House of Lords: Procedures and Practices

Debate between Lord Trefgarne and Lord Dykes

Thursday 4th December 2014 Lords Chamber

[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.