Health and Social Care Bill

Debate between Lord Grocott and Lord Campbell of Alloway

Monday 19th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Noble Lords]

Lord Campbell!

[Lord Campbell of Alloway]

Thank you very much. I will make one short point. All your Lordships, wherever you may sit in this House, know perfectly well that if this Bill is delayed, urgent requisite reform cannot be used or done, to the detriment of the public. For that reason alone, I oppose this amendment.

[Lord Grocott]

My Lords, I am sure that we are about to reach a conclusion. I want simply to make an obvious point which may have been missed. It is that we have had an interesting debate, going on now for the best part of an hour, most of which has not been about the amendment on the Order Paper. I know that this can be disturbing at times, but I would like to remind the House of what it is going to make a decision about—or, perhaps, what it is not making a decision about. It is not making a decision about the freedom of information legislation, on much of which I might find myself in complete agreement with the noble Lords, Lord Butler and Lord Wilson. It has many problems and difficulties associated with it, not least for Ministers. Ministers in this Government are finding that, just as much as Ministers in the previous Government did. However, it is not about the merits of the Freedom of Information Act—that is for another time. It is not about the merits of risk registers, good, bad or indifferent, and there are all those categories of risk registers. It is not about the merits of the Bill, where we are considering whether it should have a Third Reading now. It is about the momentous decision that the House must reach shortly: whether the Third Reading of this Bill should be delayed for, in my estimate, three weeks. That is the decision we are being asked to make.

With respect to previous speakers, that makes one or two of their contributions problematic, if not redundant: those who have suggested that somehow it will be very serious, if not cataclysmic, for the health service in this country if the Bill is further delayed. I have not been involved with the debates on the Bill, but it already seems to have been going on for most of my life, as far as I can see; certainly for 12 months. Are we really being asked to accept the proposition that a further three weeks—that is my estimate, and I will come to my question to the noble Earl, Lord Howe, in a moment—will somehow traumatise the health service? That is an unsustainable proposition. I would not have voted for the amendment had it not referred to the specific point at the end, which is that the House must be able to reach a decision on Third Reading before Prorogation. That is what we are being asked to do. As we all know, the Queen’s Speech is in May—I cannot remember the date—so Prorogation is not too far away.

I know that the House will not vote on the basis of the point that I am making. The proposition is simple and straightforward, and I cannot believe that it is of the cataclysmic significance that one or two speakers have suggested. I have no doubt that we have reached the stage, which we have all been around long enough to recognise with this kind of legislation, where government supporters just want to get it over with, for which I do not blame them, and the Opposition want to ensure, even at this eleventh minute of the eleventh hour, that they have a few more opportunities to point that this really is a bad Bill—a view held not only by the Opposition but by the whole of the medical profession and, as far as we know, most of the public.

Procedure of the House (Proposal 1)

Debate between Lord Grocott and Lord Campbell of Alloway

Tuesday 8th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Campbell of Alloway]

My Lords, I want to make a very short intervention because everything I have on my notes has been said by my noble friend Lord Wakeham and the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, so really there is little more to say but this. The question is: are we to retain a self-regulating Chamber? If so, why dabble with the concept of opening a gateway that can never be closed? To what end and where is the justification for it?

Last night I read the official reports on this. There is not a shred of evidence to support proposal 1. Whatever was said about the Leader of the House and the Convenor of the Cross Benches, it forgot to mention the interests of the spiritual Benches. They are all the people who will decide what to do; they have the authority. You cannot land this job on a Speaker who does not have the authority and should never have it. I am not criticising any person or Speaker; I am talking about how the House should be run. It should be run by the arrangement of consultation that was referred to by my noble friend Lord Wakeham.

The last thing is that this is a question of crucial importance which also relates to other outside concepts that would have to be considered in legislation. It is quite wrong that we should now, without justification or evidence simply to please some concepts, do away with the maintenance of self-regulation of the House. It is the same sort of problem that we will have later on with retention of the ethos of the House.

[Lord Grocott]

My Lords, I know the concerns that are being expressed principally, although not exclusively, on the other side of the House. They basically imply that we are in danger of ending up with a situation like that of the Commons Speaker. I sympathise with those concerns. We do not want a Speaker in the sense of someone who has to adjudicate constantly on points of order and decide on balance whether difficult issues should be debated and so on. We do not want to go in that direction for all sorts of reasons which I think are well understood. However, I strongly support the proposal because I do not think there is any risk whatever of that happening under this change.

Indeed, I would offer as a kind of reassurance to those opposite that all these kinds of anxieties were expressed five years ago when the Speakership in its present form was established in this House. It was pretty vehemently opposed in all sorts of ways, while all sorts of forebodings were expressed as to what it would result in. I put it to the House that those forebodings have simply not been fulfilled. The Speakership has worked extremely well. I think that should be of some reassurance to those who feel that something serious, even cataclysmic, will happen if we support this proposal.

My main concern for wanting to be assured that this proposal will go through, and why I support it, is the issue that has not been mentioned. We are here to serve the public and part of that is for our procedures to be intelligible. Let us leave aside the term “self-regulation” at the moment—if there is regulation in any debate or at Question Time, it comes spasmodically from the government Front Bench. That is totally unsatisfactory for the reasons given by the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd, and for the practical reasons given by my good and noble friend Lord Rooker that you physically cannot see. In no Chamber anywhere on this planet or at any time in this planet’s history has the person responsible for order had half the audience sitting behind them. We are an absolute one-off on that, which is the position that we are in at the moment.

I simply put it to the House that we should do as every other representative organisation that I, or I guess anyone else in this Chamber, have ever had any experience of by having the person with a kind of responsibility for easing things along sitting in the centre and at the front—so far as there is a front here—of the audience, which would make it immediately intelligible to people watching in this Chamber or on television. It is such a minimal change. It does not advocate any new powers; it simply says that the power should be transferred from somewhere that—let us be blunt—does not operate that wonderfully at present. I defy anyone to say that it is a model in how it operates at present that others should follow. It is a small change in the right direction without any fear that has been expressed or any likelihood of being justified in the exercise. I urge the House to support this unanimous proposal from a committee on which I was very proud to serve. It was a very diligent committee that took evidence from everywhere across the House, and we should let this proposal go forward.

Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Debate between Lord Grocott and Lord Campbell of Alloway

Tuesday 29th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grocott]

He immediately called the general election. My noble friend is quite right to correct me, but it amounts to the same thing. My point is that there was no negotiation. He announced the general election immediately, and the public and the parties knew where they were.

Unless the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, can explain it to me, there is a double fault in the Government's position. Am I right in assuming, first, that the Government think that it was wrong for Jim Callaghan to go to the country when he did; and, secondly, according to other parts of the Bill, that the Government should have gone on for another six months until October 1974 without a majority to complete the five-year fixed-term period? That builds absurd rigidity into the system. I cannot see what they are trying to deal with. If the noble and learned Lord cannot answer those two specific questions about what Jim Callaghan did wrong, he ought to remove the provision.

I agree with my noble friend's amendment. To distil it, it simply says, “If a Government lose a motion of no confidence, there shall be a general election”. I would love it if someone would follow me to say, “It is a risky, false proposition that if a Government lose a motion of no confidence, they should go to the country”. Why fiddle about with it? What on earth are the Government doing? Why do they not save us all a lot of time and energy and just withdraw the provision?

[Lord Campbell of Alloway]

My Lords, very briefly, I have for a long time shared the concerns expressed by the noble Lord. Those concerns appear to me to be met by Amendment 50. Has he considered that?

[Lord Mackay of Clashfern]

My Lords, it is worth pointing out that the noble Lord’s Government introduced a fixed-term Parliament in Scotland with procedures if the incumbent Government lose a motion of no confidence. The Bill is dealing with a fixed-term Parliament on somewhat the same lines as the Labour Government did in the devolution legislation.