My Lords, as the noble Baroness knows, I share a large number of her concerns, not least on some of the detail to which she has given attention. We will, of course, come back to that in Committee. However, I do not share her view in one respect: the fact that the Bill has been a long time a-coming is indicative of the considerable interest that there has been at the other end of the building—for obvious reasons. I note that I am the first of some 10 former Members of Parliament contributing to this debate, and I suspect that we will hear some interesting observations in that respect.
In this House, I first proposed a recall power for MPs back in June 2009, in the immediate aftermath of the expenses scandal, to enable constituents rather than party leaders to instigate an appropriate review of the behaviour of their representatives. The proposal was defeated then but by the general election, just a few months later, all three parties committed to a recall power of the kind that I had proposed—one that covers “misconduct” and “serious wrongdoing”. At the last general election, that was how the proposals were expressed in a number of manifestos and it was, as the noble Baroness said, repeated in the coalition agreement. Now the Bill gives us the opportunity to make good on those promises. However, as the noble
Baroness said, in its present form it is by no means perfect, and that is acknowledged by the work that has been done in the other place and the reference to our work on it there. There is important job of work for us to do.
There are technical issues to address in respect of ensuring that donors to recall campaigns are permissible and eligible, and to ensure that campaigns for and against recall are placed on an equal footing. On these Benches, we also note the reports of the Constitution Committee and the Delegated Powers Committee in respect of the order-making powers of the Bill. It will be for the Minister to demonstrate why these are the right powers.
However, there is one big issue of principle at stake that we must all in this House address. When and in what circumstances recalls should occur is, I think, agreed between the parties—that is, in cases of serious misconduct or wrongdoing. But where the collective forces of the two government parties and the Opposition have not yet secured a good solution is the key question of who should be involved in that process of determining whether misconduct has indeed taken place.
The Bill sets out only two bodies that may decide. One is straightforward: if the courts sentence an MP to a prison sentence, that immediately triggers a recall petition. The second is less straightforward. If the Commons Standards Committee suspends a Member for 14 calendar days or 10 sitting days, a recall petition is automatically triggered. The problem is that the voting membership of the Standards Committee is composed entirely of MPs. Even taking into account the lay members, that is plainly an internal parliamentary body. To the public outside, this—quite reasonably—smacks of being a group of people who seek to retain what we might call “exclusive cognisance” over their own affairs. I am sure that noble Lords have already seen that the public have been responding to that problem as if it were equivalent to MPs marking their own homework. That is a fundamental problem.