Procedure of the House

Lord Elton Excerpts

Wednesday 24th April 2013 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Clancarty]

My Lords, I do not support the proposal for a Back-Bench committee for debates. There will inevitably be a tendency towards safer, more mainstream and more predictable debates and a decrease in the breadth of debate—of issues discussed in this House—something for which this House is known. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Butler, that having only a few people speak in the debate does not necessarily say anything about the quality of that debate, which may be very high. I certainly support staying with the balloting procedure.

[Lord Elton]

My Lords, I always regard things which are commended because they work well in the House of Commons with a certain degree of suspicion. I urge your Lordships to do the same for a very good reason. The pressures that Back-Benchers cope with in the other place are quite different from the pressures that we are coping with here. They do not have tenure, but we do. Their tenure is dependent in part on the power of the Whips to deselect, so the positions of the two Houses in the competition with the Crown for power, which is what this is all about, are quite different. A Back-Bench committee with command of some time in the House of Commons is a very large step forward. A Back-Bench committee here, for the reasons which have just been very adequately voiced by the noble Earl, is a step backwards, and I hope we do not take it.

[Lord Grenfell]

My Lords, I would like to be very brief. I have just three small points; or rather, they are not small, but I will try to put them briefly. Before I do so, I should say that I found the argument of the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, very strong and, certainly for me, very convincing.

First, I want to take up what the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, just said, which was reflected by the noble Lord, Lord Elton, and a number of other noble Lords. It seems to suggest that a Back-Bench Committee would be devoid of all sympathy for the more esoteric topics that might need to be debated. I think it is rather insulting towards Back-Benchers to suggest that they might not be interested in topics which are rather unusual but personally important to the people proposing them.

The noble Lord the Leader of the House is wedded to the word “balloting”. I am very glad that the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, has once again said—as I have done before—that we should not be using the word ballot in relation to the present system. It is a lucky dip. If you want a ballot then you should be supporting a Back- Bench committee because such a democratically elected committee, working on democratic principles, would be deciding on what debates should take place by balloting within the committee. That is where you get the ballot. So let us not confuse balloting with lucky dips; that is the present system and I find it quite extraordinary.

Finally, I think the case the noble Lord the Leader of the House has made falls flat when we come to paragraph 14 in the report, when he says that all Back-Benchers must,

“have an equal chance of securing time to debate issues of concern to them, without having to secure the approval of their peers”.

Peer approval is one of the cornerstones of a self-regulating House and I strongly believe that there is a case for setting up a committee where democratically elected Back-Benchers can decide and make proposals as to what they think it is in the broad interests of the House as a whole to listen to when debate slots are available. I know we have a topical debate period but it is very important that a Back-Bench committee should be sensitive to both the more specialised issues that some would want to debate—and they would be taken into consideration—and also to the broader interests of the House. This is to make sure that highly important issues do not go by the board because a lucky dip has decided that they have no place in the debating Chamber.