Lord Naseby
Main Page: Lord Naseby (Conservative - Life peer)
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
My Lords, I hope that this House will not pass this without substantial discussion. It really is quite an outrageous series of suggestions. I go from time to time to schools, under the guidance of the Lord Speaker and her predecessor, as part of the Peers in Schools programme to talk about this House and how effective it is in scrutinising legislation, challenging the Government and in debates. Over the past year in particular, I have begun to doubt whether I am actually telling them the truth when I say that. We are cutting down the time in which we can debate and challenge.
To give one or two examples before I touch on the precise issues of this report, the Leader of the House gave us an extra week of Easter Recess without any consultation, when we were not able to discuss, challenge, raise Questions or take up Statements that were made in the other place. We will be proroguing a lot earlier than ever: tomorrow, as I understand it. Important debates on membership of the European Union and nuclear energy were held the day before yesterday in Grand Committee. In a major debate on nuclear energy, Members were told that they had three minutes to talk. This is ridiculous. We are not debating things properly. Those two debates in the Grand Committee should have been on the Floor of the House and there should have been time to discuss them properly.
My friend the noble Lord, Lord Martin, and I have raised the issue of PNQs on the Floor of the House. There is 10 minutes for supplementary questions when Urgent Questions are repeated here. This is not just a question of the Front Bench. Both the Minister and the Opposition took up minute after minute, but then other Members spoke at length so there was insufficient time to ask questions. All that the committee is suggesting is that we remind Members of what is in the Companion. We can do that until we are blue, or red, in the face; we will still not get the message over to people. Why do we have to limit it to 10 minutes? Do people want to rush home at five o’clock for their tea? I just do not understand. We should be here to ask questions, to challenge, to discuss and debate. That is what we are here for. To limit it to 10 minutes seems totally arbitrary and ridiculous.
The Chairman of Committees said that the committee looked at but rejected giving Oral Questions 40 minutes instead of 30 to allow more time, which would have let more people come in. They say instead that they should limit such Questions to seven per Member in a year. Why limit it arbitrarily to seven? That seems totally gratuitous. Then, in order to persuade us, the Chairman of Committees says that it does not matter very much because it affects only seven Members, and the maximum number of Questions they ask is 10. If that is the number of Members and Questions, it will make no substantial difference. It is an unnecessary restriction.
I am afraid that this is typical of what comes from the Procedure Committee. It does not want debate and discussion. It does not want the Executive and their control challenged. We know that it is controlled by the Leader of the House and the government Chief Whip. It is about time that people admitted this and said so: that they control what is happening. They do not want the Government to be questioned and challenged. After the next election we will be changing sides. We will be the Government. I ask the people opposite to think of that.
Lord Naseby
My Lords, I support the proposal on PNQs. I have had the privilege of asking two recently, and the procedure followed by the Lord Speaker was entirely appropriate: one was rejected and the other was accepted. There is nothing wrong with it. In my judgment they need a finite length because they happen immediately, and the noble Lord, or Baroness, who has come across that issue is the person best briefed to ask that Question. It is inevitably a Question asked of the Minister of the day. That is the person who should answer the Question, and the best person to ask it is the noble Lord who has raised it.
I will make a couple of observations on Oral Questions, or rather ask for a clarification from the Chairman of Committees. I am mystified as to why Oral Questions should have to be asked in a calendar year. Most things in your Lordships’ House are done on a sessional basis. What is so different about Oral Questions that they now have to be asked within a calendar year? First, it means that the Table Office has to keep two logs, and secondly, noble Members have to keep two logs to know where they are within the calendar year. Within the Session it is so much easier. My question relates to clarity on that point.
Secondly, the words used are:
“to table no more than seven oral questions”.
I ask the Chairman of Committees: is an Oral Question Question 1, 2 or 3, or does it include, or not include, the topical balloted Question? In my judgment, the seven should be confined to Question 1, 2 and 3, and the balloted Question should be quite separate. I do not want to chastise my noble friend the Chairman of Committees, because he has a very difficult job. However, this is the second time that the Procedure Committee has not put in clear terms how this House operates, and it should not be for the Back-Benchers—even though some of us are pretty assiduous in Question Time—to keep correcting the Procedure Committee.
Lord Grocott
My Lords, I certainly do not agree with the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, which in effect would lead to appealing against the Lord Speaker’s decision. If that were done on the Floor of the House it would mean that the Private Notice Question was aired, irrespective of whether the Lord Speaker said yes or no. I certainly do not agree with that.
I am in part reassured that the Chairman of Committees says that even if we make permanent the procedure on repeating Urgent Questions from the Commons, it will still be reviewed. I would like to hear, certainly from the Leader of the House, that he endorses that. We are getting ourselves into a bit of a muddle on the relationship between the two Houses. Of course, our procedures are different, but there are areas—and Urgent Questions in the Commons being repeated here is one of them—in which if you get a mismatch it looks peculiar to any neutral observer.
In practice, because we are using the PNQ procedure here for repeating Urgent Questions from the Commons —I am sure the clerks would be able to give us the figures if we needed them—you can have an Urgent Question in the Commons that by definition is important; it would not be agreed as an Urgent Question if it was not immediate and important and needed urgent discussion. The Commons can have up to an hour to debate an Urgent Question, but when it gets to this end of the building the procedures are such that it is locked within 10 minutes.
There have been one or two quite spectacular mismatches like that, even in the relatively small number of Urgent Questions that have been repeated here as PNQs. I suppose it was my fault not to have put down some sort of amendment on this, but I would like to be reassured that the Procedure Committee will look at that kind of area, where there is an obvious mismatch between the scrutiny given to an important issue by the Commons and the scrutiny given by us. It is certainly not satisfactory to have these huge discrepancies.
We all know that the practical application of this procedure of repeating Urgent Questions will have no effect whatever on the behaviour of Members of the House. I am sure that the exhortation to keep Questions short has been made for much longer than I have been in the House, and has been routinely ignored. However, will the Leader of the House give me an assurance that among the reviews or consideration that will still be given to the application of this procedure, this mismatch between the two Houses will be kept under review as well?