Voting by Proxy (Amendment and Extension)

Patrick Grady Excerpts

Wednesday 12th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (Ind)]

I think that there is only one Amy Callaghan, and the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire has just proven that with one of the most eloquent speeches that many of us will have heard in this House. I congratulate her immensely on everything that she has achieved.

I think the hon. Member alluded to the point that, if we started from scratch, we would not invent the current system for voting in Divisions in this House. Crowding into Lobbies to queue up for an individual headcount is a colossal waste of time and resources.

The card reader system has marginally improved things, but we still waste hours, if not days, each year simply queuing up to vote. Anything that improves the experience and accessibility of voting in Divisions, however marginal, is to be welcomed.

During the pandemic, the then Leader of the House—now, quite remarkably, the Business Secretary—made great play of the historic and

“absolute, unequivocal constitutional right of Members to attend Parliament”,—[Official Report, 16 December 2021; Vol. 705, c. 1172.]

which, he repeatedly reminded us, dates back to at least 1340. Of course he was correct: we are privileged to have an absolute right to attend Parliament.

I completely agree with the hon. Member for Bracknell (James Sunderland) that, ultimately, the purpose of attending is first and foremost to vote. We have an absolute right to vote in this House, but we do not have an absolute right to speak. We can do our best to get on the Order Paper or to catch the Speaker’s eye, but there is rarely, if ever, an absolute guarantee of being called to speak, so ultimately it is through voting that we can be certain of exercising our mandates to represent our constituents.

However, there are times when attending Parliament is difficult, if not impossible. The House eventually recognised that, with a system of proxy votes for baby leave. Even in a few short years, that experience has been overwhelmingly positive and has evolved and developed. Anyone who would suggest rolling it back would find very little appetite at all for doing so.

Extending proxy votes to Members in other unavoidable situations that make attendance difficult is the natural next step. The Procedure Committee heard many important personal examples, and we have just heard one, incredibly powerfully, on the Floor of the Chamber. The broad consensus for today’s motion is to be welcomed, as is everything in the Procedure Committee’s report. I echo other Members of the Committee in thanking the Clerks for their outstanding work, as always, in assisting with its production.

Having served on the Committee from 2015 to 2017, it has been a fascinating experience to return to it in this Parliament. I agree with the Chair that perhaps there will be a little flexibility to let the pilot scheme breathe, given the delays in getting this motion to the Floor of the House in the first place, but I slightly disagree with her when I say that, in reviewing the operation of the scheme, I hope we can consider whether there is room to go further or do things a little bit differently.

The “proxies for all” system that existed during the pandemic operated incredibly successfully and removed any question of what the reason was, what the qualifications were or why people had to be absent at any given time. It also remained voluntary throughout the pandemic. Members did not have to sign up for a proxy vote; they could attend if they wanted to, or make an arrangement for pairing, or to have a slip or to be nodded through, using the other mechanisms that exist.

It is worth exploring how the system might evolve, and that includes looking again at remote voting, because it worked extremely well and ultimately that is where the future of a modern, 21st-century Parliament should lie.

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

Does my hon. Friend share my surprise and puzzlement that most people are not allowed to have a vote counted if they do not physically go through the Lobby, but there is absolutely no requirement on us to have listened to a single word of the debate? We do not need to know what it is we are voting on, as long as we turn up. Does he understand why my constituents, and possibly his, think that that in itself is something strange?

[Patrick Grady]

Yes, my hon. Friend makes a good point. The Chamber is maybe not quite as full as it ought to be for a debate of this importance, but I am sure that other hon. Members, wherever they might be, are following our proceedings live—as no doubt are the many thousands of people tuning in to the live stream and to BBC coverage and so on. There are a lot of different ways now to engage with parliamentary proceedings, both for members of the public and for those of us who, for whatever length of time, are Members of Parliament.

We only have to look at the Scottish Parliament to see how, when it was first set up 20 years ago, it went out of its way to become that kind of modern exemplar, adopting fixed decision times and electronic voting. Similar systems are in place in devolved legislatures and, indeed, local council chambers across these islands. In Holyrood they have continued to use remote voting since the pandemic, which is of huge assistance to Members of the Scottish Parliament who have remote constituencies, caring responsibilities or other kinds of accessibility requirements.

If Parliament—any Parliament, including the future independent Parliament of Scotland—is to be inclusive and truly representative of our modern and diverse society, then participation for its elected Members must be as straightforward and as intelligible to the outside observer as possible. Proxy voting means that Members are not forced into an opaque pairing system or the nonsense of nodding through, which is essentially a proxy voting system but means that Members—I have experienced this as I have had to nod people through in the past—have to stay somewhere else on the estate but are excused from having to go through the Lobbies. That does not help people who have difficult conditions for which they should really be at home recuperating and regaining their strength. The extension of the scheme will allow constituents to be represented even when a Member is indisposed through no fault of their own.

[Karen Bradley]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Patrick Grady]

I am happy to give way to the Chair of the Procedure Committee.

[Karen Bradley]

I thank the hon. Gentleman, who is a valuable member of the Committee. I want to reassure him that many people who are not here are watching the debate. My hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Theo Clarke), who is availing herself of the proxy vote for baby leave, has just texted me to say how pleased she is that the debate is happening and how much she wants the extension to go through, so there are Members observing who might not be in the Chamber.

[Patrick Grady]

I entirely agree. That exactly proves the point. Many Members are in their offices right now catching up on their constituency correspondence, but they will have the Chamber feed on and will be watching the debate out of the corner of their eye, if only just to find out when the Government will drop the Whip so they can all go home. That is exactly the point: we engage differently now. It does none of us a service when people see pictures of a full Commons talking about one thing and an empty Commons talking about another. That is not representative of how this job works. This point has already been made, but if we want people from more diverse communities, with broader life experience, and who want to raise a broader range of issues, we have to make the job as accessible as possible. That is what I think is happening today.

At this rate, we might manage to drag this House into the 21st century sometime around the start of the 22nd, but by then Scotland will be blazing its own trail as an independent country and, for us, Westminster will be merely a quaint historical curiosity.