House of Lords: Domestic Committees

Lord Cope of Berkeley Excerpts

Monday 9th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cope of Berkeley (Con)]

My Lords, I am glad to contribute to this discussion on the very interesting report of my noble friend Lady Shephard and her colleagues. I have been involved in various capacities in the governance of your Lordships’ House, and I was previously in another place for some years. I am currently a Back-Bench member of the House Committee, but for some years I was the opposition human resources manager, known for historical reasons as the Chief Whip. I was therefore at the centre of the great jigsaw puzzle of who does what, although I hasten to add that I was by no means the only player in that puzzle. I found that, broadly speaking, subject Select Committees attracted plenty of volunteers, but the administrative committees did not, with the notable exception of the Works of Art Committee.

The fact is that few of us take a sustained interest in organisational aspects of the House. There are important exceptions to this, such as the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, who spoke so well. Most Members of your Lordships’ House have a lifelong interest and great experience in various policy matters, such as medicine, education, economics or the law. They are only intermittently interested in the administration of the House—and usually, as my noble friend Lord Fowler pointed out, when something goes wrong, or is thought to have done. This tendency of your Lordships’ House is of course strengthened by the efficiency of the clerks, those who serve us so well in Black Rod’s Department and so on. Things generally run smoothly so your Lordships do not need to take an interest.

So what about the changes proposed in the report? With regard to the House Committee, there is not really much change on paper. The proposal is that the House Committee should be replaced by a new senior committee, with little if any change proposed in the remit. The new committee is supposed to develop, set and approve on behalf of the House the strategic plan and annual business and financial plans of the administration, working with the management board of House officials, and then monitor performance. The present terms of reference for the House Committee, as fully advertised, are:

“To set the policy framework for the administration of the House and to provide non-executive guidance to the Management Board; to approve the House’s strategic, business and financial plans; to agree the annual Estimates and Supplementary Estimates; to supervise the arrangements relating to financial support for Members; and to approve the House of Lords Annual Report”.

That is of course what we do. The only extra element of our current explicit terms of reference that is not so far part of the new committee is the reference to the supervision of the financial support for Members, but I am in no doubt that that will come within the remit of the new committee.

Some changes are proposed to the composition of the senior committee compared with the present House Committee: first, that the new services committee and finance committee chairs should be members of the senior committee, which I thoroughly support, but also that there would be two fewer Back-Bench representatives and instead two outside members, described as non-executive, although as a matter of fact those words describe us just as much as they would describe someone from outside. The idea is obviously to bring in individuals with suitable expertise, particularly where administration rather than anything else will be their specialist subject, and I support that.

The new factor is the proposed junior finance committee—below the senior policy and resources committee or whatever it turns out to be called—to do some groundwork, some detailed financial and technical scrutiny, on behalf of the senior committee. The terms of reference for that committee will presumably be very similar to those of the senior committee, except making it clear that it is junior to the senior committee. I worry that this will bring in duplication, which in other respects is what we are trying to get rid of. When the senior committee agrees with the junior committee, all will be well, but when the two disagree then the House itself will have to adjudicate, which might involve considerable delay.

I am also concerned about the proposal in paragraph 86,

“to align the work of the Finance Committee and the Audit Committee”.

I trained and worked as an auditor and consider that those functions should essentially be independent, not “aligned”, whatever that means, with the finance committee itself. I certainly do not think that the chair of the Audit Committee should only be a member of the junior committee; she—or, at some time, maybe he—should of course be a member of the senior committee.

The other new committee, the services committee, will combine the duties presently undertaken by the three committees. Like others in this debate, I am concerned about the width of those responsibilities on those members and that chairman. It will of course reduce by two-thirds the number of Back-Bench Members serving in these various capacities and so reduce the problem of finding enough committed Members to do the job, but the remit will be very wide, as the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, pointed out just now. Of course, it neatly avoids any boundary confusion between the three committees, which has been part of the difficulties of defining who is responsible for what, and gets round the printer’s ink problem. However, it leaves the problem of defining the difference of remit between the senior committee and the junior committees. What is strategic? So the decisions to be made about the precise remit of these two new committees, including the services committee, will not be very easily made. In any case, neither I nor, I think, the committee or the House believe that these adjustments to the committee structure and senior posts will of themselves make much difference to the reporting procedures or methods of working. They also need to be modified.

There is concern that those of us who currently serve on these committees do not report enough to our colleagues. Perhaps more proposals for change which are thought necessary could be brought to the Floor of the House before being instigated. However, I must warn the House that there is limited appetite for that among Members who want to raise other topics. I notice that the future business currently shows 65 Back-Bench Motions awaiting debate. Only one of those is about administration; the others are all about different aspects of policy.

Perhaps we members of the House Committee and other committees do not advertise our services as a channel of complaints enough. However, in my experience, Members who wish to complain about something that has gone wrong find their way to us quite often, and obviously we take up the points that are made. I add that I have only occasionally reported to the Association of Conservative Peers in my capacity as a member of the House Committee or in that sort of capacity, but I have also rarely observed an appetite for administrative matters to be raised in that forum either. In practice, of course, concerns are usually raised in the weekly session of the Association of Conservative Peers with the Chief Whip, as my noble friend Lady Shephard will recall from her time as the excellent chairman of the ACP. Not the least achievement of the Leader’s Group she chaired was to have brought out the views of Members about governance which are not normally expressed and have not been over the years. This report has given us a useful opportunity to reflect on how this rather special place works, and we can and should go ahead with its proposed changes.