Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Stephen Williams Excerpts

Tuesday 18th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Thomas Docherty]

The Minister is a thoroughly reasonable individual and I am sure he will not hold that statement against the rest of Her Majesty’s loyal Opposition when he considers accepting our amendments.

As has been outlined previously—it would be inappropriate for me to go into great detail—we do not support the principle of a five-year term, for one practical reason that has not been touched on before, which is that it would take us into a clash with the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and the Northern Ireland elections that are scheduled for 2015.

As this is the first opportunity that the Minister has had to address the House on the matter since our Committee stage last year, I hope that he will be able to provide us with an update on the Government’s plans for providing flexibility to the devolved Administrations to vary the dates of their elections. That is an extremely personal matter, as I shall explain. Perhaps he can tell the House what progress has been made in his consultation with the devolved Administrations on how any such alteration of the date of their elections would be achieved.

That is directly relevant to the issue under discussion because of the different number of days of Prorogation. As my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda outlined, we have 25 days for the Scottish Parliament, the Northern Ireland Assembly, the National Assembly for Wales and local elections, and just 17 days for this place. Let me give a simple local example to show why new clause 4 and others are so important to the date.

The differing number of days will cause great confusion for parties and for the electorate in the 2015 election cycle. Part of my constituency is the Dunfermline East Scottish Parliament seat. We have an MSP called Helen Eadie. Under the current rules—we still do not have firm proposals from the Government to alter the date—some two and a half weeks from polling day it would be legitimate for the Labour party, for example, to send out leaflets saying, “Vote Helen Eadie for your Member of the Scottish Parliament and vote Thomas Docherty for Member of Parliament.” That is an unsatisfactory situation, and it is the reason why my hon. Friend and I are hoping to persuade the Minister tonight that he should change the length of Prorogation to 25 days to give us consistency across the whole of the United Kingdom.

There is also the question of how campaign finance will work. Members are painfully aware of the importance of ensuring that money is correctly apportioned to the long campaign, as it is commonly known, as opposed to the short campaign. Joint elections could give rise to difficult legal and technical disputes, as we saw in the case of the Under-Secretary of State for Scotland, the right hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell), if sums of money are inadvertently misallocated. We therefore hope that the Government will accept our reasonable amendment.

[Stephen Williams (Bristol West) (LD)]

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that such anomalies already exist and have existed for a long time? In England it is common for local government elections to be held on the same day as a parliamentary election. In Bristol those local government elections follow an entirely different timetable from the parliamentary election.

[Thomas Docherty]

The hon. Gentleman makes a perfectly sensible point, although I always caution hon. Members not to equate local elections in England with elections to the devolved Administrations. There is a substantive difference in the amount of spend that is allowed, and the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland devolved elections use the same formulas for election spend. Perhaps it was an oversight of previous Governments not to address the valid point that the hon. Gentleman makes. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) has said, we are prepared to admit that we did not achieve all the legislation that we would like to have achieved, although if we were to ask the electorate what was the most important thing that we could have achieved, fixing that would not necessarily have been the top priority.

Reference has been made to the issue of Prime Ministers handing over power to their party or other parties. I think that the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford misunderstood the difference between the House being adjourned and the House being prorogued. As you know, Mr Deputy Speaker, if the House is adjourned, existing legislation is not lost. If it prorogues, however, all legislation except public Bills falls and the legislative process must start again. That is why it is important that when the Parliamentary Resources Unit produces its next brief for Conservative Members it should spend some time getting those details correct.