Electoral Registration and Administration Bill

Debate between Lord King of Bridgwater and Lord Martin of Springburn

Monday 14th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Martin of Springburn]

My Lords—

[Lord King of Bridgwater]

My Lords—

Justice and Security Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord King of Bridgwater and Lord Martin of Springburn

Monday 19th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord King of Bridgwater]

My Lords, I share some confusion over this amendment. The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, has asked whether it is intended that the chairman should come from a group that has already been put forward and proposed, while the noble Lord, Lord Reid, made the point about the membership of the House of Lords. As I read the Bill, you could end up with one Member of the Commons and eight Members of the Lords. That is pretty unlikely, but I can certainly see that we have moved from having one Member of the Lords as a member of the committee to having two. I can see a situation in which the new Opposition do extremely badly in an election and are very short of membership in the Commons but still have to man all the committees and so on. In those circumstances, they might well prefer it if they had one or two extremely well qualified members, perhaps recent Members who had lost their seat and moved into your Lordships’ House and who would be very useful members of the ISC.

Against that background, there would then be the problem, as the noble Lord, Lord Reid, has said, of whether or not the Commons should vote for Lords. I would trust the members of the committee, knowing the ways in which they have arrived on it, to be well capable of deciding who should be their chairman. That is well established practice, as we know from elsewhere. I therefore feel that, subject only to the qualification that the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, raised, I support the idea that the chairman should be a member of the Opposition. I feel an amendment coming on at Third Reading, and that is one that the Government might like to prepare for.

[Lord Martin of Springburn]

My Lords, the amendment makes heavy weather of finding a chairman. Most, if not all, members of this committee will have a long history and reputation in both Houses. I do not see where the difficulty would be if at the first meeting the members chose a chairman. I do not see anything wrong with that. That is a tradition that I found in local government. The first time we met after we were elected, we picked a leader of the group. That happens in the House of Lords and in the House of Commons, where I used to belong.