Procedure and Privileges Committee
Debate between Lord Harris of Haringey and Baroness Morgan of Cotes
Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Con)
I say to my noble friend that I am not trying to minimise the impact, I am trying to get to the bottom of what the actual figures are. The figure in the report is different from the figure used by the noble Lord, Lord Scriven. I also take issue with my noble friend over what “coming to the Chamber” means. Of course, there is nothing like standing among the leather Benches for visits, but there is also something very special about sitting in the Galleries and listening to the Houses at work as debates continue. There are other ways of achieving the same ends.
I want to move on to the work of Select Committees and other business, which we have also heard about. I have been a Select Committee chair in the House of Commons when the hours of sitting had changed. It is perfectly possible to do both and the conclusion of this debate for me has been that a lot of what we are talking about is how Members of this House prioritise the work they are doing here and the work they are doing outside and how they juggle the rest of their lives. I think we would all say that it is very much a juggling act; we know that we cannot do everything. I am also the chair of a current inquiry of this House. I see some of its members here and it is very nice to see them. We are meeting when the House is sitting. That is a decision we took, given everybody’s commitments. Again, it is question of choice and priority.
My noble friend Lord Balfe talked about travelling and train times. Should I ever be invited on to “Mastermind”, my expert subject would be the train travelling times between Leicestershire and London, single and return journeys, because I have spent many years doing that. Of course, there is an issue, as we have heard, about personal convenience, but there are also issues of safety and reliability. I just say to my noble friend Lord Wolfson, for whom I have great respect, that one of the other constraints on taking part in debates is that one is meant to be here at the end of a debate. If people cannot stay to the end of the debate, they are not to take part in those debates. I know that noble Lords are returning home because they have not just childcare responsibilities but responsibilities for older relatives who need their help and the carers need to be relieved. People are having to make decisions about which parts of business they take part in.
I fully support the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, in saying that Members should absolutely be encouraged to have outside interests, and that is why they do. We are talking about 3.5 hours of changes in bringing forward the sitting times. We would finish at 8.30 pm, after which plenty of life happens, not just travelling but engaging with other things—not just the television.
I conclude with a broader point on the workplace. I was absolutely dismayed by the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Moore. I have sat in the other House and am watching the issues around culture going on there at the moment—and the clearly much better and more collegiate culture I like to see in this House. To say that we should recognise that these are workplaces like no other and that we need special rules is at the heart of many of the cultural problems we now see in this Parliament. We should be honest about those problems and really start to tackle them. I see nothing wrong with modern HR practices; if people need to make complaints or if things have happened to them, they need to know that they will be taken seriously, and not just by the Whips’ Offices.
This debate about sitting hours is about the culture of this House. It is about the message it sends. The noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, said that Parliament is not fully understood. What is not fully understood is how we can possibly make the best decisions about legislation at 10 pm and beyond on a regular basis. He also said that camaraderie comes over dinner. Camaraderie comes because we work together, whether on committees and inquiries or in debates; it does not come because we dine together. I suggest that that has not been the case since probably the early 20th century.
Although I will support the Motion this evening, in the interests of seeking compromise, I think that my noble friend Lord Young has put forward a sensible amendment —a pilot is never a mistake in these matters where there is going to be change—and, should we reach it, I will of course support it.
Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)
My Lords, I think we have reached that stage in the debate when everything has been said but not everyone has yet said it. However, I want to make one substantive point and one comparatively minor one.
The minor point is that I want to pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Grocott. Not only did he remind us of the momentous change—I remember it vividly—that stopping going through the night quite so often brought not only to the lives of individual Members but to the quality of what we did but he managed to speak for about 10 minutes, plus interruptions, without once referring to the fact that a hereditary Peers by-election was going on while he was on his feet. That is a statement of how mature this debate has been.
My substantive point is that the Leader of the House has not been present today; the Government Chief Whip was here very briefly but has departed. A lot of noble Lords seem to believe that the Government will somehow magically be happy to stop at 8.30 pm. I recall that, under both Labour Governments and Labour Chief Whips and Conservative Governments and Conservative Chief Whips, the pressure to go on remains. We will find that it will not just be 8.30 pm. It will drift routinely; this benchmark of 10 pm, which will still exist notionally for Monday, will start to be the norm on those other two days.
As this is a House matter, we will not hear from the Government Chief Whip today. I would be grateful if we could somehow get a clear statement from the Government on how rigorously they will treat that 8.30 pm finish.