House of Lords: Working Practices

Baroness D'Souza Excerpts

Monday 27th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness D'Souza]

My Lords, this is a comprehensive, imaginative and authoritative report, and the group is to be congratulated. If only half the recommendations were implemented, they would transform this House, making it more effective in getting business through, making better use of the talents of the Members and meaning better scrutiny and more opportunities for all Members to contribute. It is quite an achievement on the part of the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad, and indeed the group.

The broad themes of the report are saving time, ensuring that the Back-Bench voice is heard, more accountability on the part of Government and better scrutiny. I understand that many of the recommendations contained in the report could well be implemented in the near future, while others will require more discussion and even legislation.

I shall speak briefly about the reforms about which I trust there will be less dissent and which might thus go ahead speedily. These are about providing more opportunity for scrutiny and thus enhancing accountability. More specifically, I am referring to: pre-legislative scrutiny and post-legislative scrutiny; a legislative standards committee; and the setting up of two cross-cutting Select Committees on domestic policy. These three recommendations are all concerned with ensuring that legislation that comes before the House has already undergone a fair degree of scrutiny—in the case of post-legislative committees, the lessons learnt will also feed back over time to legislative drafting—and that some contradictions at least will have been resolved.

Furthermore, the main task of a legislative standards committee, as envisaged by the group, would be to assess the technical and procedural compliance of government Bills with the standards of best practice in Bill preparation. The recommendation has force because it would also allow the House to decide whether or not a given Bill was granted a Second Reading, and that is a pretty strong force. Another striking feature of that recommendation is that it would involve the public in providing evidence. This could of course slow down legislation but surely it is preferable to the current system, which tends to foster prolonged and sometimes bitter arguments in the Chamber, which is extremely time costly and not constructive. Nor would a check on the torrent of legislation necessarily be a bad thing.

Pre-legislative scrutiny takes place already, of course, but much less so than was promised in 2003. Today the average number of Bills subject to pre-legislative scrutiny is three, compared with 10 in the 2002-03 Session, though I hear what the noble Lord the Leader has said about very recent arrangements.

Recommendations 14 and 15 of the report make it clear that all Bills embodying important changes of policy, especially constitutional Bills, should be subject to pre-legislative scrutiny. The recommendation goes further in making it a requirement, if there has been inadequate public consultation, for the Government to justify any decision not to produce a Bill in draft. There is, after all, ample evidence that such scrutiny has proved a very useful tool for both Ministers and officials.

I shall take a brief look at committees. The report proposes two additional sessional Select Committees and sets out criteria, among which are that they be cross-departmental and composed of Members who have particular expertise and that they complement the Commons departmental Select Committees. I earnestly hope that that will not be a controversial recommendation. It would require additional resources but I really think that the return on any investment would be substantial. Scrutiny of domestic policies is not well catered for and cross-cutting inquiries even less so, yet most domestic issues are cross-cutting. Day in and day out we debate in this Chamber policies and Bills that touch on myriad interests, to the extent that many Bills could be viewed as hybrid. For example, the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill incorporates local funding, decentralisation, foreign policy, security, the disabled, transport and licensing laws, to name but a few areas.

The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, has argued in the past for three cross-cutting committees to cover public service, national infrastructure and welfare. His rationale is that the cross-cutting nature of the committees would enable broader inquiries than are presently undertaken by the other place, and he indicates that a public services committee would encompass public service employment and recruitment policies, the application of market mechanisms and devolution within public services, accountability processes and the role of local government across the public services. In the noble Lord’s view, the reports resulting from those committees would provide valuable material for subsequent topical debates and questions from the Floor of the House. I wholly agree.

I believe that additional committees with undoubted experts and sufficient resources would result in reports of immense value to this House, the Government and the other place. I very much hope that the Government will agree that this is not a controversial matter and could be implemented very soon.

The report, which addresses how the House deals with legislation, is of paramount concern and priority. When it is implemented, this House will be far more effective in its chief role of scrutinising legislation and holding the Government to account. I sincerely hope that this will happen in the near future.