My Lords, I will also speak to Amendment 3 in my name and those of my noble friends Lord Lexden and Lord Norton and the noble Lord, Lord Alton. Our purpose throughout as a cross-party group has been to try to answer the very powerful point made by the Constitution Committee of your Lordships’ House about the second trigger in the Bill concerning suspensions by the Standards Committee. I will remind the House briefly of that very important comment:
“the provision that an MP should be subject to recall where he or she is suspended from the House for ten sittings days or more means that it will be MPs themselves, rather than voters, who under this scenario determine whether the recall process can be triggered. The constitutional purpose of recall is to increase MPs’ direct accountability to their electorates: it is questionable whether that purpose is achieved when the trigger is put in the hands of
MPs rather than constituents. There is also a possibility that decisions taken either by the House of Commons Committee on Standards or by the House itself may become skewed by knowledge of the ten-day trigger”.
The Government have now responded to this criticism with two important contentions. First,
“The Government believes that it is important to be careful to respect the disciplinary arrangements of the House of Commons”.
I had some difficulty in squaring that view with the purpose of the Bill, which is to increase direct accountability of MPs to voters. Deference to MPs’ own preferences about the regulation of standards created in a quite different environment and for a quite different purpose cannot be squared with direct accountability to the public. The second of the Government’s contentions in relation to the Constitution Committee’s concerns is that,
“It will be for the standards committee and for the House of Commons to judge how they wish to respond to the introduction of a recall mechanism”.
No one can disagree with that; they will have to work out how to respond.
However, lo and behold, I discovered this very morning this report published by the Standards Committee. In over 100 pages it sets out in extreme detail and with great relevance to this part of the Bill, a whole set of proposals for the future of that committee. It comes from a sub-committee chaired by one of the lay members but comprising six very respected Members of that House and that committee. The proposals have huge significance in terms of the committee’s composition, its role and the way in which it could operate in the future. Nothing could have more salience for this part of the Bill and, indeed, to our amendments. It beggars belief that the Government’s response to the Constitution Committee of your Lordships’ House, sent to the committee just a few days ago by Mr Sam Gyimah, made no reference whatever to the imminence of this report. It is also, incidentally, very relevant to Amendment 6 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours.
I simply do not know Mr Gyimah, as he entered the Commons in 2010 and by that time I had retired. I cannot imagine that a Minister of the Crown actually intended to mislead either our Constitution Committee or your Lordships’ House, but he must surely have been very badly advised or informed not to make any reference to this extremely important report. What were his officials thinking? I can imagine only that he may have been persuaded to be disingenuous, since surely he would not wish to have been thought naive. Either way, these are very unsatisfactory circumstances.
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I and my colleagues are bitterly disappointed that we are now considering this section of the Bill with no idea of how the Government or the House of Commons as a whole intend to react to these recommendations. This report is extremely important. I trust that my noble friends on the Front Bench have been fully briefed about its contents because, if they have not, somebody is surely seriously at fault.
The report intimately relates to the tasks given to the Standards Committee in the Bill before your Lordships’ House. To consider one without knowing
about the other is just absurd and fails to recognise the risks to the Standards Committee, about which we were reminded so forensically by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, at Second Reading. Placing in the committee’s hands judgments about who should and who should not be subjected to a recall petition puts it and the Commons as a whole in an extremely invidious position. It risks further politicising the committee and, in so doing, seriously damaging public confidence in the whole recall process just when it so desperately needs to be reinforced.
Anyone who has followed the long gestation of these proposals must recognise that the perception outside of what the Government call “disciplinary arrangements” is that we inside simply mean that Members of Parliament should make the essential decisions about the potential recall of their colleagues. The system as proposed seems to place the red card of the recall procedure not in the hands of voters or in those of an independent referee but in the hands of MPs themselves. Unless the Commons first addresses the report of the Standards Committee, published this morning, on these very matters, the Bill and the recall process will be fatally flawed.
My noble friends and I argued in Committee that the best way out of this problem was to create a new, independent trigger which could be used by electors themselves, all overseen by something akin to an election court. I readily acknowledge that those proposals did not command the support in your Lordships’ House that we hoped for, and I understand the reasons.
However, I think that Members across the House will equally acknowledge—indeed, they have done so previously—that we have tried to come up with a satisfactory remedy. It is most disappointing that the Government have, by contrast, produced no alternative proposals whatever. Ministers have failed to make a compelling case for the second trigger or to explain how the Standards Committee can be protected from the invidious position into which it will otherwise inevitably be placed. In the absence of that case and that explanation, our Amendments 2 and 3 seek to do two complementary things.
Starting with Amendment 3, we strengthen the criminal trigger in the Bill by saying that any offence could cause a recall petition to be opened. The whole premise behind the Bill is to hand a measure of power to electors. In the case of an MP who had committed a minor offence, it would be for voters to determine whether they viewed it as sufficiently serious to merit about 7,500 of them turning up at designated places in each constituency to sign a special recall petition. I suspect that in the case of, say, a public order offence to do with a political protest or a minor motoring misdemeanour, the electors would be understanding and generous enough not to seek to dismiss their MP, especially given the quite extensive length that people have to go to in order to sign a petition. It is our contention that if the Government were to accept this quite radical strengthening of the criminal trigger, it could leave behind the non-criminal trigger and leave MPs and the Standards Committee completely out of the recall process.
It would be wrong, of course, to lose the second trigger without the substantial broadening of the first—although it could be right to do both in tandem. Doing so would mean acknowledging that the attempt to tie down bad, but not criminal, behaviour as a cause for recall had failed. Given the very wide concerns expressed on all sides of the House in Committee, these twin steps would seem to be a very reasonable compromise. They are simple proposals and would get the Government out of this dreadful bind that they have created for themselves.
Whatever their view on the amendments, I appeal to Ministers to recognise that the very existence of this new Standards Committee report today adds considerable weight to our argument. Indeed, the report recommends that, even in its more limited existing role—forgetting the Recall of MPs Bill for a moment—the committee should be rebalanced to introduce more lay members and increase their number from three to seven, so that there would be seven lay members and seven elected members. The need to clarify the balance of the committee becomes all the more pressing if the second trigger is allowed to stay in the Bill. Whether it happens or not is the hinge on which the credibility of the second trigger either hangs or falls.
It surely makes sense to determine the crucial matter one way or another before putting the Bill, in its present form, on the statute book. In these circumstances, your Lordships should not be asked to look at the Bill again on Third Reading until that is resolved and the whole issue of the role of the committee, its membership and its operation has been comprehensively addressed. In the mean time, I beg to move.