Business of the House

Debate between Lord Foulkes of Cumnock and Baroness Noakes

Thursday 4th April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Noakes (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

Oh no.

[Baroness Noakes]

I thought that the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, would be looking forward to hearing from me. The amendment standing in my name on the Order Paper gives reasons for not supporting the Motion of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, which are as follows:

“that the Prime Minister has already indicated her intention to ask for a delay”;

and that this House “considers it unnecessary”—as well as “undesirable and unprecedented”—“to apply exceptional procedures”. I shall speak to those elements in a moment.

I wish that the House had committed this Motion to be debated in Committee because we could have had a more natural, free-flowing discussion about some of the issues raised so far—all of which have been brought to an end by the closure Motion, which I believe is undesirable. However, the House chose not to go that way; that leaves a number of unanswered questions, which we still need to explore, about exactly how the procedures will work today. I am quite unclear about how we proceed between Second Reading and Committee, given that there has to be an interval to allow for amendments to be processed and made available to noble Lords, and for noble Lords to consider them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Noakes]

I completely agree with my noble friend, which is why it is important to understand the implications of this. If, as I suspect, a number of amendments to the Bill will be tabled after Second Reading—of course, they cannot be tabled until then—the Public Bill Office will require considerable time in which to manage them. It will arrange for them to be printed, then noble Lords will obviously need to have sight of and consider them, as well as consider whether there are any appropriate groupings of them. This is not a rapid process, so we then come up against the issue of what time this will all happen. I have absolutely no idea.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

Can I answer the question of the noble Lord, Lord Cormack? If noble Lords who have tabled wrecking amendments decided not to move them and if the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, decided that the important reports from his committee should not be debated half way through the night, we could go straight to considering the Bill now. That would show this House in a good light, considering the Bill properly.

[Baroness Noakes]

I hear the noble Lord, but to put the onus on my noble friend Lord Forsyth to delay the debate on his very important reports issued last year is unfair. We are in this position because of the action taken by the Opposition in tabling the Motion to deal with this in one day.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Noakes]

I thank my noble friend for that intervention. He reminds me of the importance of his debate, and indeed I am speaking in that debate. It is not just about the 50,000 people who are affected by the loan charge—although it is very serious for all those individuals—but there are issues with suicides that have flowed from that loan legislation. That is why it is really important that we continue with that debate.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

The noble Baroness is right that these are two important reports. It would be much better for them to be dealt with properly, at a sensible hour on Monday afternoon—which they could be if the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, wanted them to be properly debated instead of used as an obstruction to today’s business.

[Baroness Noakes]

I am sorry that the noble Lord thinks they are an obstruction to today’s business, but today’s business has been forced on us by the Benches opposite—it seems without any consideration of the sequencing of the Bill as it comes through this House, as I raised in my opening remarks. These are important issues and I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, will reflect on them.

The first reason for my amendment to the Motion of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, is that the Prime Minister has already indicated her intention to ask for a delay. I remind the House of what my right honourable friend the Prime Minister said earlier this week, when she addressed the nation. She said:

“I know there are some who are so fed up with delay and endless arguments that they would like to leave with no deal next week”.


I count myself in that group—but that is not the point of today. She said:

“I’ve always been clear that we could make a success of no deal in the long term. But leaving with a deal is the best solution. So we will need a further extension of Article 50, one that is as short as possible and which ends when we pass a deal. And we need to be clear what such an extension is for, to ensure we leave in a timely and orderly way”.


My right honourable friend the Prime Minister said that to the nation on television. She said it in the other place and in a letter that has been written to all Conservative parliamentarians—so she means it and we should take her at her word.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Noakes]

Indeed, but there are important issues of process that we do need to address. I was saying that the Prime Minister had not always made a success of Brexit to date, but she has been persistent throughout in trying to achieve the will of the majority, the 17.4 million people who voted to leave in the referendum, and we have to give her credit for that. She has also acted throughout with integrity, and I hope that no noble Lord would suggest otherwise. In some ways, the Bill suggests that we cannot trust the Prime Minister, and I resent that.

As the noble Lord, Lord Myners, pointed out, the Prime Minister has now engaged in discussions with the Opposition. We understand that they are constructive; whether anything comes of them remains to be seen. To date, the Leader of the Opposition has shown no interest in doing anything other than pursuing a political line on Brexit. He even refused to go into cross-party discussions which my right honourable friend set up last month because he could not walk into the same room as Chuka Umunna, one of the MPs who had left his party and was a founder member of the independent group—the TIGers. It is of great credit to the Prime Minister that she is now reaching out to try and reach some consensus on a deal that the Commons can align around when it goes back to them. This Bill is saying that we do not trust the Prime Minister to do that. That is an unfortunate thing, and why the Bill is unnecessary.

The next reason for not agreeing with the Motion in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, is that it is unnecessary to apply exceptional procedures. Your Lordships’ House has good procedures to allow it to do its job as a revising Chamber. The House normally prides itself on its ability to scrutinise legislation carefully. The reason we do this—

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

Let us get on with it then.

[Baroness Noakes]

The reason we do this is that the other place does not do a very good job of scrutinising legislation. There are a lot of reasons for that. Compared with the normal proceedings of your Lordships’ House, the proceedings in the other place are much more party political. Anybody who reads Hansard can see that. In particular, since 1997, when Mr Blair introduced programme Motions, the amount of time dedicated to legislation has been severely truncated at all stages of Bills going through the other place. They often arrive in your Lordships’ House with very little scrutiny, and with some clauses and parts of Bills not scrutinised at all.

We have an important job to do. When my right honourable friend Sir Oliver Letwin was moving one of his Motions yesterday in the other place, he freely admitted that the Bill—which we will move on to at some stage—needed to be “tightened” and that that would be done by the House of Lords. So the other place now expects this House to do the job of perfecting legislation. That has been the case for some considerable time, but we have to have procedures to do it.

Standing Order 46 sets out the bare bones of how we approach legislation. It states:

“No Bill shall be read twice the same day; no Committee of the Whole House shall proceed on any Bill the same day as the Bill has been read the Second time; no report shall be received from any Committee of the Whole House the same day such Committee goes through the Bill, when any amendments are made to such Bill; and no Bill shall be read the Third time the same day that the Bill is reported from the Committee, or the order of commitment is discharged”.


Those arrangements—