House of Lords: Working Practices

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Monday 27th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I must be the 40th speaker to say that this is an excellent report but perhaps the second to say that it was very fairly introduced by my noble friend on the Front Bench. I am glad that it will clearly receive the proper consideration that it deserves.

I have three particular favourites: voting on delegated legislation is one. It is time that we took a step in that direction. We may have to turn the screw a little tighter and start to involve some delay in that. It is a question of what it takes for us to be taken seriously by the Government. At what point do they start to listen to what we are saying, rather than reversing it in the Commons in two minutes and expecting us to behave? I am very glad that we are doing post-legislative scrutiny. I entirely agree with my noble friend Lord Strathclyde that there should be ad hoc committees, and I like the little recommendation 42. It is important that key letters coming from the Government to people who have taken part in Committee or debate are recorded in Hansard both in the bound version and, perhaps more importantly, online, to provide a full picture of what is going on for people outside this House.

I have some grouses, the principal of which is the proposals for Grand Committee—particularly putting all Committee stages in Grand Committee. This House is about its Committee work. I know that we all enjoy the other aspects of it, but how much effect do all those other theatrics have? How many Starred Questions have resulted in the Government being held to account effectively? I can remember one in 1992 but I am hard put to think of a second one. How many debates have resulted in changes to government policy? I can remember a few. On how many occasions have we dealt with a Statement that resulted in changes to government policy? I cannot think of any. However, it is extremely hard to think of a Committee stage that has not had an effect on a Bill being debated. That is the principal point of our effectiveness in this House.

There were 50 speakers at Second Reading on the Education Bill. How will we fit all of them into the Moses Room? The answer is that we will exclude most of them. They will not feel like coming. They will think that they have had their say at Second Reading and go away. The Chamber is the theatre in which we ought to be handling Committee stage. It is open to everybody and has lots of room. There are plenty of chances for people to drop in to listen to the points they are interested in and plenty of chance for Members to form an opinion about points that are being pushed in Committee. If one looks at the Bills taken currently in the Moses Room, Report stage rarely results in real turnovers for the Government because the House has had no chance to develop an opinion and Report stage is far too formalistic for that. If we want a House that is really effective we have to have an open Committee. Taking that away from this Chamber will be a great mistake.

I also think that morning sittings are a great mistake. I entirely agree with my noble friend Lord Crickhowell. Sittings of Committee stages are entirely unpredictable. I have a life to live and want to be able to plan when I am meeting people, going up to the midlands, or whatever I want to do. If that might get hit by a change of date in a Committee stage, that renders my whole participation in Bills in this place extremely difficult.

My noble friend raised the question of cost control and implied that some of the recommendations in the report were expensive, so to keep the budget balanced, spending more money would mean spending less elsewhere. The noble Lord, Lord Martin of Springburn, drew careful attention to what that might mean in practice. I have a simple solution for my noble friend—reduce the numbers in this House. Take out 100 Peers and save £1 million. That is about the measure of it.

I come back to the suggestion I made in the previous debate of offering 100 hereditary peerages. There were two people 400 years ago who earned the peerages that I have and they are remembered by me. Is it not a great prize to offer someone? You will be remembered 400 years hence by at least one person. It costs nothing. I hope my noble friend was listening when the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, made her suggestions. She should be co-opted immediately on to his cost control committees. On the idea that we should impose a measure on the Written Questions we ask and whether they are they really worth while, perhaps sharing the savings with the departments could produce an income.

Automatically recognising our presence in this Chamber and quicker methods of voting as ways of saving money and time would cause problems only when there were identical twins involved. Lord Thurlow used to share his seat with his brother, but I am not aware of any present Peers doing so.

I was very attracted by what my noble friend Lord Kirkwood said about technology. There are things we can do to reach out to the grass roots. We think the idea of aping the Commons and getting people into a bit of pre-leg is high-tech. No, it is not. We can reach out much further than that. We can really involve people out there in having a say on what is going on in a Bill. We can condense it and control it through modern technology. We really ought to explore that because it is not expensive.

The last thing I want to press upon my noble friend is the need to look at this report to see if we can find more ways of generating Back-Bench influence. With 870 Peers in this place, no central organisation can know what we are all capable of and interested in. The creation of a Back-Bencher committee is all very well, but it will not really be any better informed than anybody else in the House, even if we have elected the members. We have to find ways of flowing information into the committee. On the question of debates, how is it to know which debates we all want? We have to find a way of indicating that to it with a sheet we can sign up on or whatever.

When it comes to the membership of committees, earlier today, we approved a committee on privacy and related matters. How does anybody in the usual channels know where the expertise and interest is in this House? They will know a few of the obvious suspects, but there are far too many of us for the usual channels to have a proper influence on that. There must be some way of us registering that interest and knowledge when an opportunity comes up. I am not suggesting that we should have the selection, but there should be a way making these things known so that the usual channels or the Back-Bencher committee can take sensible decisions. I think that is a great idea.

I very much hope that the Back-Bench committee expands its influence but, echoing something that my noble friend said, I would hate to lose the randomness of balloted debates. Otherwise we will merely get the consensus debates, the ones that everybody likes and the off-centre—something that is really important that none of us understands or knows about—will never come before us, and that would be a great shame.