House of Lords: Procedures and Practices

Lord Trefgarne Excerpts

Thursday 4th December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Trefgarne (Con)]

My Lords, a number of points have been raised on which I might very well like to comment on another occasion, but time forbids me to do so now. I listened to the noble Lord, Lord Butler, who was a most distinguished Cabinet Secretary, as he reminded your Lordships. I was a very junior Minister in the Government over which he so effectively presided, if that is the right word, and we spent our time thinking of ways of doing things that did not need parliamentary or ministerial approval.

The purpose of your Lordships’ House, as is often said, is to examine Bills in detail and debate important matters. It is also important that the House should not forget that it indeed has a duty to hold Ministers to account, as MPs do in the other place. We tend to do so more gently, perhaps more courteously, here than in the other place. Questions to Ministers are a crucial part of that process. We have four Oral Questions a day for four days a week, and three topical Questions, but no Questions on a Friday, which is regrettable. Often no slots are available and we often have the unseemly sight of noble Lords queuing outside the Minute Room waiting to table their Questions. They have to sit there for an hour or more sometimes to get just one slot. We are allowed only one Oral Question on the Order Paper at any time, which is understandable and necessary, given the restriction in the number of slots, but it certainly restricts the capacity of noble Lords to table Oral Questions.

I suggest that we think in terms of increasing the number of Oral Questions to perhaps five a day instead of four—and, as I say, perhaps to allow Oral Questions on Fridays. If we were to allow five a day, I would advocate no increase in the time we have to take Questions, namely 30 minutes. The reason for that, I have to say, is that ministerial answers are often rather long-winded and could be further reduced in length, particularly to meet the opportunity for Back-Benchers to ask more supplementaries. However, Back-Benchers should also be ready to keep their supplementary questions shorter and more terse than at present. We have on many occasions heard noble Lords reading out three or four questions supplementary to a single Oral Question; we lose track of them by the time the noble Lord sits down and, of course, Ministers are obliged to answer only one. That has removed the opportunity for at least one or two noble Lords to ask any supplementary question at all.

I turn now to topical Questions. Three are three a week, decided by ballot. On the whole, that system works rather well and I hope that it will be continued. However, topical Questions are heard as Oral Questions in the normal way and ought to be subject to the same restrictions on length.

I will also refer to Private Notice Questions. One way in which to increase the opportunities for Back-Benchers to ask questions would be to relax the rules that govern the allowance of PNQs. Very few are taken in this House, mostly because they have been refused by the Lord Speaker—correctly, no doubt, in accordance with the rules—but also because noble Lords are put off tabling them, assuming that they will be refused, as is usually the case. In years past, Private Notice Questions were considered and allowed or disallowed by the Leader of the House, not the Lord Speaker, and there was a right of appeal to the House if a Private Notice Question was refused. That is not now the case. There is no appeal following the refusal of a Private Notice Question. That is regrettable. I once put that very proposition to the Procedure Committee and it was rejected fairly smartly. However, I think the fact that Private Notice Questions are allowed or disallowed absolutely by the Lord Speaker and there is no right of appeal is not the right arrangement. I hope that that can be further considered.

I will refer to Questions for Short Debate. As a matter of fact, I think that they work rather well. There is a question over whether perhaps we should have only an hour instead of an hour and a half—in which case I had better sit down quickly. Be that as it may, I think that they work well, on the whole.

Finally, I will respond to the point made by my noble friend Lady Thomas about statutory instruments. I am probably one of the very few Members of your Lordships’ House who was here in 1965 when we turned down the statutory instrument imposing sanctions on Rhodesia for the first time. I remember my late noble friend Lord Jellicoe standing at the Dispatch Box, turning round and advising my noble friends to reject the Motion, as indeed we did. Whether that was wise or unwise is for others to judge. There is an argument for allowing noble Lords some means to amend statutory instruments. They can, of course, reject them and Ministers can come forward with a revised one, but that very rarely happens—I cannot remember it ever happening. However, I have some sympathy with the point made by my noble friend.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lipsey]

As I said, there are a few, though I doubt that they would command a majority today.

[Lord Trefgarne]

We had much wider powers prior to 1911 than we do now.

[Lord Lipsey]

Thank God we do not have them anymore.

The real resistance to change, let us face it, comes from the Whips—from the Government leadership—because they have a sole object, for all the gilded words in which they tend to clad it: to get the Government’s business through with as little trouble, scrutiny and change as they can get away with. That is their fundamental mindset. I do not criticise them for that—that is what they are paid for.

Those are the forces of conservatism. However, it seems to me that there is now a great countervailing force in the people who are coming into this House, particularly—we are all glad to see this—the growing number of women but also people from outside politics and those who have not been acculturated to the way in which we have traditionally done business. I know that there is an argument about whether the Lord Speaker should call questioners. Who has talked to incoming Members about Question Time—about the bear garden and about the bullying males thrusting ahead of polite women and preventing them getting in? I will not come in for Question Time; I have had 16 years of listening to it. Seeing what we tolerate brings the House into poor regard. Therefore, I believe that there is a constituency for change.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Dykes (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow those comments and the others that reflect the need for modernisation in this place. As a conservative with a small “c”, I also had the feeling when I first came here 10 years ago that one should not really utter any suggestions or ideas about these things for the first 17 years because that would be very pushy and presumptuous, and people would, rightly, tut-tut. However, things move on and accelerate, and this place is changing. The sociology of the House of Lords has changed enormously. Taking a foreign example, I have always been impressed with the system in Denmark. It is a single-Chamber system where a perpetual minority Government are on their knees, constantly begging MPs in Copenhagen to support their latest legislative proposal. I do not detect that Denmark is worse run than Britain; in fact, it is probably the other way round. Denmark also has a high-taxation system, both indirect and direct, which produces efficient economic results.

Secondly, on arriving here I treasured the story of the old days when, about 50 years ago, the Chief Whip said to a hereditary Peer who had just joined the House, “It is a great honour for you. You’ve got to appear to be very enthusiastic and deeply honoured to be here. On the question of making your maiden speech, you shouldn’t be pushy but you should be enthusiastic about doing it, eventually”. The new Peer asked, “How long do you recommend”, and the Chief Whip replied, “Three and a half years”. Nowadays, it is three and a half weeks, which is considered to be quite a long time.

[Lord Trefgarne]

When I first came to this House, I was told that I should wait 10 years before making my maiden speech.

[Lord Dykes]

I am grateful for that correction and for the excellent suggestions of the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, and the points that he made today. I do not have the time to go into them. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, for initiating the debate, and for some of his suggestions as well.

We had the example of the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, intervening on the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, and the confusion that that caused. It was only a small occasion, of course, and the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner, with his customary skill, solved it very quickly. If we had a Speaker with the power to call someone or ask someone to sit down, would that not be better? Is that not more modern? I see the Leader of the House indicating that she is against that idea, but maybe she will change her mind later. That would not necessarily happen quickly because she is a new Leader and needs time to think about these things.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Butler. It is always a great joy to see the gamekeeper turning operational poacher, going through the thickets of all these problems with some excellent suggestions. Having been in the Commons for 27 years myself, I am almost in despair at the terrible Bills that now come this way. The noble Lord mentioned a famous example in the last few days of a badly drafted, silly Bill that is all to do with “manifesto-itis” rather than any deep legislative urge on behalf of the Executive. Other badly drafted Bills have come through that were not properly considered by the Commons because of the timetabling of every Bill nowadays. They come here to the House of Lords, with insufficient time for them to be dealt with properly, but it is an excellent revising Chamber none the less. That is good and needs to be built on.

However, the modern sociology of this place—men and women—demands that it modernises itself much more fundamentally than that. Whether or not it is elected in the future, this place must represent the people of this country more directly, legitimately and instantaneously, too. There is no harm in being quick about these things; we do not want to appear to be slow. It is very unfair that the press continually just use the famous photograph of us wearing robes. That is what people think we do every day, partly because of the antics of some of our colleagues, tragically, but also because of some mischievous reporting. We have a wonderful, enlightened press, owned almost exclusively by foreign owners who do not pay UK personal taxes, but lecture us on the need for British patriotism. It has caused trouble by giving the impression that people clock in here for a few minutes and then leave. There may be a small number of those but I doubt it. Most people here now, maybe 350 to 400, are what I describe colloquially as FTWPs—full-time working Peers. They are really active people who are here every day, working very hard for long hours on behalf of the public. But do the press give us any attention as a result of all that activity and cerebral work that we do in trying to improve some very dodgy Bills and sending them back to the Commons?

Incidentally, why does ping-pong always have to end in a Commons victory? It may perhaps concern a strong leading manifesto item, on the basis of which the Government may have won an election. But of course, mostly they cannot win an election on their own; it has to be a coalition, as we see now. Normally Governments here in Britain are elected by less than a genuine majority of the public, and a percentage of seats. If ping-pong is always to be defeated, we should say that we will have one ping-pong stage, as for some JHA stuff that is now coming up, and that will be enough. We will have made our point and can then defer to the Commons. I am not sure that that should always be right. It would probably be mostly right but not always.

Question Time should definitely be longer. It could be up to an hour, or maybe 45 minutes might be better as an experiment and to see how that would go. It is very frustrating that so many colleagues want to get in on Questions and are prevented from doing so repeatedly—not only because of the difficulty of not having a Speaker who is able to call Members to put a question or stop putting a question, and so on. There are other things we can do around that to modernise this place. Some people are traditional and feel very affectionate about the past of the House of Lords. They want to keep it that way: old-fashioned and very endearing but not really doing a proper job.