Proxy Voting — House of Commons, 2020-09-23
Topic: Civil Rights
Karen Anne Bradley (Conservative, Centre-right): I, too, will attempt to keep my remarks short I thank my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House for accepting most of the recommendations in my Committee’s report. We do support the motion on the Order Paper. Although the amendment was not selected, my right hon. Friend will have noted that it did not try to change the motion; it would merely have added to it something on other forms of voting I pay tribute to my predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Sir Charles Walker), because his incarnation of the Committee was the first to look at a version of proxy voting for parental leave. Had it not been for the work done by his Committee at that time, we would not be where we are now. I also pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller), who was the Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee at the time and part of the team that pushed so hard to make sure that proxy voting for parental leave could be brought in. I reassure my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House that there was unanimous support for the recommendations on parental leave in our report, and we are grateful that the Government have taken most of those recommendations forward The Committee members do differ when it comes to proxy voting for coronavirus. I am afraid that the majority view—I will be clear that it was a majority view; not everybody on the Committee feels the same—was that the proxy system for coronavirus is substandard. The majority view was that it is a very unwieldy system and is possibly open to abuse—that point was made by some Committee members; indeed, my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) would have found friends in our debate on that—but it was also felt that it is simply unreliable and not robust. We know that the queuing is not properly socially distanced. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the House is right to say that that is a matter of individual responsibility, but it simply is not possible: we see perhaps 500 Members queuing up and, inevitably, there end up being logjams, delays and points at which people are too close to each other. People are worried and scared—not just for their own health but for the health of the staff of the House of Commons. If we do not have our staff here, we cannot operate The majority view of the Committee was that we had a robust system of voting. The remote voting system that we used on our phones worked. It works consistently in the other place, which has been using it, and it is quick and simple. I do not accept that Members would not attend this place; Members want to be here. We want to take part in Committees and we want to take part in proceedings. We want to be here and be part of it. Some simply cannot, but we can see that it is not possible for all of us to be here. We are limited to 50 in this Chamber, and many Members feel that they are putting their health at risk to take part in a Division. They may really want to be part of that, but they have not been able to take part in the debate because there simply is not space for them.