Procedure of the House

Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts

Wednesday 9th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley]

With respect to the noble Countess, I was not sure whether it was in the Chairman’s gift to accept it or whether it was for the Committee. May I carry on for a little bit longer and then we can debate that?

Timing is very important. We started this debate an hour later than most of us thought would happen and we have had to spend an hour doing something else. We are all good at time management. Queuing in a nice soft chair once a month is not a big problem compared with the time management of all the other things happening in here. As my noble friend Lord Harris said, balloting could be a problem. Perhaps the solution is to trial going back to five Questions a day. The Chairman of Committees said that this was tried in 2002, and I remember it well. He said it was a failure, but if there are not enough Questions to fill the five, you have four Questions and you carry on with other business.

I do not know what the statistics are for the 10 years between 2002 and now, but I suspect that it would not be difficult to fill five Questions on most days when we have Questions. That would be a reasonable way to go forward. Before making massive changes to balloting or part-balloting, let us try five Questions over 40 minutes for a period and see how Members react to it. If they have to queue for half an hour rather than an hour, so be it. I do not think it is a problem, which is why I propose this amendment.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss]

My Lords, perhaps I may give an opposite point of view. I have been in this House since 2006 and have not yet put down an Oral Question. The main reason was that the procedure of queuing, whereby I might not get there in time and there were all these other noble Lords who wanted to table Questions, led me to the view that perhaps mine was not so important and I had better let other people table them. I would be likely to put down a Question and take my chance if there were a ballot. I am perhaps a lone voice but I support the Chairman of Committees and the Procedure Committee’s proposal.