House of Lords: Working Practices

Baroness Wheatcroft Excerpts

Thursday 1st November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wheatcroft]

My Lords, I am delighted to have the opportunity to speak after the noble Lord, Lord Bichard. I hope that I can cheer him up a bit because some of the people who I have listened to are amazed at what goes on here—but in a good way. A fortnight ago, there was a debate in this House about excellence in education and, among others, we heard from a former president of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a former Chief Inspector of Schools, a businessman whose generosity is helping to create a string of new academies, the current master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a theatrical impresario. That does not sound irrelevant to me. Some things that go on here are slightly arcane. I treasure the moment when it was explained to me when it would be okay to sit on the knee of a bishop. I have not done it yet—perhaps I should take the opportunity now.

I support my noble friend Lady Seccombe in saying that the membership of this House creates an extraordinary institution that we should try to preserve. However, no institution is perfect and this one certainly has scope for improvement. We need to get more topical debates on to the Floor of the House and faster, while they are still topical. We also need to ensure, when our committees do so much wonderful work, conducting reports into so many different and important issues—everything from child trafficking to auditing—that their reports are debated on the Floor of this House much sooner, while they are still relevant and while the outside world is going to be interested in what we have to say.

That must mean clearing some other stuff out of the main Chamber. We have already heard the proposals for doing that by making far more use of Grand Committee in the Moses Room. That must make sense for non-controversial or moderately specialist legislation. Too often we see legislation going through in this Chamber with a handful of people involved in the debate. They are the right handful of people and they are really interested in what is going on, but for this entire Chamber to be used for that purpose seems to be a wasted opportunity when we could bring more topical debate into the Chamber. Quite how we decide what debates should be debated in here I am not sure; there is already a suggestion in the Goodlad report and there may be others. If we had more time, though, we could get more done here.

There are other means of dealing with legislation. I sat on a special Public Bill Committee, dealing with a proposal that had come from the Law Commission. It was a relatively non-controversial proposal—not a debate that drew great crowds, it must be said, but it was quite important. It was to do with the way that trustees can deal with the funds that they have and the division between preserving capital and generating income. We took expert evidence and got the Bill through remarkably quickly, and there must be scope for doing more of that. There is room to improve our processes, speed up what we do and get more topical debates on to the Floor, but do not let us change the basics of what remains a unique and very effective institution.