Role of the Lord Speaker

Lord Newby Excerpts

Thursday 30th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Newby (LD)]

My Lords, I find myself in the somewhat disconcerting position of broadly agreeing with the noble Lord, Lord Grocott. This has never happened to me before on a constitutional issue, and I would not necessarily want your Lordships to feel that my remarks today could in any sense constitute a precedent.

The starting point should be one that a number of noble Lords have made: why are we the only deliberative assembly in the world that does things in this particular way? It therefore seems that, looking at this afresh, we should ask why we, uniquely, should behave in this way when the rest of the world has decided to do things somewhat differently.

Obviously, your Lordships’ House has considered this; it considered it at great length in 2011 and decided that it did not want to make any change. But, as the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, said, the size of the House has increased, and there are more people wanting to come in, and it is undoubtedly the case that more people watch proceedings in your Lordships’ House than ever before. The perception that they gain, as a number of noble Lords said, is that Question Time is unduly shambolic. I do not think that having a Lord Speaker exercising a role would stop it being contentious—but the perception would be significantly improved.

I have to accept that the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, the Government Chief Whip, is an extremely benevolent, subtle dictator at Question Time. He does the job extremely well and extremely fairly, as does the noble Baroness the Leader. No Lord Speaker would do the job more fairly; I have no worries about that. But, having been a Whip on the Government Benches, I think that the role the Government Whips play is pretty difficult in practice.

This is not strictly related to today, but my role very often was to try to impose time limits on speeches. I felt that I was often seeking to reduce the time of Opposition Members. They felt that this was partisan and I felt very uncomfortable doing it. My free tip to the Whips is that the best way of getting people to realise that they have gone over time is not excessive gesticulation but just tapping one’s wristwatch with a pen. It is very effective non-verbal communication—but it is not a very impressive way of doing things.

I have great sympathy with this proposal. However, I have to accept that it is not the universal view of the House or indeed my own group—I slightly feel the breath of my noble friend Lord Beith down my neck as I speak. The qualms expressed today are largely born out of experience of the House of Commons that they do not want replicated here. In particular, the point was made by the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, that if the Lord Speaker has the power to call individual Members, they might over time moderate their behaviour. I am not sure that it would quite work in that way in your Lordships’ House.

The proposal put to the House in 2011 was not for greater powers to go to the Speaker than currently obtain in the Government Front Bench but simply to transfer the existing powers. I would have thought that that was a pretty good way of avoiding the slippery slope. It is a very easy argument—and not always wrong—to say that if you make any change it is the start of a slippery slope. However, given that we are a self-regulating House and it is virtually impossible ever to change anything here, the idea that making one modest change is going to lead to an avalanche of changes for the Lord Speaker seems implausible. So I recommend that this narrow proposal should go back to the Procedure Committee, whence it came originally, for another look. I would not recommend the kind of review that the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, suggested, because if we went for that we would probably never get anywhere—the only change we will ever make is incremental.