Government. The Scottish National party are a minority Government in Scotland and we know exactly how these things happen: we will get beat, and this Government will get beat. The key thing is that nobody expects them to change their policy or direction on certain issues just because they get beat on a Labour party Opposition day motion—that is the last thing people expect. Nevertheless, the votes on such motions reflect the will of the House, so people expect the Government to respond in a particularly positive way. They should not try to avoid votes or dismiss debates; they should respond and say something. They should go back and consult, review their position and come back to the House with a new set of recommendations. That is what I think the people we represent want from Parliament and from the Government.
Pete Wishart
I think we have heard enough from the right hon. Gentleman. He took up about 25 minutes of the available time so I shall move on, if he does not mind.
We on the SNP Benches have a little experience of minority government: we are in our second parliamentary session as a minority Government. We had a minority Government with just two Members more than the second party, and now we are just two short of a majority. In each case we have tended to try to function as a minority Government, respecting the view that we do not have a majority and trying to work in consensus and partnership with other parties. The exercise we are doing around the budget is an example of how things can be done in a minority Parliament.
I mentioned fracking: it is important that we come back to the Scottish Parliament on that with another view. On other issues on which we are defeated, we will consult further and try to address the concerns. That is how we govern as a minority Government. I am happy to talk things through with the Leader of the House to help her to understand better. If she wants to come to the SNP, we can give her some lessons about running a minority Government. If she is having difficulty with it, which it seems she is, she can come and have a chat with us. I will not break the confidence of our meeting, as she did to me at the most recent business questions. She can come and have a chat and perhaps we can talk through some of the issues.
Mr Bone
I am grateful for that intervention, but may I give the new Liberal Democrat Member some advice? He should never agree with me if he wants to progress in his party.
Let me go back to another false argument that was used today. There was criticism of the Liberal Democrats for not being here for certain votes, and I have on occasion pointed that fact out in this Chamber. However, if we extend that to say that only people in this Chamber who know what the debate is about can go and vote, we would have quite a lot of different results in this House. It is not a bad idea.
A business of the House committee would solve a lot of these problems. That was proposed by Wright. It was supported; it was Government policy. Unfortunately, it was not Whips’ policy, and that is both lots of Whips. Many of the problems we have would be solved by having such a committee.
I am not sure whether anyone from the Government will be winding up the debate, but it would be useful to have a commitment from them on this matter. On an Opposition or a Backbench business day, if the House votes on something—we did vote; it is just that no one opposed the motion, so there was no recorded Division—that is the will of this House of Parliament and we should have a Government response.
Mr Harper
Presumably, my hon. Friend is asking the Government to say something only if the House votes for something that is counter to the Government’s existing policy. My argument was that the motion on the NHS was completely consistent with the Government’s policy, which is of course why the Government did not oppose it.
Mr Bone
I am grateful to the former Chief Whip for his intervention. As usual, he will not expect me to say anything other than that I completely disagree with what he said. I am saying that, if the House expresses a view, a Minister should come to the Chamber. The Minister can stand up and say, “I absolutely agree with the motion”, if that is what it is, but that should happen if, on an Opposition day, on a substantive motion, the motion is carried.
The issue of circus animals is the best example we have had in the House. There is no doubt that the overwhelming majority in the House wanted something done about circus animals.
Mr Bone
I am sorry, I do not think I have time to take another intervention.
We really do need this to be done: the Government must take notice of what the House decides. It is a fact that, when the Backbench Business Committee came into being, the Government used to take it seriously. They used to vote on the motion. Then a former Leader of the House decided that it would be a good wheeze just to ignore votes and carry on. The reason we did not vote against the motion on circus animals—we can deny it as much as we like—is that we would have been defeated. It would be good in this parliamentary democracy if the Government on occasion were defeated. It would not be the end of the world and the Government would take note of it. That lot on the Opposition Benches would cry about it, but so what? Let us get used to it. This is Parliament. The people sitting here are not members of the Government—they are MPs sitting on the Government side. No one tells me how to vote.
Mr Bone
The former Chief Whip knows that. If I had wanted to, I could have been the only one to oppose the motion on that particular day. However, I did not feel like that.
This is not a wasted debate. It is a chance for parliamentarians to say that Parliament should come first and the Government should listen to what the House says when it votes.
Nomination of Members to Committees
Mark Harper Excerpts(6 years, 8 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Valerie Vaz (Walsall South) (Lab)
I thank the Leader of the House for the explanation, albeit fairly brief, of why the motion is before the House. I want to ask three questions: why, why and why? Why are the Government doing this, why is this necessary, and what does the motion say? Basically, for the benefit of hon. Members, it gives the Government an extra place on the newly named Selection Committee.
When the motion was tabled last Thursday, the Government included only eight names. They hastily added the hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Julian Smith) to the list. Members will note from part C of the motion that the Chair will be remunerated. The name has been changed to the Selection Committee and it feels rather like a Select Committee. If that is so, should not the whole House vote on the Chair?
Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)
In case the hon. Lady is unaware, under the existing arrangements the Chair of the Committee of Selection is a remunerated position, so that is not a change, but just carries forward existing practice.
Valerie Vaz
I do not know whether the right hon. Gentleman was listening, but the name of the Committee has changed from the Committee of Selection to the Selection Committee.
The Selection Committee appoints Members to the Standing Committees. The Government want the extra place on Public Bill Committees to give them the majority that they do not have. This is not about the smooth running of business; it is a power grab. It is not about allowing proper scrutiny; it is a power grab. It is not about wanting to abide by the democratic result of the election; it is a power grab. What are the Government relying on? I heard nothing from the Leader of the House on why the Government want to do this.
Pete Wishart
I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I want to move on to what happened in the 1970s, because it is very instructive and there are real lessons that the House could learn from that experience.
We now know why this Government have been so lax in putting together the normal functioning arrangements of the House. I raised this matter on the day we came back to Parliament, and I always feared that we would reach the stage when a motion such as this would be presented to the House. All this nonsense about Select Committees and why they were delayed was mere collateral damage resulting from the Government’s intention to control the legislative Committees. Now, at last, the rest of the House and the media are alert to the dangerous path that this Government are taking us down.
This House is determined by parliamentary arithmetic, and the day that we play fast and loose with that arithmetic and the verdict of the British people is the day that we start to walk down a murky, anti-democratic path. Our membership of the Select Committees is based on the number of Members that we secure. That allows us our membership on Select Committees, and it allows for our speaking rights and for all the other arrangements. These orders do not reflect the numbers of the House. We know that because the Clerks were charged with coming up with the formulae that allowed us to determine the Committees of the House. When it came to the Select Committees, the Clerks went away and crunched the numbers and then came back and presented the results to the parties. It was expected that there would be five Conservative members, five Labour members and one from the other parties, and everybody accepted that because it reflected the arithmetic of the House.
The Clerks also said that the Government should not have a majority on Standing Committees because they do not have a majority in this House. When it came to even-numbered Committees, they agreed with the Government that there should be no majority. That was fine, and everybody agrees with that. The Clerks did the numbers and the Government accept that. For Committees with an odd number of members, however, the Clerks said that there should be an Opposition majority. Remarkably, according to the Clerks, the Government only have a majority on Committees of 13 members. If we disregard the information supplied by the Clerks of this House—the people responsible for arranging the arithmetic, crunching the numbers and coming up with the formulae—we are again entering some seriously dangerous territory.
Mr Harper
I hesitate to start talking about spreadsheets on the Floor of the House, but the hon. Gentleman has tempted me. It is true that the Conservative party does not have a majority by itself—[Interruption.] That is not a revelation. But the Government command a majority because they have the support of a smaller party. If we take those two together, which is all that we are talking about, we do have a majority. The official Opposition party does not command a majority in the House either, but the hon. Gentleman is suggesting that that should be the case.
Pete Wishart
The House is going to get sick and tired of that argument because it is a feeble fig leaf that does not for a minute cover the fact that this minority Conservative Government do not command a majority in the House. They have their murky arrangement with the DUP—they have them in their pocket—and they command that majority on the Floor of the House, but we have to do what is right and what reflects the reality. We must respect the verdict of the people of this country, but we are not doing that.
Mr Carmichael
That is indeed the case. My party was not party to the discussions that resulted in the convention and have not felt themselves to be bound by it. But it remains the fact that it is something on which the majority within their lordships’ House have proceeded until this time, and which continues to be the case to this day.
It is a fundamental principle of this House that the composition of Committees should reflect the composition of the House. That means that if the Government have a majority in the House, they will have a majority in Committees. It goes beyond that. On matters where we decide things by way of a free vote and the matter then goes upstairs to a Public Bill Committee, the composition of that Committee reflects the vote of the House here. That is the most fundamental principle that we have, and I use these terms advisedly. It is not a convenience, nor something that is just here to be discarded when it becomes difficult or messy. It is absolutely fundamental to the way in which we do and have always done our business.
The Prime Minister went to the country. She asked for a bigger majority. She was denied it. She was returned as the largest party and that offered her a number of different options: she could have sought to govern as a minority; she could have entered into a coalition and got a majority that way; or she could have entered into a confidence and supply arrangement. She chose to take the latter approach. As a consequence, she has a majority on the Floor of the House for matters of confidence and supply. Matters of confidence and supply do not go upstairs to Public Bill Committees. They are dealt with on the Floor of this House. So it is simply wrong for the Leader of the House to assert—as she has done tonight along with others on the Treasury Bench and Government Benches—that the Government have a working majority. Beyond confidence and supply matters, they do not.
Mr Harper
I do not like disagreeing with the right hon. Gentleman, but he is just wrong. I have looked at the agreement. It does not just cover confidence and supply. This is rather pertinent given how much legislation there will be. It also covers matters pertaining to the country’s exit from the European Union and legislation pertaining to national security. So the agreement is much wider, and Brexit will be a big chunk of the legislative agenda of this Parliament.
Mr Carmichael
The right hon. Gentleman will also be aware that constitutional matters such as the question of the future of our membership of the European Union are also dealt with on the Floor of the House, so although the agreement may go slightly further than that which is normally understood by the terms of confidence and supply, it is not a comprehensive deal that gives the Government a majority on the Floor of the House. If it were, the Democratic Unionists would not be on the Bench behind me; they would be on the other side of the House on the Government Benches.
There is no direct precedent for this. There has been talk in this debate about the position that pertained relating to the Labour Government from 1974 to 1979. The clear distinction—this is an important point, of which the House should not be ignorant—is that, on that occasion, when the country was asked to choose a Government, it chose a Labour Government by a very narrow majority. That Government started with a majority—something the present Government simply do not have. I do not like what the Harrison motion did. My party opposed it then, as we oppose this measure tonight, but let us not pretend that it is somehow the same thing.
That takes me back to my quarrel with the right hon. Member for West Dorset. Surely, in advancing a change as profound as this, there has to be something more substantial by way of argument to support it than, “They did it when they were in government.”
Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)
Rather than repeating arguments, let me go through the arguments that have been raised so far and comment on them as I think fit, which I hope will be of assistance to the House.
The Leader of the House made an admirably short speech—I do not know what the shadow Leader of the House was moaning about. Normally everyone moans in this House that people go on for too long, but the Leader of the House crisply enunciated the purpose of the motion and set it out very clearly. That was an admirable thing for her to do.
I listened to the shadow Leader of the House very carefully. She moaned about references to the Selection Committee rather than the Committee of Selection. I am afraid that reminded me—we have already mentioned Monty Python once in the debate today—of the argument about the People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front. I do not think that what the Committee is called is significant. [Interruption.] It is just not important—arguing about what the Committee is called is not important. In addition, the Chair of the existing Committee of Selection is already paid, so the current proposal is not a change, and there is no sinister aspersion the shadow Leader of the House can cast on that. So I did not think that those arguments really had any great weight.
The substance of the hon. Lady’s argument was driven through precisely by my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin), who put his finger on the issue: if we pass this motion this evening, it will demonstrate again—as have all the votes we have had since this Government were formed—that we actually command a majority in this House. The hon. Lady’s only possible motivation for not wanting to agree to the motion is that she wants to gum up the works.
The hon. Lady invited us to look at the Opposition Members being put forward for the Committee and to assess their reasonableness, and I do not necessarily quarrel with that—they are very reasonable people. I would argue that the Government Members who have been put forward to serve on the Committee, including the Chair, are very reasonable people. However, if we want to look at the Opposition’s approach to reasonableness and the progress of business, we do not have to go back very far; we only have to go back as far as yesterday, when the Opposition were faced with the decision of the British people to leave the European Union. They knew it was necessary to have the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill and to pass that legislation, but they chose to oppose it. If they had got their way, they would have frustrated the will of the British people. Rather than abstain and try to improve the Bill in Committee, as a number of my right hon. and hon. Friends chose to do in saying that they support the principle of the Bill but it needs improvement and they have tabled amendments—the Lord Chancellor has indicated that he is going to discuss those amendments in a constructive and appropriate way—they chose to vote against the Bill to try to vote it down. A number of Opposition Members spotted the inconsistency between that approach and the referendum result and called them out on it. That betrays the hon. Lady’s real motive.
Mr Nigel Evans
Does my right hon. Friend find it somewhat bizarre that representatives of the Scottish National party and the Liberal Democrats are saying that Conservative Members are trying to circumvent democracy, and yet although on 23 June 2016 the British people decided to vote, by a margin of more than 1.3 million, to leave the European Union, on every piece of legislation we have brought before this House, those Members have voted against the democratic wishes of the British people?
Mr Harper
My hon. Friend makes a strong point very well, but I think my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset put his finger on it.
I listened very carefully to the arguments made by the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart). I should just counsel him that he wants to be a bit careful quoting Margaret Thatcher. While she is held in high regard by Conservative Members, I note that the leader of his party, the First Minister of Scotland, says that her entire political mission to get independence for Scotland was driven by Margaret Thatcher, so if he starts quoting her in this House with approbation, he may be putting his own future in his own party at great risk—and Conservative Members would not want to see that.
The hon. Gentleman’s arguments did not hold much water. Again echoing my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset, if we win the vote on this motion, we will have demonstrated that we command a majority. As I said in an intervention, he is entirely right to point out that the Conservative party on its own does not have a majority in this House, but the Government do. The Opposition cannot command a majority either.
Neil Gray (Airdrie and Shotts) (SNP)
Does it not boil down to this? Up until now, the Government have managed to garner the support of the DUP on the issues that have been brought before the House, but they do not garner its support on all issues, hence they foresee problems and want to bring forward this measure. The measure is quite convenient for the DUP because it means that it keeps hold of its Short money, so it suits everybody. Is not that the nub of the issue?
Mr Harper
Not at all. As I said to the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael), the confidence and supply arrangement is quite wide. [Interruption.] No, it does not cover everything, but it covers legislation pertaining to Britain’s exit from the European Union, and that is going to be a significant proportion of what the House considers during this Parliament.
Mr Harper
Let me finish responding to the hon. Gentleman before he intervenes again. If it is the case—this is where my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset put his finger on it—that the DUP does not support the Government on a particular matter, then whatever happens in a Public Bill Committee or a Delegated Legislation Committee, when that matter returns to the Floor of the House, Opposition Members will get their way. There is therefore nothing for the hon. Gentleman to worry about. It will not be possible for Conservative Members to force through our wishes if we do not command a majority in the House. That is the democratic check that my right hon. Friend explained very well.
Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)
Is not the other point that if the Government can command a majority in this place on the ground floor, it would be utterly bizarre if they lost it on the first floor, where the Committees take place? People outside Parliament would perceive that as perverse and illogical.
Mr Harper
My hon. Friend makes a good point. The shadow Leader of the House talked about the British public being outraged about what was going on in Public Bill Committees. I have to say—I do not know whether my constituency is particularly typical—that if I went out into the street and spoke to 100 people, I doubt that more than two or three of them would even know what a Public Bill Committee was. I do not think she is accurately characterising what the British people think. What they think was described by my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset: they had an election, they had a referendum, they had another election, and we have a Government who got a considerably larger number of seats than the main Opposition party. The people want us to get on with governing the country, making decisions and delivering a smooth exit from the European Union as well as to deliver on important domestic matters. That is what they want us to do and we are well aware of that responsibility.
In conclusion, this is a reasonable measure. It is about ensuring that the Government can conduct their business in a reasonable way but there is always a check and a balance. Ultimately, if a measure is brought forward in a Committee that does not command majority support on the Floor of this House, this House will have its way, not the Committee. There is a democratic check and balance in place, so Members should have no trouble supporting the motion when it is put to a vote in a short while.
Private Members’ Bills
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Mr Lidington
We will certainly consider the report as quickly as we can, but equally we want to make sure that we have given serious and proper consideration to the various proposals that the Committee has made. It is important that legislation, whether it stems from Government or from a private Member’s Bill, is thoroughly scrutinised in the House of Commons and enjoys a clear majority of support across the House. It would be wrong for legislation that lacked that support or that scrutiny to hit the statute book.
Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)
You will remember, Mr Speaker, that, before I was fortunate to be in government, I was a regular attender on Fridays. Who knows, now that I am back on the Back Benches, I may well become so again. From my observations it seems to me that the real problem with Fridays is that many colleagues profess support for measures, but do not consider them important enough to bother appearing here in this House of Commons when it is sitting. That is the problem, and Members have it within their own power to deal with that by turning up here and supporting measures that they feel command the support of the House.
Mr Lidington
My right hon. Friend makes a very good point. Last Friday a closure motion was moved, but only 57 Members were present to vote in its support.