House of Lords: Working Practices

Lord Grenfell Excerpts

Monday 27th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grenfell]

My Lords, I join others in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad, and his working group for the comprehensive, very perceptive and occasionally downright ingenious report. I have no problem with 50 of the 55 recommendations. Fifty-five recommendations in a main report of 62 pages tests one’s mental digestive system, but it remains a very good and challenging report. This leaves me with five recommendations against which I have either questions or exclamation marks, thus indicating a need for clarification, caution or rejection. But to a few of those of which I approve, I say a very loud hallelujah indeed, particularly the proposal for a legislative standards committee, for pre-legislative scrutiny and for the establishment of a Back-Bench business committee and two additional sessional Select Committees.

Let me focus on the five recommendations about which I have some questions. Recommendations 1 and 12 ask us to consider conferring the Leader of the House’s role at Questions and Oral Statements on the Lord Speaker. Some object to this on the grounds that this is a slippery slope leading to a Commons-style Speakership. I have never signed up to the slippery slope argument because a properly self-regulating House does not have to go anywhere it does not want to go. It simply says, “So far but no further”.

My concern is over any reduction in the responsibilities of the Leader of the House. He or she is the Leader of the whole House and needs to be seen as such as much as possible. I would hazard a guess that if and when, God forbid, this Chamber is abolished and replaced with an all or partly elected Senate, the powers and duties of the Speaker of that Chamber will be very different from those enjoyed by the Lord Speaker in this Chamber. I suspect that this recommendation will be adopted for a trial period, which is quite right, but I hope that the effect on the role and standing of the Leader will be as carefully assessed as the effect on the conduct of Questions and Oral Statements.

In recommendation 5, Members are asked to read out the text of their Oral Questions with a 40-word limit on them. That is not a bad idea, but why is this proposed under the heading “Saving Time”? The present formula is only 17 words long—some time saver. While we are talking of time saving, to have the House sit at 2 pm on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays strikes me as very ill-advised, to put it politely. I share the view of the noble Lords, Lord Maclennan of Rogart and Lord MacGregor of Pulham Market, that the benefits of creating up to two additional hours of business per week are far outweighed by the inconvenience caused to those who have jobs outside and have far to travel. For many of them the 2.30 pm start provides valuable time to prepare for any afternoon’s business in which they may be involved. By the way, have the originators of this proposal never heard of Parkinson’s Law?

Recommendation 48 raises the most doubts in my mind. The noble Lord, Lord Geddes, has already addressed this. The preceding recommendation—recommendation 47—which would charge our Select Committees with electing their own Chairmen, seems eminently sensible, although it raises, as elsewhere, the question of party balance. I come to that in the context of recommendation 48, which recommends that the Chairman of Committees and the Principal Deputy Chairman of Committees be elected by a secret ballot of the whole House. I declare an interest, having occupied the Principal Deputy Chairman’s office from 2002 to 2008. In paragraph 247 of the report, the working group acknowledges,

“that further thought may have to be given to the means whereby a system of election can be reconciled with achieving party balance among the House’s three elected office-holders”.

On the face of it, this is a circle that cannot be squared. If the objective, which I am convinced is right, is to elect to these three offices the persons judged most capable of discharging them to the standards that we have a right to expect, something has to give. Either we abandon the concept of party balance or we trust to luck that the elections will come as close as possible to finding the right people for the offices with the appropriate party labels. I doubt that the abandonment of party balance will prove acceptable to this House, however beneficial it could be to its functioning.

We are therefore left with the alternative, which is to come as close to balance as possible under a secret ballot system—but how do we do that? My first recommendation is to hold the election of the Chairman of Committees by a secret ballot of the whole House ahead of the election of the Principal Deputy Chairman. If the party already holding the office of Lord Speaker exercises restraint, as I am sure it would, and discourages the candidacy of its members for the office of Chairman of Committees, we will, following that election, know which of the three parties has so far missed out on gaining an office. There would follow an election for the office of Principal Deputy Chairman.

There is of course no guarantee that the party that has so far missed out will have a successful candidate; nor should it have such a guarantee. That third office also carries the chairmanship of the European Union Select Committee. Nine years after my selection by the usual channels, I can speak with some objectivity on this. For as long as the EU Committee post is linked to the office of Principal Deputy Chairman, which makes few demands on the holder but carries a salary that reflects the full-time work of chairing the EU Committee, election to these twin posts is not best determined by a ballot of the whole House. If Select Committees should, according to the report, elect their own chairman, why should the EU Select Committee not do so?

I go further; I should like to see the EU chairmanship voted on in a secret ballot not only by the Select Committee members but by the membership of the Select Committee and its seven sub-committees. That would mean an electorate of around 85 Members of your Lordships’ House, all of whom would know what was expected of the chairman. Maybe 90 per cent of the chairman’s working hours will be spent on managing the committee and participating in its varied work, with 10 per cent being spent on the limited functions of the Principal Deputy Chairman of Committees. Moreover, I believe that the party that missed out in the elections for both Lord Speaker and the Chairman of Committees would be perfectly capable of fielding experienced candidates for the EU Committee’s chairmanship from among the membership of the Select Committee and its sub-committees.

Once again, I congratulate the working group and its chairman on giving us such rich food for thought. I am sure your Lordships will find many of these proposals fit for early implementation, which will in turn contribute greatly to the incremental reform—rather than the abolition—of this House. However, I offer a word of caution; instant implementation is a popular cry, but let us be sure that there are no unintended consequences. There are 55 separate recommendations. Most, but not all, will be implemented, but we must be sure that those that are fit together in a comfortable, coherent and mutually reinforcing whole.