Procedure of the House (Proposal 3)

Lord Geddes Excerpts

Tuesday 8th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

My Lords, a simple arrangement would be to have a surtitle over the Throne so that anyone could look at it up there.

[Lord Geddes]

My Lords, I am all for paucity of words and the concept of limiting supplementaries to 25 words is thoroughly admirable, but that is not the point of this proposal. In that respect, I think that noble Lady, Lady Saltoun, has done the House a good service with her initial intervention. I certainly am not in favour of wasting the House’s time even further.

[Lord Jenkin of Roding]

My Lords, I have a confession to make. I do not spend a great deal of time watching the Parliament channel or listen to “Yesterday in Parliament” and I do not know the answer to the question. Do those channels ever print the Question so that people can see it? It seems to me that the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Butler, is absolutely right. I am not concerned that the Questions should be on these screens because we can always get hold of the Order Paper ourselves. Indeed, that is one of the first things most noble Lords do when they come into the House. It is a question of whether people who are watching the proceedings know what the Question is. I do not want to have the Question read out in the House but we should follow this up through the Information Committee or whatever to make sure that the television channels print the Questions so that many more of members of the public who watch will know what we are talking about.