I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to provide for corporate status of and for certain privileges and immunities to be accorded to the international inter-parliamentary organisation of national and sub-national legislatures of Commonwealth countries known as the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association and to its Secretary-General; and for connected purposes.
I declare an interest as chairman of the UK branch of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association and as international vice-chairman and acting chairman.
I have been a Member of this House for 21 years. In all that time I cannot recall many ten-minute rule Bills ever becoming law, but I sincerely hope that this one will be different, and for several very good reasons. For a start, the Bill would cost the taxpayer absolutely nothing. In fact, it would probably save public money because the CPA and its London-based international operations already cost very little to run, as Mr Speaker knows.
The contributions of every participating Commonwealth Parliament keep the wheels turning. All 180 branches across the globe chip in with subscriptions that help to finance the work we do, and this work is of the utmost importance as it promotes parliamentary democracy—that is rather what we have just been talking about—and good governance. The motive is to improve the way decisions are taken throughout the Commonwealth.
The CPA runs an extensive range of programmes and activities. We run online courses, workshops, webinars and conferences, as well as publications, toolkits and handbooks. Our values are Commonwealth-centred and seek to uphold the highest principles that the Commonwealth promotes. We are here to mentor and to teach. We offer world-class research and library facilities, and our ethos is to improve and nurture proper understanding of the way things can be done within a parliamentary system.
We are in business to build a wide-ranging perception of parliamentary democracy that recognises every national context and is totally non-partisan and non-exclusive. Through its many different programmes, the CPA sets out to capture the diverse experience of parliamentary democracies across the Commonwealth.
We are talking about a community of 2.4 billion people all over the planet. The Parliaments they elect are frequently young, so the CPA’s focus and ethos seeks to engage young people in a positive way. We have encouraged the sharing of ideas for 110 years, and we recognise the diverse challenges that many Commonwealth jurisdictions face. All our work seeks to strengthen what individual member Parliaments can do. Above all, we are in the business of dialogue at national, regional and pan-Commonwealth levels.
For that reason, the nature of the CPA’s status in law really matters. Increasingly, we operate rather like a non-governmental organisation. Our voice is listened to at the highest levels throughout the Commonwealth, but there remains one legal peculiarity that the Bill seeks to cure. By a curious quirk of tradition, the CPA still qualifies as a charity. When the organisation was founded 110 years ago, it was granted charitable status. Perhaps there was a compelling reason at the time, but as the years have passed and the old empire gave way to the new, young Commonwealth, a growing mood of concern began to spread among CPA members about what it means to be a charity.