House of Lords: Governance

Baroness Buscombe Excerpts

Wednesday 8th December 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Buscombe (Con)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Desai. As other noble Lords have done, I wish to focus my remarks on the House of Lords External Management Review dated 27 January 2021, which was commissioned by the House of Lords Commission to review the governance, management and organisation of the House.

This review provided a crucial opportunity to consider the role and remit of the commission since its inception in 2016 and its place within the make-up of the Lords. Unfortunately, its authors give the impression that the commission is responsible for the overall leadership of the House. In practice, of course, the commission should avoid entirely any infringement on the constitutional element and role of the House of Lords. Contrary to the findings of the report, programmes for “change” that are essential to our workings—for example, communications and digital—should not be aligned with “organisational”, “constitutional” and “rebuilding”, whatever “rebuilding” is meant to mean. Indeed, I was not aware that your Lordships’ House was broken.

My first question to the Senior Deputy Speaker is: has the commission decided which observations, conclusions and recommendations it accepts? Prior to requests made on the floor of the House on 25 October 2021, had it occurred to the commission that we, the Members of the House of Lords, might have the right to know? The report sets out a plethora of recommendations for “change” and piecemeal implementation of those changes should surely not have begun before the commission had either rejected any conclusions and recommendations or at least remedied its own—it seems numerous—shortcomings exposed in the report. In fact, the entire report is littered with criticism of the commission yet, other than a sentence on its website, the commission has remained, until now, virtually silent as to its response.

Some fundamentals are exposed; for example, we learn that:

“It has been hard to disentangle some of the governance structures and establish where accountability lies.”


Has the commission now appointed a programme director and an oversight panel, as suggested, in order to provide commission direction and support? Judging by the findings regarding the capabilities of the commission, its members need help. In addition, while the commission is

“too large and too busy”,

the management board is clearly not fit for purpose given that, as the report states:

“Current … management style and practice is insufficiently effective or agile in dealing with an increasingly complex context of projects and change”.


So, the relationship between the commission and the management board needs attention. I understand that, until earlier this year, the two had barely met—if at all—which is a damning indictment of the current workings of the commission. The report states that:

“The Commission is invisible to most of the staff we spoke to and the Management Board is invisible to many Members of the Commission.”


In addition, a lack of transparency does not appear to have been of concern either. I wonder what the two lay members think and whether they are happy with the findings of this review—and who are they?

The principal author of the report, Keith Leslie, states that

“Leadership in the House of Lords has much in common with leading at Samaritans”.


Having chaired the advisory board of the Samaritans UK for seven years, I can confirm that the House of Lords has very little in common with the Samaritans. Nor should the House of Lords, a self-regulating institution, be in any way aligned with any corporate or not-for-profit structure. Leadership in every sense of the word is crucial. However, we are told that the leadership from the commission is “ineffective”. In addition, there is no clear reference to the role of the Leader of the House of Lords, which is quite strange given that the Leader, the Lord Privy Seal, is supposed to be the Leader of the whole House. Also, is it not extraordinary that the Government of the day have precisely two out of 12 seats on the commission? Has not anyone questioned this since 2016?

The report makes 37 recommendations for change, which are

“all well-proven across the UK public sector”.

Alarm bells should immediately ring at this point, as huge swathes of the public sector are severely inefficient and ineffective with poor outcomes and poor value for money. Dame Kate Bingham—who had a truly transformational response to Covid—recently referred in a speech to Civil Service “inertia” and a “broken Whitehall”, so I suggest that the public sector is hardly a worthy role model for instituting change to the administration and governance of your Lordships’ House.

Although the report is peppered with the word “change”, with references to committees that some of us have never heard of, including the Steering Group for Change, some proposals make complete sense in principle, particularly with regard to people development of all staff across the estate. Human resources is of course important, although the current emphasis on diversity must not remove focus from ability, skills and experience, coupled with clear pathways for career progression. In this regard, the report exposes a serious flaw wherein it states that:

“The current targets on ethnicity are to attain 38% of applications from BAME candidates with a proportionate 38% offer rate, aligned to the economically active population of central London.”


This percentage, which assumes that central London exists as an island without its 1.1 million daily commuters, equates to actual discrimination and is not positive action under the Equality Act 2010. It ignores the fact that the House of Lords is a national institution and should be open to employment from across the UK.

On a positive note, improved communications and the ongoing and frankly extremely good focus on delivery of digital support are key. Is it so complicated that we need an entire change to our organisational structure? Clarity and simplicity speak volumes.

There is good news I would add to the report, which is that while more than 600 members of staff to support around 800 Peers is an extraordinary ratio, the staff are a very precious asset to us all. While it is unwritten, I hope that I speak for all fellow Peers when I say that we value their presence and their support enormously. So much of what makes this House frankly unique is that unspoken relationship, and it echoes the point I made recently on the Floor of the House that this place is ours collectively, as if it were our second home, and it would not be worth a jot without that unspoken and indefinable support.

In conclusion, unbridled change to our governance and structures without respect for our customs and traditions would be bad enough. Change without communication from the commission and allowing opportunities for open discussion and debate among all Members would be a disaster.