House of Lords: Reform

Baroness Hayman Excerpts

Wednesday 6th February 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman]

My Lords, will the Leader reconsider the pessimism implicit in his original reply? It is intolerable that the failure of the Government’s plans for an elected House should stand in the way of progress on a reform agenda that is widely supported and which is urgently needed for the reputation of this House. The noble Lord could do the House a great service by championing that reform agenda, as the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, said. Will he undertake so to do?

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

My Lords, I hope that I can always be a champion of this House, about which I feel extremely strongly. On the point about me being a pessimist, I like to think that I am an optimist. I am optimistic about this House, about its future and about the contribution that it makes to our national debate. I have, though, to be realistic about the consequence of the debate and the votes that took place. We know that the other place said at some point that it was in favour of an elected House; it did not then will the means for that to happen. Given where we got to last October, I am not a pessimist but I am realistic.

House of Lords: Peers

Baroness Hayman Excerpts

Thursday 8th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Strathclyde]

My Lords, why do we not just wait and see whether it is picked up by a Back-Bench Member?

[Baroness Hayman]

My Lords, may I encourage the Leader of the House to go ahead with those conversations that he suggested as there is a widespread feeling in the House that there is a possibility of a rational, staged and fair way of reducing the size of the House? He was very relaxed about the Bill in the other place. I suggest to him that the danger to the reputation of this House is not only in its size. At the moment it is also in the fact that those with serious criminal convictions are free to return to the membership of the House. The Steel Bill would put that right and I suggest that it would be wrong not to take that opportunity.

[Lord Strathclyde]

My Lords, like the noble Baroness, I think that the most important part of my noble friend’s Bill is that which deals with serious offenders.

House of Lords: Working Practices

Baroness Hayman Excerpts

Thursday 1st November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman]

My Lords, I join others in congratulating and thanking the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, for introducing this debate. The noble Lord, Lord Judd, referred to him as a dedicated engineer. I was grateful for that, because it is much better than the phrase I was going to use, which was “terrier-like”, to describe his devotion to improving the working practices and the quality of the work that is done in your Lordships’ House. That of course is part of a wider, bicameral agenda to strengthen Parliament—an agenda that I believe is extraordinarily important.

It may be that those of us in the two Houses want to put behind us everything that went wrong in the disaster of the parliamentary expenses scandal. However, it permeated public consciousness very deeply. I felt at the time, and still feel, that in order to regain respect and trust, we need not only to put our financial houses in order—which we have done—but to strengthen Parliament, and to do our job better so that it serves the public better. In that way will we regain respect. That is why I agree with others who have said today that this is a very important time to take on this particular agenda. It is an opportune time because we now have a gap, a moratorium, on the big bang proposals for election to your Lordships’ House. There is no longer the argument that we will put everything right when we have the big, all-singing, all-dancing Bill. We are not going to have that. It is incumbent upon us therefore to take our fate into our own hands in the ways that we can and to make things better.

Luckily, there have been very good speeches already about three proposals that I should like to endorse, so I can do so very briefly. One is about using the device of a Back-Bench debate committee to inject more topicality into the agenda of the House. It is a real weakness when an issue is on the front pages and everyone is talking about it in their offices or the pub or wherever but we are not talking about it in Parliament. We could do better on that.

Given the volume of secondary legislation, we need to look at how we have not a take-it-or-leave-it situation but an opportunity to influence secondary legislation better. The proposals in the Leader’s Group and those of the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas of Winchester, were extremely interesting. The Legislative Standards Committee, to which the noble Lord, Lord Butler, referred, is tremendously important. I put in a plea for it to be bicameral. We have to improve the performance of Parliament as a whole, as others have said. We do not want to ape the lower House—we want to be complementary to it—but we do not want to pretend that we are not part of the same institution doing the same job. That is tremendously important.

On the other area of taking control of our destiny, I shall end with a couple of sentences about issues of composition. I believe there is a threat to this House—not in being too large but in having too many active Members. I became a grandmother this week. This has made me think about a lot of things, including the ageing process. It is tremendously important that in this House we have a balance, a range, and that that range does not become top-heavy with too many of us who are too elderly and too detached from the current experience that the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, spoke about.

We have to look seriously at the difficult issues of reducing the size of the House. The proposals in the coalition document, as my questions show, are phrased about representing the proportionality of those who voted in the last election. However, it is possible to produce proportionality and fairness when reducing as well as increasing the size of the House.

House of Lords: Reform

Baroness Hayman Excerpts

Monday 8th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Strathclyde]

My Lords, that may or may not be asking too much. Of course I am aware that this House will be very pleased with the news. Ever since the election, in every debate that we have had there has been an overwhelming majority against the proposals in the Bill. As far as the Steel Bill is concerned, this House has passed a Private Member’s Bill in the name of my noble friend Lord Steel. It now languishes in the House of Commons at the back of the Private Member’s Bill queue. It remains to be seen whether a Member of the House of Commons regards it as a priority and decides to pick it up. However, I will just point out that more than over 70% of the House of Commons voted in favour of an elected House. It may be a little difficult to believe that the House of Commons will now move to entrenching an appointed House so soon.

[Baroness Hayman]

My Lords—

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords—

--- Later in debate ---

[Noble Lords]

Hayman!

[Baroness Hayman]

My Lords, I am grateful to the House, and I am sure that the whole House will be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, for ensuring that we at least have 10 minutes to discuss this issue. Will the noble Lord the Leader of the House accept that reform and election are not synonymous? Will he also accept that two areas of consensus did emerge from the debate on the Government’s Bill? First, the Bill for elections to this House was not deliverable. Secondly, there was an urgent need to make changes in the House. I must say to the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, that I have never seen myself as a modest housekeeper and am more interested in some substantive reforms that are urgent for this House. Despite the pique felt over the withdrawal of the Bill, those remain urgent priorities on which there is widespread agreement. Will the noble Lord accept that and help make some progress on it?

[Lord Strathclyde]

My Lords, there may well be widespread agreement in this House, but I have seen no indication that there is widespread agreement in another place. That agreement is absolutely necessary before a Bill can be passed. I urge the noble Baroness, with all her influence, and those who agree with her to discuss things further with Members of the House of Commons.

Arrangement of Business

Baroness Hayman Excerpts

Monday 2nd July 2012 Lords Chamber

[The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (Lord Strathclyde)]

My Lords, the point is that the debate that we are now on is about whether or not the House should adjourn during pleasure for 10 minutes. I suspect that it is probably my fault that we are in this position. I said that the first Statement should not start before 4 pm; it started pretty much on the dot of 4 pm, and perhaps if we had delayed it for another 10 minutes we would have been able to continue without a gap at all. I am in a bit of a quandary because I would have hoped that the Statement in the Commons from the Chancellor of the Exchequer would have already begun.

[Baroness Hayman]

Perhaps I could offer a potential solution to this. If, on the debate on whether the House should now adjourn during pleasure, the noble Baroness were allowed to make the point that she had not been able to put certain questions to the Leader of the House on the previous Statement and to explain to the House what those questions would have been, and perhaps the feminist dimension to them, and then the noble Lord the Leader were to answer that, we might even find ourselves in a happier position regarding the second Statement.

[Lord Strathclyde]

That is an astonishingly good idea. Although we are still on the Question of whether or not the House should rise during pleasure for 10 minutes, perhaps my noble friend Lady Falkner could reconsider what she was going to say.

House of Lords: Behaviour in the Chamber

Baroness Hayman Excerpts

Thursday 21st June 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Strathclyde]

Yes, my Lords.

[Baroness Hayman]

Does the noble Lord the Leader of the House agree that an underlying pressure on behaviour in the Chamber is the size of the House and the number of Members who want to participate? On an earlier Question, he spoke about the increased costs of a reformed House. Will he confirm that an elected House and a reformed House do not have to be the same thing, and that a smaller reformed House would in fact be cheaper than the current House?

[Lord Strathclyde]

My Lords, I understand the point that the noble Baroness makes. In 1999, the average attendance at the House of Lords was 350; in 2005, it was 400; in the previous Session it was 475; so we can see the increase there. However, as far as behaviour is concerned, more than half of the Peers appointed since the general election have not attended any of the induction seminars offered by the Clerk of the Parliaments. I have written to them, encouraging them to do so. I am glad to say that the Clerk of the Parliaments will be resuming a further series of seminars in the autumn and I would very much encourage them to go along.

House of Lords: Reform

Baroness Hayman Excerpts

Thursday 21st June 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Strathclyde]

My Lords, I do not think that I can go quite as far as my noble friend wants. Yes, I believe that there will be a comprehensive breakdown of the costs of a reformed Chamber. As for the costs of the future of this House, that is more difficult to see, but the House needs to be aware that the total costs of this House are currently around £90 million a year, forecast to rise to £103 million in 2012-13.

[Baroness Hayman]

My Lords—

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe]

My Lords—

Queen’s Speech

Baroness Hayman Excerpts

Thursday 10th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tyler]

My Lords, I wish it were so, but I am afraid that the latest analysis shows that it is not, particularly in terms of age, of geographical basis and—I have to say—of background. It does a disservice to the other place to pretend that it is somehow totally unrepresentative and that your Lordships' House, particularly its active membership, is above all that and totally independent of party politics. I wish it were so, but it is not.

[Baroness Hayman]

My Lords, I wish to do no disservice to the other place whatever, but the noble Lord should not do a disservice to this place either. Geographical representation is varied, but, of course, that is what the House of Commons is there for—lower Chambers are there for representation by population. It does a disservice to the diversity and expertise of this House not to think back to the Welfare Reform Bill debates in this House and to our hearing from Members who worked in voluntary organisations for the elderly, from Members with disabilities—who offer huge expertise—from the ex-director of the Refugee Council and from people who have worked for the Child Poverty Action Group. To say that they did not understand the problems being described in welfare reform seems a grave disservice to this House.

[Lord Tyler]

My Lords, I do not think that I need respond to that. I accept and have great respect for the noble Baroness’s point of view—she has made a very eloquent, simple speech to your Lordships' House—but it does not follow on from what I was saying previously.

Procedure of the House

Baroness Hayman Excerpts

Monday 26th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alderdice]

My Lords, I appreciate the good advice from my noble friend Lord Elton, but there are two issues to which I wish to refer. The first is the difficulty I have with the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Royall. There are some controversial, even exceptionally controversial, pieces of legislation which are very well dealt with in Grand Committee. The Welfare Reform Bill was a very clearly controversial—indeed, I think the noble Baroness will agree exceptionally controversial—piece of legislation, but it benefited from being dealt with in Grand Committee. There are therefore assumptions that are too wide-ranging.

Secondly, when it comes to the timing of Grand Committee, there is a case that Grand Committee might be able to go on until 10 o’clock on occasion, but it would be a mistake to make that a regular procedure because it would mean that we would be running two Chambers at the same time, and there are some difficulties with that. Therefore, I make a plea that we ensure that in what is remitted to Grand Committee, and on the timings of Grand Committee, there is a deal of flexibility perhaps on that basis of presumption, and certainly not on the basis of more rules.

[Baroness Hayman]

My Lords, I had not intended to contribute to today’s debate, but three things make me want to contribute briefly. One was the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Laming, for whom I have the utmost affection and respect, and with whom I share a commitment to change, reform and improvement in the way in which we deal with legislation in this House. We deal with legislation very well, but we can deal with it better, and the report of the Leader’s Group gave us some very clear ways in which we can take that forward. However, the pick-and-mix approach of taking one highly controversial issue which can have all sorts of unintended consequences, at a time when you do not have to be paranoid to think that someone is after you in terms of the next Session of Parliament, puts back the cause of those of us who are reformers. Certainly, the five years I had the honour to occupy the Woolsack taught me that to move things forward in this House you have to do a great deal of groundwork and create a great deal of consensus—and that has not happened on this occasion.

The second contribution was from the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit. Although I believe that we have to take some action on Written Questions, like the noble Lord, I cannot understand how two Members of this House, from different perspectives, put down a Question about a government policy that was delineated in the coalition agreement as government policy and are told that we cannot have an answer to it because appointments to the House of Lords have, in the past, been a matter for the Prime Minister. I think that those were the words used. I do not understand how one cannot get a comment on government policy in that area.

House of Lords: Membership

Baroness Hayman Excerpts

Thursday 9th February 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack]

My Lords—

[Baroness Hayman]

My Lords—

[Baroness Anelay of St Johns]

My Lords, may we hear now from my noble friend Lord Maclennan? His is the only party group that has not yet had the opportunity to put a question.