Procedure of the House (Proposal 3)
Debate between Baroness Royall of Blaisdon and Lord Empey
Lord Empey
My Lords, I support the noble Lord, Lord Cormack. Clearly, we want to make the House intelligible to as many people as possible. However, given that we have Questions one month in advance on our green sheet and, on the day, we get two sheets with the Questions on, nobody should be in any doubt as to what Question we are going to be asking. Given that the Questions are well known in advance, the solution is to have the text on the television. That would achieve the two things that we want to achieve: first, to better inform the public; and, secondly, not to do the very opposite of what we are trying to do in many of these Motions, which is to save time. This goes completely contrary to the thrust of them.
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, I am slightly agnostic about this. If I have to come down somewhere, I come down on the status quo. However, I am attracted to the limit of 25 words. We need more brevity in this House. I take myself to task, following on from the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, earlier, that my colleagues and I on the Front Bench do not take ourselves and other noble Lords on our Back Benches to task when they ask long supplementary questions. I do not say that we must have it in writing, but as a consequence of this debate we all need to be more mindful about the length of supplementaries, both questions and answers. I hope that that is one lesson we will have learnt from today.