Courts and Tribunals Bill

Debate between Lord Howard of Lympne and Lord Rooker

2nd reading
Tuesday 27th October 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rooker (Lab)]

My Lords, this will not take long—as I have said in the past. The purpose of this amendment is to strengthen the role of the elected Members of the Commons. There is no way anything I say or have said before is critical of Commons Members. My criticism is purely of the Government.

We are in a cycle where Commons Second Readings are, in effect, all guillotined. It is called a programme Motion, but it covers all Bills. The effect is that the Government always want to boast about the number of Bills, which is done at the expense of the scrutiny of Bills. We have Bills arriving in your Lordships’ House. As a result of inadequate scrutiny, we end up sending back more amendments than would otherwise be the case.

The Government in the Commons then blame the extra work for elected Members on the upper House abusing its position and therefore call for reform of this House. Even when we return amendments, the elected Members, under the guillotine, are limited in the time that they can use due to the original programme Motion.

The elected Members clearly need more time for scrutiny. The Government have to return some of the powers to Parliament that they have taken away with programme Motions designed to fit in more Bills rather than better Bills. Simply asking the Government for a list of what has not been allowed to be scrutinised in the Commons puts the buck back where it belongs. I see it as being to the supreme advantage of this House that it gets a Bill and knows, as the revising House, what has not been scrutinised in the first place.

As for this Bill, on Tuesday 13 October, the Commons dealt with the Bill on Report. The Government tabled two Statements that day, which took an hour and 30 minutes. As with other Bills, no “injury time” is ever allowed on the programme Motion, which would be a normal and reasonable thing to do, but it does not happen. The time allowed was from 3.29 pm to 6 pm, when the guillotine came down—two and a half hours. In those two and a half hours, the Commons dealt with 27 new clauses and 30 amendments from the Government and Opposition for debate. As is the new norm, elected Members had one general debate. That is a Second Reading debate; it is not a debate on Report about what has come from Committee. When you do it like that, it is equivalent to a Second Reading debate. When the guillotine came down, another 20 government amendments were added to the Bill on the nod, spread over four new clauses and two schedules.

When that happens, the numbers of the clauses and amendments change when they are put into the Bill by the Bill team and parliamentary counsel. It is not possible to go back to Commons Hansard and work out exactly where these changes are in the Bill unless you are aware of the way they have been put in there. That is difficult. This is the fourth Bill during this Session on which I have raised this issue, and I can tell the Government that there will be more.

My main concern continues to be the material that the elected House has never considered but put into a Bill on the nod. There is a pattern emerging, which is that Report in the Commons, as I said, is effectively now just a Second Reading debate on a very large group of new material, at the end of which all the government material is added and the non-government material is not considered before the guillotine. No scrutiny or attempt to raise specific issues takes place. After the guillotine, all the material added to the Bill is, of course, the government material only. All the rest falls, so it is done on the nod. It is clear, therefore, that elected Members have lost some powers of scrutiny.

As it is, I have been contacted by a long-retired parliamentary official who has also spotted the same pattern. They are not the only ones, of course; I caught the speech from the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, while I was out of the Chamber. They suggested, in the absence of the Government being open to Parliament, that the Libraries of both Houses could serve Parliament in this respect. However, why should the library staff have to search in the Bill and Hansard for material that is then unnumbered, because the numbers change when it goes in the Bill, when the Government control the Bill team and parliamentary counsel—which is government counsel really? They are the ones who know exactly which bits of the Bill have not been scrutinised in the Commons. They could provide the list. They could italicise the content, for example, or provide us with a list. It is to the abiding purpose of this House, in making revisions, that we have a better idea of what the elected House has not had time to properly scrutinise. I beg to move.

[Lord Howard of Lympne (Con)]

My Lords, I wish to place on record, as I have before, my strong support for the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Rooker. I am not going to repeat what he said; he said virtually everything that can be said and I agree with everything he said. It is within your Lordships’ power to give effect to the proposals contained in this amendment and I hope that one day we will.