Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Yes, but there is a distinction, which I drew attention to before, between the House of Commons and the House of Lords: we are not remunerated. We stand here unpaid. They are paid but they cannot manage to man all the committees that have been established in the other place. I have done three Joint Committees dealing with draft legislation. What is interesting about those committees is that they are invariably attended by the Members of this House, but we have found a low level of attendance by Members of the other place. When you ask them why that is, it is often because they simply do not have the time to attend Joint Committees of the House, particularly when it comes to dealing with draft legislation. I make no criticism of that, because I know the pressure that MPs are under. Let me take another committee, an interesting one to which people want to return: the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy, where turnout is 79.2 per cent. That only emphasises the fact that if Members are particularly interested in an area they will find the time for it, at the cost of other work that they do. Meanwhile, other committees, which they obviously regard as Cinderella committees, simply do not secure a sufficient level of attendance. I could go through all of these, but I have already been on my feet for 15 minutes and have made my case. I often visit MPs in their offices in the other place. They loathe doing Statutory Instrument Committees. The Government of the day—I understand that it happens on both sides—often desperately ring round asking Members of Parliament to attend Statutory Instrument Committees because they cannot find people to sit on them. When MPs get there, they are invariably told by their government Whips, ““Please don’t speak. Don’t say anything””. If they speak they will delay the Minister who has to get back to his department to get on with his job, and other Members want to return to their offices to get on with the sensible work that they do as Members of the House of Commons. I now move to a conversation that I had last night over dinner. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, is laughing, as he is well aware of the dinners that we have in the House; they are always very constructive. The one last night was particularly constructive as my attention was drawn to the handling of this legislation in the Commons and the use of the guillotine on these amendments. I think that we were guillotined last night at about 1 o’clock in the morning when we had a guillotine Division. Perhaps I should explain to noble Lords who have not been Members of the other House that in this House all amendments tabled can be debated; however, that is not the case in the House of Commons. One of the great joys of being a Member of this House is that we know that all amendments, when the House is working properly—which it is not at the moment because the Government are insisting on ramming through this legislation—can technically be debated.