The office of Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Chiltern Hundreds functions as a procedural device by which a member of Parliament (MP) may resign from the House of Commons of the United Kingdom. The House of Commons, by its own resolution, does not allow its members to resign. An MP who wishes to leave the House therefore effects their resignation by being appointed to the stewardship, which the House of Commons Disqualification Act 1975 designates as an office disqualifying its holder from membership of the House; the act designates the office of Steward of the Manor of Northstead in the same way. The chancellor of the exchequer traditionally makes the appointment. The resigning MP is simply appointed and does not have to accept the office: the appointment itself effects the disqualification, vacating the seat.

The use of the stewardship for this purpose began as a legal fiction: historically, appointment to an "office of profit under the Crown" disqualified an individual from sitting as an MP, and several such offices were used to allow MPs to resign before the disqualification was placed on its present statutory footing. The position was reworked in 1861 by William Ewart Gladstone, who was worried about the honour conferred by appointment to people such as Edwin James, who had fled to the United States over £100,000 in debt. As such, the letter by the chancellor was rewritten to omit any references to honour.

The office was first used in this way on 9 February 1850 to allow Sir George Smyth, MP for Colchester, to resign his seat. Appointees to the offices of Steward of the Manor of Northstead and Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds are alternated so that two MPs can resign at once (as happened on 23 January 2017 when Tristram Hunt and Jamie Reed resigned). However, every new appointment revokes the previous one, so there is no difficulty in situations in which more than two resign, such as the 1985 walkout of Ulster Unionist MPs when several separate appointments were made on a single day. If a resigning MP wishes to contest the following by-election, as Douglas Carswell did in 2014, they need to resign the stewardship to avoid further disqualification.

The incumbent steward of the Chiltern Hundreds is Keir Starmer, formerly the MP for Holborn and St Pancras.

Key to party abbreviations

Up to 1849

1850 to 1899

1900 to 1949

1950 to 1999

Since 2000

See also

Office still in use

• List of stewards of the Manor of Northstead

Offices no longer in use

• List of Stewards of the Manor of East Hendred

• List of Stewards of the Manor of Hempholme

• List of Stewards of the Manor of Old Shoreham

• List of Stewards of the Manor of Poynings

References

General

Specific