Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
Main Page: Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Conservative - Life peer)Procedure and Privileges Committee
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean Excerpts
The Senior Deputy Speaker (Lord Gardiner of Kimble)
My Lords, this first Motion invites the House merely to take note of the report of your Lordships’ committee on the sitting times of the House. Normally, the House would be invited to agree a report from the committee, but on this occasion our report makes no recommendation to the House. Instead, this report seeks only to provide information relating to the second Motion standing in my name, which has been tabled to enable the House to come to a decision on sitting times.
Your Lordships’ committee has not taken a formal position on the second Motion, or on the amendments to it; nor have I. Should they choose to, individual members of the committee will vote as they see fit. I shall not vote in any Divisions. I hope it will assist the House if I begin by explaining the procedure to deal with these Motions.
Today’s debate will take place on the first take-note Motion and, once that is complete, I shall respond. This is a neutral Motion to take note of the report and it does not invite the House to come to a decision. Following that debate, I shall then move the second Motion—the substantive Motion for resolution—formally, without making a further speech. Amendments will be taken in the order they have been tabled, although if the first amendment, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, is agreed to, it will pre-empt the others. Similarly, if the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, is agreed to, with or without the further amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, that will pre-empt the last amendment, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham. Finally, once the House has decided on all the amendments, the question that the substantive Motion, amended or not, be agreed to will be put to the House.
I turn to the background of today’s debate. Noble Lords will recall that on 13 July last year the House debated the first report of the Procedure and Privileges Committee of the previous Session, which proposed various adaptations to our procedures as we returned from a hybrid House to in-person sittings. The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, tabled an amendment, proposing that the House should sit at 1 pm on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. The amendment was defeated by 296 votes to 234. As I said in response to that debate, the task of your Lordships’ committee is to keep our procedures under review, and in this case we saw benefit in considering sitting times in more detail, gathering evidence and taking soundings to enable the House to have a more reflective, informed debate.
Your Lordships’ committee therefore considered a range of options, seeking advice on their impact on Members, on Select Committees, on public access and on other services. On the basis of that advice, we identified the option set out in today’s second Motion: that the House should sit at 1 pm on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, normally rising on those days by 8.30 pm. We identified this as manageable.
Our next step, on 6 April, was to send a parliamentary notice to all noble Lords, seeking your Lordships’ views on the proposal. We set up a dedicated email account, to which noble Lords were encouraged to send their thoughts, and those members of the usual channels who sit on the committee were encouraged to initiate discussions in party and group meetings. The results of this consultation are summarised in the report from paragraph 10 onwards. As far as we can tell, on the basis of a small sample, views are balanced between those favouring earlier sitting times and those opposing them. While some noble Lords suggested variations on the committee’s proposal, there was no clear consensus on such changes and for that reason the committee, when considering the responses to the consultation, decided to put the original option, unamended, to the House.
That is a very brief outline of the work your Lordships’ committee has undertaken, but I hope it demonstrates that a lot of time and effort has gone into the report that is on today’s Order Paper. We have received input from across the administration and from bicameral services; we have discussed options at a series of meetings over almost the last six months; and we have conducted an open consultation, providing all noble Lords with an opportunity to comment.
This consultation, in my view, was in no sense rushed. It began before the Easter Recess, when my open letter inviting views on the proposal was first circulated to noble Lords, and continued until the responses, along with feedback from discussions in party and group meetings, were considered by your Lordships’ committee on 7 June. A consultation of this kind by the Procedure and Privileges Committee is, I am advised, unprecedented, as is today’s debate, at the end of which I hope the House will come to a clear decision.
In all this work we have been motivated by a desire to assist the House in coming to an informed decision. We have sought to gather information and evidence and to produce a workable option for the House to debate and decide on. That option is a compromise and, like all compromises, there is a risk that it will satisfy neither those who want more radical change nor those who oppose change. However, we felt it was better to put a considered option on the Order Paper so that Members could have an informed debate and table amendments.
I repeat, as I said at the outset, that neither I nor your Lordships’ committee has taken a formal position. I shall not vote in any Divisions, and my role today is purely to assist the House. It is for your Lordships, as a self-regulating House in matters of our procedures, to debate and then decide. I look forward to listening to the debate. The decision is now in the hands of the House. I beg to move.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)
My Lords, I will speak to the amendment in my name. I shall want to divide the House and my understanding is that that will come at a later stage.
The Senior Deputy Speaker has explained why we are faced with this very unusual precedent and these amendments. Having listened carefully to what he said, I have to say to him that I still do not really understand why we are having this debate at all. We decided this question less than a year ago and the House rejected the idea of changing our sitting times. Is the Privileges Committee going to do an annual test? Are we going to discuss this every year? Why are we ignoring the result we saw before?
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)
No.
My noble friend said that he has carried out a consultation. Some 49 people responded to that consultation out of 767 Peers. One of those 49 was me, writing on behalf of the unanimous view of 12 members of the executive of the Association of Conservative Peers. It is somewhat misleading to say that there has been a consultation. It is true that various groups discussed this. We discussed this in the Association of Conservative Peers and there was pretty strong and robust support for things staying as they are, partly because it would be pretty well impossible for us to hold our meetings at the time we held them in the past—
Noble Lords
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)
—without taking people away from the business of the House, which I would have thought all Members would think very important.
The very helpful paper my noble friend has produced helps us with
“information relevant to the House’s decision”.
The very last point before the conclusion in paragraph 22 is headed “Educational visits”. One effect of these changes would be to absolutely trash the number of children able to come and visit this House. That is really important, especially at a time—the noble Lord opposite does not think it is important—when Parliament is perhaps not fully understood in the outside world and is facing a degree of, shall we say, contempt.
For those Members suggesting that it will not have a profound effect, I talked to people in the education centre. One of the effects on Wednesdays will be that many of the children will not be able to go into either Chamber because it is Prime Minister’s Questions at the other end of the building and, for security reasons, the Chamber would have to be closed at 11 am if we were starting at 1 pm. By my calculations, some 60% of up to 21 schools with 36 students will find that they are not able come at all. Others will find when they come that they are not able to come into this Chamber. That would be a great tragedy especially if, as I was told this morning, most schools might cancel if they could not get into either Chamber. We understand that. These schools book up to a year in advance, but we are deciding on this now. If we decide to support the Motion, they will all be written to and told that they will not be able to come. That would be an absolute disgrace and a very odd thing to do for a House that spends 6% of its budget—some £9 million—on outreach to schools. It would be extraordinary for us to change our sitting hours at the expense of those children. This is very important.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab Co-op)
I am grateful. Earlier, the noble Lord mentioned the Motion that was previously defeated. It was defeated because it included Monday, and those of us who live outwith London cannot get here for 1 pm on a Monday. This Motion does not include Monday, which is why it should be supported.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)
I am grateful to the noble Lord but, if we defeat this Motion now, he will no doubt say, “Actually, the Motion was defeated because it didn’t deal with Thursday and the need to get back early”—that is not an argument. The fact is that the House decided something less than a year ago and it is being brought back for no apparent reason.
My point was that some people think that they will be able to finish at 8.30 pm because there will be an 8.30 pm rule. We already have a 10 pm rule, but I have recently sat here until 2 am; what makes people think that an 8.30 pm rule would make any difference? How long will it be before those who wish to vote for this measure because they would like an 8.30 pm rule succumb to the Whips—whoever is in power—and the idea that we should have a guillotine, like at the other end? That is why we get vast amounts of legislation that has not been properly discussed, debated and considered. The notion that we should try to organise our affairs on the basis of a fixed finishing time is deeply damaging to the very basis of this House.
With the greatest respect, I suggest that it is very naive to think that we will be finishing at 8.30 pm when, in recent months, individual Members have tabled more than 100 amendments to one Bill. In this House, we have the right to speak to all these amendments, so how long will it be before the desire to finish at a particular hour results in the distortion of our procedures?
The noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, might accuse me of being nostalgic, but I remember the other place in the days when we had a 10 pm vote. You knew that, if you were getting the runaround from the Minister’s private office, you could say, “I’ll see your Minister at 10 o’clock and I’ll tell him how unhelpful you’ve been”. I remember that we all had to be in the Lobbies together because we voted at 10 pm, which meant that you were able to talk to colleagues about constituency and other issues.
I also remember the way in which the dining rooms worked: Labour sat at one end and Tories sat at the other, and you had to sit wherever there was a vacancy. You would get hilarious occurrences where Ted Heath had to sit next to Mrs Thatcher, or something else of that kind. That camaraderie and involvement are absolutely essential to the political process.
If we finish at 8.30 pm—assuming the optimists are right—it is too late to go anywhere else for dinner, and noble Lords will either be stuck here or will go home. I suspect that what will happen here will be exactly the same as has happened in the House of Commons: the catering services will lose a huge amount of revenue, because people will disappear, and then close. The effect in the House of Commons has been absolutely disastrous. What will happen then to the staff in the catering departments?
By the way, on the issue of staff, it is extraordinary that not a single member of staff was consulted on these proposals—they are affected by this, including our doorkeepers and the catering staff. Not only that, if noble Lords agree to this Motion today, we will find that in less than three weeks of sitting time it will all have changed. The proposal is that all of this will change as of September, so everyone’s hours will change. I am very surprised, having listened to questions about the importance of consulting staff and everything else, that this Motion should be in front of us.
If this all sounds a bit negative, I have a proposal. There clearly is a problem in our House with the conduct of business, but it should not be addressed by piecemeal changes of this kind. We all know that this is ridiculous; our speaking time can be reduced to a couple of minutes on really important issues of national importance—of which this is not one. Our ability to deal with legislation sensibly involves sending amendments down to the other place that it might conceivably accept, as opposed to amendments which are part of a political platform or campaign, and our ability to ensure the proper consideration of committee reports. On that, committees often sit beyond 1 pm; what are Members meant to do if they are to be here in the Chamber for Questions? All these things need to be considered. I respectfully suggest to the Procedure and Privileges Committee that it might try to convene cross-party agreement as to how we could change our operations in a way which will enable this House to do its best and to draw on the talents within it.
This is the final point I will make. We often tell people that this is a House of great expertise—and so it is—and a polite House which considers things carefully. A move in this direction is a move to a full-time House and away from noble Lords having interests outside the House. I know some people think that it is bad that some noble Lords have interests outside the House, but how are you going to have up-to-date expertise if noble Lords do not have these outside interests? If this is the reason that we tell people that we have an unelected House of expertise, what on earth are we doing moving a Motion such as this, which takes us in the direction of being a nine-to-five, full-time House, paid, and not populated by people who give it their best out of duty to their country and to our parliamentary system of government?
Lord Taylor of Holbeach (Con)
My Lords, I hoped that I would not have to move an amendment to the Senior Deputy Speaker’s second Motion, but I am very unhappy, as my noble friend Lord Forsyth has clearly enunciated, with the way in which procedure is being used in this matter. The collegiate nature of this House means that the procedures are being abused by a consultation which was long in preparation—the consultation paper was available in January—but which did not come to us until just before the Easter Recess.
We do not achieve change in this House when there is no consensus. The formula of a take-note Motion and a binding decision being grouped together, as they are today, is not only unusual but, it has been said, unprecedented. I see it as an abuse of the House’s procedures. It could have been handled so differently. We could have had a proper debate and then a consultation, but that was not to be. I am sure the whole House, whichever way it feels about the Procedure and Privileges Committee report of which we are taking note, is grateful that we have this chance today, and we thank the Chief Whip and the usual channels for the extended debate we have this afternoon.
My amendment to the Senior Deputy Speaker’s second Motion is one of four. We have heard from my noble friend Lord Forsyth and we will hear two others; they are all anxious about the consequences of the changes proposed. As has been said, less than a year ago, on 13 July, we discussed these matters: 530 Peers voted on the issue and we had if not a huge majority then a substantial majority of 62. The item was given considerable debate—I looked at it and at the notions that were exchanged. Compare that with 49 individual responses to the consultation. It is the fact that the consultation was, in my view, so poorly handled that has led to us feeling so disquieted this time; it seemed to make no difference whatever to the way that the Procedure and Privileges Committee handled the suggestion in the text of the consultation. None the less, it was a fairly evenly divided consultation.
I do not know whether noble Lords will remember, but we got an email—a parliamentary notice—immediately before we rose for the Easter Recess, when most of us go home and have no contact with our parliamentary email; it is actually difficult to interact with your parliamentary email if you are outside London, and a lot of people were not able to respond to the consultation. I ended up writing a letter to my noble friend the Senior Deputy Speaker—noble Lords will know that we are old colleagues and friends—so I suppose I count as one of the people who was against these proposals.
We were given options. The options were extremely complex and it was quite difficult to choose as to who would start and when and what they would do with them. I am not surprised that the consultation did not attract a lot of individual respondents; just look at the number of Peers here this afternoon, even those who applied in aggregate. I understand that the Lib Dems submitted a large number of supporters for the proposals in aggregate, and we know that the Association of Conservative Peers did so, but how many individuals in this Chamber today actually voted in this consultation? Had we done so, we might have saved the embarrassment of having to reject a proposal that was made in all good faith—we decided on 13 July last year.
When the committee met on 18 November, I think, in any other business a member of the committee proposed that it should consider changing to two days —exactly the proposal that has now appeared. The Procedure and Privileges Committee agreed to work up this proposal. That was made available at a meeting on 21 January. As far as I can see, that is the proposal, more or less, that we are dealing with today.
But Members of the House were not involved—no one asked us. It chose to do so just as we rose for the Easter Recess, and the conclusions of the committee were published the Tuesday immediately after we returned from the Jubilee Recess. Perhaps I am paranoid about this, but I feel there was momentum for pursuing an objective which appealed to individuals in this House without any real input from its membership.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)
I have the greatest respect for the noble Lord, especially as a former Chief Whip, but has he not noticed that there may be half a dozen people in the Chamber discussing a particular amendment, but a lot of us are sitting either watching our screens or doing work, and we are required to be here because there is a Whip on? I should have thought that, as a Whip, he would not be putting forward the argument that anyone can go home when they like.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
Yes, there was no Green Party.
I have visits at all times of the day. I would be interested in knowing the exact details of educational visits and I personally will set some up for schoolchildren, I hope when the House of Commons is actually sitting so that they are not excluded from there.
The noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, said lots of things that I disagree with. One of the things he said was that the House of Lords is held in contempt. My experience is that the House of Lords now has more credit given to it than it ever has since I joined—admittedly I am a new Member of only nine years.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)
I did not say that the House of Lords was held in contempt; I said that Parliament was being held in contempt. On the point about school visits, when the noble Baroness says they can look at the House of Commons, on Wednesdays the House of Commons has Prime Minister’s Questions, which means that school groups cannot go there. The only Chamber they can go to is here. If noble Lords vote for this Motion, they will not be able to go to any Chamber at all.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
Then it is the House of Commons that really needs to change its procedures. I will look in Hansard and check what the noble Lord said.
I speak as an old woman here. The noble Lord, Lord Moore, used the term “old women” pejoratively. Perhaps I can urge him not to do that again.
Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Con)
In that case, I hope the Senior Deputy Speaker will clarify that, either in his closing remarks or in a letter subsequent to this debate. I do not know whether that is a future projection of numbers, but the report says there will be 116 fewer school visitors per week. I think that is something to be managed.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)
On this point, I talked to the education centre this afternoon and the people there made two points to me. One, which I mentioned earlier, is that they thought that if school groups—they are groups of 36—were unable to see either Chamber, those schools would cancel the visit. My own arithmetic may be wrong, but on Wednesdays they have 18 scheduled school visits of 36 people—they can do 21 if the Covid regulations are modified a bit—and I worked out that 60% of them on a Wednesday would not be able to come at all to the Chamber. Of course, they would also not be able to go to the other Chamber, so it is quite wrong to minimise the impact of this.
Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Con)
I say to my noble friend that I am not trying to minimise the impact, I am trying to get to the bottom of what the actual figures are. The figure in the report is different from the figure used by the noble Lord, Lord Scriven. I also take issue with my noble friend over what “coming to the Chamber” means. Of course, there is nothing like standing among the leather Benches for visits, but there is also something very special about sitting in the Galleries and listening to the Houses at work as debates continue. There are other ways of achieving the same ends.
I want to move on to the work of Select Committees and other business, which we have also heard about. I have been a Select Committee chair in the House of Commons when the hours of sitting had changed. It is perfectly possible to do both and the conclusion of this debate for me has been that a lot of what we are talking about is how Members of this House prioritise the work they are doing here and the work they are doing outside and how they juggle the rest of their lives. I think we would all say that it is very much a juggling act; we know that we cannot do everything. I am also the chair of a current inquiry of this House. I see some of its members here and it is very nice to see them. We are meeting when the House is sitting. That is a decision we took, given everybody’s commitments. Again, it is question of choice and priority.
My noble friend Lord Balfe talked about travelling and train times. Should I ever be invited on to “Mastermind”, my expert subject would be the train travelling times between Leicestershire and London, single and return journeys, because I have spent many years doing that. Of course, there is an issue, as we have heard, about personal convenience, but there are also issues of safety and reliability. I just say to my noble friend Lord Wolfson, for whom I have great respect, that one of the other constraints on taking part in debates is that one is meant to be here at the end of a debate. If people cannot stay to the end of the debate, they are not to take part in those debates. I know that noble Lords are returning home because they have not just childcare responsibilities but responsibilities for older relatives who need their help and the carers need to be relieved. People are having to make decisions about which parts of business they take part in.
I fully support the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, in saying that Members should absolutely be encouraged to have outside interests, and that is why they do. We are talking about 3.5 hours of changes in bringing forward the sitting times. We would finish at 8.30 pm, after which plenty of life happens, not just travelling but engaging with other things—not just the television.
I conclude with a broader point on the workplace. I was absolutely dismayed by the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Moore. I have sat in the other House and am watching the issues around culture going on there at the moment—and the clearly much better and more collegiate culture I like to see in this House. To say that we should recognise that these are workplaces like no other and that we need special rules is at the heart of many of the cultural problems we now see in this Parliament. We should be honest about those problems and really start to tackle them. I see nothing wrong with modern HR practices; if people need to make complaints or if things have happened to them, they need to know that they will be taken seriously, and not just by the Whips’ Offices.
This debate about sitting hours is about the culture of this House. It is about the message it sends. The noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, said that Parliament is not fully understood. What is not fully understood is how we can possibly make the best decisions about legislation at 10 pm and beyond on a regular basis. He also said that camaraderie comes over dinner. Camaraderie comes because we work together, whether on committees and inquiries or in debates; it does not come because we dine together. I suggest that that has not been the case since probably the early 20th century.
Although I will support the Motion this evening, in the interests of seeking compromise, I think that my noble friend Lord Young has put forward a sensible amendment —a pilot is never a mistake in these matters where there is going to be change—and, should we reach it, I will of course support it.
Lord Stoneham of Droxford (LD)
I thank the House. I accept that a lot of the arguments have been made, but I want to say a few words given my experience acting as a Chief Whip for my group in this House and working with the noble Lords, Lord Taylor and Lord Kennedy, and others during my term of office.
The essential issue is how we can do our job of scrutinising government business and legislation better. I sat through every single one of those late sittings in January and March, and I thought that they were unworkable for the future. We very nearly accepted a proposal last year to change the working hours. The reason we did not, as others have said, was that those who came from the north and Scotland were not prepared to vote for an early start on Monday. That is why the Procedure Committee decided to look at this issue again, to see whether there was wider support for having different working hours on other days of the week. Monday is not included today, and that is why I think there will be wider support than there was then.
I will make a number of points from my own experience. The fact is that it is only a minority of the House who actually do the detailed work on legislation; they are the people who stay late at night. There is not exactly a huge demand in this House for working late. I spend all my time as a Whip trying to get my people to stay, and the only time I have success with the Government Chief Whip is when the Benches behind him have had enough themselves because they have stayed late. I do not think this helps scrutiny, because we are doing it late at night, there are limited numbers of us, and there is no point having a vote after dinner. With all respect to the Cross Benches, whose expertise I value, the parties assume that they are going to be here in very limited numbers after dinner. That is the reality. The House is missing out on that expertise; in my experience, the people of expertise do not want to stay late. Those who have jobs outside the House also do not want to stay late. I have had several jobs outside the House during my 10 years here, and I welcome that expertise, knowledge and experience coming into the House, but the people who are trying to do other jobs do not want to be here at 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock or 12 o’clock at night.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)
I am most grateful to the noble Lord, and I am listening carefully to what he says, but does he not think that when some of his colleagues put down 103 amendments on one Bill, that is part of the reason why we are sitting into the late hours? Does he not think that the constant calling of Divisions and sending stuff down to the House of Commons which has no chance of being considered there may also add to the length of time that we sit?
Lord Stoneham of Droxford (LD)
No side of the House is innocent on this; everybody does it, frankly. If I might say so, the Government quite like the House staying late, because they get through the business quicker late at night. That is one of the reasons they quite like the late sittings, but it does not help scrutiny; it does not help the effectiveness of the House.
Insisting on the 8.30 pm finish is another issue that has been raised. If the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, and I know that the House is committed to 8.30 pm, just as we go along the corridor to the Government Chief Whip at five to 10 to insist that we finish at 10 pm, we will do the same at 8.30 pm. We will want a very good reason why the House should continue after then. If we do not have that commitment, we have no negotiating. The noble Lord, Lord Taylor, can smile; I have been along to his door and to the current Government Chief Whip a number of times trying to get us to finish at 10 pm, and we normally have to because they know that it is the common practice of the House. If 8.30 pm is agreed by this House, we must follow it. It will be in our negotiating satchel.
On school visits, yes, I really believe in school visits here. However, we can look at this; logistically, it should be possible to get more people through the House. They can have a slightly different type of visit—they can use the Education Centre. I have asked for a number of years why we have to have such a long time for the security search when the House is closed, before it opens again—it takes about two hours, I think. That is something we can look at.