Melanie Onn
Main Page: Melanie Onn (Labour - Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes)Department Debates - View all Melanie Onn's debates with the Leader of the House
(6 years, 4 months ago)
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Andrea Leadsom
My hon. Friend raises a really important point. We need many more people to come forward, particularly women, and to be compatible with good, solid family life, it is vital that we look at how we manage things in this House and improve on it.
Melanie Onn (Great Grimsby) (Lab)
In her statement, the Leader of the House told us that 2,000 pairs had been arranged without error until last night, but I note that since then, in her responses, she has backtracked slightly to ease herself through this discussion. People will take from that what they will, but given the closeness of the votes on Brexit this week, which I think has driven this so-called administrative error, the simplest way forward would be for her to adopt the good and thorough work of the Procedure Committee and put its recommendations to a vote. She says that she is supportive, so why is she trying to wriggle out of this?
Andrea Leadsom
The hon. Lady is wrong on two counts. I said that the pairing system had worked well overall. As I have made clear, there have been more than 2,000 pairs in this Parliament and several have been broken because of errors. The vast majority were broken by Opposition Members, although I do not want to be at all partisan over this. It is a complex administrative system and errors have occurred. She makes a good point about the importance of bringing in new processes, but the Procedure Committee did not set out a prescription; it raised a number of issues that the House would need to decide on, such as, for example, what business should be proxy votable—all business, just Government business, business Monday to Thursday, closure motions of the House, private Members’ Bills on Fridays? These are the questions that the Procedure Committee rightly raised and the reasons why the House needs to debate this further.