Mr James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Conservative): I am grateful to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for allowing me to speak and to Mr Speaker for selecting the amendment that stands in my name and those of a goodly number of right hon. and hon. Members from across the Chamber. I thank you for allowing a goodly amount of time for this important and useful debate. I do not intend to take up much of the House’s time, because a number of useful speeches have addressed most of the important arguments on both sides of the debate.

I very much agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Mr Knight), who started the debate by saying that this is a matter of taste, discretion and delicacy. There are not passionate arguments on either side. One side is not definitely right and the other side definitely wrong. It is a matter of how we handle such machines, what we use them for, what their purpose is and how we ensure that debate in the Chamber is as good as possible.

In fact, as is often the case when we discuss matters that affect ourselves, today’s debate on the issue has been among those of the highest quality that I have heard recently. My right hon. Friend’s Committee was split on the report; four of us have signed the amendment disagreeing with it. We go from his stance, which is that virtually any electronic device can be used for virtually any purpose either in the Chamber or in Committee, through to that of my right hon. Friend the Member for Saffron Walden (Sir Alan Haselhurst), a former Deputy Speaker—he is by no means a dinosaur in this matter—whose broad view is that such devices should not be used for any purpose whatsoever.

I received a letter from a very senior Member with which I would not necessarily agree. He said that he felt that the rules applying in the House should be precisely the same as those applying at the opera—we should not use such devices at all—and there is some sense in that, although I do not necessarily agree with it.

Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Labour): Give us a song!

Mr Gray: I shall not give the House a song; I fear that my voice does not rise to that.

I would not necessarily agree with the hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger), who focused on the use of electronic devices for Twitter. It is right that I suggested in the e-mail that I sent to all hon. Members that we should probably not use Twitter and blogging, although I will suggest how we might be able to use them. I am not necessarily totally opposed to the notion of twittering.

The main thrust of my amendment, and of my thoughts on the subject—and the thoughts of a great many hon. Members who have spoken to me—is that if we allow unfettered use of electronic devices, three things will happen. The first is that the quality of debate will decline. Let me give an example. Recently, I chaired a Public Bill Committee. Glancing round the room, I saw that some two thirds of the people on the Committee were using electronic devices for one purpose or another. That included the shadow Minister, the Minister, both Whips, and six or eight Back Benchers, one of whom, rather magically, was using two electronic devices simultaneously; how on earth he managed to do that I have simply no idea. It seemed to me that the fine technical point being made about the Pensions Bill—for that was the Bill—was not necessarily being considered carefully by the two thirds of the Committee who were using those machines at that time. Had I challenged members of the Committee to lay out precisely what the person speaking had just said, a very large percentage of them would have looked at me blankly, and would not have had the faintest idea what was going on.

I totally accept the point made by my neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Claire Perry), that we can all multi-task. Of course we can; there is no question about that. MPs do it all the time. However, I simply do not believe that the finer points of argument in a debate will necessarily be picked up if one is focusing one’s mind on something else. The purpose of debate is not just for our own voices to be heard, or to get something on the record; we could do that by handing the speech in, as they do in the United States of America. The purpose of debate is to listen carefully to what the other person is saying, to pick up the other person on fine illogicalities in their speech, to make delicate points, and hopefully to come to some kind of useful conclusion. If a person is focusing on emptying their inbox, surfing the net, tweeting or who knows what else—famously, recently a member of the Italian Parliament was spotted surfing an escort site—while theoretically listening carefully to a debate, they are not taking part in it in the way that they should.

Guto Bebb (Aberconwy) (Conservative): The crux of the issue has been touched on. In the Welsh Assembly, every Member sits in front of a computer. Earlier this year, the Conservative Assembly Member for North Wales, Brynle Williams, passed away at a very young age. A Labour Member, paying tribute to him on the radio, said, “When Brynle Williams spoke in the Chamber, we stopped working on our computers and listened.” Is that not the crux of the issue?

Mr Gray: My hon. Friend makes an extremely good point, and it is useful to hear of his experience of the Welsh Assembly, where such changes have been made. Elsewhere around the world, there are examples of all kinds of Parliaments where people use the devices excessively and so are not taking proper part in the debate. [Interruption.] I am being passed a message—on paper—from the Whip, which reminds me to move my amendment; I shall indeed do so. I am most grateful to her; had she passed me that electronically, I would not have got it.

I beg move amendment (a) to motion 1, leave out from ‘used in the Chamber’ to end and add—

‘to a minimal extent, silently and with decorum, to receive and send urgent messages, as a substitute for paper speaking notes and to refer to documents for use in debates, but not for any other purpose.’.

That useful intervention from my hon. Friend the Whip leads me to the second reason why I feel uneasy about unfettered use of electronic devices. Whereas at the moment outside interests—including, dare I say it, the Whips Office—may have some influence over what we do or say, or how we vote in this place, by and large they have to exercise that influence in writing, prior to the debate. It would be particularly unhelpful if, during a speech or debate, outside interests—lobbyists, businesses and groups of all kinds—got in touch with us on our electronic devices and said, “I think you should ask the Minister such and such a question, because that is a weak point in their argument,” or “I think you should do this or that.” We should be listening carefully to the logic of the other person’s speech, and seeking to counter that argument not because a lobbying company or the Whips have asked us to do so, but because it is what we want to do.

Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Conservative): Does my hon. Friend not accept that that is possible under the rules as they stand? It is perfectly possible right now, under the rules of the House, for someone to receive a message and check it in debate.

Mr Gray: My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and if that were to happen, I would decry it. The purpose of my amendment is to say that electronic devices should be used for the purposes of the matter under debate and no other purpose. If the Chamber was seen to be full of people blogging, tweeting and surfing the net, it would risk bringing the Chamber into disrepute.

Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Conservative): Does my hon. Friend not agree that one of the reasons MPs exist is so that people can lobby them with a view to influencing Parliament?

Mr Gray: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Of course, I was a professional lobbyist for a number of years and so have no difficulty with that whatever. It is of course right that all sorts of interest groups around the world, from journalists to lobby groups, should be able to make their views known to us, but I am not certain about the propriety of a lobby group, the Whips or anyone else getting in touch with us during the course of a debate or a Select Committee evidence session to say, “Here’s an interesting point you ought to raise.” Would it really be right for outside interest groups to get in touch with us via electronic devices during Select Committee cross-examinations, for example of the Murdochs, and say, “Here’s something you ought to say”? I think that that would be an unreasonable intervention in our internal debates by outside influences.

Chris Bryant: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr Gray: I will give way, but first I should say that I am absolutely sure that what the hon. Gentleman said during the Select Committee cross-examination of the Murdochs was entirely his own idea, irrespective of what outside influences might have said to him.

Chris Bryant: Well, I was not a member of that Committee, but that is just one minor factual inaccuracy of several that we are passing by. The point I was going to make is that one of the oldest rights of members of the public and constituents is the right to come to the Lobby and demand that we come out of a debate to listen to their point of view, so I do not see the difference.

Mr Gray: The difference is extremely simple. Someone outside communicating via an electronic device during a debate is not equivalent to a member of the public coming to Central Lobby, filling in a green form and asking to speak to us; it is equivalent to a member of the public coming into the Chamber and saying, “Would the hon. Gentleman please ask this question?” which I do not believe is right. We should be debating among ourselves and not excessively involving people outside.

Most people agree that excessive use of electronic devices is not a good thing. Two or three objections have been raised with me. The first relates to the fact that we must all sit here for six or seven hours before finally being called to speak. That could be corrected in two ways: first, Members could take a greater interest in the debate; and secondly, we could perhaps move to the system enjoyed at the other end of the Palace, where peers have some indication of when they will speak. You, Mr Deputy Speaker, and your colleagues tend to indicate when Members will be called to speak, but the notion that we should sit here clearing our inboxes or writing articles on electronic devices for local newspapers because we are a little bored and cannot be bothered to listen to a debate seems a thin argument.

Gavin Shuker (Luton South) (Labour/Co-op): The hon. Gentleman makes his case powerfully, although I do not necessarily agree with it. Is the key issue not that Members can best engage in debate by being in the Chamber? If we are outside doing the work of clearing inboxes, the example he raised, we cannot be present listening to the arguments. I agree that Members should be present in the Chamber more often, but I believe that his amendment would prevent that.

Mr Gray: On the contrary, my amendment encourages Members to make use of their electronic devices in the Chamber for purposes connected with the debate. That is the important point about the amendment.

The last main objections that have been raised concern the fact that the amendment’s proposals would be very difficult to police. You, Mr Deputy Speaker, sent out a letter in July stating that although any such ban on the use of hand-held devices would be difficult to police, it would none the less be down to the individual discretion and decency of hon. Members not to use them. There are all kinds of conventions and rules in this place that we observe. They do not have to be written down or policed. The fact of the matter is that there are things that we agree to do, and I believe that the amendment's proposal should be one of them.

If we allow the Procedure Committee’s report to be agreed as printed, we will end up with a Chamber full of Members staring at their electronic devices—I can see three or four doing so now. I suspect that those looking in from outside, whether from the Public Gallery or on television screens, would say, “What are those people doing? We used to object to the Chamber being too empty. It has filled up a little, but look at them all playing with their electronic devices.” I think that it brings the whole nature of debate in this place into some disrepute. I would like to see the standard of debate maintained. We are the mother of Parliaments. Let us engage with each other in detailed and logical debate and not spend an excessive amount of time on our electronic devices.

Source: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmhansrd/cm111013/debtext/111013-0003.htm#11101351001876