House of Lords: Working Practices

Baroness Tyler of Enfield Excerpts

Thursday 1st November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, on securing this debate and on all his efforts to maintain momentum on the much needed modernisation of the working practices of your Lordships’ House. I speak as a relative newcomer to this House and, after just under two years, hope to add the perspective of someone who is still able to view its often rather arcane and mysterious workings through fresh eyes.

It was clear to me that it is important to view the recommendations in the Goodlad report as a coherent package that needs to be addressed in the round. I was therefore encouraged when the Leader of the House in our debate last year said:

“I … intend to ensure that a large number of the group’s recommendations are considered promptly by the relevant committees of the House so that the House may take a view on them at the earliest opportunity”.—[Official Report, 27/06/11; col. 1552.]

As we have heard today, some of those recommendations have been addressed and indeed accepted by the House, and I welcome that, but to me the response has felt rather piecemeal. To the best of my calculations, and I am more than happy to be corrected on this point, roughly half of the recommendations have yet to be addressed. One good example of that is what I felt were the very good recommendations for pre-legislative scrutiny and post-legislative scrutiny and the establishment of a legislative standards committee, which I strongly support as part of the package. In my view, a legislative standards committee would provide a powerful incentive to improve the quality of legislation coming forward and ensure that legislation was being used for the right purposes and was capable of being implemented.

My almost 20 years as a civil servant in Whitehall taught me that hurriedly drawn-up legislation often backfires, and nothing has more forcibly underlined that to me than the many hours I spent with others debating all stages of the Health and Social Care Act. It was the first Bill that I had scrutinised in depth, and something of a baptism of fire. I am conscious that the Bill left this House in a very different shape from that in which it came in, which in my view is very much to be welcomed, but I am also conscious that after the myriad amendments that were passed there was no proper opportunity to look at it in the round and ask whether it all hung together sensibly. I have to ask myself whether that is a sensible, let alone optimal, way to make the laws of the land.

I also strongly support the proposal for a Back-Bench debates committee to help with the choice and scheduling of debates. I hope that it would be able to use criteria such as topicality, interest to the wider public, variety, coverage of key subject areas and the opening up of the process to much-needed transparency.

I welcome the setting up of two additional ad hoc Select Committees and have the privilege to sit on the new Select Committee on Public Service and Demographic Change. This is an excellent example of taking a longer-term view of some very cross-cutting issues; indeed, I can hardly think of a more pressing social challenge facing this country. We should have more such committees to allow others to contribute their expertise, and perhaps fewer of some of our more traditional types of business.

There are many other issues that I would have liked to have talked about, not least how the House’s highly unpredictable nature impacts on part-time Peers, colleagues like me from all Benches, who are still active in their professional and external lives—with one foot in the outside world, you could say—in a way that helps to ensure that the much vaunted virtue of this House, expertise, is indeed up to date.

I shall conclude with a suggestion that I suspect some will find rather barmy. Most modern-day institutions have regular satisfaction surveys to gauge the views of their members or their staff. We have surveys, but they are generally to do with the satisfaction or otherwise with the services and facilities of this House. I would like to see a survey sent to all Members asking how satisfied they are with the way that business is currently conducted and what else could be done to make better use of their skills and expertise. I recognise that this would be quite an innovation but I ask my noble friend the Leader of the House to give it serious consideration. As an incentive, should one be needed, I am more than happy to offer my services in suggesting what questions we should be asking.

House of Lords: Working Practices

Baroness Tyler of Enfield Excerpts

Monday 27th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield]

My Lords, I must start by apologising profusely to the House for being a few minutes late in arriving for this debate. I hope that it will still be permissible for me to make a few quick comments. Like so many noble Lords before me, I found this report to be absolutely excellent. It was so clear. It was well written and well argued, and it drew on the evidence. For me, as a newcomer to the House, it fulfilled a very helpful function. Frankly, so many things which I had found so baffling about this House finally fell into place. It was such a key part of my induction that, for me, reading this report was—I think this is the term—a light-bulb moment. I should like to focus on a few aspects of it.

I found the proposals on the scrutiny of legislation compelling. Taken in the round, the three key recommendations on pre-legislative scrutiny, the establishment of a legislative standards committee and the proposed focus on post-legislative scrutiny would very much strengthen the House’s role in undertaking that function. I was particularly taken with the recommendation for a post-legislative scrutiny committee—I think it is recommendation 26—to see whether legislation is having the effect for which it was originally designed and whether sufficient thought was given to its implementation when the Bill was being drawn up.

Over and above that, lessons could be drawn up and shared as to the essential characteristics of successful legislation. Given the vast experience and expertise this House possesses in its function of scrutiny, it seems almost bordering on the criminal for that expertise not to be used for wider educative purposes for policy makers in both Westminster and Whitehall. I recognise, of course, that everything that has been proposed has cost implications. I was pleased to see that those cost implications are set out in Appendix 1 to the report but my overall stance would be to say that less but better drafted and scrutinised legislation would be very much in the wider public interest and, in the longer term, a more cost-effective way of implementing public policy.

Like so many others, I very much support the proposal for a Back-Bench business committee, the proposals for the use of simple language and, indeed, that for simplifying the titles by which we refer to each other. I think we could still do that while observing the normal courtesies. For me, my first experience of Question Time in the Lords was, frankly, quite a revelation. I would simply say that it was not at all what I was expecting. We have heard a lot in the debate today about the reasons for that and about some of the underlying tensions and frustrations. I strongly support the recommendation of a trial period for the Lord Speaker to take on the role currently performed by the Leader of the House. I feel that that would be enhanced if the existing conventions about the allocation of supplementary questions to the various political parties and other groupings were clarified. A number of speakers today have explained the need for that, and I think that it would help.

I would like to say something that I know will be slightly controversial. I have listened carefully to previous contributions that have put other points of view, but I would like to see a corollary added to the effect that should matters not improve during the trial period, however long it might be, the Lord Speaker should be given the power to call supplementary speakers, as happens in most other legislatures around the world. As others have said, I think that that would speed things up and we would get through more business, which I think everyone would find more satisfactory.

I turn to the House’s other key role in public debate and inquiry. The report makes a strong and very welcome case for the establishment of two additional sessional Select Committees. As others have said—I particularly welcome the eloquent words of the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, on this point—there remain large areas of public policy that are neither scrutinised nor debated. I would greatly welcome more opportunities to scrutinise government policy that is not connected to legislation. I shall finish by giving my two reasons for that.

First, if my almost 20 years in Whitehall taught me anything, it was that the big challenges facing this country are generally of a cross-cutting nature and do not fit neatly into departmental silos. The really difficult, often deeply intransigent issues that bedevil Governments of all colours—sometimes called the “wicked issues”—require, frankly, a long-term cross-cutting response. Be they about meeting the needs of an ageing population, tackling poverty and social disadvantage, climate change or perhaps resilience and emergency planning for major disasters, these things all need a multifaceted response.

This House, possessing a vast amount of expertise that is not primarily departmentally based, is very well placed to scrutinise government policy at a strategic level and look across the piece. This would help to ensure complementarity with the work performed in Select Committees in the other place, to which I also hope we can soon refer as the House of Commons, that generally are departmentally based. It should also help to provide continuity. The less partisan nature of the scrutiny would also fit better with the longer-term perspective that is much needed to tackle some of those issues.

Secondly, I suspect that many Peers in this Chamber—we have already heard this today—often feel frustrated at the lack of opportunity to use their knowledge and experience, and as a newcomer I count myself among their number. I was very surprised to read in the report that one of the reasons why additional Select Committees were not set up a few years ago was that it was thought there would not be enough Peers to fill the places. I think that the reverse would be the case now, and the difficulty would be in selecting whose expertise would be the most relevant. The work of the House and the value that it provides to the country would be greatly enhanced if we could have the two additional Select Committees that the report proposes.