House of Lords: Remote Participation and Hybrid Sittings

Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville Excerpts

Thursday 20th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I congratulate the staff on supporting the functioning of the House throughout the pandemic.

I was hoping to take part in this debate physically. However, having been present for the adjourned gracious Speech debate until 9.30 pm on Monday, and with briefings and statutory instruments on Tuesday and Wednesday, I knew that I would not be able to sit in the Chamber until 10 pm today, for a fourth day. The Benches, which were designed and built for men, do my arthritis no favours at all.

I have found the hybrid arrangements during lockdown and working from home to be a mixed blessing. I have been able to participate in Questions without being shouted down—nearly always by male Peers—and managed to contain my contributions to roughly 70 words and 30 seconds 90% of the time. Participation in statutory instruments has been extensive, but most have managed contributions within the timeframe. I have used the mornings for research and speech writing, as I am sure have other Peers. The Agriculture Bill was managed reasonably well, although, on the days when we finished at 11 pm or midnight, I had great difficulty getting up from my desk, having become extremely stiff.

Many of your Lordships have felt the time constraints on speeches to have been too short. However, they do help to focus the mind considerably, with unnecessary verbiage cut out. This also assists the listeners not to lose the plot. I fear that some in the House have come to expect that everyone who wants to can take part in any debate. I fear that today’s debate may fall into the category where everything will be said early on but not everyone will have said it by the end.

What I did miss during lockdown was the chance to chat with colleagues over coffee or a glass of wine—but the whole country was similarly restricted and missing social interaction with family, friends and colleagues. When I returned, I was shocked to find just how few spaces for Peers there were in the Chamber. On the Tube, on the bus, in the supermarket, on pavements et cetera, we were all much closer to one another, even while wearing masks and keeping two metres apart. However, the layout of the Chamber gave what seemed like an excess of space.

If there were no seats in the Chamber, we were invited to go up to the Gallery. I did this twice—it took quite a while. We are not a House of young, agile Members—quite the opposite. I cannot be the only Peer with arthritis and mobility problems that mean that steps and stairs are becoming completely impossible. Unless we were on one of the sparse seats on the Benches or in the Gallery at the start of debates, we could not speak. “Rules are rules”, I hear many of you say; however, the pandemic has given us a golden opportunity to modernise some of our practices and bring the Chamber into the 21st century.

I urge your Lordships to think very carefully about the way forward. Rushing back to the old ways is somewhat like donning an old favourite suit. When it was first made, of finest-quality worsted wool, it looked amazing. It is still comfortable but is now very misshapen, baggy and shiny, and has seen better days. It no longer fits, has moth holes and needs replacing. This is the upper Chamber of a world-famous parliamentary system. There is no room for sentimentality in clinging to outdated practices. I recommend that we review and move forward with courage.

I read with interest the report of the Select Committee on the Constitution and agreed with many of the comments. Electronic voting has been a godsend: struggling over from the fifth floor of Millbank House in the pouring rain, negotiating cyclists who ignore both crossings and traffic lights, fighting with the door at Chancellor’s Gate and then waiting for the lift to take me up to the Principal Floor to vote was never a great experience. No doubt those Peers whose offices are above the Chamber cannot wait to get back to queueing up in the Lobbies. I suggest that remote voting is so easy that reducing the time allowed for it to take place would not be out of the way and would assist in speeding up the business of the House.

I have one negative comment to make about what is contained in paragraph 94 of the report. In the opinion of the noble Lord, Lord Norton, Members have

“a moral obligation to contribute to the work of the House”.

I agree with this. However, he and others feel that being present in the Palace is everything. I have been here for seven and a half years and have seen Peers in the Palace having coffee, tea, wine, lunch and dinner—oh, and popping into the Chamber for five minutes during Questions, but rarely speaking. It is insulting in the extreme to imply that Peers who are not in the Palace are not contributing to the work of the House; this is quite clearly not the case, as this debate demonstrates.