Allowances

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Wednesday 27th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Privy Seal (Lord True) (Con)]

My Lords, on 13 March, the House of Lords Commission agreed to restore an overnight allowance scheme to provide specific accommodation support for Members who live outside Greater London. The resolution that I move as Leader today will put into effect the proposals agreed in the commission report published on 21 March.

The original impetus for this came from the chairs of the Back-Bench party groups in your Lordships’ House. Having reached a cross-party consensus as to the principle and extent of any additional financial support, as I suggested would be necessary, they approached me to present their case to the commission. I agreed to do so. The commission agreed the proposals and I am putting them to the House today. The resolution that noble Lords see before them reflects the recommended proposals of the party chairs and the usual channels. I know that they do not meet everyone’s aspirations, but I submit that they represent a compromise and a balance.

For the avoidance of doubt, as an officeholder and a resident of the Greater London area, I have no personal interest whatever in this change. Indeed, I supported my noble friend Lord Strathclyde in the design of the current approach to allowances. It was intended to be, in my noble friend’s words,

“direct, transparent and accountable, a scheme that is simple and not open to abuse”.—[Official Report, 20/7/10; col. 916.]

In the same way, I submit that the current measure before your Lordships passes those tests as simple, transparent and accountable, and is appropriate to meet the changing burdens currently faced by many Peers.

To summarise, if this Motion is agreed to, Members whose registered address is outside the Greater London area may claim towards the expense of overnight accommodation in Greater London in a hotel, club or similar accommodation while away from their registered residential address for the specific purpose of attending sittings of the House. The maximum that can be claimed for each eligible overnight stay is £100, and it will be reimbursed only on production of a receipt. If the room costs less than £100, only the receipted cost of the room will be paid. The number of overnight claims cannot exceed the number of recorded attendances a Member has in a given week. A review will take place of this new scheme after 12 months.

As many Peers travel daily from far beyond the M25, and Members who seek accommodation inside London pay an increasing price for undertaking their parliamentary duties, I pass over the fact that it is far more sustainable to have Peers staying over rather than commuting daily. But I submit that this House must be accessible to all, regardless of financial status and location. We have, and I mean no offence, become far too much a House of the south-east of England. It is not right that some noble Lords may be deterred from coming to this House because attendance would impose a significant financial burden on them. In responding to this, the commission seeks to ensure that geographic and economic disparities do not dictate the conduct of Parliament.

I believe that the proposal strikes a balance. We must all be mindful that money we spend in this place is not our own. Any scheme that seeks to support parliamentarians must be proportionate to both the purpose it seeks to address and the implications for the public purse. In this case, the commission considers that a flat rate that sits below the average cost of London hotel accommodation is a proportionate figure. This proposed ceiling is well below—indeed, less than half—that which is offered to our good colleagues in the other place.

I return to my first point: the scheme is simple, easy to check, and aimed to avoid abuse. This House will rightly come down hard—very hard—on any who may seek to abuse it. We have placed a review of the scheme after 12 months to ensure that the allowance is working as it should, and the House will expect that every Peer will stand on their honour in this regard.

If this resolution is passed, the scheme will come into effect after the Easter Recess. I will of course continue to welcome Members’ views on this matter, though I know that very many have fed into the cross-party consultations in the various groups, and I thank them for that. I hope that this scheme may support participation in this House, and I thank the noble Lords who worked on the proposals, the usual channels and the convenor for their support for this resolution. I commend it to the House and I beg to move.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

I welcome this proposal, and the points I wish to make are made in a friendly manner, not a critical one. I am concerned about the interpretation of the words “similar accommodation”. I wonder whether the noble Lord the Leader of the House would consider whether a requirement that the accommodation is registered for VAT should be part of the scheme. I understand that this is fairly common within the Civil Service. I also wonder why we are reinventing a wheel and why we do not just adopt the same system as applies to Treasury officials who come to London for meetings and are part of the Home Civil Service. This seems a very easy thing to incorporate into our rules. I am concerned that the absence of any mention of VAT and the loose wording “similar accommodation” could lead to loopholes. As a person who was responsible for closing many loopholes in the European Parliament scheme, I am well aware of where loopholes can be found.

[Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale (Lab)]

My Lords, it would be wrong of me not to comment on this, having been the Member who first raised this about a decade ago when we first raised the annual allowance. I welcome the report and the Motion in the name of the Leader of the House. I thank him personally. He may have been involved in the original scheme and the mistakes that were made then, but I welcome very much his efforts as Leader, with, I am sure, the support of the Lord Speaker and others, to make sure that this change came before the House today. It is long overdue and very welcome.

I also want to thank my noble friend Lord Foulkes. When I gave up the campaign on this issue through sheer exhaustion, he took up the cause. He deserves some credit on behalf of all of us who live outside London for making sure that this change comes forward.

The initial scheme, which was introduced in the month in which I came into this House, was wrong. In order to stop people who live in London abusing the old scheme, it has resulted in all of them receiving significant financial benefit during the last 14 years, while every Member who lives outside London and who uses overnight accommodation in London had their allowance cut in July 2010 and has suffered financially ever since.

Long-Term Strategic Challenges Posed by China

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Thursday 19th October 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, one of the significant things missing from this debate is the usual contributions from former Foreign Office diplomats. I note that there is not a single ambassador or permanent under-secretary speaking in this debate, and I wonder whether that is because they, like many, are confused by the changes in British policy over recent years. As some of your Lordships will know, before I was here, I worked for David Cameron. He had a very different view as to the development of the world. I recall a discussion with him about overseas aid. He said, “We need to increase overseas aid because we need to make these countries worth living in, so that people don’t all want to leave”. Part of the consequence of reducing 0.7% has been the reflection in cuts in aid, as previous speakers have mentioned. Our belt and road initiative is a lot of belt and no road at the moment.

We also have to face the fact that the world is changing rapidly, and not in our favour. It is 100 years ago this month that the British Empire and dominions reached its peak; it never grew bigger than it was in October 1923. That was the key pinnacle of an already financially weakened British state, but that was when its overseas reach got to its highest. We had behind us the Amritsar massacre, we had before us the Bengal famine: both of them human rights abuses that we managed to make excuses for, frankly. However, we were an imperial power, and in many ways we behaved quite similarly to China and not so dissimilarly from the United States. If we look at the United States and its treatment of Cuba, do we say, “Well, it’s okay to treat Cuba this way, but China and the Spratly Islands? No, that’s not on at all”. What we are seeing in many ways is that China is behaving largely in exactly the same way that the British Empire behaved, and in the way the United States behaved with its Monroe Doctrine, intervening all over Latin America from Chile to Nicaragua.

I do not put that forward as an excuse. However, reading the statement that was made at the summit in China this week, which I read on China’s internet rather than ours, what they basically said was, “We want to do our own thing—we don’t share your values”. They did not pretend to share our values; that is the important thing to remember. They actually repudiated our values. The only thing we have left now is the threat of a good example, and maybe some selective moves to downgrade certain products, such as cotton from Xinjiang. What we cannot do is have a big cold war with China. It will not and cannot work—the international economy is far too integrated for that.

What we can do is give the countries near China as much diplomatic support as we can. I know from visiting Vietnam that it feels somewhat under pressure, but the ruling party—which, incidentally, is also communist—believes that it somehow has to find a modus vivendi because Vietnam is so small and China is so big. The vice-president of Vietnam, whom I met when I was last there, said, “We have to be realistic. If we have trouble with China, you’re not going to come to defend us. You’re not going to be able to send troops here and battle for Vietnam. Apart from that, it would be somewhat of an irony; we are still clearing up after the last time you came to this country”. The best thing we can do is to give some sort of diplomatic support and, where we can, support such protest as exists.

I was interested in this week’s New Statesman, which has an article on China and what it calls the struggle for Chinese history and the fact that there is still an underground movement there. It says:

“As long as there has been repression in China, there has been resistance”.


It goes on to quote the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Ian Johnson, who argues that victory for the regime’s repressive attitude was not total. Indeed, a brave group of independent filmmakers and writers continues

“to preserve an alternative version of the country's history and to stubbornly resist the party’s efforts to rewrite the past”.

As far as we can give any quiet support to that, we jolly well ought to. But we must realise that the limits of what we can do are exactly that: limits. We are a small country. When I was in the European Parliament, people in Europe used to be really surprised when I went to meetings. I said to them that Europe is a very small place and that we have fewer languages than India. People would ask me, “Fewer languages than India? They all speak English”; to which I replied, “That shows how much you know about India, for a start”. China and India are virtually the same size. Part of our strategy for China ought to be to give as much support as we can to India—which, frankly, also has some democratic problems at the moment.

The recent review has some very good home truths in it, although they are a bit buried. For instance, paragraph 13 says:

“Today’s international system cannot simply be reduced to ‘democracy versus autocracy’”.


That is absolutely right. It later says that we will need to work with countries such as China, among others, “to protect our shared”—note the word “shared”—

“higher interest in an open and stable international order, accepting that we may not share all of the same values and national interests”.

That is absolutely true. Someone in the Foreign Office wrote that; I presume they got it through the Ministers, otherwise it would not have appeared there. It is absolutely true that we have to be prepared to be flexible.

The review says on page 13 that some of the

“actions pose a threat to our people, prosperity and security”,

but

“we will engage directly with China bilaterally and in international fora so that we leave room for open, constructive and predictable relations”.

That is part of the way diplomacy works. We close our eyes to the fact that, at this time in Moscow, there are still talks going on between Russian and British diplomats about such things as nuclear proliferation in Iran. Behind-the-scenes contacts have not stopped; they should not stop; and there is absolutely nothing to be gained by us from them stopping. We have to encourage as much as we can.

The review states on page 31 that, as part of the 2023 review,

“the Government will also increase investment in the capabilities that will help us understand and adapt to China”.

I hope that all our Ministers carefully read—I am sure they do—the documents that come out of their own Foreign Office, because they contain a lot of grains of truth. There is far too much belligerence in the way we pursue our public discourse on relations, not only with China but with many other places in the world. We need to remember that the biggest secret of democracy is discretion, confidentiality and moving forward.

I finish with a story that is absolutely true. When I joined the Foreign Office in the early 1960s, there were still diplomats around from the 1930s. I remember one of them saying to me, “Richard, be very careful how you treat your enemies, because one day you might wake up and find that they’re your friends”. The example he gave was Ivan Maisky, who we refused to recognise as an ambassador until the day after Germany invaded Russia, at which point he was invited to the palace to be acknowledged as the ambassador, to be followed by dinner with the Foreign Secretary, who up till then had refused to meet him. Remember, you need to keep the channels open, and that one day your enemies might be, if not your friends, at least people you need a civilised conversation with, so just be careful.

NATO Summit

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Tuesday 18th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, this is an alliance of volunteers and volunteer nations. Of course, it is ideal that every nation should contribute to the agreed target, and that has been reaffirmed at the summit. I am not going to stand here and throw stones at other nations. Putin has failed in his illegal invasion: he thought it would divide NATO and that some of the less enthusiastic nations might split away but, as we have discussed, the reverse has happened.

I do not think we can talk about penalising nations that do not reach 2%. We have made good progress in recent years, with more countries hitting the 2% minimum. Last year, 2022, was the eighth consecutive year of increased defence spending across Europe and Canada. Since 2014, our European allies and Canada have spent an additional £350,000 million—£350 billion in easy parlance—on defence. The noble Lord is right: if we are to ensure that our alliance is equipped to take on the challenges of the future, we must go further. However, it is in all our interests for every member to meet the 2% commitment; that is our plea to our allies and partners. As far as a penalty is concerned, the penalty for failing to fund NATO properly is our future collective security, and I think that is recognised by all our allies.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, some 34 years ago I was the first leader of the European Parliament delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. At that time, we were trying to be friends with the Russians; indeed, a certain Mr Kelin, who is now the Russian ambassador in London, was in Brussels representing the Russians. We always found it difficult, but part of the difficulty was the disunity among NATO members, which we must address. We also have to address the fact that the Minsk process, which was supposed to help get peace in Ukraine, failed comprehensively.

Will the Minister make it clear to the Americans that the break-up of the Russian Federation, which is widely talked about in some Washington circles, is not in the interests of European security? Secondly, will he promote interoperability within NATO? We discovered, for instance, that you could not drive one of the British tanks in Germany through Denmark because the Danish Parliament would not allow it and the bridges were not strong enough. The biggest challenges facing NATO are interoperability and the fact that, if we do not stop the guns firing, there are far too many frozen conflicts in Europe for us to go to bed happily. We need at some point to find a way of promoting a ceasefire.

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, interoperability is obviously important—I agree with my noble friend on that, at least. When I made reference to Ukraine’s accession, I said that interoperability is important. What we face here is the most brutal and disgraceful challenge to the international order seen in modern times. More people have perished in that country than in any NATO country in the post-war era. I believe that we need to be absolutely solid in the face of the Russian Government. They must understand that no advantage or chink of gain will come from this aggression. I appeal to my noble friend to play his part in that.

Counsellors of State Bill [HL]

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 23rd November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

My Lords, it seems unnecessary to exclude the Duke of Sussex and the Duke of York who, for reasons we all know and understand, are not going to be performing royal duties in the immediate future in any event. As to the drafting of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, in proposed new paragraph (e), that there should be excluded

“any other person who in the opinion of the Lord Chancellor has not in the … preceding 2 years undertaken Royal duties on a regular basis”,

this leaves rather open for analysis what “regular” means. Does it mean once a month, once a week or once a year? What if they are ill for a period of time? The idea that the Lord Chancellor should determine this question without any criteria seems rather unsatisfactory. Mr Dominic Raab has more than enough to do at the moment.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

I will make one small point. We will have five Counsellors of State, two of whom are not going to be used, namely the Dukes of Sussex and of York. That means that, since you have to have two Counsellors of State acting if the monarch is away, if either the Princess Royal or the Duke of Wessex were unavailable, we would have only Princess Beatrice left. We do not have anyone else on the reserves bench, so to speak.

I doubt whether we have heard anything, but noble Lords will recall that I suggested that the Princess of Wales should added to the list. I still think that would be a sensible idea because she will of course become a Counsellor of State when her husband succeeds to the Crown. Again, I will not support any votes, but the palace should look at this because you only need one person to be ill, and you have Princess Beatrice as a Counsellor of State. Although she is probably acceptable, she is virtually unknown.

Counsellors of State Bill [HL]

Lord Balfe Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 21st November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I was moved to put my name down on the speakers’ list by the same point that the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, made. First, I commend the King on bringing this matter before us so speedily, because it is something that needs looking at.

What the Bill is doing, I think, is trying to deal with an Act that was conceived and passed before the idea of a working member of the Royal Family was invented. That makes for part of the difficulty because it clearly does not remove either the Duke of Sussex or the Duke of York from the list. It does, however, still apply to Princess Beatrice, of course, who will disappear from the list when Prince George is 18 years of age. So it is a bit of an odd Bill. I wonder: what would happen if the Duke of Sussex decided to jet in? What if he saw the King’s diary and saw that the King was going to be on a state visit going from X to Y in, let us say, Australia, so he got on a plane, got off at Heathrow and said, “Hi, I’m here. I’m on the succession list”?

We would get over all this if we had a system whereby the monarch just prescribed that “the Counsellors of State shall be as follows”. That would be very adequate. The Princess Royal and the Earl of Wessex have in the past held the role, and dropped off because of the rules of primogeniture, which is what we are dealing with today. In my elected time, I met the Earl of Wessex and, on several occasions, the Princess Royal. I was always immensely impressed with her. Whenever she turned up to a function in my Euro constituency, she was extraordinarily well briefed and spent her time talking to the people on whatever project she had come to visit. She did not spend her time with the mayor, let alone with the MEP, but with whoever was working in the area that she had come to open, commend, present prizes concerning, and the like. I can think of no one better placed than the Princess Royal to be a Counsellor of State. She certainly knows everything about the job.

The noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, will put me right if I am wrong, but the 1840 Act appointed Albert as regent until Prince Edward came of age if Victoria died before he was 18 years old. A strong candidate for the role of Counsellor of State must be the present Princess of Wales. She will be a Counsellor of State when her husband eventually succeeds to the throne. Presumably, if the throne is vacated before Prince George is 18, the Princess of Wales will be designated as the regent-in-waiting. Therefore, it would be very sensible, and give her some practice in the job, if the Princess of Wales was added to this list. I dare say that someone at the Palace will be reading this debate. They might like to consider these points. I certainly will not be pushing anything to a vote, but this is the one time in a lifetime when we can express an opinion on this. As such, I disagree with the noble Baroness, Lady Jones. One of the jobs of this House is to make informed comment on matters such as this. We are a monarchy, and the Counsellors of State matter.

P&O Ferries

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

My Lords, I answered the last question with the words of my right honourable friend in the other place. The noble Lord is quite right that there is some truth in Barry Gardiner’s Private Member’s Bill, but I am not sure that it would have helped in this case, given that the fire and rehire may not apply to the replacement of British workers with lower-paid workers from overseas in a maritime context, as their contracts were with Jersey and therefore may not have been subject to UK law. However, we are looking at all these things and working out how we can take this matter forward and stop companies taking advantage of a loophole in the minimum wage legislation as it stands.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, can the Government take a very strong line on this? Many trade unionists will be looking very carefully to see how strong the government reaction is. Can the Minister take up with the DWP the fact that P&O was in the pension scheme of the Merchant Navy in a “last man standing” scheme, so if there is a deficit in this scheme, it could affect seafarers from all over the seafaring world, far beyond P&O?

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

I assure my noble friend that P&O is still accountable for its deficits in the pension scheme, particularly in the Merchant Navy ratings reserve fund. Regarding interaction with the trade unions on the situation, we are working closely with them to understand their concerns and act in support of their aims where possible, including to establish the legality—or lack thereof—of the actions of P&O. Minister Courts held a round table with maritime unions last week to discuss how Governments can best support maritime workers. We will continue to engage with unions as appropriate.

Ukraine

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Wednesday 26th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord for his contribution, and recognise his great expertise in this area. I will most certainly take it back to make sure that people are aware of it.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, to follow up on the question from the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, two months after Stalin’s death, Churchill said in another place:

“I do not believe that the immense problem of reconciling the security of Russia with the freedom and safety of Western Europe is insoluble.”—[Official Report, Commons, 11/5/1953; col. 896.]


The fact is that Ukraine was a creation, as much as anything else, of Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, and it is a very odd country indeed. We started many of the problems that we now have when we chased Yanukovych out of office. In the Prime Minister’s Statement, he says we should

“address any legitimate Russian concerns through honest diplomacy.”—[Official Report, Commons, 25/1/21; col. 861.]

The problem is that what we regard as legitimate, they do not, so I should like to rephrase that and ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they will seek to get together a conference, with everything on the table, to try to get some sort of agreement.

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

As I said, the UK is committed to Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and we are providing a full range of support. There is no justification for Russia’s aggressive and destabilising activity towards Ukraine.

House of Lords: Governance

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Wednesday 8th December 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I have also been promoted somewhat up the batting order, as they say, but I will try to survive the first ball. The first thing that struck me about this debate is how one-sided it is. I believe that the noble Lord who has just spoken is the only Labour Party speaker we have; we do of course have my good friend, the noble Lord, Lord Desai, who is a refugee from the Labour Party. We have virtually no Lib Dems—I can see one here, but maybe there is another. I just wonder whether we do not start off from the disadvantage of being rather biased in what we have got.

I have been here somewhat longer than the noble Lord who just spoke—not a huge amount of time; eight years—and I can tell him that I am as mystified as he is about how the place works in its essential parts. What I do notice is a crushing lack of any level of democracy in any part of any structure in this House. We vote for absolutely nothing among our peers. I begin with a straightforward criticism: I believe that that is one reason why none of the party leaders is sitting with us this afternoon. They owe nothing to us. None of the people who are the usual channels is voted for by any of the people who are ruled by these usual channels. That is a major disadvantage in trying to run and modernise the House.

My second point is that we certainly have a complex decision-making structure. I despair at what the Chief Operating Officer is going to do. We have, and we need, clear levels of responsibility within Parliament; in inserting another person—and of course we have just engaged a HR person—we seem to be putting in staff as an alternative to looking at the structure that we are dealing with.

I give two examples. From a very early stage in this building, I noticed that, for all the talk about its unrepresentative nature and everybody being London based, one reason for this could well be that no one who lives outside London gets an overnight allowance for staying in a hotel. I know that there were problems in the past—10 or 12 years ago—but many organisations have devised systems that are foolproof; for example, look at our Treasury and the Civil Service scheme, or the scheme I used to use when I worked in local government. You can devise systems. To me, it is utterly wrong that people should be asked to come down from Scotland, or from a long way away, at a different level of remuneration than applies to those who live in London or who, like me, can commute backwards and forwards to Cambridge—at, of course, a daily cost to the House—which is probably 50% of what they would spend if they had an allowance.

The main point I make is that I have been chasing this round for years. There is no way in which an ordinary Member of this House can table a resolution which is looked at anywhere. The most I have managed to achieve, having gone round the houses about three times, is being told “You’ll get nowhere with this until the Leader of the House is willing to put it on the agenda. And she’s not.” The first thing we need is a way for Members of this House to have an influence on the way that it is run—an ability to put proposals forward, to have them debated and to know what is happening.

My second point is this: the way in which we treat the Members who are no longer here is an absolute disgrace. People retire, they leave, and there is one line in Hansard, if they are lucky: “We would like to thank the noble Lord for all his service”. But there is no structure to keep them informed and there is no system of ever inviting them back once a year for a drink with the Speaker. Okay, they have certain dining rights, but there is no structure whereby we can know what happens to retired Members. It is completely left to chance. I notice that the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie of Luton, who was a friend of mine, died a few days ago. The Labour Whip told the Conservative Whip and it came out on our Whip, but there have been many instances where noble Lords have passed away and we have known nothing about it at all. If we have missed the day in the House, we probably have not even realised that much. I put it to the new Speaker that we should look at this. He offered to send his assistant to talk to me. This is not the way to treat Members of this House. We need a better structure going forward.

My third point is this: we need a way where an ordinary Member knows of someone or other in the administration who they can go to with virtually any problem that they have. I had 10 years in the European Parliament in a very obscure role called Chairman of the College of Quaestors. We were basically the complaints service, but people knew that they could come to us with any complaint and we would at least know where to go and where to push them. I used to manage it by walking around the building—it was called being on foot patrol, for those with a military background—and people would come up to me and give me their problems, and that is how we got round the freedom of information requests. I put it to noble Lords, in particular the noble Lord opposite, that we need a structure where Members of any grade can feel that there is someone or other who will be able to feed their concerns into the machine and come back to them with some sort of answer.

Those are a few thoughts. I hope they are of value and that I at least survived the first ball.

Afghanistan

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Wednesday 18th August 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

There are one or two facts we might like to face. First, what has happened is quite predictable. President Trump announced the withdrawal from Afghanistan; President Biden confirmed it. We knew it was coming; we just do not seem to have prepared very well for it. Secondly, President Biden is accused of not talking to his allies, but what have they to say? “Please don’t do it”, is all they would have said. If I were him and sitting in Camp David, I would have said, “Let’s not waste our breath. We know what they are going to say.”

Thirdly, the United States is fully within its rights to withdraw. We have to face the fact that, as has been said, we in the United Kingdom, or even in the EU, cannot mount a mission on our own without the United States. We are dependent on the United States where the mission goes. There were 90,000 US troops out of 130,000 at the height.

My noble friend Lady Morrissey talked about values that we may have to live with. We are going to have to talk to the Taliban; we may not like it, but if we do not, we will have the entire Afghan middle class as refugees. That is the reality. We have to talk to the Taliban; that is why we have a Foreign Office. As Margaret Thatcher famously said, the job of the Foreign Office is to talk to foreigners. I suggest that the Foreign Office should settle down, start to make some contact with the Taliban and talk to them about what their plans for the country are, because it will still be there, right on the edge of all our concerns.

The point has also been made that Afghanistan was the first NATO Article 5 operation. Yes, it was, because we could never agree on an Article 5 operation anywhere near Europe, and I predict to noble Lords that we could not do so now. If Russia decided to move against the Baltic states, we might just about get an Article 5—but if it moved against Ukraine, I am not sure the Baltic states would support an Article 5, because they would be worried about themselves.

The biggest job for the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence in the coming time is to start to talk seriously in Europe about what we want to achieve in the world. This is where my noble friend Lord Cormack was absolutely right. We talk about “taking back control”, but we have not—we have abandoned our international duties. It is about time that the Foreign Office got back to its job of talking to foreigners and looking after British interests.

Procedure and Privileges

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Tuesday 13th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I begin by associating myself with the remarks of the noble Lords, Lord Adonis and Lord Cormack, thanking the Leader and the staff and the Leaders of the other parties here for the way in which we have managed to get ourselves through the last year. Before I move on to my amendment, I will offer support to the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, for his. He mentioned people coming down to London on a Monday and said we might need to look at it. That is exactly why we need to start earlier, certainly on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday—because most Members do not have other jobs. Most Members, if the House is not sitting and they are from outside London, are basically just kicking around, looking at the newspapers, et cetera. I think they would be much better employed if the House was sitting, and I hope that serious consideration will be given to the amendment moved by my noble friend Lord Adonis.

Much has been said about the dignity of the House. My contention is that the least dignified part of the House used to be the scramble at Question Time, with people shouting against each other and generally trying to get in to a debate, without anyone regulating it at all until, if it got totally out of order, the Government Whip would get up and say, “It’s the Cross-Benchers’ turn” or something like that. It was totally undignified. People watching on television or in the Gallery could not understand what was going on. When I first came here, the advice I was given was, “Sit as near to the front as you can and carry on shouting. Pretend you do not know there is anyone else behind you and you will probably get in.” This is not the way to conduct a Question Time.

I am sorry to put extra work on to my good friend the Lord Speaker, but I think that having the Lord Speaker choosing people to ask supplementaries as the debate goes along does combine spontaneity with being able to share the questions around the House. No one, I think, is suggesting that the House of Commons does not have a reasonably fair Question Time. There, the Speaker provides this service, and I think it is a most important service to provide. I also think that those of us who have not been in the House of Commons feel somewhat at a disadvantage at the way in which Commons procedures such as that are used in this House—not that that is a complete Commons procedure. So I advise and hope that we will ask the committee to look at the matter and report by 31 October.

My amendment does not say that it should start now, because I appreciate that there will be points that have to be looked at. There will have to be guidance and discussion as to how Question Time should be structured, with the Lord Speaker or one of his deputies calling the person to ask a question—but it will, in my view, enable a certain amount of spontaneity, governed by a certain amount of discipline and the ability to give people the opportunity to ask a question and spread it around the House, not only between Members but between different types of Members. I very much hope that we will look at that.

This is not to denigrate what has gone before, but I have to say I always thought Question Time was the least dignified part of the proceedings of this House and that, if we are a self-regulating body, one thing we surely should regulate is good manners in the Chamber. Shouting against each other does not conform to my definition of good manners, so I ask Members to look favourably on this. We are asking the Procedure and Privileges Committee to report by 31 October; we are not taking a decision but offering a guide that I hope Members will feel able to issue to this committee. It may, of course, come back and say it does not work—in which case we would have to think again. But I think that, if it can find a way of making it work, we will have a more dignified and better House.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Balfe]

At end insert “but that this House believes that the Lord Speaker should call members during oral questions, in a manner similar to that which pertains in the House of Commons; and calls on the Procedure and Privileges Committee to consider this matter and report by 31 October at the latest.”

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

I am afraid I am not going to be as helpful as my noble friend Lord Cormack. Some interesting points have been made during this debate. One of the most interesting is the fact that this proposal has been around for many years; indeed, I understand it was considered in 2006, when it was decided that it would not be quite this much of a regulated House.

I tabled a very reasoned amendment, which gives until 31 October for the points to be sorted out. The amendment

“calls on the Procedure and Privileges Committee to consider this matter and report”—

not to agree it but to consider it—because I think we need to consider the way forward for this House. I am gratified that a number of noble Lords have indicated their support and, on their behalf as much as mine, I would like to test the opinion of the House on this quite fundamental way of us going forward.