Evidence of meeting #21 for Procedure and House Affairs in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was chamber.
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Clerk of the House, United Kingdom House of Commons
I think it's probably ad hoc, but you could always ask the parties what they have done, and I'm sure they would happily respond to you, possibly more willingly than to me.
Liberal
Ginette Petitpas Taylor Liberal Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB
You said that 29% of your parliamentarians are female. What is the average age of your female parliamentarians?
Clerk of the House, United Kingdom House of Commons
I have no absolutely no idea, but that is something we can easily find out, and we can give you the mean as well as the median.
Liberal
Clerk of the House, United Kingdom House of Commons
There are some who are quite experienced. There's also an interesting issue with regard to age of first election, if you see what I mean. One tends to assume they'll be young, but they're not young in every case. There are women of quite a wide variety of ages entering for the first time. There was concern in 2015 because several first-term female members unexpectedly stood down and did not wish to be re-elected. I think that was from a mixture of personal circumstances, but there was also concern as to whether that suggested an unfriendly culture or a failure of our family-friendly policies in some broad perspective.
I think Professor Childs will probably be better placed to answer that.
Liberal
Ginette Petitpas Taylor Liberal Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB
Thank you.
Could you also perhaps elaborate a bit on the issue of Fridays? You've indicated, I believe, that you sit on 12 or 13 Fridays during the calendar year. Could you explain to us what is different on Fridays? Is it routine proceedings? How does that work? What does that look like?
Clerk of the House, United Kingdom House of Commons
Fridays are merely for backbenchers to introduce legislation.
There's no government business, so there is no whipped business. There can be quite a lot of members here, but they don't have to be here according to their parties. On a big day, on the first Friday of the session that just ended, we had about 450 members here because there was a bill on assisted dying, which is obviously a very major subject, but I would mislead you if I suggested that was a typical Friday. On a typical Friday there's a handful of members.
Liberal
Ginette Petitpas Taylor Liberal Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB
How do you deal with your private members' bills? Where do you fit that in to your calendar?
Clerk of the House, United Kingdom House of Commons
We deal with it just on these 13 Fridays.
Liberal
Clerk of the House, United Kingdom House of Commons
Yes. There's no other time that they can be dealt with.
Liberal
Ginette Petitpas Taylor Liberal Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB
Thank you.
I'm going to share my time with Mr. Lightbound.
Liberal
Joël Lightbound Liberal Louis-Hébert, QC
I have a quick question.
You mentioned earlier that you have a voting system called “nodding through”. I am wondering if you could elaborate on what that is.
Clerk of the House, United Kingdom House of Commons
Nodding through, although members may not recognize this description—I mean my members—is actually a form of proxy voting. A member is in the precinct but too infirm or uncomfortable for it to be reasonable to ask them to pass physically through the voting lobbies. We vote by passing through lobbies, past a desk at which the name is taken, and members are then counted, unlike standing in the chamber.
If you are ill or, for example, on crutches temporarily or indeed permanently and the whips of both major parties agree, they will confirm that the member is in the precinct. They will then discover which way he or she wishes their vote to be cast, and then one of the whips will act in effect as a proxy in order to cast that vote. It is pretty rare. It is mainly used, as I said, for those who are either quite seriously ill or temporarily or permanently incapacitated physically. It has, I believe, been used recently for those who are in the final stages of pregnancy or who are nursing an infant.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
In England, you have to walk through either the “yes” lobby or the “no” lobby. You don't stand at your seat to vote, because not everyone has a seat.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
We're technically finished time-wise, but because we started late, does anyone have any pressing questions?
Liberal
Joël Lightbound Liberal Louis-Hébert, QC
You mentioned precincts. When you say the member has to be in the precinct to nod through, what are the precincts? Can you say what that includes?
Clerk of the House, United Kingdom House of Commons
That's really a matter for the whips, and we have no formal knowledge of how they do this, but we are pretty confident that “precincts” means where the Speaker's writ runs. I think it can include an outbuilding, but the whips are supposed to go and inspect the member to make sure they're alive.
Clerk of the House, United Kingdom House of Commons
Therefore, they're unlikely to be in an office in an outbuilding. That normally means in the palace. What can't be allowed is a member who is, let us say, 10 or 15 minutes away, communicating by email or telephone or even video conferencing. It's the physical presence of the member in the precincts that counts.
I think you have precincts as well, do you not? In other words, you have the same concept, I think, of the parliamentary precinct—