Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill

Debate between Peter Bone and David Winnick

2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 18th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Bone]

I absolutely agree that as a matter of fairness we should try to equalise the seats, but it is absolutely wrong to reduce the number of MPs and to say that it is being done on the basis of cost. Democracy cannot have a cost put on it. We could of course have a dictator—that would be very cheap! But that is not how it works. In fact, the Government have tended to go a little way towards being a dictatorship. We have had sofa decisions that were not made in Cabinet, and at times it has been really difficult for us in this House to vote on certain issues because of these wretched programme motions. My hon. Friend the Member for Kettering and I spent a lot of our time during the coalition Government voting against programme motions on every occasion, because we had said in our manifesto that that was what we were going to do.

The former Prime Minister made a great speech on Parliamentary sovereignty, and if those proposals had been enforced, MPs would have been encouraged to have a free vote in Committees—although the Government would have been able to change things on Report—and we would have had more open debates without programme motions. That all fell by the wayside, however, because the Government do not really want that to happen; and, to be honest, the shadow Government do not want it either. That is why we have never made progress on that. Hon. Members will remember that the timetable for this House was going to be run by a parliamentary business Committee within two years of us coming into power. I remember talking to the then Chief Whip, who said that that would happen over his dead body, and of course it never did happen. So please do not talk to me about manifesto commitments.

[Mr David Winnick (Walsall North) (Lab)]

May I take the hon. Gentleman back to his point about the number of Members of Parliament who are on the payroll? Any Government—those whom I support and those whom I oppose—will have not only Members who are on the payroll but Members who want to be on the payroll. Reducing the number of MPs to 600 will inevitably mean fewer independent-minded MPs. Those on both our Front Benches would probably welcome that, but we should not do so. It will be a retrograde step, to say the least, if that happens, but it seems inevitable that it will.

[Mr Bone]

The independent Member is entirely right. Of course, I have to be really careful about what I say today because this could ruin my chances of getting on to the Front Bench. This is a serious and important matter, however. I say gently that there has been a tendency for some Members to come to this House not because they want to be Members of Parliament but because they want to be Ministers. They are not interested in the role of scrutiny. We cannot scrutinise the Government properly if nearly half those on our side are on the payroll. Equally, there will be Opposition Members who are on the “payroll”, even though they do not get paid, unless they are Whips. I have never understood why Whips get paid. We should do away with that, but that is another issue.

The role of scrutiny is really important. I have seen in a recent email that about six Select Committees have vacancies for Conservative Members. If we are having problems filling Select Committees now, what will it be like when there are 50 fewer MPs? Those 50 MPs will not, by their nature, have been in the Executive. As my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch said, there are absolutely no proposals to reduce the size of the Executive in parallel with the reduction in the number of MPs, although there should be.

I want to deal with the question of timing. In my view, it is more than likely that we will have a general election in May, if not before. Such an election would of course be fought on the current boundaries. The argument that we have to get all these boundary changes in place before 2020 is therefore nonsense. Also, it is not good for a Conservative to say that something is out of date just because it is 20 years old. It might be time to start looking at it if it is 120 years out of date, but not after just 20 years.

I want to speak briefly about something that I feel passionately about, which is the other side of our role. We spend a lot of our time here in Parliament from Monday to Thursday—or Monday to Friday if it is one of the 13 weeks in which the House sits on a Friday—doing exactly what we are doing today. The rest of the time, we are looking after our constituents. I have been looking back, and I can tell the House that in the last 100 years, we have never had fewer than 615 Members of Parliament. Way back then, however, they did not have the constituency workload that we have now. I am not complaining about this; constituency work is a very important part of our role. For example, my Listening to Wellingborough and Rushden campaign generates an enormous amount of work. Most Members hold a surgery every week, and my estimate is that I receive at least 1,000 emails, letters and phone calls a week. We have a limited number of staff to help us with that. That workload is going to increase because we are getting rid of MEPs, and it will also increase if we reduce the number of MPs and make the constituencies larger.

I also want to look at how busy Members of Parliament are and what we have to put up with. I am going to touch on an area that does not get a lot of coverage because we do not like to talk about it, for very sensible reasons—namely, the question of security. I doubt that there is a Member in this House who has not been threatened in the last few years. We have seen the terrible death of a colleague. Other colleagues have been attacked. Only recently, I had death threats. My wife has had death threats. The police have intervened. In my first 11 years in this House, I had to dial 999 once from my constituency office because we were worried. Since the referendum, I have had to call 999 three times. I had someone outside chained to the gates of Parliament who had threatened me. I have had two bullet holes—admittedly from air pellets—put in the windows of my office. I have had my house attacked. I have had the office windows smashed. The vile stuff that we get on Twitter is unbelievable. One of the worst things that happened is that some months ago, there was a picture of my youngest son being executed by Isis. They had actually taken another child’s photo and mocked it up, but the police rang me up to say, “Where is your son?” I said, “Well, I think he’s at school”, and they said, “Well, you’d better check.”

We have to put up with all that. We have to have contact with our constituents, and I would not change any of that. Some of us will be getting enhanced security, and the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority is doing its best to help with that. We have to deal with that sort of stuff. We have to deal with constituents’ problems. Some of them are just run of the mill things where we can help out. A lot of the stuff we deal with relates to local government. A lot of it is social care issues, which this House really needs to look at from a bipartisan point of view.

Some of the stuff we deal with, however, is exceptionally serious. I can remember at least two occasions where we campaigned on such matters in this House. As a result of one of those, thanks to Gordon Brown, the NHS position on some treatment changed, and a little boy who would have died got a few years extra life out of it. That sort of thing is worth while, but it is time-consuming. The fact is that if we are going to put more work on ourselves because of leaving the EU while at the same time reducing the number of MPs, we will not do the scrutiny properly, and I am afraid that our service to our constituents will go down. I feel passionately about that, and that is why we should not reduce the number of MPs.

I will tell the House about the effect that the current reforms will have in Northamptonshire. Under the scheme, we are entitled to 6.5 MPs. It is proposed that the seat of my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris) goes all the way up to the borders of Leicester. There is no logic in that and no consistency. My seat will be divided between the constituencies of four different MPs, who will all be representing one council. It does not make any sense. The Boundary Commission proposals move people around willy-nilly. I would have 6,000 coming in from the Corby constituency, 3,000 going into Kettering, another 3,000 going into Northampton South and the northern villages going into the new Daventry seat, which will go up into Leicestershire. If we had the same number of MPs, Northamptonshire would be entitled to seven MPs and we would not have those problems.

I know that there are party political issues about numbers. I urge all Members to put that to one side and to think about Parliament, the Executive and why we are here. I urge everyone to support the Bill. There obviously will be issues that will need to be looked at in Committee. If the hon. Member for North West Durham would like me to, I volunteer to serve on the Committee.

Crime and Courts Bill [Lords] (Programme) ((No. 3)

Debate between Peter Bone and David Winnick

Monday 18th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

I beg to move amendment (d), at end of paragraph 2, leave out ‘at today’s sitting’ and insert

‘in two days (in addition to the First Day already taken)’

It is normally a great privilege to follow the hon. Member for Wallasey (Ms Eagle), but this evening the opposite is the case. I am afraid that what has happened today is part of the deal that has been done to reach all-party agreement. The deal was: “Okay, if we agree to this, we won’t object to the fact that these very important amendments and new clauses won’t be discussed.” It is clear that there will now be a maximum of only 40 minutes in which to discuss some really serious issues. I fail to understand how the Leader of the House or the shadow Leader can say that there will be other methods and time to discuss them.

I have moved a manuscript amendment to the programme motion—the first time I have done so—because of the unusual circumstances. In the short time since it was prepared and we knew what was happening today, 15 right hon. and hon. Members from both sides of the House have signed it, including two former Home Secretaries and the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee.

When we were in opposition, we always used to criticise the then Government for curtailing debate on legislation, but I must say that this is the most outrageous example I have ever seen. These are really serious issues affecting extradition and vulnerable people, and to say that, effectively, they will not be discussed because of a clever way of guillotining their consideration is, to my mind, completely unacceptable.

Over 20 amendments have been selected, never mind all those that were tabled but not selected, and very many Back-Bench Members have signed them. It cannot be right to have tabled a programme motion last Thursday at 5.15 pm, after a huge row at business questions, saying that there would supposedly be plenty of time to discuss the Bill—although people had queries about that—without any knowledge that a Standing Order No. 24 application was going to be tabled and granted. I absolutely believe the Leader of the House when he says that when the Government tabled the new programme motion very late on Thursday they did not know—indeed, they could not have known—that there would be a Standing Order No. 24 application and that three hours of today’s debate would be lost.

If the Leader of the House thought that that amount of time should be available, we are going to be three hours short of it today. It would be possible, even now—I know that it is not going to happen because I have been here and seen this too often—for him to get up and say that this is a perfectly reasonable amendment to the programme motion and accept it. All the Leveson clauses would still be debated exactly as was proposed in the original programme motion; all that would happen is that the important amendments that we have lost would be debated on another day. If the Leader of the House is saying that so much legislation is rushing through this House that we have no time to find on any other days, that is hard to believe since the House of Lords has been given an extra week’s recess because we are not progressing enough business.

In May 2009, when we were in opposition, the Prime Minister-to-be made a speech called “Fixing Broken Politics”—I would recommend it to every right hon. and hon. Member—in which he made it clear that the one thing he was not going to do when he was in power was restrict debate; he was going to have open, transparent debate and allow enough time to scrutinise really important issues.

[Mr David Winnick (Walsall North) (Lab)]

Did the hon. Gentleman really believe what the then Leader of the Opposition, now Prime Minister, said? Did not those of us on the Government Benches during those years say that the programme motions that were being tabled and passed would almost certainly happen in the same way if the Conservatives won the election? I am sure that the hon. Gentleman is not so naive.

[Mr Bone]

I am very naive, because that is exactly what I believed. At that time, the hon. Gentleman would have gone through the same experience of the expenses scandal, when there was a real movement in the country for this place to change so that proper scrutiny would take place in this mother of Parliaments.

Previously, any scrutiny occurred down the corridor; we never got the chance to reach important clauses and amendments in Bills. We complained about that week in, week out. Yet here we are tonight having lost any debate whatsoever on really important clauses. Even when the situation was at its worst, under the Blair regime, I cannot remember anything being so dramatically curtailed. Why on earth could not the Leader of the House simply have said that we were going to have another day because of the Standing Order No. 24 debate? We could have extended tonight’s timetable by another three hours—that would have been sufficient—but given that that has not happened, the only way that we could, at the very last minute, come up with an acceptable, in-order amendment, was to say, “Deal with Leveson today and finish that at the time the Government suggested”, which will now be 10.44 pm, “and then move on to these important issues another day.” It is condescending to say that a few Members will be upset. It is not about a few Members being upset; these are really important issues that we should be debating as a House.

National Referendum on the European Union

Debate between Peter Bone and David Winnick

Monday 24th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

It is customary when summing up to say, “This has been a good debate,” but this has been an amazing debate. We must thank the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Natascha Engel) and the Backbench Business Committee for putting it on, and we must also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) for having opened it so sensibly so many hours ago. I have sat and listened to most of the debate, but as there were 52 speeches, I must apologise to the majority of contributors because I will not be able to respond to what they said.

Let me say at the beginning, however, that I must praise the Prime Minister. If it were not for him, we would not have the Backbench Business Committee. If it were not for him, we would not have petitions either, and it is the petitioning of this House of Commons that has brought this debate into being. I also thank the Prime Minister for his speech on 26 May 2009, when he encouraged returning power to the people. He said that in the past when debates were held in this House, the arguments went one way and the other, but then the bells rang and the Whips got into action and Members floated through the Commons like a herd of sheep. That is not going to happen tonight. I am going to take the advice of my Prime Minister when he encouraged every Member to be independent-minded, to put his constituents first, to put his country first, and to put narrow party interests last. I say, “Well done, Prime Minister,” and I will be voting in accordance with my conscience tonight.

It is unfortunate that some of the Whips have not quite got the Prime Minister’s message yet, but there is a rule of thumb in this House: if the three Front Benches agree on something, it is absolutely wrong. That is the situation tonight.

I say to my Whips that a mistake has been made tonight. The Backbench Business Committee was set up to test the will of Parliament, not in order for us to vote on party lines. This is exactly the sort of debate on which we should have a free vote. I am of the opinion that if there had been a free vote tonight, this motion would have been carried.

Lights have started flashing, instructing me to shut up early, although I thought I could go on for a little longer. I am afraid I must apologise to all 52 members who contributed for not having had time to comment on their speeches, but I will write to them.

Question put.

The House proceeded to a Division.

[Mr David Winnick (Walsall North) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. Is there any reason why the vote is being delayed?