House of Lords: Working Practices

Debate between Lord Goodlad and Baroness Anelay of St Johns

Thursday 1st November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goodlad]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, on this timely debate and on his very wide-ranging speech on a subject which, as he said, is sufficiently important to your Lordships’ House to attract an attendance today on all sides.

I shall perforce be brief. We spend the majority of our time on the scrutiny of legislation. Our role is quite different from that of the other place. We seek to address points of principle and of details, drawing on the knowledge and experience of your Lordships. We seek to conduct our affairs in a timely way, while paying special attention to those parts of Bills that have not been scrutinised in detail in the other place. Therefore, I turn first to the case for a legislative standards committee, to which the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, referred, which was made last year by the Leader’s Group, the Hansard Society, the Better Government Initiative and others. The House of Commons Political and Constitutional Reform Committee has been asked by the Liaison Committee to examine the proposal, whereafter I hope that my noble friend the Leader of the House may seek your Lordships’ views.

The case for a legislative standards committee, preferably a joint committee with the other place, is this. The past few decades, as the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, said, have seen a vast increase in the volume of legislation, both primary and secondary, put before Parliament by Governments. There is intense competition between departments for parliamentary time. The resulting workload on Parliament has led to serious consequences; the other place’s capacity for proper scrutiny has been all but overwhelmed. Amendments have been routinely accepted without debate in your Lordships’ House towards the very end of parliamentary sessions, not in response to argument or evidence but under pressure of time and to avoid the alternative of Governments of the day losing entire Bills. There was an answer to a Question by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Butler, earlier this year, showing that a vast number of measures have not been put into effect in the past few years for that very reason.

We rightly pride ourselves on what we do, but the fact is that much legislation is worse than unsatisfactory. There is a massive waste of time and resources—financial and human—in both Parliament and Whitehall. The proposed business standards committee would help the Government as a whole, particularly the business managers, to ensure that legislation brought before Parliament was validly and properly prepared. Its role would be to ensure Bills’ technical and procedural compliance with agreed standards of Bill preparation, rather than to scrutinise policy or drafting. The discipline which such a system would impose would be wholly beneficial, enormously cost effective and widely welcomed by the overworked occupants of both Whitehall and Westminster. As I have said, it would be manna from heaven to the business managers, but benefits would be felt not only by government, Parliament, the judiciary, legal practitioners—whose pain I admit is frequently greatly eased—and stakeholders, but above all by the citizens, who would be relieved from the frustration, bewilderment and worse inflicted on them by what many see as the ever-growing tsunami of amateurishly prepared legislation. The volume of delegated legislation continues to grow, as does its importance. Parliament accepts the concept of unamendable secondary legislation nearly every time that it passes an Act, but there must be a limit somewhere.

[Baroness Anelay of St Johns]

Perhaps I had better remind my noble friend that his four minutes are up.

[Lord Goodlad]

I speak in the hope that my noble friend will take seriously the points being made in the debate—or the two that I have had time to raise.