Virtual Participation in Debate

Procedure Committee

We now come to the Select Committee statement. Karen Bradley will speak initially about the report for up to 10 minutes, during which no interventions may be taken. At the conclusion of her statement, I will call Members to put questions on the subject of the statement as on the call list, and I will call Karen Bradley to respond to them in turn. Members can expect to be called only once and questions should be brief. I call the Chair of the Procedure Committee.

I rise to speak to the report issued by the Procedure Committee last night about virtual participation in the debates of this House for those who cannot participate physically. It is the sixth report of the Committee in this Session, and the fourth we have produced on House procedure under coronavirus restrictions.

I must start by thanking the Chair and members of the Backbench Business Committee for allocating time in the Chamber for this statement, and the sponsors and contributors to this afternoon’s debate for their understanding. My final thank you is to the very many right hon. and hon. Members from all parties who have given evidence both publicly and privately to my Committee on this matter. It is that evidence that has informed the Committee and on which our recommendations are based. Those recommendations go much further than the Government’s position on this matter.

I am a great fan of my right hon. Friend the Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House. He is a most courteous parliamentarian and, as a Back Bencher, was one of the greatest champions of the independence of Parliament from the Executive. But his failure to schedule any debate on this subject and his refusal to listen to the views of the House, expressed so fervently on Monday in response to the urgent question secured by my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron), when tabling the motion to extend virtual participation in debates is indefensible.

The Procedure Committee was unanimous in its view that virtual participation in debates should be extended to all Members who cannot, for whatever reason, participate in person due to the pandemic. There should not be different tests for those who can participate virtually in debates, those who can enjoy virtual participation in our scrutiny proceedings and those who decide to use a proxy vote. It should not take the image of my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch) being denied the right to participate in a debate on the very disease that is keeping her from Parliament to make the Government move. The Leader of the House was right to say that nobody could fail to be moved by that image. It is my view that he should have seen the possibility of that image, demonstrating the complete contradiction in his position on this matter, and never have let it happen. The public will be baffled by a situation in which the Prime Minister can answer Prime Minister’s questions virtually yesterday and make a statement to the House virtually today but cannot take part in a debate until he has finished self-isolating. This is an utterly farcical situation.

I am sure that the Leader of the House, being a traditionalist, does not want to change our procedures too much because of a fear that those changes will become permanent. I have enormous sympathy with that view, but we must acknowledge that things are not as they were. This hybrid House is, to coin a phrase, sub-optimal. We must try to make this House work as best we can for the situation we find ourselves in now and ensure that all Members can do their job today. That requires us to look at the issue strategically, with easy-to-understand and clear rules about participation that reflect today’s reality, as set out in the four reports published by my Committee on this matter.

May I thank the right hon. Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley) for her statement and say that I agreed with absolutely every single word of it? I commend her and her Committee for this report, which is based on the principle that, despite this awful pandemic, all Members should be able to participate in our debates, whether in person or remotely, and I strongly support that principle. I agree with her that it is the role of the Leader of the House to support MPs to do their job and to speak in debates and that it is not for him to set up exclusions.

Is the right hon. Lady aware that the proportion of MPs who are exercising proxy votes and therefore excluded from debates is 62%? That means that 62% of us are not able to speak in our debates; that cannot be right. Is she also aware that the figure for Scottish Members of Parliament is 78%? Imagine having a situation during this pandemic where 78% of Scottish MPs are excluded from debates! We want and need to hear from them and from our colleagues in Wales and from the regions outside Westminster as well. We do not want a situation where half of the Chairs of Select Committees are not able to speak in debates, even debates that are on the subject on which they have done inquiries and reports.

We might be essential workers, but we can work remotely. I strongly back the amendment of the hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron) and my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) to the motion of the Leader of the House. I urge the right hon. Lady to back that amendment—I am sure that she will—and to urge all other Members to do the same, so that we can override the Leader of the House and ensure that all Members are able to speak in debates on equal terms at this crucial time.

Order. I gave the right hon. and learned Lady some leeway, as Members may have noticed, but please can people just ask questions now?

I thank the right hon. and learned Lady for her comments. It is important that I make it clear that the Government moved their position on proxy votes so that those who have a proxy vote can now take part in proceedings in the Chamber, and I give credit to the Government for doing that. None the less, she is right to say that a large number of Members cannot participate in the Chamber; around one quarter of Members are exercising the ability to participate virtually in scrutiny proceedings because they do not feel that they are able to come to the Chamber. It is that quarter of Members whom my Committee is incredibly keen to see taking part in debates. By the time we get to the end of March, it will have been for nearly 12 months that a quarter of Members have not been able to take part in debates. That is simply not acceptable.

I completely agree with everything that my right hon. Friend has said. I also agree with the Mother of the House. It is absolutely unacceptable that Members are still unable to fulfil their jobs properly in our Parliament. We have this superficial sense that we are all taking part: we are able to ask questions and to ballot for absolutely everything, but we cannot bob, we can barely intervene, and far too many people cannot even speak in debates. Will my right hon. Friend please continue to press very firmly for the return of some normality to our Parliament so that we can hold the Government to account properly?

I thank my right hon. Friend, who was an esteemed Leader of the House in her day and knows these issues incredibly well. The point that the Committee wanted to get across was that we cannot continue having a situation where so many Members are unable to take part in our debates. As I have said, by the end of March, this will have been going on for nearly 12 months. I urge the Government to give time for that debate and to give the House the chance to have its say. The House may well agree with the Government, but we will never know unless we have that opportunity.

I am my wife’s carer, which I think is well known in the House. If I come down from the north of Scotland to London, catch the virus and have to self-isolate for two weeks, what good is that to my wife? I have to make a choice between my constituents and my wife. Surely the situation that we have at present is extremely dangerous and corrosive to our precious democracy—something that should be an example to the world, but which right now is not.

The hon. Gentleman is right about the way in which our democracy is being portrayed. When we introduced our hybrid proceedings in April, we were actually held up around the world as a fantastic example of ensuring full participation for all Members. We all accept that there will be differences in ability between those who participate virtually, and those who are here in the Chamber and can therefore interact in a different way, but that does not mean that we should exclude people who wish to participate virtually from all our proceedings. I know that the House services can make it work, and I want the Government to allow them the chance to do so.

Does my right hon. Friend agree that if we have to find a balance between spontaneity and interactivity in debates, and allowing all Members to take part in those debates, the choice should be easy and clear—we should choose to have as many Members taking part as we possibly can, and not restrict a quarter of them?

I thank my hon. Friend, a fellow Committee member, who has made such a contribution to the report. I agree wholeheartedly with what he says.

I pay tribute to the right hon. Lady for the leadership that she has shown since taking over the chairmanship of the Committee. It must feel like a decade ago, but it has not even been a year. She has shown enormous leadership in ensuring that the reports have all been on a cross-party basis. As a member of the Procedure Committee for the last four years, I think that we have covered more ground in nine months than we did in two whole previous Parliaments.

Let me turn to paragraph 33 on page 11 of the report, where we talk about the issues of hybrid procedures and a mixed debating system. We state in that paragraph that the Clerk of the House has confirmed that we have made significant progress in relation to the availability of the Chamber to be fully hybrid for all debates, but that the Standing Orders for this have not been progressed because there has been no request from the House to do so. To me, this confirms that the House is ready and there is enough capacity. As I said on Monday, it is disappointing that the Leader of the House has suggested that he has now requested the capacity be improved when the Clerk argues that the capacity is there. Does the right hon. Lady agree that if the Standing Orders could be changed to allow for full participation, another Standing Order could be changed to say that those taking part in the hybrid proceedings on the screens could not do things such as intervene, but that, as was so eloquently put last week, that is a small price to pay for allowing Members to take part in all debates, including on Armistice services, when Members were excluded from what should have been truly cross-House debate that brought the House together and showed it at its best?

I thank the hon. Gentleman, who is another esteemed member of the Committee; it is very gracious of him to make those comments. His experience as a member of the previous Committee certainly helped me coming back on to the Committee, as I did in January this year as the new Chair. He makes some incredibly important points. The Armistice Day debate was so powerful and did show the House at its best, but excluding a quarter of Members, who simply could not take part because their own health or the health of their loved ones would have been put at risk, simply demonstrates to me, once again, the need for this provision. There is capacity; we have heard evidence time and again that the House service can deliver this. I urge my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House to give the House a chance to have its say on the matter.

I also extend my appreciation to my right hon. Friend for her statement. I understand the strong desire to have MPs appearing in the Chamber in so far as it is possible for them to do so, but would it not be sensible for there to be a system whereby Members who are self-isolating, because of age, health or pregnancy—or indeed, because of a member of their household having equivalent concerns—could verify their status via a doctor’s note? I know that there has been some reticence about Members disclosing their health conditions, but it strikes me that that would create parity with employees in any other workplace, who to explain the reason for their absence, and would create a justifiable basis for allowing Members to participate remotely.

My hon. Friend made a very important point on Monday when she raised the issue of pregnant women. The fact that those women do not fall into the definition of clinically extremely vulnerable means that, as things stand, the Government propose that they will have to come into the House if they wish to take part in debates. I know that the Leader of the House has concerns about that; he has said so to me privately. I hope that he will listen and make sure that he does allow for pregnant women to be able to take part in debates. My hon. Friend makes an interesting comment about the analogy between other workplaces and this workplace. She will know that for other workplaces the Government’s advice is “If you can work from home, you should.” Perhaps the Leader of the House should listen to that piece of advice as well.