MPs to challenge John Bercow over '18th century' rules against proxy voting for new parents

Pregnant MPs are planning to challenge John Bercow to bring in changes to archaic parliamentary rules that force expectant mothers to vote right up to their due date.

A cross-party delegation of MPs will meet the speaker this month to implore him to introduce a new baby leave system, which would allow proxy voting for new mothers and fathers.

Senior women MPs warned that parliament is run like an “18th century gentleman’s club” and female politicians risked being shut out of key votes as parliament gears up for potentially explosive clashes over Brexit in the coming months.

The Commons is preparing for a showdown over Theresa May’s Brexit deal after the vote was shelved at the last minute in December in the face of near certain defeat.

Plans for a proxy voting system – where MPs can nominate colleagues to vote on their behalf – were unanimously approved in February 2018 but progress to introduce the measure has stalled, despite support from Commons leader Andrea Leadsom.

A newly formed women’s caucus in the Commons will now demand the system is brought in for a trial by 1 February, with three Labour MPs and one Tory expecting babies.

Maria Miller, the Conservative chair of the Women and Equalities Committee, told The Independent: “It has been kicked into the long grass and I think that is shameful.

“Any reform at all. The baby leave, how many debates have we had on that? We’ve had two debates on that and it still hasn’t gone through.

“We’ve got a delegation of pregnant women going to see him [the speaker].”

She added: “Whilst you have a push for more women to come into parliament, we have got to make it a place that’s attractive to a wider cross-section of women and most women would find it quite difficult to come to somewhere that is run the way this place is run, which is more like an 18th century gentleman’s club than it is a legislative body for the country.”

The current system for parental leave is informal and organised by the political parties, where whips make so-called pairing arrangements so an MP from a rival party does not vote as well as the absent politician.

However MPs can fall foul of the system, such as when Tory chairman Brandon Lewis broke a pairing pact with Liberal Democrat Jo Swinson to take part in a crunch Brexit vote, when Ms Swinson was nursing her son.

Harriet Harman, who is known as the Mother of the House as the longest-serving female MP, said the group were not seeking to abolish pairing but to allow women in parliament the right to vote on key issues, if they wish.

The Labour MP told The Independent: “We’ve got four pregnant women already and there will be others coming up.

“We have tiny babies in the voting lobbies and it’s just not good enough to say to these mothers, ‘Push off, we don’t need you to come and vote.’

“They fought to be selected, they fought to be elected and they want to be able to fight in these votes.

“They don’t want to be pushed out – they want to be able to vote.”

Ms Harman added: “MPs from Yorkshire or Durham should not have to bring small babies to parliament just to vote.”

The cross-party Procedure Committee has developed a model for a non-compulsory proxy-voting scheme after conducting an inquiry, where it heard evidence that new mothers and fathers had received unfair criticism for missing votes while on parental leave.

It also heard that the scheme would send a “strong symbolic message” that new parents could still work as MPs, and make parliament more appealing to a wider section of society.

In a Commons debate on the issue, MPs told of hitting the campaign trail days after giving birth or being called back to work early for crunch votes.

Labour MP Emma Reynolds said she started campaigning for 2017’s snap general election just seven days after giving birth to her baby, while party colleague Tulip Siddiq said she met leader Jeremy Corbyn at her house in Hampstead, while breastfeeding her baby.

Luciana Berger, MP for Liverpool Wavertree, said she received abuse from a rival candidate in the general election for not attending a debate because she was caring for her newborn baby.