The office of Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead functions as a procedural device to allow a member of Parliament (MP) to resign from the House of Commons of the United Kingdom. As members of the House of Commons are forbidden from formally resigning, a legal fiction is used to circumvent this prohibition: appointment to an "office of profit under The Crown" disqualifies an individual from sitting as an MP. As such, several such positions are maintained to allow MPs to resign. Currently, the offices of Steward of the Manor of Northstead and Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds are used, and are specifically designated for this purpose under the House of Commons Disqualification Act 1975; several other offices have also been used historically. The appointment is traditionally made by the chancellor of the Exchequer. 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 20 March 1844 to allow Sir George Henry Rose, MP for Christchurch, 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.
