Procedure of the House (Proposal 3)

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Tuesday 8th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Higgins]

My Lords, I believe that the present arrangement works extremely well. As far as I can see, this will actually slow down the proceedings, and, to try to get some of the time back, imposes a limit on the length of Questions to 25 words. One can see a number of Questions on the Order Paper now which are over 25 words and are by no means excessively long. I see no reason whatever to change the existing arrangement.

[Lord Cormack]

My Lords, I agree very much with my noble friend, but there is one thing that we could do—and I hesitate to mention this. There is one practice in the Commons that speeds it up: that the Member asking a Question gets up and says “Number One”, “Number Two” or “Number Three” or whatever. As the Question is printed on the Order Paper; as you can put texts on the television that viewers can read; and as every Member of your Lordships’ House can read and has an Order Paper, that is the way one could speed things up. However, in my view there is absolutely no justification for this particular suggestion.

[Lord Empey]

My Lords, I support the noble Lord, Lord Cormack. Clearly, we want to make the House intelligible to as many people as possible. However, given that we have Questions one month in advance on our green sheet and, on the day, we get two sheets with the Questions on, nobody should be in any doubt as to what Question we are going to be asking. Given that the Questions are well known in advance, the solution is to have the text on the television. That would achieve the two things that we want to achieve: first, to better inform the public; and, secondly, not to do the very opposite of what we are trying to do in many of these Motions, which is to save time. This goes completely contrary to the thrust of them.