Brexit: Horizon 2020 and Erasmus

Lord Sutherland of Houndwood Excerpts

Thursday 7th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Coussins (CB)]

My Lords—

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood (CB)]

My Lords—

[Lord Lawson of Blaby (Con)]

My Lords—

Adult Education: Part-time Attendance

Lord Sutherland of Houndwood Excerpts

Wednesday 9th March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

I congratulate the noble Lord and the committee on their report. As I said, we want to encourage people to undertake part-time study if that is what they want to do, and of course we are working with employers and colleges to try to ensure that we have a flexible system that everyone can take advantage of.

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood (CB)]

My Lords, two of the main providers of higher education for part-time students are the Open University and Birkbeck College, both of which do exceptionally well. Have the Government carried out any consultation with them about the impact of the new fees regime on applications for such courses?

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

I also congratulate those two organisations on their work—in fact, I met both of them recently. The Government are certainly listening to their concerns. Part of the reason we are consulting on the introduction of maintenance loans is because we want to make sure that we get the details right and ensure that those who want to take advantage of this support can do so.

House of Lords

Lord Sutherland of Houndwood Excerpts

Tuesday 6th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Williams, for giving us the opportunity to debate this very important topic. I also congratulate him on securing a debate that does not have the usual constraints of time limits on the speeches. I will come back to that, as I may come to regret it as I look down the list of speakers, but that is my initial thought.

I have one regret, however, about the subject for the debate, which is that it focuses on what I regard as only one side of the problem: the size of the House. The difficulty we have is that changing it—we have rehearsed this well and I will not go into it again—is very difficult and, I have no doubt, will be very contentious. However, it seems to me that we have not debated sufficiently the way in which we might be able to adjust our procedures to deal with this fact and to begin to allow a better use of the talent that we have in this place, perhaps—I throw this in as a possibility—by extending the use of committees with real powers to carry out some of the work of this House.

If you are a Cross-Bencher, you find that to raise a supplementary in Question Time you have pretty well got to surprise God and the Bishops by coming in for Prayers in order to be seated in the right sort of place. That is not sensible. Equally, if you wish to speak in a debate in which you believe you have some expertise, you might well find that the list of speakers is so long that there is the crass example of the two-minute speech. That is not good enough. Yes, most of what I want to say can be said in a minute and a half—I shall not do that just now but it can be done—but often if there are real points of issue, and that has applied to some of the debates in which many of us have taken part, the constraint on time is a great difficulty.

Is there no way of beginning to deal with that? I can think of several ways, none of which I will put forward now because they will be shot down but they are worth detailed discussion, including the use of a more extensive committee system; for example, education is one of the areas in which my own background gives me some expertise but there is no committee on education allowed in this House. Equally, we can take some of the Bills in Committee next door but there could be a much greater pre-legislative scrutiny process, as applies in some areas of our business. I throw these in simply as suggestions. It is a two-part issue: size and adjusting procedures to the size because undoubtedly we will not reduce the numbers significantly within a short period of time.

Those who are looking to the next election should consider the worries of the noble Lord, Lord Butler, about conspiracies here. If one looks at the figures for the two years following the previous election, the net numbers in this House increased by 90. That tells us what is going to happen after the next election, especially with more parties in play. That inevitably will increase the number of those hoping and reasonably wanting to come into the House.

Many of your Lordships who have come through other routes will perhaps not know much about the scrutiny that some of us Cross-Benchers went through. When the Appointments Commission was set up in the previous big revolution here in the House of Lords, it was a complicated procedure and eventually 16 of us were nominated in 2001 and introduced to the House. As part of my involvement in this, I filled in a nine-page form on request from the committee, I nominated referees and I even went and had what was initially referred to as a conversation—although in fact it was more like an interview—and in that interview there were three things that the committee wanted to establish, as far as I could see.

The first was that I had a background of relevant experience—I could match the claims and the pro formas sent in and what my referees said. The second, and I think the most important for them, was that on no account should I be tainted by the virus of party politics. I was to be an independent Cross-Bencher. The third, which was probably just my own paranoia, was ensuring that I did not make social gaffes too often, so I avoided asking for three lumps of sugar in my cup of tea. I passed the test, apparently, and here a number of us are. I think there are about 50 of us now. But there was a procedure.

The important part of the procedure came next. The interview was a two-part process so I asked what was expected of me. I did not know and I wanted to be sure that the job was doable. Occasionally one is invited to take on posts—I am sure your Lordships all have been—but the job is not doable. I actually got very good advice from the sub-committee I met. The good advice was, first, make sure you identify areas of interest and expertise on which you could make contributions. Secondly, the hint was to stick to those, but that was up to me because freedom of thought was part of the deal. Thirdly, I should make sure that I was here on the right occasions—not chalking up a sufficient number of attendances to be allowed in next time there was a ballot but taking part in the debates on which I was thought to have something to contribute. I thought, “Yes, that is doable. I can do this”. My training in philosophy immediately reminded me that Immanuel Kant, whom I believe to be the greatest European philosopher, formulated the premise that “ought” implies “can”. If I ought to do that, then surely I should be able to do it. That is partly up to me, but it is partly up to the structures of this place.

What I want to say in this debate is very precise. My worry is that, with the way that things are moving in this House, where we have not adjusted procedure sufficiently to take account of its size, it may well be the case that we cannot make the contributions for which we were brought here. If one is to slim us down, there is a special issue for the Cross-Benchers; I was glad to hear that mentioned, not least by the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde. However, the broader issue is: can we do this, and does the way in which the House operates allow us to do it? My plea is that, in any further discussion, we set our minds to the questions of procedures that relate to the size of this place.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Maxton]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Williams of Elvel for introducing this debate. During the Recess, I read that his stepson, the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury, had contracted pneumonia. I hope that he is now well on the road to recovery. I shall make two points, one of which is in relation to the transport problems of my noble friends Lady Taylor and Lord Foulkes. I attend this debate having taken today five forms of transport to get here. I took a car to a hotel on the Isle of Arran, a bus across the island, a boat from the island to the mainland, a train to Glasgow and a train from Glasgow to London, and then the Underground. If that does not deserve a pat on the back, perhaps it should.

My noble friend Lord Gordon of Strathblane and I are the same age and will be 80 next year, which means that, under the proposals being put forward, we might have to retire. However, recently I did an online test which showed that my real physical age, if you take the fact that I take exercise, go to the gym and do this and that, is 60. That therefore means I have another 20 years to go until I have to retire.

In this debate, it would be very easy to fall into the trap of defending the House of Commons against those who are attacking it. I spent quite a long time there and have to say that some of the changes, although not all of them, have been beneficial. The noble Lord, Lord Cormack, said that rebuilding the Chamber still has to be adversarial, but it always has been such. I am sure that, like me, when he shows people around the two Houses, he points out the sword lines in the Commons and says, “You can’t step over that line because the length of the sword is between the two”. It always has been adversarial. I had an uncle who was thrown out of the House of Commons for making an overtly political, let us say, insult to a Member of the Tory party.

The question that has not been asked is not whether we should change the size of the Lords but whether we should change at all at this point in time. My answer would be no. I agree with my noble friend Lord Clark that we have to have legislation but, before we have legislation, surely we have to look at the whole way in which we are governed, including whether we still should be in this building, how and whether we should vote, whether we should vote online and the type of card we should use to vote, right through to the sort of devolution we should have to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. After all, we have just had the referendum in Scotland and have seen more powers given to the Scottish Parliament. We may have to say, “You will not be able to serve on the education committee in this House because you are a Scot. Education in Scotland is devolved and is not part of the English system, so you will not be able to serve on a committee that is about the education system”.

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood]

I may be a Scot. I worked for 20 years in England and London. I was Chief Inspector of Schools here for England and vice-chancellor of the University of London. I think that that opens the door a tad.

[Lord Maxton]

I was born in Oxford of an academic. Therefore, like the noble Lord, I probably would have the same qualification, although I spent all my career in education in Scotland. The fact is that we are living in a political world that is changing very rapidly. We are also living in a high-tech world that is changing very rapidly, not just in terms of this country but in terms of the world more generally. The idea of the nation state may be at an end. Let alone whether we devolve power to different parts of this country, this country may have to be part of a larger organisation in order to govern itself and to control the companies and organisations that are now much bigger than a country. Companies such as Amazon and Apple—I hold one of its products in my hand—are as big as some of the countries in which they operate and have a turnover larger than those countries.

Surely we must look at the whole issue, which is why I am in favour of something for which my noble friend Lord Foulkes has been pushing for some time; namely, a convention on the constitution to look in the broadest possible way at how we govern ourselves, the people of this country, and how we fit in with the rest of the world. Until we have done that, we should hold off any changes in this place. That will require legislation but surely we should sit back and say, “Let us have the general election, see what happens and then consider what we are going to do”. I hope that the Labour Party will win an overall majority, will set up the constitutional convention and will look at the way in which we govern.

Finally, I say to my noble friend Lord Williams, having expressed a hope that the most reverend Primate the Archbishop is on the mend, that he is not talking about 400 Peers in this Chamber. He is talking about 426 Peers because 26 are here automatically; namely, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Archbishop of York, the three Bishops, plus the others who make up their number. Should they be here? Are they part of this deal? I am told that there is separate legislation for them and therefore the plan put forward by my noble friend cannot cover them. Are the Bishops prepared to be part of the plan? Are they prepared to say, “We will not attend if this plan goes ahead”? I hope so. A noble friend says, “Of course”, and I hope they will. That ought to happen. The Bishops’ Bench is the biggest single anomaly in this place at the moment. That is because this is now a multicultural society and they do not represent even the majority of the people of this country, so why should they, and they alone, be sitting in the House of Lords, which is part of the legislature, the body which makes the laws of this country? That cannot be right. It is time that we separated the church and the state completely and the Bishops should be told to go. We should resolve that this House becomes completely secular. People will still talk about religion and different religions are represented here, but the Church of England should not be an established church within our organisation.

Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting and Philippines

Lord Sutherland of Houndwood Excerpts

Monday 18th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

My Lords, I certainly accept the point. The Prime Minister was very clear in his Statement that one cannot disassociate oneself from the awful history of Sri Lanka over the past 30 years and the history of bloodshed and civil strife that it has gone through. That having been said, I do not accept that the Prime Minister made his case to the President of Sri Lanka in an unbalanced way. There is quite a lot of contention around figures of the sort to which my noble friend refers. That is precisely why my right honourable friend the Prime Minister stressed the importance of having a credible transparent and independent inquiry to get to the bottom of what happened during the closing phases of the civil war and then addressing the situation so that it is possible on that basis to move forward with reconciliation to a shared understanding of what the future might be like. Until that has happened, it is very hard to work out how there can be reconciliation that will last.

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood (CB)]

My Lords, it is clearly good that the Prime Minister’s visit to the north had the impact that it did in the wider world and among the Tamil community in the north. Will the Leader of the House tell us anything about how this was reported elsewhere in Sri Lanka, where perhaps sympathies were rather different? It is important that there is impact there as well.

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

I fear that I have not seen any other coverage of how it was reported in Sri Lanka. Obviously my friends at the Foreign Office and so on will have done. I am sure that they spend their days doing that and other productive things. Oh dear, I can feel that my briefing is now going to dry up on me.

On the point that some of the world’s press were able to go there, I saw the transcript of the press conference that my right honourable friend the Prime Minister gave on, I think, the Saturday morning, which had representatives of the press from both Sri Lanka and the rest of the world. That gave the opportunity for a wide range of people to report honestly and openly on what went on.

Procedure of the House

Lord Sutherland of Houndwood Excerpts

Wednesday 24th April 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

My Lords, as I said when I intervened in the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Butler, for me the crucial thing is that this committee should be elected. If people are standing for election to this committee whom we do not think would take a balanced view on the quirky topic and the large topic, then do not vote for them. Surely within this House we are grown-up enough and experienced enough to realise the importance of maintaining a balance in what we do, and can trust our colleagues. The alternative is a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory situation, where you have to wait to get the golden ticket to have your chance to put forward your debates. It has been said that colleagues are going to be lobbying—of course they are, but we lobby our Front-Benchers all the time. Surely all of us are grown-up enough to be able to survive the experience of a bit of lobbying. I support this proposal because it is about strengthening Parliament, and it is by strengthening Parliament that we will increase the respect and standing of Parliament outside.

I think it was my noble friend Lord Higgins who talked about us having tenure. I do not think we have tenure in this House. This House has to prove itself every day in the eyes of the public; I think it does a brilliant job. This measure is at least worth trying, because it could strengthen Parliament, increase our ability to hold the Executive to account, and be seen to be relevant to the interests of those outside who, after all, pay the bills.

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood]

My Lords, I have three points: first, if there is to be a committee it must be elected. There are no doubts about that. Secondly, a major gap has been identified in this debate, and that is the capacity of this House to identify major topics of current concern and debate them urgently. There has to be a way of doing that, whatever comes out of this debate, and I put it to the Leader of the House that he must look at that. Thirdly, we should not vote to have another committee on the basis that this is an experiment. Any committee that I have ever seen that people have tried to kill has been cut in half and then there are two new ones.

[Baroness Thomas of Winchester]

In general, I am in favour of progress, modernisation and change, but I am not in favour of a Back-Bench debates committee at this point because it is unnecessary in view of the Leader’s proposal. In the light of that proposal, a Back-Bench debates committee would be a huge sledgehammer to crack a tiny nut. It could easily turn into a bureaucratic and expensive procedure, if full accountability was desired. One just has to think about it. Peers tabling subjects for topical QSDs would have to give reasons in papers or e-mails, and signatures of support would be sought. Minutes of the committee would have to be prepared; all conflicts of interest, not just financial, would have to be declared; and all lobbying, either ignored or debated, would have to be declared. A clerk would be required, plus an assistant to prepare papers. The committee would not be cheap and, if there is capacity for another committee, I would much rather the money was spent on more pre-legislative or post-legislative scrutiny.

As for transparency, the government Whips’ Office has given a very clear and welcome explanation of how debates and QSDs get on to the Order Paper. As for balloted debates, what is more transparent than pure chance, with all Peers having as good a chance as each other of having their subject debated? Do we really want to go down the road of having a group of our fellow Peers deciding which debates are more important than others? Why do we not give the Leader’s proposals a trial and, if there is dissatisfaction after that, come back to the idea of a Back-Bench debates committee?

Liaison Committee: Third Report

Lord Sutherland of Houndwood Excerpts

Monday 26th March 2012 Lords Chamber

Instead of reducing the number of committees, we should be thinking of expanding them. I have spoken before in the House about my failure to understand why we do not have a foreign affairs committee. There are whole rafts of foreign affairs issues, of which the Commonwealth is only one, with which Sub-Committee C, covering foreign affairs, defence and development, cannot begin to deal. I profoundly disagreed with the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Filkin—for whom, from previous associations, I have the greatest possible respect—when he spoke about committees being, in his phrase, “squeezed out”. Rather than squeezing out these committees—particularly the European Union Committee—we ought to see what we can do to strengthen them. I very much support those who hope that when the Leader of the House responds to the debate he will agree to take the matter back and think again.

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood]

My Lords, I support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, on, if nothing else, the basis that to give way once might be thought a virtue but to give way seven times seems more like a form of masochism peculiar to the practices of this place. Therefore, I shall support the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, for a variety of reasons but I shall be brief.

For a number of years, the Lords Science and Technology Committee fulfilled a role in the absence of a similar committee in the other place. The other place now has such a committee, but a House that can stand down a committee of that type in a contemporary world is quite capable of standing it down again. A far more important point here is that in the other place I know of only one Member who has a recent and strong scientific background. He is able and good, and he will make a significant mark in that place. However, in this place—and without sparing the blushes of my colleagues—we have people such as the noble Lords, Lord Oxburgh, Lord Broers, Lord Krebs and Lord May, and that is before we stretch to the marvellous range of medics who have a scientific background and can speak with relevance to what goes on in those committees. I think that the one Member of the other place whom I mentioned would not wish to be weighed in the balances against that collection of talent.

The role of these specialists, and the place which this committee gives them, is important in two fundamental ways. The first is that cross-examination of witnesses requires experts. We have seen committee reports—especially, lately, from the other place—where there has been an absence of experts to make the cross-examination as sharp as it should be. I can assure you that it is very sharp on this particular committee. The second role that these specialists play is to identify where, one way or another, the evidence is to be found. These internationally-rated scientists—perhaps unlike those of us who depend on them—have that significant skill. Although I should declare an interest as a past chairman of this committee, I am not a practising scientist. These experts have given their time and energy to this House, and their main mode of contribution is often through this Select Committee.

I turn to the issue of impact. Today there has been a government announcement of £66 million for research on dementia. Our report on science and ageing set that hare running when we pointed out the sums that were spent in this area as compared with other illnesses. The impact on society of weakness in this area is huge. I am therefore glad that the Government are following it through. We also managed to persuade the Wellcome Trust and the MRC to put up £30 million about four years ago.

Lastly, after the recent follow-up report that the committee issued on flu pandemics, I had a letter from several consultants thanking us for paying such attention to the subject and making their task more manageable. I think that we would do a great disservice to this House, and to the importance of science and technology, if we did not accept this amendment.

[Lord Winston]

My Lords, I will be brief. I would like to take up a point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, in a previous debate. It seems absolutely ridiculous to change the nature of these expert Select Committees at this time, when the whole question of the reform of the House of Lords will start to be discussed in the next few months. I beg the House to consider that issue, because the Science and Technology Committee is a highly respected committee. I could cite a list of sub-committees that have all made an international impact, from our treatment of antibiotic resistance, to the change in aircraft passenger environment, to the use of science in education in schools—where, for example, extensive, major changes have been made as a result of the House of Lords report. I am really surprised at the noble Lord, Lord Filkin. After all, he spent some time in the Home Office, which has to deal with a range of scientific issues, from animal research, to security and surveillance, to electronic monitoring, to weapons. We have to recognise—

Parliament

Lord Sutherland of Houndwood Excerpts

Monday 13th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Strathclyde]

My Lords, I completely disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Morgan, in almost everything he said. He does not have a long enough memory. There have not been many coalitions, but the whole point about the Government is that they are made up of whoever controls the majority in another place, and the coalition clearly does that.

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood]

My Lords, in the interests of accountability, would the Government consider attaching where appropriate measurable numerical targets to legislation—for example, numeracy and literacy targets to legislation affecting primary schools?

[Lord Strathclyde]

My Lords, we in this Government have been trying to get away from targets. I am not entirely certain what point the noble Lord was trying to make, but perhaps I could look again at his question and, if I can think of a better answer, I will write to him.