It is very clear that the Committee is overwhelmingly against the Government on Clause 2, although we hope that the Minister will reflect further before Report. Assuming that the Government stick to Clause 2 on Report, it is clear that the House will want to debate it further and, probably, divide on it.
I turn to the procedural issues that are raised thereby. First, although we pay tribute to the officials and the remarkable technical team who have managed our proceedings—and done so, I would say, to the efficiency limits of the technology available—our reflection on the last few hours is that it has been patchy at best. We have not been able to hear in this debate from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, one of our most distinguished Members, and I could barely hear the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris, another of our distinguished colleagues, when he was speaking earlier. I do not think we would find it acceptable in any other circumstances to proceed to a vote or a decision of the House while key Members were being silenced and were unable to participate in the debate.
The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, referred earlier to the interchange between Members, which of course is necessarily reduced when we are online, but perhaps I may also draw attention to something that has become
very clear in this debate. We need to separate the ability to vote online from the process of debate that leads to votes. Clearly, we cannot have a Report stage until it is possible to have a reliable system of voting online. I hope that our colleagues on the Procedure Committee—I think that my noble friend Lord Foulkes, who is here, is one, as well as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge—will bring to the attention of the committee an issue that has become very clear in this debate: the big divorce between the ability to participate online, which is extremely restricted, and the engagement of the House as a whole.
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When we debate and make decisions in the Chamber, the House as a whole is engaged—not that every Member who votes is necessarily in the Chamber for a debate that leads to a vote, although normally quite a high proportion are—by virtue of the fact that every Member is in the House, at least while voting. They are aware of the issue and a large number of them are engaged with the subject of the debate. That is particularly important on the government side. On this occasion, only one Conservative Member besides the Minister has spoken, whereas in the Chamber quite a number would be present and able to listen to the arguments.
Therefore, if we proceed to an online vote with an exclusively online debate, we will be faced with a debate almost entirely divorced from the process of voting. Indeed, while I have been listening to the discussion, I am afraid I have allowed myself to be distracted and have looked at what is going on on Twitter. Successive online votes have taken place in the House of Commons this afternoon. One of my Labour colleagues—I shall not identify who it is—has been tweeting about how she has been able to give online interviews and indeed construct and send tweets while voting, so little engaged has she been in the subject of the votes.
Therefore, I hope that it is possible for our colleagues on the Procedure Committee to take back what I think will be the strong feeling in the Committee based on today’s proceedings that it is not good enough to have just an online process of voting. We need debates to take place in the Chamber on a hybrid basis, obviously allowing people to participate from outside too, but with real interaction and engagement in the Chamber leading up to the vote so that we have the best approximation possible to proper parliamentary debate and engagement before we divide.