Procedure of the House

Earl of Erroll Excerpts

Monday 26th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Laming]

My Lords, I have never felt so lonely for such a long time. I voted for this report in committee and I will vote for it again today. The noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd, has also indicated how incompetent I am that I cannot get a letter to all Members of the Cross-Bench group. We all—well, a large proportion of the House—supported the Leader’s Group, but when it comes to implementing its recommendations the debate demonstrates how difficult it is to get agreement across your Lordships' House. It may be that I am too innocent to be allowed out, but I have tried to address the issue before the House and not be dragged into other, wider issues. Perhaps that is a failure on my part.

Having considered the report of the Leader’s Group on these matters in recommendations 9, 20 and 22, it seemed to me that the committee had addressed the issues with great care and concern. I agree strongly with the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, on one point: this House needs to preserve as much flexibility as possible for a self-regulating House. I regret to say that I cannot support the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, because it states that all Bills should go to Grand Committee except in exceptional situations or when they are very controversial. If we think about this Session, there is not one Bill that could have been described as anything other than controversial. The amendment of the noble Baroness is altogether too restrictive for a self-regulatory House.

It is very important that this House takes forward the need to change in a way that enables us to manage the business as effectively as possible. I have formed a high regard for the usual channels and the way in which they try to deal with the business of this House. I believe that the usual channels can be relied on to reach sensible decisions which will command the confidence of the House. The recommendations are for a trial period. We have the opportunity to rehearse them in due course and we can learn from experience.

On Written Answers, the point was made about the expense that has been accrued by some noble Lords. Of course we want noble Lords to fulfil their responsibilities within the House, but that has to be balanced against the proper use of public finance, particularly at this time. I commend the recommendations relating to both Committees and Written Answers.

[The Earl of Erroll]

My Lords, if we start sending more things to Committees off the Floor of the House, we will soon discover that variant of Parkinson’s Law: talk expands to fill the time provided.

I would far prefer us to go back to what we used to do not that many years ago, which was to vote in Committee on the principle of amendments—even if they were defective, we looked at the principle. At Report, we tidied them up, which took much less time. That is why debates on Report are much more focused and we are not allowed to do the to and froing. Third Reading was purely confined to sorting out the typos, the essential little mistakes, not dealing with anything of principle. If we started to go back to that system, with voting in Committee, we would have far more abbreviated proceedings later on. All we are doing is talking it through in Committee and again at Report.

We have to use that as a brake on the deluge of legislation that is coming on us these days. If we give more time for talking, we will just get more to talk about.

[Lord Berkeley]

My Lords, I shall talk just briefly about my amendment on Written Answers during times when the House is not sitting. We have talked about Written Answers long and hard already today. Unfortunately, holding the Government to account does not stop when the House is not sitting. I am not an abuser of the system, and I am sorry that some people are, but I think that it would be a very good idea to be able to table more Questions during the recesses, and to be able to get Answers back rather more frequently than we do at the moment, which I think is once every five weeks in the Summer Recess. I am therefore very grateful to the Chairman of Committees for offering to take it back to the committee, and I hope that we can take it forward on that basis.