House of Lords: Questions

Debate between Lord Trefgarne and Earl of Clancarty

Monday 9th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Chesterton, for the opportunity to speak in this debate.

The beauty of the system as it stands is that if you have a burning question you know you will get to ask it if you are willing to put in a little effort. People say, “I do not have time to queue”, but it is a privilege to ask Oral Questions in this House. It is a service we perform on behalf of the public. If we feel the question we wish to ask is important, then, quite honestly, we should make time to queue. All of us should be humble enough to do that.

The current system is simple and open. Those first in the queue get their questions asked. The problem with the method of the ballot, if it were adopted for regular Oral Questions, is that it could introduce the temptation to game the system because it would become less transparent and more complicated. What worries me particularly is the possibility that Peers might get together to submit the same Question or a variation on it to increase its chance of winning the ballot. I am not saying that Members would do that but it is a temptation that would then exist which was not there before. Would we be getting a daily list of every entry into every ballot for every Question to ensure that this could not happen? Frankly, that sounds like an administrative nightmare and a waste of public money, if the ballot system were to be introduced. In the end, the system would be frustrating for those who continually have to resubmit their Question and might never get to ask it or have any control over the day on which they do get to ask it.

The same problems do not exist for the excellent balloted topical Questions element, because at any one time there is a limit to the number of topical Questions, and there is a small window of time in which to ask them. The Table Office, as we know from experience, takes seriously the decision of whether a Question is topical or not, so with topicals you either win or lose without the worry of continually having to resubmit your Question more than perhaps once or twice. There is of course a way of dealing with the problem, as the noble Lord sees it, without changing the system. If we feel that too many of the same people are asking Oral Questions, we should limit further the number of regular Questions an individual can ask from the current seven to perhaps five a year. It might be helpful if that would significantly increase the number of questioners. From the stats kindly provided by the Table Office for last year, by my calculation that would have freed up 25 regular Questions—a week and a half’s-worth, so not that many—but perhaps having some taken up by new questioners. The fact remains, however, that there will always be some people who want to ask Oral Questions more than others. Although Oral Questions are important, they are still only one way to participate in the business of the House.

If there is some tweaking to be done, it is regarding supplementary questions. I think that the House is correctly tolerant about the use of notes for asking supplementaries. The ability to ask a good Question is not the same as the ability to learn lines, and if there is one thing that would markedly reduce the number of people participating at Question Time, it would be to enforce the non-reading guidance. The House is also correctly intolerant of overly long supplementaries, of which we have too many, and often asked by those without notes in hand. Many of us have on occasion pushed it to the limit, but there is some unspoken boundary that does get crossed, and it sometimes feels as though we could have got in another two or even more speakers during a Question if we had not had those especially long supplementaries. Does the Minister think that enough guidance, either formal or informal, is given on this, particularly to new Members?

The popularity of Oral Questions for Members is one valid measure of their success. At four, we have the right number of Questions, and here I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne. There is a good balance between regular and topical and they last for the right length of time. Only a minority of Members leave before the end, but if they lasted for more than 30 minutes, that would not be the case.

[Lord Trefgarne]

My suggestion was that we keep Question Time to 30 minutes, but have five Questions instead of four.

[The Earl of Clancarty]

That may be slightly different, but we have tried five Questions in the past and I do not think it worked. I believe that, as it stands, we have the right system for generating questions. We should not tamper with a system unless we are confident that it can be improved.

Equality (Titles) Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Trefgarne and Earl of Clancarty

Friday 6th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Trefgarne]

My Lords, there is a problem with the noble Baroness’s proposition that a hereditary title is property. There is more than one respectable view on that, as I understand it, so it may or may not be property. Another way forward, of course, would be to seek some sort of derogation from the European Convention on Human Rights with regard to hereditary Peerages. The Spanish Government are faced with the same problem. Perhaps my noble friend the Minister has some information about how the Spanish Government are responding to this difficulty. They recently created a new hereditary marquis in Spain who turned out to be the coach of the football team. However, they then lost so he may be stripped of it after all.

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, I agree with the sentiments of the noble Baroness, Lady Deech. We will come to the main discussion on this a little later. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, for enabling us again to discuss gender equality in the peerage, and I congratulate the noble Lord on pushing the Bill further forward.

On these particular amendments I will be brief. I am not sure that at this stage we should be overtightening the Bill and prescribing so precisely what it contains in the title. In the way that it stands at present it contains peerages and baronetcies. In the next group we will be discussing other Crown offices and rights, so I do not think that we should yet be jumping to any conclusions about what necessarily will be covered in toto in the Bill.

It is probably no surprise to the House that I support Amendment 4. Irish peerages are an identifiable group under the current jurisdiction of the Crown and stem from a time before the current United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which of course excludes the Republic of Ireland. “Great Britain” therefore is a term which has a certain ambiguity attached to it. My own peerage, the Earldom of Clancarty, is Irish, though I sit in this House by virtue of a viscountcy which is an English title. It would be wise to include the reference to Ireland, just as England and Scotland have already been included.