House of Lords: Domestic Committees

Lord Oxburgh Excerpts

Monday 9th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Oxburgh (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the Leader for setting up this committee, and I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, on a truly excellent report, from which we can all benefit greatly.

It is probably worth making one or two comments. Noble Lords will be glad to know that I have thrown away the speech that I had prepared simply because everything has been said more than once, and certainly better than I would have said it. However, I think that the point has been made only indirectly that, although there were all sorts of things wrong with the previous system, at least part of what was wrong was us. People were not taking commitments seriously. I serve on the Information Committee. When I joined that committee, the Clerk of the Parliaments and the then Chairman of Committees took a great deal of trouble to brief new members. I think that we had two significant briefing sessions but only a minority of members attended them. That is a problem, and it is going to be a problem for the new structure unless we change our ways.

Today, I want to concentrate on the Information Committee. All sorts of benefits of a services committee have been outlined but, frankly, I simply do not think it is credible that the range of activities and inquiries carried out by the Information Committee could be carried out by the services committee with the major and broad remit that is proposed. The same point has been made very clearly by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, and others. Either one has to say that the work that the Information Committee was doing was not very useful and did not need doing or one has to find a different way of managing it.

One possibility is to have an information group or sub-committee that takes on some of those responsibilities but then reports to the services committee. In other words, it would use the proposed structure but tweak it, and this could be done in one way or another with all sorts of finessing. However, I think that some of our work has been useful. Perhaps it has not always been to the liking of some of those whom we have interviewed but, under the skilful chairmanship of the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, I think that the meetings have always been constructive and have probably been helpful to the officials whom we have seen. We operated with a very high degree of informality. We were constrained to a horseshoe-shaped arrangement by the rooms in which we generally, although not always, met, but it worked extremely well. I suspect that quite a number of people would feel that it was a loss if that sort of activity ceased.

I urge the Leader and those whom she consults on this to think upon this question and how these things can be managed within the new system.