Procedure and Privileges Committee
Debate between Lord Grocott and Lord Rooker
Lord Rooker (Lab)
My Lords, I will be brief, but I want to go slightly beyond my amendment on the Order Paper. I agree with much of what my noble friend Lady Quin has just said. I want to go back to the old system, but I did not like it because of the defects that have been put forward. That is what I really want to share.
When my noble friend Lady Amos was Leader of the House, I was her deputy and Question Time was managed. There was self-regulation, but it was managed. I have here every single Order Paper for every day that I helped to manage Question Time, and I have my notes on the bottom of where the questions came from around the House. I have the list of the different parties and groups, so that the House could see we were being fair. But from the Government Bench, you cannot see who is standing up behind you on either side—on the Cross Benches or the government side—so there is a difficulty. As the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd, said when we had a debate on this issue in November 2016, there is something wrong with a Minister deciding which Member questions another Minister. There is something fundamentally wrong about that.
I have looked at the issues and taken one example of what the situation was. Question Time was 30 minutes; I assume that we are going to keep it at 40 minutes, but that is not an issue. In the example I have, we had 34 supplementaries in 30 minutes. Yesterday, we had 32 supplementaries in 40 minutes. Unless it is managed, the questions and answers are too long.
I know that the Leader intervened on her brief visit today, but the fact is that while the noble Baroness, Lady Chisholm, is one of my favourite Ministers, there is supposed to be a limit on ministerial Answers of 75 words. Their Bench has to intervene to stop the long question and make sure that, within the government team, you get the short answer. If that is not done, it will become chaos and you end up with fewer questions. The idea is to get more questions to Ministers, not fewer. I can show that we were getting more questions with a partially managed system than we are getting even today.
I will make a couple of other points. I am talking about 2005 to 2007; those were the days when my noble friend Lady Amos was Leader, and I first came here in 2001. It was seen as the duty of the Leader and Deputy Leader to be at Question Time every day, because it is the only way to read the House. If you cannot read the House, you cannot really lead the House. It is pretty fundamental, to be honest, to get a sense of what is happening in the House. Then, because you are there every day, the House will accept it when you intervene to stop somebody speaking if they have gone on too long: they get their question cut in half. You may also have to cut the Minister’s reply or have to decide if it is one person or another. That is a pretty fundamental issue.
We have had some changes, of course, in the last two years. The non-aligned Members, some of whom are my noble friends, and the tiny parties can forget their participation on the scale they have had with listed Questions, because it will not happen, and they had better get used to it. From a proportional point of view, they have been having a much bigger share than what their membership has justified. The House will regulate and decide, but we might as well say this now and not wait till a row afterwards: they will get fewer opportunities in going back to the old system than they had before.
We did an analysis at one time: 50% of supplementary questions were asked by 10% of the Members. Think about it: that is the shouty lot. There were occasions when Members who could rise slowly—they were here but could not get up very quickly—would tip me off before Question Time, saying: “I’d like to get in on that Question, but I can’t stand quick enough.” I used to facilitate that, where it was possible—you could not always do it—because I knew that person could not stand as quickly as everybody else. So that is a factor.
We need someone to manage it, and it has got to be the Leader and Deputy Leader; I do not think it is fair to leave it to the Chief Whip. It really needs to be the same people, so they can read the House each day. It is no good coming in as strangers, because it will not be accepted then when you cut someone off in their prime.
It is not a perfect system. On one occasion, my noble friend Lady Amos said to me at the end of Question Time, “Jeff, you owe that Member an apology, and you’d better do it bloody quick.” I had cut someone off; the question was too long. I found out where that Member’s desk was and, at her blind side, I got on my knees and I said to Baroness Trumpington, “I’m ever so sorry.” She forgave me.
There are some serious issues here, because accountability of Ministers is the key. The more supplementary questions the better, because that is important and it is what we are here for, but the way we had it today was a good example. The questions were far too long, and the answers were twice as long as what they should have been. There has got to be discipline within the Government, and it is down to the Chief Whip, the Leader and the Deputy Leader—I am sad to say that they were both here earlier on, but not now; they ought to be here now to read what the House’s mood is on this. Anyway, I have said my piece.
Lord Grocott (Lab)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friends Lady Quin and Lord Rooker, especially my noble friend Lord Rooker’s trip down memory lane, when he was the Deputy Leader and I was the Chief Whip—those were the days; it was a Rolls-Royce operation then.
My purpose in putting down an amendment was to try to put the role of the Speaker into some sort of context, because these issues are not new. It is 15 years since we had a Lord Speaker first elected. Initially—I know that quite a few Members have come quite recently—we had the bizarre situation whereby the Lord Speaker was not allowed to do anything. In fact, the Lord Speaker would process in in a very important way—the public, or some members of the public, would be able to see that—and then process in here in an important way and sit down in an important way. They would then sit there looking important but doing absolutely nothing. That was the choreography of it all. It was even more absurd than that, because, for a period of years, the Speaker of the House of Lords was the only Member of the House of Lords at Question Time who could not speak. That must be a first by anyone’s standards, but, slowly, things have improved.
I will not give the House all the signposts along the way, but they were tentative steps to begin with. One that came shortly after we introduced the post of Lord Speaker was that the Lord Speaker would announce when someone had retired from the House or if someone had died—there was a Statement. That had always been ignored in the past, but then that was announced by the Lord Speaker. That was a small step but then, a couple of years ago, we made quite a revolutionary step in the speed at which things progress in this House. We handed to the Lord Speaker the role of filling roles that were not done in the House at all previously.