Procedure and Privileges
Debate between Lord Mancroft and Earl Attlee
Lord Mancroft (Con)
My Lords, we are ostensibly debating the report of the Procedure and Privileges Committee. Three subjects are on the front page of that report. I do not think that any noble Lord has touched on the first one:
“Virtual participation in Grand Committee”.
I suspect that that is because nobody would object to it; it a simple proposal and I think that the House will probably agree to it. That is one of the difficulties: we have three subjects to discuss, one of which I think everybody agrees with and the other two rather less so.
The second subject before us, “Divisions: pass-readers”, is, as the noble Lord, Lord Addington, well explained to the House, about slightly more than pass readers. The issue around the role of Tellers and Divisions is in many ways more important than the pass readers themselves. I think that moving from having a clerk ticking us off as we go through the Lobbies to being able to use our passes electronically is probably a perfectly reasonable modernisation, but that is not the same as abolishing Tellers, removing the call for voices at three minutes and the other things that go with it, which are hugely important parts of the process that are disguised within that subject. That creates a difficulty for the House.
The final subject in the report is “Leave of Absence”, which is the subject of the amendment moved by my noble friend Lord Forsyth. That gives me huge concern. I am a member of the Procedure and Privileges Committee and it gave me concern at the time. By this recommendation we are delegating a further power to the Commissioner for Standards and the Conduct Committee, a power which this House previously had. It is a small power. We have never really used it because it has never needed to be used, but nevertheless it makes me unhappy that we should give a further power away by saying that we will agree to any request made by the commissioner or the Conduct Committee in relation to a leave of absence, not that we may agree. I am in favour of “may”. We probably would accept that advice and agree to that request, but this House should retain the ability to say no if it wishes to. I personally do not know the commissioner. I am sure that he or she is an excellent person in many ways, but I do not know who he or she is and he or she is not a Member of this House. I do not think that we should give somebody like that a power that for very good reasons has been retained by this House until now.
That is my view on the three issues. However, during the course of the debate we have moved on from the three issues that make up the subject matter of this report. We have revealed that, whether we like it or not, there is now a crisis of confidence in the governance of this House by its Members. We are unhappy. As the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, said, we are going too far, too fast. That is what it is about and that has caused our confidence to be cracked in an unfortunate way.
I take the point of the noble Baroness Lady McIntosh, but I do not think that anybody is being bounced; I think everybody is agreeing that they are mildly unhappy. We collectively agree that things are not absolutely right. Nobody is being blamed; neither the Conduct Committee nor officials, nor anybody else, but we do have a new Lord Speaker, a new Senior Deputy Speaker and a new Clerk of the Parliaments. I suspect that all noble Lords will join me in wishing them well, but we need them to start well and what we have seen today is not a good start.
I hope, therefore, that my noble friend the Senior Deputy Speaker will take the advice offered from all sides of the House to take away this rather muddled report, quietly go through it again and bring it back in rather better form.
Earl Attlee (Con)
My Lords, I have been both an Opposition Whip and a Government Whip on and off for about 17 years, since 1997. I am extremely supportive of my noble friend Lord Taylor’s amendment to the Motion; I believe that the proposals in the report are a recipe for disaster and unintended consequences. I sincerely hope that my noble friend the Senior Deputy Speaker will come to the Dispatch Box right now and tell us that he will withdraw his Motion.