4 Providing certainty about when Members
are required to be present in the House
49. A recurring message which we heard from Members
in the course of this inquiry was the desire for certainty about
when their presence will be required in the House (specifically,
to vote).[43] Diary commitments
in the constituency and elsewhere can be badly disrupted by lack
of notice of the business to be taken in the House, and short-notice
changes to the business or, particularly, the whipping. David
Blunkett, for example, suggested that
[…] what would help, in a purely practical and
common sense way, would be certainty of sittings, proper notice,
the ability to manage time effectively, and the avoidance of complete
disruption to a range of activities inside and outside the House
which are directly related to the role of a Member of Parliament
and their political duties.[44]
Jo Swinson argued on similar lines for
[...] more advance notice of business. In any modern
workplace meetings and events are planned more than two weeks
in advance. MPs do lots of work outside of the Chamber, and the
uncertainty over meetings due to changing parliamentary business
makes diary management incredibly inefficient, using additional
staff resource that could be better deployed serving constituents.
No one will mind if an emergency means there is a sudden need
for legislation or debating time and business needs to change,
that is the nature of politics. However, to set business only
a week or two in advance purely for the convenience of government
is not sensible when 650 MPs' working patterns should be considered.[45]
50. Procedural solutions to this issue are, regrettably,
very difficult to find. In our consultation document, we floated
four possibilities:
- greater use of deferred divisions;
- a defined voting time;
- more advance notice of business;
- providing that no running whipped business, or
no business requiring a division in the middle of the sitting
day, may normally be taken on one or more specified days of the
week.
51. There are great difficulties, either of principle
or of practice, with all of these. Referring to the third and
fourth of these options, the Leader of the House commented "Some
of the possibilities to which you refer would be incompatible
what the House of Commons Reform Committee referred to as 'the
Government's right to have the opportunity to put its legislative
and other propositions to the House, at a day of its choosing'."[46]
Questioned on the point in oral evidence, the Leader proved no
more inclined to address the issue, arguing, "If we were
going to lose a quarter of the week by having, for example, Wednesday,
no votes or no business in the Chamber, it would cause quite a
lot of problems in terms of business management".[47]
These comments effectively rule out any possibility of avoiding
votes in the middle of the sitting day on any particular day of
the week. We suspect in any case that any such provision would
be likely to be honoured more in the breach than the observance,
as the Government tabled business motions to "notwithstand"
the relevant standing orders to take business which it considered
to be urgent.
Advance notice of business
52. Notice
of business is now normally given, in the Thursday business statement,
for the following two weeks; and although changes are sometimes
made to the business announced, we recognise that the Government
generally tries to give as much notice as possible. It is inevitable
that Parliamentary business is subject to change, and notwithstanding
the difficulties which that causes for other aspects of their
Parliamentary role, business in the Chamber remains a central
focus for Members of Parliament and they need to be prepared to
attend to it whenever that is called for. Nevertheless there may
be more which the Government, and others, can do to ensure that
Members are able to use their time at Westminster effectively.
We urge
the Government to redouble its efforts to provide Members with
accurate and timely information about the business which is to
be taken in the Chamber.
Voting
53. There remains the possibility of deferred divisions,
or a defined voting time such as is provided for in the standing
orders of the Scottish Parliament. Both the Leader of the House
and the Clerk of the House declared themselves inclined against
such reform, on the grounds that it would divorce debate from
decision and thereby undermine one of the principal functions
of a Parliament. The current provision for deferred divisions
tends (albeit not without exception) to apply not to the decision
or decisions at the end of a debate, but to business which is
taken without debate in the Chamber, such as the approval of statutory
instruments which have been debated in a delegated legislation
committee.
54. We are much
influenced by the views of the Clerk of the House and the Leader
of the House on this issue, and consequently we do not recommend
the introduction of greater use of deferred divisions, or of a
defined voting time, at this time. We intend to look in more detail
at the issue of voting, including whether to introduce electronic
voting, in a later inquiry, during which we will consider these
possibilities further.
43 See, for example: Qq 63, 89, 100,120, 178; Ev w66,
w74, w77, w82, w88. Back
44
Ev w3 Back
45
Ev w86 Back
46
Ev w58 Back
47
Q 279 Back
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