My Lords, we debated an amendment in Committee to deal with this matter. Put simply, the problem is this: if the Bill becomes law, we will have two different systems running in parallel. We will have the system as envisaged in the Bill and a separate, older system, which is the election court. As I said in the previous discussion, it is possible for an election court to punish a Member of Parliament, deprive him or her of their seat and not allow them to stand for a number of years in any by-election for a lesser offence than that covered by the Bill. Clause 1(11) states:
“The loss by an MP of his or her seat under this Act as a result of a recall petition does not prevent him or her standing in the resulting by-election”.
That is very clear, yet the election court has the power—and used it in the case of Phil Woolas in 2010—to prevent a Member of Parliament standing in any by-election for a number of years. That seems to me, at the very least, inconsistent and potentially unfair. After all, under this Bill an MP could be sentenced to a term of imprisonment of up to a year, yet he would still be subject to the Bill and would be able to stand at the by-election. In the case of Phil Woolas and the election court, he was not sentenced to imprisonment but he lost his seat. I am not talking about the merits or demerits of what he did; I am talking about what the election court did to him, which was at variance with the purpose of the Bill.
Therefore, the amendment is very simple. It is much milder than the amendment we debated in Committee, so I hope that the Government will find it fairly easy to accept. It says:
“Within 2 years … the Secretary of State must lay before each House of Parliament a report assessing the merits and feasibility of granting election courts the discretion of initiating a recall petition process”.
We are not making a dramatic change; we are saying that, if the Government are so minded, they can take steps to ensure that in future an election court can say, “No, we don’t want to do what we did to Phil Woolas. We want to subject him to the provisions of this particular Bill”. It seems a very reasonable and mild amendment, and the Government can surely say yes to it. I beg to move.
6.15 pm