Procedure of the House

Lord Filkin Excerpts

Wednesday 24th April 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

My Lords, we do have a ballot. I have had this conversation before with my noble friend, who I know takes the view that it is a lottery rather than a ballot. It is a ballot by definition, one in which everyone has an equal chance and does not need to persuade others of the merit of their case or the wisdom of the topic that they want to debate. They have an equal chance among all their peers.

[Lord Filkin]

My Lords, I appreciate what the noble Lord the Leader has done in seeking to respond to the pressure for more Back-Bench debates and time. That is utterly commendable. However, he is proposing a mechanism whereby we would still have a lottery in which we chose from topics that were judged to be topical. Who will decide that topicality question? Clearly, from previous discussions, that topicality would have to be decided by the clerks, under whatever guidance the House had given them. That puts them in the invidious position of making a judgment about whether an issue is topical, and it would be much better if such judgments were made by the House itself by the only mechanism that it can—through a properly appointed committee.

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

My Lords, topical Questions each week are dealt with in precisely that way. As I have said, we would need to agree in the Procedure Committee, in just the same way as we would if we end up with a Back-Bench debates committee, the criteria by which that committee will reach decisions, because the House will want to know on what basis the judgments that the Back-Bench debates committee is making are being determined. At an earlier stage, the proposal for the Back-Bench debates committee was that it would make the consideration and would not have to give reasons, perfectly properly, for why it had reached its decisions. Whichever route we go down, we will have to have a set of criteria within which we operate, so that the House knows what the basis of the decision is.

My point, though, is that I am not proposing new procedures. The proponents of a Back-Bench debates committee are proposing a new procedure. I am effectively saying that we would still have the way in which we have already operated for a long time. There could be some improvements in terms of different criteria, cut-offs and so on, if that is what people want to pursue, but we would fundamentally stick with the current system. It is those who want to change the system who are proposing the innovation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Higgins]

My Lords, I support the proposal for a Back-Bench committee. Indeed, I was one of those who put the suggestion to the Procedure Committee. I start by paying tribute to the former Leader of the House for establishing the working group on our working practices. He was sometimes accused of dragging his feet and not getting on, but we have made a number of improvements, although a number remain to be made, of which this is one, and I hope that we can make progress on it today. Secondly, I express appreciation to the present Leader of the House for the extra time that he is proposing we should have for Back-Bench debates, which is very important.

The noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, asked why we should go along with the Goodlad report. The answer is very simple: we should or should not go along with it on the basis of the arguments that were put forward on this issue. The letter that the noble Lord the Leader of the House has circulated strongly stresses that we should look at the situation and read the report of the Procedure Committee. I am sure that we should read the Procedure Committee report, but the report that we should be reading on this issue is the Goodlad report. The recommendations in this regard run to a full page and are supported by a number of paragraphs arguing in favour of such a committee.

The noble Lord, Lord Butler, set forward the case comprehensively. I do not wish to delay the House for long, but I shall refer to one personal experience of these matters. At the height of the first outbreak of the eurozone crisis, I sought to obtain a debate on the Floor of the House. It proved extremely difficult. I tried for week after week on a matter of major importance; meanwhile ballots were taking place on issues of relative unimportance. Eventually I managed to secure a debate in the Moses Room. The Motion was immediately hijacked by the Opposition, who added a second part to it, which was entirely partisan. The debate broke up completely in both directions and the real issue of the eurozone was barely debated. Had we had such a committee at the beginning of the crisis, we could have had what would have been, as always in your Lordships’ House, an expert debate. This is not going to happen with a ballot.

The reality is that the odds on the chance of getting a debate on a major issue as against some particular enthusiasm are not good. A large number of Members may have put in for the ballot and the odds are getting worse because there are more Members. Therefore, the chances of getting relevant, topical, important debates would be improved if we had someone, and a group of the kind suggested, who would be effective in bringing that about.

My noble friend asked a moment ago how the group would be selected. I am strongly in favour of its members being elected. That seems to me the obvious way of proceeding rather than by appointment or any other method. That should ensure that they are appropriately members of the committee and can then act in our interests as far as the overall picture is concerned.

Reference has been made to the situation in the House of Commons. Its Members are enthusiastic about the change that was made to their proceedings. Matters are never on all fours between one House and the other but I had the chance last night of speaking to Mr Bernard Jenkin, who happened to be involved in procedures in the other place and who is wildly enthusiastic about what has happened there. Perhaps that is overstating it; I am not sure that one is ever wildly enthusiastic about such matters. But he has not the slightest doubt that the change has meant that Back-Benchers have a greater influence on the matters that are debated and the priority given to them. That is what we ought to secure by this proposal and I hope very much indeed that we do, because I am frankly rather puzzled by the position that the Leader of the House has taken. I do not think that the present arrangement is working well and we ought to reform it.

[Lord Filkin]

My Lords, I will speak briefly, because I am sure that the House wishes to come to a conclusion on this quite rapidly. I was slightly troubled by the last thing that the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, said in his excellent speech, as it is almost guaranteed to ensure that the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin of Roding, will not now vote in support of the Motion. But you cannot have everything, can you?

The points are as follows. If we adopt the proposal on the Order Paper, we are much more likely to be able to have timely debates on issues that the public think are important and we will be seen to be relevant. That is important; it was one of the fundamental issues that the Goodlad report affirmed. Secondly, unlike in the Commons, these issues are not divisible. That is important for our traditions. The Government do not have to fear what they fear in the Commons—that you have a debate on some contentious issue leading to a headline story that the Lords voted X or Y. That would not happen and it is in keeping with our traditions that it should not. That ought to allow the Government and the coalition parties who are signatories to the letter to relax a little bit on this issue. Thirdly, the proposal makes no change to the existing procedure for QSDs. Those who are beloved of ballots will still be able to go in for ballots for a number of QSDs; that is going to continue. Finally, we all know that the Government can ensure that there is a debate on any issue that they judge to be topical and important whenever they wish to do so. Back-Benchers ought to be able to do the same.

[Lord Brabazon of Tara]

I welcome parts of this report, particularly paragraph 6, which gives us extra time for QSDs, but I am not so keen on this idea of a Back-Bench business committee. I know that it was proposed in the Goodlad report, but not everything in the Goodlad report was gospel. I well remember bringing the first half dozen proposals from the Goodlad report to the Floor of the House when I occupied the position of Chairman of Committees; three of them were voted straight out. So I am not certain one should use that as an argument for the goodness of this suggestion.

I make the point, as have other noble Lords, that balloted debates are the only chance that some noble Lords have of getting their subjects debated. Will this new committee have to give reasons for its decisions? Would it deliberate in public? How does it intend to fulfil its remit, in paragraph 10, to “add transparency and accountability”? I assume that the committee would be set up in much the same way as are most of the other committees in this House. Whether it is elected or appointed, it would still have party balance. Like, I am sure, all committees in this House with party balance, it would tend to rotate the debate subjects around the various parties. I am not quite sure why it would operate in a different way from the existing party debate days, which will continue.

I welcome the proposals in the Leader’s section—option 2 in the report. I welcome the idea of not rolling over debates from one to another, so that you hopefully get a slightly lower number of two-and-a-half-hour balloted debates on the Order Paper at any one time. I agree that there should be an element of cross-party support for the particular subject. I make one further suggestion, which is that the present two and a half hours for each balloted debate—five hours in total—should not rigidly be divided at two and a half hours each. If we were to have a situation where there were more speakers in one debate than in the other, the list might have to close slightly earlier but one debate might get, say, three hours and the other only two. I wonder if the Procedure Committee might look at that proposal.

House of Lords: Working Practices

Lord Filkin Excerpts

Thursday 1st November 2012 Lords Chamber

Moved By

[Lord Filkin]

That this House takes note, in the light of the Government’s decision not to proceed with the House of Lords Reform Bill, of the options for making better use of the skills and experience of its Members in performing its core functions of scrutinising legislation, holding the Government to account and providing a forum for public debate.

[Lord Filkin]

My Lords, I am delighted to see how many people are in the Chamber wishing to speak on this Motion. Unfortunately, noble Lords will pay a price in the amount of time that they will have to do so.

I will argue how crucial it is now that we look afresh at how we make better use of our talents and the skills of our Members, fundamentally better to fulfil the functions of the House as set out on the Order Paper. I will argue that it is timely to do so. We know now that fundamental change to the composition of the House is off the agenda, at least for the immediate future. You can make your own guess, but I would expect that the present incumbents, if we are fortunate, may well be here in 10 years’ time. That therefore increases the necessity of looking at our processes to see whether we can improve them.

Next, it is right to look at this again because there is unfinished business. The Leader helpfully set up a Leader’s Group, chaired very ably by the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad, but many of those recommendations, some of the most important ones, have not yet come before the House for discussion and decision. It is timely for many of them to do so.

Lastly, there are wider issues, and none of us will be able to resist some of the temptation of straying into them. However, the fundamental issue should be about completing the Goodlad business that was started and is not yet at its end.

I turn to what was in the Goodlad report. My apologies to the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad, for using the abbreviation; he will know what I mean by that. The report looked at the scrutiny of legislation. That matters. We spend most of our time on it; it is our most important function. The volume and complexity of legislation have increased enormously over recent decades. We do not do a bad job, but we do not do a good enough job either. That is not always helped by the fact that Governments of whatever party have a persistent disease of rushing Bills into the House before they are properly ready and prepared.

There are two fundamental recommendations in Goodlad which would have helped to address that. The first was establishing a presumption that there should be pre-legislative scrutiny on all important Bills, particularly those which made major policy shift and/or had not had full consultation via Green Papers or White Papers. The second was a test of legislative preparedness before a Bill had its Second Reading to ensure that some basic process tests had been fulfilled. This may sound tedious and unnecessary, but I ask noble Lords to reflect on the Health and Social Care Bill that came into this House. I hope that the Health and Social Care Act works because, for most of us, the improvement of the NHS is fundamentally important to the cohesion, health and well- being of our society. But it was an object lesson in how not to proceed. I do not make that as a party-political point. The Government of whom I was a Minister was, at times, guilty of similar failings. I argue that a fundamental change like that needed the fullest consultation before the Government had firmly made up their mind. That is why pre-legislative scrutiny matters: because Governments are more flexible before they and their officials have committed themselves in that way. If we had had pre-legislative scrutiny, and if we had had tests of legislative preparedness, I am confident that the Health and Social Care Bill would have had an easier passage, probably a quicker one, and I would have expected that it would have been a better Act at the end of the process.

The Goodlad report also recommended that we should change some of our processes. The primary recommendation was that most Bills should go into Grand Committee. I will not go on in detail about that; we have debated it. However, the Goodlad proposal was not of course the proposal on which the House voted. I hope that at some stage—not in the near future but at some stage—we will come back to the proposal that most Bills should be scrutinised in Grand Committee. The process of scrutiny is evidentially better there than it usually is on the Floor of the House.

On secondary legislation, Goodlad recommended what had been recommended by the Wakeham commission previously: that the convention on secondary legislation that the House does not usually strike down and defeat SIs would be better replaced by a convention that essentially said that the House should use a power to defer and ask the Government to think again. That is absolutely consistent with what we do on primary legislation, and the benefits of doing it on secondary legislation are for the once or twice a year when there are manifestly failings in an SI brought before the House, either because its policy or processes are unclear or its consultation has been poor. The Government would be invited to think again about such an instrument and bring it back in a month’s time with amendments or with a better argumentation as to why that SI should stand. We would have better SIs as a consequence because officials and Ministers would be aware of this potential delaying power and would therefore do their homework better. That is not to imply that the quality of SIs is generally poor, because it is not; it has improved.

Those are some of the changes on legislative process that this House has within its power to make relatively simply, at relatively little cost. The public would be better served if we did so.

This House is an important forum for debate and inquiry. We do not get that much attention in the wider world. Sometimes, that is the media’s fault; sometimes, it is our own. The question for us, though, is how we make better use of our time and skills to be an effective forum for debate and inquiry. I shall make three simple points.

First, Goodlad argued that the process for choosing Back-Bench debates was somewhat arcane—some of us would say asinine. Essentially, the Government can table a debate on a topic that they think is important, relevant or even urgent at any time they wish to do so. Back-Benchers are not able in this House to do that. The only mechanism by which they can do so is if they win the lottery, which is what, of course, the ballot is, and there is no guarantee that the name that comes out of the hat will meet the test of being important or topical. Alternatively, they can put their name down for a Question for Short Debate. We are now debating issues on Questions for Short Debate that were tabled five months ago. Therefore, it is impossible by that mechanism to use QSDs to raise timely and urgent issues. There is something fundamentally flawed in the way in which we select topics for Back-Bench debates. Goodlad recommended a very simple, very low-cost process for doing so, whereby the Back-Bench Members of this House control that process. I very much hope that we will discuss that before long.

Secondly, recommendations that Goodlad made that have been introduced, and I was delighted to see them, were to establish two ad hoc sub-committees. They were not introduced in exactly the way that Goodlad recommended them, but it could well be that the Leader of the House was right on this occasion, as he often is, to recommend that they be short and sharp rather than standing or long-standing. Two are under way, on SMEs and on public service and demographic change, and they will report by Easter. There will be two new ones next year. Therefore, it is clear that we should focus on that issue and try to ensure that we have two excellent topics for the successor committees. I hope that, in time, we will recognise that this is one of the best possible ways of harnessing the talent in this House and that we have more such ad hoc sub-committees. However, that will depend on whether we can demonstrate that there are good topics that need to be so debated.

Thirdly, we need to find ways of getting on with debates on Select Committee reports. It is not healthy that a committee works very hard to produce a report and that it has then to wait sometimes weeks and months before there is a debate on it.

Transparency was touched on in Goodlad, although perhaps with not quite that language. Transparency is an objective of this Government and I commend them for it. It is healthy for public life and public policy if most of our processes are more transparent and thereby accessible to the public and the wider world. However, public understanding of and involvement in the House of Lords, while they have improved, are still not good enough. Members’ own understanding of its processes and decisions is often shaky and weak—I think, after 10 or 12 years here, I begin to understand how it works, but I would not like to sit a GCSE on the subject.

One illustration—I am not just teasing the Front Benches on this—is the way in which the usual channels work. The processes of the usual channels are necessary—I do not think that the usual channels are malign, or at least not usually—but it is clear that many Members do not understand how they work. Goodlad argued that it would be healthy if the Leader looked at how we could make the workings of the usual channels more understandable and thereby accessible to the wider membership of the House. That is necessary and I hope that it happens before long. It would also be helpful to the wider public.

I say with tact that the usual channels are extremely influential in the way in which they manage the business of the House and are extremely influential in the major committees of the House. The consequence can be, no doubt unintentionally, that they have quite an influence on how Back-Bench issues are addressed as well. The House should take ownership of its own Back-Bench business within the time that is allocated to it as a fundamental principle. It does not always feel as if that occurs. I shall illustrate the point by mentioning again the two new ad hoc committees that will be set up next April. How many Members of the House are aware that there will be two new ad hoc committees? How many Members of the House are aware of any process by which they can put forward suggestions? Some Members are, but very many are not. How many members of the public are aware that two new ad hoc sub-committees will be set up next year? There is nothing wicked here, but it would be a cleaner process if the wider world and ourselves were aware that there were two slots for ad hoc sub-committees next year. They would thereby be well sighted on the potential for putting in argumentations for them and aware of the criteria that will be used for selection of those and where the decisions will be made. Nothing is wrong with what is happening at present, but that would certainly be a better process.

I shall touch very briefly on wider issues. The elephant in this Chamber, which you can all see, is that this House is too big. It frustrates the ability of new Members and many older Members to participate and it damages our credibility to some extent. It is self-evident that, if we are meant to be a House of expertise doing good scrutiny, we need to refresh and bring in new talent. Those two objectives are in conflict and the way of resolving them is obvious to us all: there has to be some process of retirement. Such a process will not be easy or even possible unless a government of the day are prepared to introduce legislation. However, it is necessary, as otherwise the House will clog up and become discredited, or we will fail to bring in sufficient new talent, which is clearly necessary.

If the scrutiny of legislation is our fundamental task, are the resources available to opposition Front Benches, of whatever party is in power, or to Members sufficient to do that? I have taken part in the scrutiny of legislation, and your Lordships know as well as I do the process. It is almost impossible unless you are lawyer to engage in the amendments and their processes without external support. That can be helpful and it involves the wider world, but it can also lead to risks. I also hope that we will as a House recognise that we have to champion Back-Bench interests, not in the interest of Back-Benchers per se but in the interest of better scrutiny, better debate and a better holding of the Government to account.

In conclusion, I am arguing that the priority is to make the case for a Back-Bench debates committee as soon as possible, and bring that before the Liaison Committee when we have completed making the case; in time, to bring in a process for a legislative standards committee; to review the transparency of our processes with a view to improving them; and, lastly, I urge all Back-Benchers, and even Front-Benchers, to persist in the important task of improving the processes of this House, because we have an obligation to the public we serve to do so.

[Baroness Anelay of St Johns]

My Lords, it might be helpful if I point out that this is a popular debate. There are 24 Back-Bench speakers to follow, with four minutes for each. When the clock hits four, I am afraid that four minutes are actually up.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Filkin]

In rising to thank all Members who have taken part in the debate, I shall do my utmost to be charitable, as it is nearly the end of our working week. First, I shall try to be charitable to those Members who have persistently and roundly insulted me by describing me as an oily mechanic or a mongrel. I have seldom had to suffer so much in silence in my career until now. I shall also, with no difficulty, seek to be charitable to the Leader of the House, because I believe that he had largely written his speech before he had listened to the debate that we have had in the past two and a half hours. I say that with good grace, because I have seldom heard such feeling around the House that we ought now to make sensible progress on reforms of this House. The Leader gave his usual eloquent and urbane reason that we had done all that we sensibly could and had better let sleeping dogs lie—or, as a councillor once said to me, had better leave lying dogs to sleep, which is slightly different.

Nevertheless, the Leader of the House has given us some pointers. First, a number of us are bound to wish to have a discussion with him. Without doubt, with his usual good grace, he will give us time. Our discussion with him will be about on which elements of the changes that have been strongly supported from all corners of this House we can move forward. As he implies, ultimately, it is not what I think or even he, from his eminence, thinks; it is what this House thinks that it wants to do on some of these issues. We will discuss with him the procedures that are there for us to explore how some of these things can be fairly, without too much manipulation, brought before the House in the ways in which they were expressed in the Goodlad report and, no doubt, informed by good guidance about what is practical. I think that the House would welcome it if we did that in a sensible and measured way. I thank again all who have spoken so strongly and supportively of the need for sensible, progressive change.

Motion agreed.

Liaison Committee: Third Report

Lord Filkin Excerpts

Monday 26th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Filkin]

My Lords, I rise, as a member of the Goodlad committee, to give my warm support to the recommendations of the Liaison Committee and to at least put on the record some of the argumentation as to why the other issues need to be considered and supported by the House.

In this report from the Liaison Committee we consider some of the significant areas for improvement to the working practices of this House which, in many previous debates, have been strongly argued for by many Members from all parts of the House. I can be brief because they come to relatively few fundamental points.

First, most Members of the House believe that if we spent more time on pre-legislative scrutiny of more Bills, we would have better legislation. This recommendation both makes that possible and starts an increase in the resources going to pre-legislative scrutiny, which is to be commended.

Secondly, many of us have argued for years that we should carry out post-legislative scrutiny. We should look, in a sober, thoughtful and informed way, at the effects of the legislation that we pass. The Commons is doing some but we have done nothing. We have not yet brought our considerable expertise and knowledge of many of the aspects on which we legislate to looking at whether the legislation achieves its objectives—and if not, why not—so that we can better inform both that policy area and, more significantly, our own processes of scrutiny of legislation.

Thirdly, the Liaison Committee makes a recommendation for a process to bring in additional ad hoc committees. The Leader of the House will know that I would not have brought it in in exactly that way but, nevertheless, it is to be welcomed in terms of what it would allow the House to do. It would allow the House to identify a topic of significant domestic policy interest which is potentially cross-cutting, and so in no way duplicate the work of the Commons; and it would have a short remit of a year in which to bring forward an influential and reflective report. There are two good examples there and I shall spend 30 seconds speaking on one of them. Most of us know that the significant demographic changes in our society will have a fundamental effect on public services—the demand for them, their cost, and the impact of that—and yet no-one in either House has as yet looked at that issue. It cries out for a short, sharp, well-informed and expert committee of this House, drawing on experts from outside. It is a topic to which the House would bring great value.

One of the more contentious elements of the Goodlad report was the recommendation that this House should be better at reviewing its committees as they exist. In the past the House has sometimes tried to do this and, for obvious reasons, it is painful. There is great resistance to making any change to the existing architecture of committees. Why so? It is because people develop passion, commitment, and expertise. Everything that the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, said, and everything that the noble Lord, Lord Roper, so eloquently said in his argumentation of the value that the EU Committee has brought to this House, is true. However, unfortunately that is not the point. The point is that unless the House can continue to increase its resources to allow new topics to be studied, there will always be a starvation of the issues that are not being debated because the existing agenda dominates the resources, and existing interests in the House are eloquent in its defence. I respect their doing so—I would do the same myself—but that squeezes out anything new to the disadvantage of the House.

If, the House considers that it can have only one net addition, the Liaison Committee would then have the invidious task of deciding that we did not do more pre-legislative scrutiny, that we did not start post-legislative scrutiny, and that we did not have a process whereby we selected a couple of topics of cross-cutting domestic policy to look at each year. That would be regrettable. I regret that the Science and Technology Committee and the EU Committee are to be reduced, but that is necessary in circumstances where we do not have limitless resources. They can both make their case in a year’s time as to why they should be increased.

However, the thrust of the report essentially is that we would be a better House if we accept these recommendations. It would involve substantially more of the expertise in the House which currently has no voice in our affairs because some noble Lords do not have a seat on a committee of the House and are longing to have that opportunity. For those reasons, I strongly support the Liaison Committee’s recommendations.

[Lord Broers]

My Lords, I speak as a past chairman and present member of the Select Committee for Science and Technology. I cannot accept the argument of the noble Lord. The Science and Technology Select Committee provides fundamental information across the board in our country, particularly as an economic entity, that is relevant to all legislation. It is therefore incredibly important.

The most effective way to rebuild our economy is to restore our industrial leadership in the manufacturing of innovative products. This will only happen if we regain competitiveness in research and development. This is the business of the Science and Technology Select Committee. We inquire into whether our educational system is producing the graduates needed by industry for its R&D activities, whether the Government are using their procurement effectively to stimulate innovation, as the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, has said, and we inquire into the state of specific industries such as nuclear power.

At present, the lack of R&D spend is the Achilles’ heel of our economy. To reach the level of spending in Germany we would have to spend £10 billion more than we are spending at the moment, and to rival the USA we would have to spend £13 billion more. The Government are doing well in some of their initiatives, such as the catapults, but this is really only seed money. We need to keep our eye upon our academic and industrial performance in both the private and public sectors, and this is what the Select Committee does.

The committee needs two sub-committees in order to cover the two broad fields of science and technology: the engineering and physical, and the biological and medical. For example, the committee needs different talents to inquire into genomic medicine and renewable energies, or to inquire into pandemic flu and nuclear power. Innovative products, and therefore gains in our health, transport, energy, communications and other systems, will also help us with our massive deficit. These potential gains are also the business of the Science and Technology Select Committee. This is not the time to cut in half the resources available to that committee.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Winston]

My Lords, I will be brief. I would like to take up a point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, in a previous debate. It seems absolutely ridiculous to change the nature of these expert Select Committees at this time, when the whole question of the reform of the House of Lords will start to be discussed in the next few months. I beg the House to consider that issue, because the Science and Technology Committee is a highly respected committee. I could cite a list of sub-committees that have all made an international impact, from our treatment of antibiotic resistance, to the change in aircraft passenger environment, to the use of science in education in schools—where, for example, extensive, major changes have been made as a result of the House of Lords report. I am really surprised at the noble Lord, Lord Filkin. After all, he spent some time in the Home Office, which has to deal with a range of scientific issues, from animal research, to security and surveillance, to electronic monitoring, to weapons. We have to recognise—

[Lord Filkin]

My Lords—

[Lord Winston]

Perhaps I may finish my sentence. We have to recognise that science now pervades every aspect of what we do and is vitally important to this country as never before.

[Lord Filkin]

I would not wish to confuse my good friend, the noble Lord, Lord Winston. I totally respect the importance of science and technology: it could not be more important. The thrust of the Liaison Committee’s report, which I was supporting, was the need for balance—by which I mean, if we cannot do everything, we need to have some space to harness the expertise of this House to those subjects that are almost completely ignored. This process allows us to do so.

[Lord May of Oxford]

My Lords, in the light of what the noble Lord has just said, I have every sympathy with the problem that the Liaison Committee is seeking to address. The past few years have, after all, seen an extraordinary increase in the number of people joining us in this House, adding roughly one-third to the number of just a few years ago. It is of course proper to wish to handle things in such a way that more people can be engaged, and that is very difficult at a time when the resources cannot expand to accommodate it. I am not going to go over again the ground that has been covered, and there will be yet further examples of how extraordinary the Science and Technology Committee has been—but it is not alone in that. However, one of the distinctive and hugely useful features of the House of Lords is the expertise and first-hand knowledge that it possesses. The best of briefing is no substitute for that. We have expertise in law, engineering, science, medicine, economics, social science, the arts, business and much else, and we want to embrace it all.

I have sat on both ends of the Select Committee table—I was also interrogated by them in my five-year stint as Chief Scientific Adviser to the John Major and Tony Blair Governments. The committees were very different entities—they were not just the one Science and Technology Committee. The House of Commons is often excellent, but it rarely matches the expert, knowledgeable, thoughtful approach that is brought forward in this House. In my experience of the other place, particularly with regard to issues of genetic modification, opinion is too often substituted for knowledge and beliefs for thoughtful analysis.

It is against that background that I offer what I hope might be a solution—or at least the elements of a solution—to the conundrum before us, of whether we embrace more people in ways that play to their strength. Let us not forget that, until relatively recently, the Science and Technology Committee typically ran two sub-committees, one of which it has lost. The committee has always co-opted other people. I have looked at the past six years and, typically, a little more than one in five of those serving on the Science and Technology Committee or its sub-committees were co-opted from outside. It therefore has a way of going about enlarging its ambit. The result of losing one of those sub-committees is the loss of some of those opportunities. If we lose the second one, we will have lost—apart from the ability to do the work—roughly half of a sub-committee’s worth of co-opted people.

I am coming to my suggestion. Having come off the Science and Technology Committee, my interests in the last three or four years have shifted; I have become involved with the Bank of England and others in systemic risk in financial systems. It is quite substantial. I am not aware of anybody in the House who has this precise kind of competence, which has not conventionally been something of major focus in the Bank. Therefore, I asked the Economic Affairs Committees whether I could be a co-opted member if and when there were things of this kind. I was told that those committees did not co-opt people. In so far as I have discovered—and I may be wrong—the idea of co-opting a fifth to a quarter of the members, which is habitual for the Science and Technology Committee, is not habitual to the other Select Committees. If this is true—if the others are more like Economic Affairs than Science and Technology—simply by altering that, we could have a much wider embrace of people who were not at that time on committees. The resources mean that we are not going to have more bums on Select Committee seats; it is just a question of how we can embrace a much wider group of people. That is an important approach.

The other proposal in this Liaison Committee report is to use four ad hoc committees. Personally, I think the idea of one or two ad hoc committees is extremely good, for the reasons that we have already heard. I also understand that we have resources for one more fully funded Select Committee. I suggest that we do not go for four ad hoc committees, rather one or two at a time, and keep what is one of the demonstrable jewels in this place, which is the full strength of its input to science and technology in the broadest sense, and with an emphasis on the technology as well as the science.

House of Lords: Working Practices

Lord Filkin Excerpts

Monday 27th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Filkin]

My Lords, it has been a real pleasure to hear the debate and to get the sense that there is a broad measure of support across the House and across party for some of the most important recommendations. That was how we worked as a group. We were superbly and subtly led by our chairman. It is not the first time that he has heard that. All the members of the committee worked together, and we were extremely well guided by Christopher Johnson and Susannah Street in the way that they supported us. They were a delight.

In part, that helped us to bring in a consensual report on difficult issues on which we all had strong opinions. I was glad that the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, referred to one of the origins of this report, which was that it was very much the Lord Speaker’s initiative to have a proper, discrete reflection, in the wake of the destruction of this House’s reputation, about whether we could do our job for the public better. That has been a central question before the committee. It has not simply been about whether we like to start at 2 pm or 2.30 pm, but about how do we do our job for the public for whom we are charged with scrutinising legislation, holding the Government to account and being a proper forum for debate. Those questions are the leitmotif that we have tried to bring throughout the report.

For many of us, the central clutch of recommendations is about trying to scrutinise legislation better. Again, it has been an enormous pleasure to hear almost universal support for pre-legislative scrutiny, a legislative standards committee, post-legislative scrutiny and for the subtle change in delegated legislation for which the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas of Winchester, so clearly and cogently expressed the rationale. I thank her for that because it is easy to think that this is the end of the world.

The only voice against was of great concern to me, that of my good former colleague, the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles. I think he was arguing that we should not overreach our hand or overview our power and influence. Of course, he is right. We should always have a sense of modesty—perhaps not always the House’s best skill. However, the argument that we cannot make it perfect is not an argument for not trying to make it better. The test of those changes in terms of legislation is: is it more likely that chipping away, challenging, questioning, having proper processes will mean that legislation will be better done? I believe it will be.

Of course, legislation should sit on a proper bedrock of good policy and reflection and public consultation on that policy. Often it is; too often it is not. The noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, put it beautifully: many of us are sad creatures who are really interested in public policy but we have to exercise that secret sin elsewhere because there are so few opportunities to do it here. The noble Lord, Lord Bichard, no doubt will say something on that. It is a phenomenal waste of this House’s talent that it does not address major cross-cutting issues of public policy. It is unbelievable to the thoughtful general public that we do not do that. Therefore, after very careful consideration, we recommended two additional Select Committees—because one sounded trivial but we should not be silly and go too far because things do have a cost. I very much hope that the House will treat this seriously and the authorities and powers-that-be will put it into practice because we have the strength and resources in this House to add a lot of value and benefit to the public if we scrutinise unscrutinised areas of public policy.

For many of us, the dog that has not barked in this debate is: what happens next? We know in theory what happens next: the usual channels will refer some things to various committees and eventually they will bring back recommendations and the House will decide. That is what we will be told and it is true. Of course, what the House will decide will partly depend on what is served up to it, and what is served up to it can colour the form of debate and the form of decision-making, because that is the way in which we work. Some of us have great concerns about ensuring that we look at these issues.

I give the greatest thanks and respect to the Leader of the House. He has continued to surprise me on this agenda by being more open-minded in process than perhaps his good soul naturally feels and allowing us to play and to have a good chairman and bring in some pretty thoughtful but at times radical recommendations. I hope that he will continue with that stance because he is earning our respect and admiration for doing so.

What worries me is “cost neutrality”. With the greatest humility, I suggest a slight emendation: “cost neutrality in time”. It is an Augustinian concept. I say this for about four reasons. The first is that these costs are trivial. They are trivial in our costs: they are 1 per cent of this House’s costs. I will not make the cheap joke about the number of Peers; you know what I mean. Secondly, they are utterly microscopic in public expenditure terms. Scrutinising a Bill better or challenging a piece of government policy—again I will not mention some pieces of public policy; I do not wish to be contentious—would help the Government and force them to think better. The yield on that expenditure would be phenomenal and we must have the confidence that we have the skills and ability to do so.

The third reason why cost neutrality is an insidious argument is that it massively favours the status quo. It basically says that the existing cost base of this organisation is sacrosanct and that any bit of additional expenditure has to make the case for change. If we are going to make the case for change, it should be on all expenditure being scrutinised, not just on the new expenditure at the margin. We will not review everything, so we should not fetter these recommendations with the shackles of saying they have to have cost neutrality immediately. I am sure it was not so intended but that phrase is at risk of killing the report.

I look forward massively to seeing where we go next. Of course, the biggest way in which we could reduce the cost of these recommendations is to have a proper discussion with the other place—the House of Commons, as my noble friend Lord Grocott would encourage me to say—because if we could do some of these processes jointly the cost would suddenly reduce substantially, at least to this House. I look forward enormously to hearing how the Leader of the House is going to lead us forward to the promised land that we hope we will move towards.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Filkin]

All that the report says is that in principle we should apply to primary legislation what already happens to secondary legislation. In the case of secondary legislation, a set of standards for good legislation is defined by the Cabinet Office and a check is then made as to whether they have been complied with. The Butler report is clear; most people say that those are good standards. All the House would do is say whether they had been complied with. It would not look at policy; that would not be its job. Nor would it have the power to say no. It is a decision for the House—it is most unlikely that it would use it—to deny a Second Reading.

[Lord Strathclyde]

Denying a government Bill that had already passed the House of Commons a Second Reading would be an extraordinary thing. There would be another problem. For Bills that started in the House of Lords, if this were not a Joint Committee—I think that there is much more merit it being a Joint Committee than a House of Lords Committee, which I know was the recommendation of the committee—the business managers would seek to avoid starting Bills in the House of Lords. As Leader of the Lords, I think that would be a very bad thing. There are issues here that need to be explored further. There are downsides too, but the basic aim is a good one.

House of Lords Reform

Lord Filkin Excerpts

Tuesday 29th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Filkin]

My Lords, follow that. When the Leader of the House spoke to us before multiple interruptions, he set out several points. He said that public confidence in Parliament had been damaged over recent years, and that the task of holding the Executive to account by this Chamber, while often done well, could have been done better. I agree with him. The point I wish to make in this short intervention is that addressing the composition of the House may make some contribution to those points but, by itself, will not rectify them. We need, within the terms of reference of the reform of the House of Lords, to consider how well we do our role, as well as who is doing that role. Over the past 15 years, we have given excessive attention to composition and insufficient attention to how we fulfil a role around which there is a broad consensus.

The noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, acknowledged that there had been many ideas for improvement of how the House functions. She had the kindness to refer to three recent contributions to that debate from the reports of the cross-party working groups led by the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, the noble Lord, Lord Butler, and me. We would say no more than that these are stimuli to a wider debate, rather than seeking to set out a rigid template for change. Nevertheless, some of those ideas—and others on the same theme of how we improve how this House works—require debate. The process of changing the composition could well take 10 or 15 years. We must not neglect the importance of addressing our processes, procedures, systems and standards.

I will briefly touch on three or four points in those reports, which are no more than a taster. On legislation, perhaps the central recommendation was that there should be a process whereby this House tests whether legislation is fit and ready for introduction to Parliament. That is basically a technical function; it would do for primary legislation on a slightly bigger scale what is already done for secondary legislation by the Merits Committee. It would ensure that legislation had been thought through; it was clear what it sought to do; it had been properly consulted on; and there was a clear explanation of what it was for and how it would achieve its policy objectives.

Next, we recommended that there should be a public evidence process as part of any Lords starter. I am delighted that we need to say no more on that; it is already the coalition Government’s policy, as set out in their manifesto. Amen to that. Finally, because we thought it made sense, we said that the use of Grand Committee should become the default rather than the exception. I am sure that ought also to cheer the heart of the government Chief Whip. We also said that there ought to be more post-legislative scrutiny and we should get on with doing it. There is no threat to the Government of the day in any of those proposals. They ought to ensure that government legislation is better prepared by officials and goes through with more understanding of what it is for, rather than wasting time trying to unpack what it is for, which is often what we do.

On procedures, I will say nothing more because the noble Lord, Lord Butler, may wish to speak on those. However, we made a range of recommendations about Statements, Oral Questions, the topicality of debates and sitting times—the micro-issues, which are very important in making sure that the House operates efficiently.

In the report on governance, we argued that there is a need for a debate about the governance of this House. Some believe that governance is self-evidently good and sound. Others find it opaque and do not understand it. Irrespective of who is right on that, it is important that any self-governing institution is particularly careful to review periodically its governance and standards so that it can command public confidence that it has good governance, and that how it has good governance is transparent. We ought to be particularly mindful of that. The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, when we discussed these issues with him, had the grace—as one would expect—to recognise that perhaps every 10 years or so, a body such as ours ought to review how we work in these respects.

We were pleased to have the opportunity to discuss these issues with the noble Lords, Lord Strathclyde and Lord McNally, as Leader and Deputy Leader. We were cordially received—I would expect no less from the Leader of the House—and had a good discussion. He agreed—I hope that he will correct me if I am wrong—that it would be desirable to have a debate on these and other issues before too long. I got the sense—I hope that I am not taking it too far—that he was minded to establish a Leaders’ Group after proper consultations. He has made a similar remark in other places. We told him that we see the benefit in such a process having wide terms of reference, being set up early rather than later—before the Summer Recess—getting on with it, and therefore reporting before the Christmas Recess, all of which we thought was perfectly possible without going at it too pell-mell. Therefore, when he responds, will the Deputy Leader say whether he agrees that we should make progress in these ways and when such a debate and such a process might start? I will say no more. I thank both the Leader and the Deputy Leader for the way they received our comments. I think that the House would generally welcome a process to look at these other issues in parallel with the debate on composition. There is more to life than composition.

House of Lords: Post-legislative Scrutiny

Lord Filkin Excerpts

Monday 14th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Strathclyde]

My Lords, I agree with everything that my noble friend has said about pre-legislative and post-legislative scrutiny. I have always been a supporter of post-legislative scrutiny, but I have discovered in recent days that there is a gap between desiring the idea and making it a reality. There are substantial issues involved in the practicalities of making post-legislative scrutiny work. I am delighted that there is a system of post-legislative memoranda being published by the Government, as a result of decisions taken by our predecessors some years ago. It remains to be seen how that works over the next few months.

[Lord Filkin]

Does the Leader of the House agree that it would be beneficial if this House at least initiated discussions with another place about whether a joint committee was beneficial, but that if it decided, for whatever reason, not to proceed with a joint committee we ourselves should start action on this, as we have been talking about it for 20 years now?

[Lord Strathclyde]

My Lords, there is no reason why any noble Lord should not make the case for post-legislative scrutiny on an Act of Parliament and put that forward to the Liaison Committee for discussion of whether an ad hoc committee should be set up.