Liaison Committee: Third Report
Debate between Lord Krebs and Lord Strathclyde(12 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Strathclyde
Is the noble Lord intervening to raise something, or does he wish to wind up?
Lord Krebs
Yes. I thank the noble Lord for his comments so far, but I would appreciate it if he would address the question that I put on what mechanism was used in the report to assess the value for money from different options. It is all very well to say that we need to create resources for new activities, but how was that evaluation carried out? I request some transparency on that.
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, we started off from a slightly different position. We wanted to do more different things, such as pre-leg, post-leg and two new stand-alone ad hoc committees, and they had to be paid for by some trimming elsewhere. We took the view that there could be a reduction in the EU sub-committees, and I am afraid that the Science and Technology Committee was next in line. We suggested this in the report that we published right at the beginning of this Session nearly two years ago, when we said:
“So far as the Science and Technology Committee is concerned, we note that the Committee has recently worked through two units of activity … Given that the House of Commons committee on this subject is now permanently established, we consider these two units of activity should be regarded as an absolute maximum; and in the event of further demands for committee work arising which require redeployment of committee resources we would in the first instance look towards retrenchment of the Science and Technology Committee”.
So all this was forecast a long time ago. I think there is a mood in the House to try to look at other ways in which we can work on our committee structure.
The Science and Technology Committee will continue. It will no doubt continue to work through a sub-committee, and I hope that it will continue to do its work extremely effectively.