House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Debate between Lord Blencathra and Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb

Committee stage
Wednesday 12th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

The Opposition side!

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

—we would never dream of kicking her out of this place. She was absolutely right to say that all hereditary Peers should be given a life peerage. That would kill this nonsense stone dead.

My noble friend Lord Lucas has proposed an excellent amendment. As he said, we are all engaged here in trying to improve the effectiveness of the House. Asking new Peers to make a commitment for the future has merit, but we still have the genuine problem of the handful of Peers who come here, clock in and do nothing. I say again to my noble friend Lord Swire that I am not suggesting measuring the quality of speeches. If Peers are making speeches, then they are participating in the work of the House. The quality of their speeches is not something to be measured by this committee. My noble friend Lord Trenchard also supports participation level, but I would say to him that legislation is not necessary if we accept Amendment 32 when we come to it later.

As I am leading on all six groups of amendments today, I fear I have fallen foul of my noble friend Lord Parkinson’s exhortation not to speak too much. He quoted an incident that occurred years ago in the Commons, when I was a junior Whip and the marvellous Harold Walker was Speaker in the Chair. We were in government, and we had an agreement with the Opposition on a two-minute time limit for speeches on Commons consideration of Lords amendments. We were rocketing through our consideration of Lords amendments to yet another criminal justice Bill. We were getting on fine until our friend Sir Ivan Lawrence QC —I am not naming names, this is in Hansard—got up and said, “Everything that could possibly have been said on this Bill has been said, but not by those of us qualified to do so”. He spoke for 20 minutes, and the Labour Chief Whip said, “That’s it—the deal’s off!” We spent another two hours in Committee.

The noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, whom I congratulate on his birthday, showed support for the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, and a minimum level of participation. He also criticised those who, as he said, turn up for 20 minutes and then leave. I think those were my exact words, too, and we did not collaborate on that.

My noble friend Lord True, speaking from the Opposition Front Bench, said that it is legitimate to discuss these issues, which were in the manifesto. He said that there is a widespread view in the House that we have to do something about the problem of those who do not participate. Peers contribute in myriad ways. The committee that the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, and I are suggesting setting up would take those myriad ways into account before establishing a minimum.

The noble and learned Lord the Attorney-General said that agreement on doing something, having a metric and removing those who fall short of that level is important and that we should do something about it, but we are not setting it up here. All we are asking for is a committee to decide on the detail. The noble and learned Lord was justifying not doing anything because, he said, there were too many nuances. Of course there are nuances, dozens of them—there are hundreds of things to be taken into account—and that is the purpose of the amendment proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell. If we pass his amendment and set up the committee, it will do the consultation on all sides and spend a year or two figuring out the details.

I say to the noble and learned Lord that he reminded me of that wonderful “Yes Minister” attitude, where Sir Humphrey says, “Yes, Minister, that is a very good idea. We will set up an interdepartmental working group and consult the Cabinet committees and this, that and the other. Then we will publish a Green Paper first and then a White Paper. I am sure that we will be able to deliver on your promise—eventually”.

In conclusion, there is a mood in the House to take this participation problem seriously. Most noble Lords favour the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell. He stressed that some noble Lords were fussing about the details. He suggests that could be done by the committee.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Debate between Lord Blencathra and Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb

Committee stage
Monday 22nd May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, last week, my esteemed colleague, the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, asked whether I would support his amendments on pavement accessibility. I trusted him completely so I said, “Yes, of course, I would love to support them”. Then I read them and, actually, they are quite tough and strict in places, but the more I read them, the more I liked them. I particularly liked Amendment 450, which is about taking bits of the road—I love that idea—and reducing the space for traffic, as well as Amendment 459 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, and others, because that is so tough on smoking and I loathe smoking. I support many of these amendments. Obviously, I support all the amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Holmes. There is, perhaps, some space to bring in the fact that cars park on the pavement. I hate pavement parking and I hate loads of rubbish bins being heaped up on the side of pavements because they inhibit free access.

My local shopping street has gone absolutely bananas with this, and it has changed the whole feeling of the street—it is so much more friendly. At the moment, only the Co-op, Iceland and Boots, I think, do not have tables and chairs outside them, with people eating, drinking and having fun. I am all in favour of this section and look forward to Report, when I would be happy to vote on many of them and perhaps even sign up to them as well.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, it is always a delight to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb. She did say that some of my noble friend’s amendments were quite tough but that she liked them. I think the Committee would agree that the noble Baroness is quite tough and we rather like her as well. I congratulate my noble friend Lord Holmes of Richmond on the initiative he has undertaken in tabling these important amendments. He is to be congratulated by all disabled people, fighting our corner—or narrow strip of pavement, as the case may be.

Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Debate between Lord Blencathra and Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb

Lords Hansard - part two & Committee stage
Monday 25th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My noble friend Lady Bennett of Manor Castle is unable to attend your Lordships’ Committee today, so I am proposing Amendment 30 in her place.

Along with the other amendments in this group, our amendment will improve the Government’s attempts to reduce serious violence. Youth groups, cultural groups and religious groups are just a few of the organisations that should be consulted in the exercise of the serious violence duty. There are many others too, and there will be big gaps in any serious violence reduction plan that has not consulted with and included these groups. They know their communities well, often with a different angle from other health services, local authorities and so on, and are currently not listed in the Bill—but they definitely should be. Perhaps most importantly, they can often shine a light on the failures of those other bodies with respect to how they perhaps underserve or misunderstand their communities.

So I hope the Minister will outline how youth, cultural and religious groups will be properly involved in this serious violence duty.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, as chair of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, I support Amendments 33 and 41 in my name. I intend to speak only once on the whole Bill, unless the spirit moves me via my noble friend the Minister’s reply. She will know that there were quite a few recommendations in the Delegated Powers Committee report, but I have put down just these two amendments.

If the Committee will permit, I will take the first minute to run through the more general criticism we made of the delegated powers in the Bill. I will not return to this subject again. In our response to the memorandum, we said:

“We are surprised and concerned at the large number of inappropriate delegations of power in this Bill … We are particularly concerned that the Bill would … allow Ministers—and even a non-statutory body—to influence the exercise of new police powers (including in relation to unauthorised traveller encampments and stop and search) through ‘guidance’ that is not subject to Parliamentary scrutiny … leave to regulations key aspects of new police powers—to restrict protest and to extract confidential information from electronic devices—that should instead be on the face of the Bill; and … allow the imposition of statutory duties via the novel concept of ‘strategy’ documents that need not even be published.”


That is the subject of the amendments before us today, and that is what I shall major on.

We concluded our general introduction by saying:

“We are disappointed that the inclusion of these types of delegations of power—on flimsy grounds—suggests that the Government have failed when preparing this Bill to give serious consideration to recommendations that we have made in recent reports on other Bills.”


That is fairly scathing condemnation, and it is a bit unfair on noble Lords in this Committee and from the Home Office, because they had nothing to do with drafting these provisions.

We all know how it happens. The Bill has come from another place; Ministers who have served in the Home Office and other departments will honestly admit this. I dealt with about 20 Bills when I was in the Home Office. The Bill team and civil servants would come in and say, “Here’s the Bill, Minister”, and we would look at the general politics of it. Then they would say, “Oh, by the way, there are some delegated powers there. When you’re ready to come back again to tweak it, we can deal with it”. We all said, “Yes, jolly good; carry on”, but never paid any attention to them. I am certain that the Bill team in the Commons—the civil servants drafting the Bill—did not, and nor did the Commons Ministers. It came here and this bunch of Lordships have got a bit upset, and I suspect others will too.

I say to my noble friend the Minister to go back, as other Lords Ministers have to do, and explain to Ministers in the Commons and the Bill team—the Bill team thinks it is sacrosanct; it has drafted it and does not like people mucking around with it—that that bunch up the Corridor will want some concessions. My political antennae tell me that on Report there may be a few amendments made by noble Lords on all sides—amendments I might not approve of at all—but if we want to get somewhere, the Commons should make concessions on this, because they are really sensible.

Before I comment on the two amendments, I will give one example. We criticise the provisions on serious disruption; I think the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, wishes to remove them from the Bill. We say in our report that the Government have been able to draft a half-page statutory instrument describing serious disruption. If the Government can draft it there, stick it in the Bill, for goodness’ sake, and then it can be amended later.

That is enough general criticism. I apologise to my noble friend as she has to take it all the time, but other departments have been infinitely worse in some of their inappropriate delegations. The Home Office is not the worst offender.

Clauses 7(9) and 8(9)

“make provision for or in connection with the publication and dissemination of a strategy”

to reduce serious violence. Clauses 7 and 8 allow collaboration between authorities and a local government area

“to prevent and reduce serious violence”,

including to

“prepare and implement a strategy for exercising their functions”—

all good stuff.

Under Clauses 7 and 8, a strategy

“may specify an action to be carried out by … an educational authority … a prison authority … or … a youth custody authority”,

and such authorities are under a duty to carry out the specified actions. However, there is no requirement for such a strategy to be published; instead, the Secretary of State has the power, exercisable by regulations subject to the negative procedure, to

“make provision for or in connection with the publication and dissemination of a strategy”.

This power would appear to allow the Secretary of State to provide that a strategy need not be published if she so wished, or even to decide not to make a provision about publication at all. That does not make sense to us. My committee is

“concerned that the absence of a requirement to publish means that a strategy can have legislative effect—by placing educational authorities, prison authorities and youth custody authorities under a statutory duty to do things specified in it—but without appropriate transparency.”

We therefore recommend

“that the delegated powers in clauses 7(9) and 8(9) should be amended”—

that is, tweaked a wee bit—

“to require the publication of any action which is specified in a ‘strategy’ as one that an educational authority, a prison authority or a youth custody authority must carry out.”

That is a minor tweak—actually, so are many of the other things we recommend. We may be scathing in the report, but we are not asking that fundamental bits of the Bill be deleted or rewritten completely; we are merely asking for more transparency. Putting more things on the face of the Bill will save the Government rather a lot of grief in this House later on.

European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Blencathra and Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 27th February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb]

I support Amendment 18. All these negotiations are going to be complex and long and for the Government to expect a respite from parliamentary scrutiny would be quite wrong. If we have a commentary it will also raise the likelihood of Parliament accepting the outcome, because there is nothing worse than something being sprung on you. My noble—I was going to say my noble enemy, but my noble opponent—the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, said earlier that the leavers had actually come round to the thought that if we lost the referendum, we would accept the result, and I think that that is partly because we talked through those things, we actually thought about it. It will be true for the EU negotiations as well that if the Government give as much information as they possibly can then the whole nation is more likely to accept what has happened.

[Lord Blencathra]

My Lords, I oppose this amendment partly on the basis that we do not need to put it in the Bill and partly because I think I have heard my noble friend say on countless occasions that we will have scrutiny after scrutiny in this House and, no doubt, in the other place. We have no legislative requirement at the moment to scrutinise the EU. Does the Minister have at his fingertips, or will he be able to tell us in his reply, how many Oral Questions we have had answered on this? We seem to have one on the Order Paper every day on an EU issue. Half the Order Papers have Written Questions on the EU. We have some excellent Select Committee reports from our Select Committees—we seem to debate one every week—and we have countless other debates. We are having more scrutiny that I think we can cope with.

My worry is that once we trigger Article 50 this House will have nothing much to do next year. The other place will start with the great repeal Bill. All we will have will be the EU retaliating immediately after we have put in our bid and saying, “We are not having any of that nonsense—we want £50 billion, thank you”. We will have German and French elections—the Dutch elections may be over by then—and we will have information coming from Europe which will be from politicians and will not be helpful. All we will have, in the other place and in this place, will be colleagues rushing in, demanding Urgent Questions, putting down Motions here, there and everywhere, demanding ministerial Answers.