Today is the beginning of the third week of Parliament however this week marks the end of usual Parliament sessions until the third week of October as the three main political parties will hold their Party Conferences for this year. Other political groups will also hold conferences during this time. According to the “TheyWorkForYou” website the MPs are not involved in any events this week after the end of business on Tuesday although the House of Lords will be operating until the end of Thursday. Sadly, this week there are no listed indications of debates being organised by any of the Sussex MPs but there are two Committees that are taking place involving two local MPs. Today there is a session entitled “Environmental Audit Committee” which is a group including Caroline Lucas from Brighton Pavilion and tomorrow there is another session of the “Education Committee” which includes Caroline Ansell from Eastbourne.

It also appears that there is nothing planned for this week relating to the e-petition events in Parliament. There are many local members of public living in their constituencies which have taken time to endorse these e-petitions in the past and so they will be disappointed that this week there will not be any discussions which represent their views. Last week there was a planned session for three e-petitions on Monday entitled “relating to pay and financial support for healthcare students” which was organised by Marsha de Cordova, the Labour MP for Battersea in London. Although she did speak on other questions her planned event to focus on the e-petitions did not take place last week and again so many of us will be disappointed. It will be interesting to see if there will be future opportunities that focus on the e-petitions that have obtained more than 100,000 contributed signatures. I certainly hope so.

Last Tuesday there was a discussion set out by Tim Loughton who is the MP for East Worthing and Shoreham. His event was entitled “Flying Schools” which took place in the Westminster Hall. Speaking contributions for the debate included two MPs from the DUP, one SNP and one Labour MP. Jesse Norman, Minister for Transport participated and one other Conservative MP, Henry Smith, representing Crawley also spoke. At the beginning of the session Tim began with

I beg to move, that this House has considered flying schools. I am grateful to colleagues who have come along to contribute. On the face of it, this is quite a niche subject, but it has implications beyond constituencies, such as mine, that contain flying schools. My interest is primarily because of Shoreham airport in my constituency — Shoreham airport, not Brighton City airport as it was somehow re-christened at some stage. It is the oldest commercial airport in the United Kingdom, founded in 1910, and the oldest purpose-built airport in the world still in operation. It mostly operates leisure flights. It has an art deco terminal building, often used for films and by air-related businesses. It encompasses helicopter training and fixed-wing pilot training.  

At the end of the discussion, he states “Question put and agreed to. Resolved, That this House has considered flying schools. Sitting suspended.” It would be very helpful if he and his colleagues could publish a document about this important subject that we could all read or listen to. Reading the recorded writing from the “TheyWorkForYou” website does not really present the full information in an accessible format.

A total of five voting sessions took place on Tuesday and Wednesday last week with a number of our local MPs and a significant number of the parties participating.  Two of the five events involved a discussion from a group of MPs. The first debate on Tuesday was “Dangerous Drugs” Interestingly only one of our Sussex MPs Lloyd- Russell-Moyle took part in that discussion but did not vote. However, there were a small group of MPs that voted to reject the content which included Caroline Lucas, the SNP, Plaid Cymru, three Labour and two Conservative MPs, a total of 35 people. On Wednesday the first item to be discussed was entitled “Deferred Division — Exiting the European Union” and once again the majority of the Conservative and Labour MPs voted together for it along with Caroline Lucas from the Green party, some Liberal Democrat and Plaid Cymru groups. It was rejected by only 10 MP’s all of which were Conservative and DUP members.

The other three items are “Delegated Legislation – Police” on Tuesday and on Wednesday “Procurement Bill [Lords] – Discretionary exclusion grounds” with a short discussion and “Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill – Failure to prevent fraud”. Conservatives voting Aye and Labour, Green and other groups voting No.

Interestingly Nusrat Ghani and Andrew Griffith did not vote at all on either day and Gillian Keegan only voted for Exiting the EU debate on Wednesday. Huw Merriman, only voted on Tuesday. These are all Government Ministers. Peter Kyle the Labour MP representing Hove did not vote on Wednesday. All other Sussex MPs voted for the items discussed on Tuesday and Wednesday.

What remains significant to me in addition to the vital importance of these subject matters is the way the MP’s vote. We as constituents do not get an opportunity to understand the reasons explaining why MP’s vote as they do. We are left questioning why some of Sussex Conservative Ministers have not been voting at all.