Forcing MPs back to Westminster betrays the government's real view of parliament

The virtual parliament is no more. The government has whipped its MPs to junk a series of innovations introduced in April to allow MPs to work remotely in favour of socially distant business as usual. Instead of virtual voting, MPs will be summoned back to Westminster.

Colleagues who are shielding or unable to travel to London will now be excluded from participating in parliamentary proceedings. As many as 250 MPs who are vulnerable or who have caring responsibilities face a stark choice – between risking their lives or those of their loved ones and being unable to represent their constituents. The main justification given by the government for abolishing hybrid sittings was that MPs could not do their job from their constituencies because they were not able to spontaneously intervene in their colleagues’ speeches. Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the house, argued this meant the quality of debate was reduced. While it is true that interventions enliven debate in the Commons in a way that sets it apart from other legislatures, their absence seems a small price to pay for enabling all elected members to participate.

Before the May bank holiday recess, the government decided to reinstate the requirement of MPs to be physically present in parliament, and bring to an end the new ways of working that house authorities had moved heaven and earth to put in place in just a few weeks. At the time the government hoped that MPs would be able to return to voting in person by walking into the aye and no lobbies in the usual way.

But last week the Commons speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, acting on advice from Public Health England, said that he would not allow voting in the lobbies and asked the government to find a new solution. That was when the government came up with the idea of a conga line of socially distanced MPs stretching through the Palace of Westminster, waiting to walk through the chamber to vote. This is a solution that has none of the supposed advantages of voting in person – such as being able to catch a minister for a word on behalf of a constituent. And many disadvantages, which were painfully apparent in today’s first new-style votes – as the conga line of MPs snaked for miles through the parliamentary estate making social distancing impossible.

For many MPs, standing in line for hours waiting to vote will be their main experience of participating in the restored in-person Commons, because of all the MPs who can travel to Westminster, only 50 will be able to participate at any one time in the chamber. In order to maintain social distancing, the rest will have to watch from their offices until a vote is called. Each vote will take around half an hour – twice as long as a remote division used to take.

It may be that MPs get so tired of the palaver of queuing to cast their votes that they do all they can to minimise the number of votes that are held. A backbencher deciding whether to push an amendment to a vote will weigh carefully whether to incur the ire of her colleagues by making them traipse around the palace again. Of course fewer votes will not trouble the government but reducing opportunities to test the will of the house will be bad for scrutiny.

Another reason that the government wanted the virtual parliament abolished was that it feared it would restrict its ability to pass as much legislation as it wanted. Early hybrid sittings in the chamber were limited in duration because of the requirements of the broadcasting technology, and there were concerns about whether there would be sufficient capacity to hold public bill committees online. The government rejected solutions to both these issues offered by the house authorities before it took the decision to abolish virtual sittings.

Many MPs did not back the move. The procedure committee – the normal origin of sound and sensible proposals about how the Commons should run itself – put forward amendments to the government’s proposals that would have seen virtual participation and remote voting continue. These were backed by 16 select committee chairs, but rejected by the government.

The government betrays its narrow and expedient view of the role of parliament when it seeks to reassure those MPs unable to travel to Westminster that it is working to find a way that their votes can be counted. Not only would proxy voting or mass pairing (where one MP abstains to cancel out the absent vote of another who would have voted the opposite way) hand significant power to the party whips, but also absent MPs would be unable to participate in debates on legislation.

Rees-Mogg wrote yesterday that “Westminster has been the seat of our democracy for centuries. It will take more than coronavirus to change that.” Apparently a government careless of the right of all MPs to vote on behalf of their constituents is sufficient.

• Hannah White is deputy director of the Institute for Government and was a House of Commons clerk between 2004 and 2014