House of Lords: Debates

Debate between Lord Hill of Oareford and Lord Howarth of Newport

Monday 25th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

Perhaps that sound is someone ringing from another place with a view on the quality of our debates. The response that the House gave to the comments made by my noble friend Lord Jenkin reminds us that we do not want slavishly to follow examples in another place.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, if there were to be a minimum ration of, say, five minutes for each speech, surely it would not matter very much if from time to time debates ran on a little longer. That would facilitate the kind of more spontaneous and lively debating that the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, rightly calls for while ending what is, frankly, the demeaning practice of limiting the time for noble Lords’ speeches sometimes to three minutes, and sometimes to two minutes or even one.

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

The whole House has taken a view about time-limited debates. The advantage of them is that noble Lords know how long they have to speak, when the debate is going to take place and so on. The ingenious suggestion from the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, about allowing things to run on would effectively take time from someone else, and they would have an equally strong view the other way. These are not straightforward issues. One point worth making generally is that the amount of time in the previous Session set aside for debates was actually greater than that in the previous three Sessions. The noble Lord will probably know that I have brought forward proposals to the Procedure Committee to try to increase opportunities for debate and, importantly, for topical debates in particular because I know that there is widespread demand for that opportunity.

House of Lords: Reform

Debate between Lord Hill of Oareford and Lord Howarth of Newport

Wednesday 6th February 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they intend to proceed with any reforms to the composition of the House of Lords.

[The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (Lord Hill of Oareford)]

My Lords, as noble Lords know, the Government have no further plans for legislation to reform this House in this Parliament.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, given that the House of Commons has made it absolutely clear that it will not tolerate the challenge to its primacy of an elected second Chamber, given the Deputy Prime Minister’s sensible acknowledgement that the best is the enemy of the good and given the undesirability in the interests of good government that the question of Lords reform should overshadow the next Parliament, will Ministers introduce legislation in this Parliament to enable us to resolve the issues of how Members are to be appointed to the House of Lords, the future size of the House, how the balance between the political parties, the Cross Benches and the Lords spiritual is to be determined, the future of hereditary membership and life peerages, and provision for retirement and disqualification, all of which need to be resolved and upon which sufficient consensus could be achieved?

Schools: Curriculum

Debate between Lord Hill of Oareford and Lord Howarth of Newport

Tuesday 28th February 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

My Lords, the Government are extremely clear that material used for the purpose of inciting homophobic bullying would be completely improper. The Government would want to take action; it would fall foul of the Equality Act and various other pieces of legislation. The question is whether we should ban all materials, whatever they are, to which any of us individually might take exception. The position that was reached in 2010 on the Equality Act seems to me right. It draws a distinction between how children are taught and what goes on in schools—and it is clear that there should not be that kind of behaviour—and the use of different kinds of material from which, used properly, people could conclude that material of the sort my noble friend mentioned was full of all sorts of errors of the kind to which he referred.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, have I been wrongly under the impression that in this country we no longer ban books or, indeed, burn them? If equality legislation, while enacted in the name of social progress, has the effect of dragging us back to that illiberal state of affairs, may there not be a case for reviewing the relevant aspects of the legislation?

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

The point that I was trying to make—perhaps not very clearly—was that the precise point reached about curriculum materials in connection with the Equality Act in 2010 was that it would not lead to the conclusion which the noble Lord and I would want to avoid: that is, that materials to which individuals might take exception would be banned. We absolutely do not want to get to a point where that happens; those days—from whatever point of view that is taken—are fortunately past. Because of the exemption in the Equality Act, that situation does not arise.

Building Schools for the Future

Debate between Lord Hill of Oareford and Lord Howarth of Newport

Monday 14th February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, the Secretary of State has quarrelled not only with local authorities but also with architects. Can we hope that we will not hear a repeat of the diatribe he launched against architects at the Free Schools conference? It was a diatribe that was particularly ill judged, as he commented individually on my noble friend Lord Rogers. After all, it is widely accepted that the design of the Mossbourne Academy by my noble friend did contribute to the transformation of academic achievement there.

If the Secretary of State is turning over a new leaf in this regard, will he listen carefully to what has been said by Sunand Prasad, the former president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, who is not entirely opposed to the new approach that the Secretary of State wishes to adopt? He sees a place for templates, prefabricated parts and repeated designs, but has advised that you still have to take account of site, locality and context. Surely that is important in relation to the Government’s own aspirations for a new localism. Does he expect that people, within their localities, will take kindly to having designs centrally imposed upon them? Can we learn the lessons from the Building Schools for the Future programme? Can we also learn the lessons from the Australian experiment, which is rather more akin to the approach that the Government intend to adopt and which, although it has its limitations, has been partially successful? Finally, does he recognise that schools historically have been built as statements of civic and community values, and that if you impose central, standardised and banal designs of the kind epitomised across the country by Tesco and Dixon’s, whose representatives are advising the Secretary of State, then you will be falling short in your responsibilities?

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

I have rather a lot of sympathy with the thrust of the remarks made by the noble Lord. Through the James review, the Government are striving to achieve on the standardisation of design a sensible balance between as much standardisation—if that is the right word—or replication as is possible. That is because, in a time of limited resources, to design each school ab initio every time and not to learn the lessons from what has worked well in previous school buildings does not make sense, and neither does each time to incur a set of consultants’ fees, architects’ fees and all the rest of it. Our view is that there must be ways of getting greater standardisation, but at the same time I accept that part of gaining acceptance of a building involves including the people who will be concerned with running it—the head, the staff and the pupils—in the process. It is a matter of trying to find the balance between a common-sense approach to standardisation while also allowing some flexibility around local circumstances.