Amendments to Bills (Explanatory Statements)

Debate between Wayne David and Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park

Wednesday 6th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Zac Goldsmith]

I take the point. There have been many occasions in the short time I have been in the House when I have had to seek advice on votes I was being asked to cast. I have asked many Back Benchers on both sides of the House and the Whips but have still been unable to understand them or get any kind of clarity. I have had to abstain in Divisions because I simply did not know what the amendments I was being asked to vote for were about.

[Wayne David]

Is the hon. Gentleman confident that he understands every explanatory statement he reads?

[Zac Goldsmith]

I think that we would stand a much better chance of understanding what we were voting for if the amendments had explanatory statements.

I reject the argument that this would place an undue burden on Back Benchers. I accept up to a point that an extra burden would be placed on Opposition parties because, as my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) said, for Members tabling 100, 200 or 300 amendments that amounts to quite a lot of minutes, but I believe that they should be given the administrative support they need to achieve that. However, that does not apply for Back Benchers, because they rarely table more than a small handful of amendments, unless they have set out to become parliamentary pests. They will have spent a lot of time understanding how to table them, so the extra five, 10, 15 or perhaps 30 minutes required to explain them is not much to ask. If a Back Bencher is not willing to invest those 30 minutes in the explanatory notes, perhaps they ought not to be wasting our time with the amendments in the first place.

This is a very small measure—a very small price to pay—that would undoubtedly, unavoidably and unarguably improve the legislative process in this place. I believe that people are appalled by some of the things that have happened here over the past few years, not least the expenses scandal and the more recent issue relating to fuel, which could be described as a scandal. The far bigger scandal is the fact that the one thing we are paid to do, we do not, on the whole, do anything like as well as we should, because we often simply do not know what we are doing. That is a scandal that can be rectified so easily with this small measure proposed by the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion.