Procedure and House Affairs committee  That's one of our concerns and that's one of the debates we've been having over the last week or so, that the proposals for physical Parliament and the use of the type of virtual participation the government has now allowed us to have and the use of proxies perhaps doesn't allow

Procedure and House Affairs committee  The same thing happened in the House of Commons when we did have remote voting. Nobody voted in person. Everybody voted using the online system and that, as I say, was very quick and efficient and did seem to work. When we came back to fully physical voting, the original proposa

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I'm not aware of there being agreement between the usual channels. I think that would have to be a conversation at that time as to whether there was a need to return to a remote voting system rather than using the physical system with the increased numbers of proxies that we're g

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Absolutely. The reason we came back physically last week is very much in line with the fact that schools are reopening, that we have more businesses reopening, and it was important that Parliament was seen to have a change in the way it operated.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I would concur with what Matt said. Even the most doubtful of my colleagues, the most opposed to remote voting, the most traditionalist of all, could not complain. The system that was introduced was quick, efficient and secure. It worked. Whilst there was a lot of noise before it

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I think there would be various reasons they might cite, but they are the Scottish National Party, which advocates Scottish independence. They have, in the Scottish Parliament, where the Scottish National Party runs the government, a form of electronic voting for which you need to

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I think my committee would not have recommended any changes at all unless we could be confident that they would be strictly time-limited and temporary. We're very aware that the House of Commons has developed its procedures over 700 years. The biggest changes to our proceedings

Procedure and House Affairs committee  First of all, you would need the government to actually put the motion forward on the Order Paper, and the government does not support electronic remote voting for normal times. I think it would be fair to say that, at the moment, there is not a majority in the House of Commons

Procedure and House Affairs committee  We're very much driven and governed by the government's advice to the general public. One of the things that has been key to what we've done is that we follow the advice that is given to everybody. We all have to follow the Public Health England advice or the public health advice

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes, absolutely. What was proved was that the system was very robust. It was very secure. We tested it, and we had a number of concerns that we raised. For example, one of the things that we had in the original trial vote was the possibility of changing our vote. We felt that it

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Absolutely, and I think that for any change to any voting system, if it's a lesson that we had from last week, in the headlines that you will have seen, it was that the new form of voting was not tested before a live division. I would recommend that for any changes to any voting

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes, I think that's fair. I think we found one member who had never even actually used a mobile phone, but they now can vote, so yes.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Very simply, a proxy vote is one where another member is able to cast the vote for that person. A member can fill in a pink slip for the other person, sign it on their behalf and hand it in, because that's been allowed by the Speaker. One thing that has changed is that deferred

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes. The Scottish National Party have the very policy that they would like to move to electronic voting, full stop. They don't want to have the division lobby. I suspect there's quite a number of members who are keen on the idea of having more electronic voting, because voting