Business without Debate

Ian Mearns Excerpts

Tuesday 15th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I can now inform the House of the arrangements for the election of the Chairs of the Treasury Committee and the Backbench Business Committee. The Treasury Committee Chair is vacant following the resignation of Nicky Morgan. The Chair of the Backbench Business Committee is elected, of course, at the start of each Session.

Colleagues, nominations for both posts should be submitted by 5 pm on Monday 21 October. Only Members of the Conservative party may be candidates for the Treasury Committee election, for reasons that are well familiar to the House. For those observing our proceedings, I explain that this is because Select Committee Chairs are apportioned to different parties in accordance with party strength in the House. In this Parliament, the Treasury Select Committee Chair is in the hands of the Conservative party. Only Members whose party is not represented in Her Majesty’s Government may be candidates for the Backbench Business Committee election. The ballot will take place on Wednesday 23 October from 10 am to 1.30 pm. Briefing notes with more details about the election will be made available to Members and published online.

[Ian Mearns (Gateshead) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I seek your guidance. Just over a week ago, one of my constituents, who wishes not to have his name mentioned, after applying for a passport for a son who lived abroad, received a knock-back letter from the Home Office.

In the envelope with the letter was also documentation from two other citizens applying for passports. They are totally unrelated to my constituent. We have written to and emailed the Home Office and the Home Secretary’s office, and followed up on that communication, asking for an urgent response, but we have not yet had an acknowledgment, let alone a reply. All we have asked for is urgent instruction as to where to send the documents so that they can be received safely and the passport applications can be dealt with quickly and efficiently. These documents concern applications not made by people who live in my constituency, but relate to people from totally different parts of the country.

Although my constituent wishes to remain anonymous, I would also like to pay tribute to his public service attitude. Having been knocked back by the Home Office, he could have done anything he wanted with those documents, because nobody knew he had them, but he brought them to my office. I have tried to bring the fact that I now retain them on his behalf to the attention of the Home Secretary and the Home Office, but I have not yet received a response. These applications need to be dealt with urgently.

[Mr Speaker]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his point of order and for his characteristic courtesy in giving me advance notice of his intention to raise it. My response is that, as will be demonstrably obvious to everybody, this is an administrative error, and something of a mess has flowed from that error. Human error is a fact of life, and we do not dwell on that, but it is very important that the matter is re-routed as expeditiously as possible, as those two other individuals with pressing cases would want. The public service that the hon. Gentleman has performed is to bring the matter to the attention of the House and hopefully very soon to that of the relevant Department, the Home Office, and the right hon. Member for Witham (Priti Patel), the Home Secretary. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will get a response from the Home Office tomorrow, if not tonight.

This is my counsel to the hon. Gentleman, in so far as he requires it. If his action tonight does not elicit a speedy response, I suggest that he raise the matter at business questions on Thursday. More widely, I suggest that he follow my general advice, which is “persist, persist, persist; repeat, repeat, repeat.” In short, I say to the hon. Gentleman, “Make a general nuisance of yourself, sir, until the Government sit up and take notice, in the interests of those two individuals.” I underline what the hon. Gentleman said by way of tribute to his public service-oriented constituent.

[Mr Speaker]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. No one can accuse him of failing to take his opportunities when they present themselves. I cannot give him an immediate assurance that an urgent question application which has not yet been made, and which therefore manifestly I have not seen, will be acceded to by the Chair. However, the hon. Gentleman was present and correct when the Minister for Europe and the Americas, who has just beetled out of the Chamber—perfectly properly, I hasten to add—referred en passant to my enthusiasm for urgent questions. Whether the Minister did so with any great enthusiasm himself, I leave observers to decide for themselves. If the Minister does not approve of my granting of urgent questions, he is perfectly welcome to his opinion, which will not cause me any loss of sleep. But it is certainly the case that I very much favour the urgent question as an instrument of scrutiny, and indeed, very often, of Back-Bench opportunity. So if the hon. Gentleman submits an urgent question—or if the hon. Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns), the Chair of the Backbench Business Committee, does so—it will be carefully considered. He is clearly not planning to do so at the moment, but we are where we are.

[Ian Mearns]

Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. At the moment, I am not the Chair of the Backbench Business Committee.

[Mr Speaker]

Oh yes, of course. There is a vacancy. Far be it for me to accuse the hon. Gentleman of being a procedural pedant, because the Chair is in favour of procedural pedantry. He is not; but he was a distinguished, indeed illustrious, Chair of the Backbench Business Committee, who regularly had confetti showered upon him by Members in all parts of the House.

If the matter comes to me, I will consider it. Let us leave it at that.