I will come back to participating virtually. I do not disagree that people should be able to participate virtually, but we have the worst of all worlds. At the moment, we have a Chamber that does not work. I have watched my colleagues in this Chamber make incredibly powerful speeches that would have moved the whole House under normal circumstances, and yet they have exactly the same effect as an Adjournment debate speech. That is what is missing; that is the problem. We are in the middle of some of the biggest problems this country has faced in peacetime, and we have a House of Commons that is not functioning. Parliament is not working.
I want the Government to look at ways of making it possible to use the Chamber better. There are small things we can do, like using the Galleries, but I think we should be testing every MP every day so that we can be sure that we can operate properly. People say, “But what about our constituents?” Well, that is what they want; I have had any number of communications in the past couple of weeks saying, “Why aren’t you going back to work? Where are you?” It is very important to do that. We do not have to do away with electronic voting, proxy voting and protecting the vulnerable—by the way, I count as a vulnerable Member in these circumstances—but we can make the House work.
My plea to the Leader of the House is this: by all means carry on for the next month, but before we get to November, when we have to make the decisions about covid—not after covid either has or has not blown up—about the next stage of the economy and about Brexit, we must ensure that we do it with a full and properly functioning House.
5.29 pm