Recall of MPs Bill — House of Lords, 2015-01-14
Topic: Government Operations
Paul Tyler (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, with my Anglican ancestry and upbringing, I like to start with a text. Perhaps I should say in parenthesis that I am the black sheep of the family. The text is as follows. It says that, "the provision that an MP should be subject to recall where he or she is suspended from the House for ten sittings days or more means that it will be MPs themselves, rather than voters, who under this scenario determine whether the recall process can be triggered. The constitutional purpose of recall is to increase MPs’ direct accountability to their electorates: it is questionable whether that purpose is achieved when the trigger is put in the hands of MPs rather than constituents"— amen to that That is a quotation from the summary of the analysis by the Constitution Committee of this part of the Bill, and I think that it is exactly spot-on. I am especially pleased to have the support of my noble friend Lord Lexden, who is a member of the committee, for the group of probing amendments that we are putting before your Lordships’ House this afternoon. Our overall purpose is to respond in detail to that challenge from the Constitution Committee, which was echoed at Second Reading by the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, who I am delighted to see here, because I know that he has been on public duty elsewhere In short, the Bill is defective in that it does not do what it says on the tin. It creates no greater independent accountability of MPs to voters. To emphasise that weakness and to respond to the widespread concern expressed at Second Reading, Amendment 2 simply calls into question the current priorities of the Bill. It is no more than a marker put down to enable the full package—probing Amendments 25 to 32—to be considered as a further and better route to the recall process I am extremely grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and my noble friend Lord Lexden for all the help that they have given me and for their support in putting together this package. Indeed, we have had most welcome encouragement and practical advice from all parts of the House and beyond, not least as result of the offer from the Minister in charge of the Bill, Mr Greg Clark, who said in the final stages of Committee consideration that, "we are open to ways to improve the Bill and we stand by that commitment".—[Official Report, Commons, 24/11/14; col. 681.] He was as good as his word. We three signatories—and those who assisted us—are in no way committed to every detail of this package of proposals to solve the core problem identified by the Constitution Committee. We are committed to demonstrate the severity of that problem and to persuade Ministers that it cannot be allowed to survive in the Bill Before I set out the specific proposals contained in Amendments 25 to 32, I should reassure your Lordships about what they do not do. I suspect that few colleagues in this House would want to revive the very wide-ranging recall propositions that were so soundly defeated on a free vote in the Commons. As a former Member of Parliament, and one who has always cherished the right and duty of the elected representative to use his or her judgment, to exercise his or her conscience and to apply his or her principles with integrity in the interests of both the country at large and/or their constituents, the notion that that role could or should be subjected to vexatious, trivial or bullying challenge by wealthy special interest campaigns is anathema—as I know it is to many other Members who have contributed this afternoon. In short, the very fact that someone disagrees with an MP should never be grounds for recall. That echoes what many Members have said this afternoon I know all too well how invidious that would be. I was once elected with a minuscule majority. On that occasion, there were at least 20,274 voters who would happily have evicted me at the first opportunity. The recall process should not be able to be used to undermine the legitimacy of the electoral process and an election result We have sought to devise a process which retains a filtering stage but which puts that filter into independent territory. This avoids the MPs themselves being given, as a regular responsibility, the invidious task of determining whether a colleague—or a political opponent—is to be subjected to the next stage of the recall challenge. It therefore avoids the regrettable but inevitable politicisation of the Standards Committee that is, at present, implicit in this part of the Bill. This was so effectively demonstrated at Second Reading by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, and others. I must say again that I am so sad that the noble Lord is not in his place today. I have had many conversations with him but he is simply not well enough to be with us. He may not agree precisely with my resolution of this problem but he was very effective at demonstrating its very serious nature.