Procedure and Privileges Committee
Debate between Lord Hamilton of Epsom and Baroness Hayman
Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)
My Lords, I very much support the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, because I do not really buy in to this idea of the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, that we are all agreed that we do not want to have a Commons-type Speaker. There are many on his side of the House who precisely want a Commons-type Speaker. Let us face it: any extra powers that we give to the Lord Speaker merely move us closer to that. We have to be a little bit wary, and it is absolutely right, as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, said, that we should have a serious debate about what sort of Lord Speaker we actually want, and try to establish how many powers he should have and how many he should not.
I did not really understand the argument of the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, that the Leader of the House is constantly leaping to her feet to call people to contribute remotely. As far as I can see, it is the Chief Whip who is doing that a lot of the time, and I do not think that the onerous duties on the Leader of the House are that great when the Chief Whip can deputise for her.
Baroness Hayman (CB)
I am extremely grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. He talked about not giving any extension to the power of the Lord Speaker. The point I was trying to make was that this would not be giving any power to the Lord Speaker. There would be no element of choice about who was speaking; it would be giving a miniscule duty to the Lord Speaker. I do not think we should see it as part of a slippery slope towards a Commons-type Speaker at all. We should see it as a simple improvement in process in the House.
Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)
I stand corrected by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman. Clearly, we are not talking about powers being given to the Lord Speaker but, as she says, about duties. As you impose more duties on the Lord Speaker, obviously the role that he or she plays in the House gets greater than it was before.
I turn now to my noble friend Lord Cormack’s amendment, which basically wants us to go back to the status quo. Here, I totally agree with the noble Lord, Lord Grocott. We have to ask ourselves: in having these pass readers, what are we actually achieving? I will try to help my noble friend the Senior Deputy Speaker by suggesting that perhaps this is to save money. If it is, perhaps he can tell us how much money he thinks he is going to save by doing this, because then we could get the whole thing into perspective. Otherwise, there does not seem to me to be any seriously pressing argument as to why we should change rather than go back to the original system that we had before this pandemic started, which seemed to have worked extremely efficiently. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, that the onus is on the Senior Deputy Speaker to say why we should change, when it seemed to work so very efficiently before we ever started all this.