My Lords, I would like to welcome the Bill, but I cannot. While I support much of what is in trigger 1 and trigger 3, subject to the caveats expressed by my noble friend on the Front Bench in his very interesting speech, I want to concentrate on the very narrow issue of trigger 2, in particular the impact of the Bill, now that it has been amended in the Commons, on the operation of the House of Commons Standards Committee. I do so having served as a member of the Select Committee on Members’ Interests in the Commons, which dealt with these matters between 1983 and 1991, and also as a member of the Standards and Privileges Committee from 1995 to 2001. I have had on aggregate 14 years’ experience on this particular committee and its predecessor in the Commons. I gave evidence to the Nolan commission inquiry and saw some of my recommendations accepted, and I have sat through innumerable inquiries in the House of Commons dealing with these matters. It is in that light that I express my reservations today, which I would ask, in particular, former Members of the House of Commons to consider very seriously, and in particular the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, whom I wish to consult.
I support recall. I have supported it right through from the late 1980s, after the John Browne, Member for Winchester, inquiry, to which David Leigh, the Observer journalist, gave evidence. It was following that inquiry that I began to realise that there was a case for constituents to have the right to remove Members in certain conditions. But this Bill is fatally flawed.
In the original Bill, the trigger 2 recall condition was based on the House ordering suspension for 21 sitting days. On 24 November, my honourable friends on the Labour Benches in the House of Commons moved an amendment, Amendment 14, which I believe was a grave error of judgment. I think that there has to be a reconsideration of that amendment. What the amendment did was to reduce recall from 21 days to 10 days. The words in the amendment were,
“where the period is expressed as a number of sitting days, the period specified is a period of at least 10 sitting days”.
In doing that, in my view, they destroyed much of the Bill. What they did was to turn a quasi-judicial committee—which is what it always was when I sat on it—into a political committee.
I shall explain why; it is very simple. Let us say that I am a member of the committee and am sitting there when we are dealing with penalty and discussing a particular case. If I find nine days’ penalty, there is no problem. If I find 10 days’ penalty, I could effectively trigger a national by-election, with huge expenditure—hundreds of thousands of pounds; tens of thousands of pounds by the local authority—simply because I have decided on that additional day. The critical point is the difference between nine and 10 days.
What will happen in that committee is that instead of acting in a quasi-judicial way, it will become a political process; it will make political judgments. I have to confess that if I had been a member of the committee in those circumstances I would have had colleagues in the Tea Room saying to me, “Dale, hang on a minute. Before you decide on 10 days, just remember what is going to happen. It might be that we’re going to have to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds”—or whatever it is—“on a by-election”. You cannot proceed on that basis. You cannot turn a quasi-judicial committee of the House of Commons into a politicised committee where it makes political judgments. That is what Labour’s amendment in the House of Commons did, and that is why it has got to be stopped. I will be moving an amendment on Report to turn that amendment over and reverse this very grave error of judgment.
Why did it happen? It happened, in my view, because the people behind the amendment lacked experience. What I call the boys in short trousers simply did not know what they were doing. There was not a proper consultation. Indeed, there was not a consultation of the Privileges Committee. If there had been, it might have produced some very interesting results.
When it came to the Division on 24 November—which I have here in Hansard—when 204 Members voted for the amendment and 125 voted against, which way did the members of the Standards and Privileges Committees in the House of Commons vote? There are 10 members, and I am going to go through the way that they voted. These are the people on the committee that will be responsible for implementing this particular arrangement. The chairman, a Labour Member, abstained. Dominic Grieve, a former Attorney-General, voted no. Sir Nick Harvey—a prominent Liberal Democrat, important in the Liberal Democrats—voted no; Sir Paul Beresford, no; Mr Geoffrey Cox, no; Christopher Chope, abstained; Dr Alan Whitehead, abstained; and Sir John Randall, abstained. Only two members of the committee voted for that amendment. In other words, the committee realised the danger of what was happening but, because there was insufficient debate, the amendment was carried by the House. I believe that their actions in voting and abstaining in the way that they did was a desperate attempt to preserve the integrity of the Standards Committee, and I hope that the House of Lords has the guts to reverse that stupid decision taken by the House of Commons.
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