Financial Services Bill

Debate between Baroness Garden of Frognal and Lord Peston

Monday 26th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

I think that the rule applies also to the mover of the amendment.

[Lord Peston]

I am sorry; I am a bit lost on the procedure here. I was under the impression that if someone was moving an amendment he could be asked any number of questions and reply to them. When did we invent a rule that said that we could not ask questions and ask the person moving the amendment to answer them? I am not convinced that we are not making a new rule here. By the way, that is not my speech, which I am about to make.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

My Lords, on Report the mover may reply to any questions at the end but does not reply individually in the course of the debate.

[Lord Peston]

I hate to prolong this but I am not certain that that is right. How are we to conduct the clarification of the amendment if we do not get an answer to an early question in order to ask a later one? I am totally lost as to how we are handling this. We should not forget that this is an immensely complicated Bill and many of us have had great difficulties dealing with it. I have a question for the noble Lord, Lord Flight, just to clarify matters and it may be that someone else will build on that, but we are being told that we cannot do that. That does not seem to be a very helpful way of dealing with this Bill.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

I am sorry to intervene again on the noble Lord, Lord Peston, who has many more years of experience of this House than I do, but this is not the form that Report stage takes. The mover may reply to questions at the end of the debate, but the debate does not go backwards and forwards in the way that it does at other stages of the Bill.

Media: Plurality

Debate between Baroness Garden of Frognal and Lord Peston

Wednesday 7th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

The noble Viscount makes a very valid point and we are hoping that it will be nimbler, with the reviews that are under way at the moment. We are not intending to delay any recommendations that come out of the Leveson inquiry, or any recommendations from Ofcom. As the noble Viscount rightly says, it is a very fast-moving world.

[Lord Peston]

My Lords, will the forthcoming Green Paper take into account the owners of the media that we are talking about, who seem to be largely people who neither live in this country nor pay taxes in this country? In addition, having become totally addicted to the Leveson inquiry myself, does the Minister agree that the biggest danger to freedom of the press in this country is the people who are appointed at senior levels in our newspapers, who seem to have no idea of the difference between truth and falsity?

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

The noble Lord’s initial point is similar to the one raised by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, about overseas ownership of our media. All I can say is that the Government take these matters very seriously. We are looking very closely at all the practices of the media and we are not intending to let these matters just drift on.

Arrangement of Business

Debate between Baroness Garden of Frognal and Lord Peston

Tuesday 4th October 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

My Lords, might I point out that for this session there are not people in wheelchairs to whom that might apply? By the time we start the Welfare Reform Bill, when it might apply, we will have had confirmation of what the system will be. We perfectly understand that it would not be possible for people in wheelchairs to get down from this room to vote should a vote be called.

[Lord Peston]

My Lords, might I raise a further question? I am not quite yet in a wheelchair but I have a badly damaged knee. I could easily not manage to get down there, particularly if the lift was not working. When these discussions take place could you not confine it just to people in wheelchairs but include people who are hampered in other ways?

Education Bill

Debate between Baroness Garden of Frognal and Lord Peston

Wednesday 14th September 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Peston]

The right reverend Prelate does not seem to understand my question. I was simply asking: do we know the facts? My view is that we do not. For example, I am not sure how many religious schools there are in the right reverend Prelate’s diocese, but does he know the religious composition of all the teachers in all those schools—and if so, can that be made public?

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

It might help the Committee if this debate were continued on a different occasion, because we are straying from the amendments which are on the Table. The Committee stage is designed to focus very much on the specific amendments that are here, rather than the more general debate such as we have on Second Reading.