Procedure of the House

Debate between Lord Grenfell and Lord Berkeley

Wednesday 9th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grenfell]

My Lords, I wish to explain very briefly why I have tabled my amendment. Many years ago, a young Italian opera singer made his debut at the Naples opera house. At the end of his first aria there was very loud applause and shouts for an encore, which he obliged. After his second rendition there was even louder applause and even more cries for an encore. However, seeing the conductor shaking his head, the young opera singer stepped forward and said to the audience, “Thank you very much indeed but I think that we must now get on with the opera”, at which there came a loud shout from the gods, “You don’t understand us; we want you to go on until you get it right”.

I have not so far had the pleasure of hearing the Lord Chairman of Committees in full operatic flow and I certainly left the Procedure Committee far too long ago to recall whether we closed our meetings with a live version of the “Toreador Song” or anything like that. However, we have to get this matter right. Oral Questions are the oxygen that enables the Back Benches to participate in the day-to-day business of holding the Government to account. I do not think that at present we have a perfect system. The discussion we have had so far this afternoon makes that perfectly clear.

The present system is not perfect in many ways. I am not going to go through that again because we have heard plenty of it already. I will mention one obvious point in relation to queuing. I always thought that the British were a nation much inclined to queuing and regarded it as an honourable tradition; I was a wartime baby. I spend much of my time in a country where queuing is regarded as an assault on the Darwinian principle, and it may be that I have not kept up with changing sentiments. However, I sense that the House is uneasy, to say the least, with this report and about the proposals that have emerged from the Procedure Committee, and that unease has been apparent in the discussions this afternoon. Can the Lord Chairman tell us whether any of that unease was apparent within the committee itself?

The Lord Chairman has reminded the House that all that is being sought is a trial run of these proposals up to the Summer Recess. I am not against trial runs, but it depends on how credible and potentially acceptable the process being tested is. If, at the end of a trial run based on the proposals before us, the House is minded to find them not fit for purpose—which I feel is quite a strong likelihood—then I would rate rather high the chances of further consideration being consigned to the long grass for a very long time, if not forever.

Would it not be better for the Procedure Committee, between now and Easter, to have one more try, aided by wider consultation within the House, at finding a more acceptable process for tabling Oral Questions than the one that has been put before us today? This could then form the basis for a trial run with a stronger prospect of acceptance by the House and, above all, by the Back Benches.

[Lord Berkeley]

My Lords, I will be as brief as I can. I congratulate the Chairman of Committees. Although I do not necessarily agree with what is in the report, I think he presented it very clearly. As other noble Lords have said, it is for a trial period and we will hold the committee to that. My worry is that, as the noble Lords, Lord Naseby, Lord Kennedy of Southwark and Lord Grenfell, have said, the purpose of these Questions is to hold the Government to account. We need the certainty of timing of the Question as part of that process; other noble Lords have given examples. If an event is coming that one knows could be a problem for the Government, it is nice to have a Question on that day.