Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill

Lord Taylor of Holbeach Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 30th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach (Con)]

My Lords, some speeches come more easily than others and following my noble friend Lord Leicester’s maiden speech, I feel I have only one principal task and that is to congratulate him on his excellent first speech to this House and tell him how welcome he is here. Not even the arguments of the coming Friday debate can take away the sense that this House, and our Benches in particular, have gained by the active membership of the noble Earl. Those of us who live nearby know the impact that he has made on Holkham Hall and its estate. For 30 years, as he said, he has been a director of Coke Estates and for the past 15 years he has been very much in control of what is a real community asset for those in Norfolk and beyond. His hands-on approach to the great house and the estate means that we have a real expert who is able to speak with experience and authority about the responsibility that we have to the past of maintaining buildings in the best condition and at the same time making them relevant to the present and the future. Perhaps I can illustrate that by referring to the work he has done on one of the finest houses in England and on the Victoria, which he referred to in his speech, maintaining its function but creating one of the best restaurants with rooms in the country. We would expect the president of the Caravan and Motorhome Club to provide facilities for them together with the cottages and holiday facilities he talked of. Holkham is the model of how to restore and engineer amenity and of how to combine modern farming with nature conservation, and we have a chance to learn from a man who has done it and knows how to do it. Not for nothing is he president of Visit East of England. As chairman of the Midlands Engine APPG Visitor Economy subgroup, I share that interest in a key economic sector.

Perhaps I should now turn to the Bill. My first reaction was to go to the Library of the House, a source of great strength to all of us who find ourselves faced with legislation we know too little about. I was particularly interested to explore further the Second Reading of the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill, which I thought might be useful, for at the time I was the Whip in this House responsible for Cabinet Office matters and I thought I might find that I had words for eating—it can happen in politics, can it not, particularly if you have ministerial responsibilities? As it turned out, that role was left not to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, who is in his place, but to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, who took the Bill through the House.

The principle of this Bill is to repeal that Fixed-term Parliaments Act and restore the prerogative procedure. I think that we are all agreed about that. However, I sense that Clause 3 is going to lead to considerable debate on how that procedure should be resolved. I am not entirely sure that I can agree with noble Lords who feel that just leaving it to the Commons to vote on the matter is to restore the constitutional convention to the status quo ante, but I believe that we have an opportunity in the Bill at least to discuss these matters, and it is good that we have noble Lords here who have experience of them from all different aspects.

Prerogative powers and constitutional conventions are a particular part of our constitution. They provide the necessary flexibility and agility for its delivery. We in this House have a welcome role in discussing the Bill, and I hope that the debates on it in Committee and further on will provide an opportunity for the interesting notions that have been presented to the House today to be further discussed and resolved. This House has a particular role to play on the shared understanding of the convention and I hope it continues to do so.