Arrangement of Business

Baroness Anelay of St Johns Excerpts

Thursday 6th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Anelay of St Johns (Con)]

My Lords, with the leave of the House, I should like to make a short statement about business. My noble friend the Leader of the House has today made the usual Written Statement to announce that the Queen will be pleased to open a new Session of Parliament in state on Tuesday, 3 June. Parliament will be prorogued in the usual way on a date to be announced once the progress of our remaining business is certain. I expect that date to be before we are due to start our Whitsun Recess. In other words, the arrangements being announced today will not disturb the Whitsun Recess.

I have two further announcements to make. When, last October, I announced a set of provisional recess dates up to January 2014, I made clear that those dates were a long-range forecast and would be subject to the progress of business and, indeed, events. I am today adding a week to the Easter Recess. We will rise for Easter, as previously announced, at the end of Wednesday, 9 April and we will now return on 6 May, the day after the early Monday May bank holiday.

The other announcement is that my noble friends, the Liberal Democrats, have moved their annual party conference to the week of 6 October so that it does not clash with the referendum to be held in Scotland in September. The House of Commons has decided not to sit during the week of the party conference and I now propose that we, too, should avoid sitting in the week of the Liberal Democrat party conference. We will therefore return from the Summer Recess on Monday, 13 October.