House of Lords: Remote Participation and Hybrid Sittings

Baroness Hamwee Excerpts

Thursday 20th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hamwee (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I have it easy: I live in London and I do not have to look after anyone else, with travel and caring two of the issues that face many noble Lords. As well as appreciating the work that has gone on—and still goes on—into enabling the House to function, I appreciate how our current way of working has meant colleagues who had had to make considerable efforts to attend, given illness or disability, could continue to do so. I say “appreciate” because their contributions are valuable. I am sure that they would be the first to acknowledge that accepting a peerage involves a commitment to contribute which they wish to fulfil. I want to see those colleagues enabled to continue to do so. Having been forced to be creative, the House should continue to innovate—quite apart from the moral, if not legal, duty to make reasonable adjustments. I mean sensible innovation in any and every aspect.

We are able to make our views known. I should be interested to know how the House is actively consulting the staff about ways of working. Our considerations are not necessarily theirs. They may have views about the effectiveness of hybrid proceedings.

I want to focus on remote working for committees. I am chairing one of the House’s new Select Committees and confess that I have not consulted anyone about what I shall say, so this is personal. Until Easter, I was a member of two committees whose chairs and staff made them productive. My strong view is that fully remote working is second best. A lot is being written about the psychology and operation of groups in the light of recent experience, I am sure. I think that a committee develops a personality of its own; it is more than the sum of its parts. A sometimes disparate collection of individuals makes up a team—not necessarily with the same views or approach, but able to operate as an entity. This is particularly true of scrutiny—everyone is interested in the workability of a policy, if for different reasons.

Noble Lords are masters of impassivity. Reactions can be very subtle. A comment to that effect was made by David Natzler in evidence to the Constitution Committee in its excellent work. That subtlety and those non-verbal communications are lost when members are not in the same physical space. They are quite different from messages in a chat function. Sometimes it is about how members react to what witnesses are saying, or how witnesses themselves react to questions and to one another. Sometimes it is about a Minister’s reactions and how at ease they are. How are all witnesses —including Ministers who are in the same room as other people—responding or not responding to one another? One can best observe these things if they are all in the same space, not dependent on the clues available according to the broadcasters’ edit. Observation is one of our scrutiny tools. It supports spontaneity. The process itself is an important part of scrutiny. It is an outcome in itself, additional to a report. My analysis of personal interaction is similar to that of the noble Earl, Lord Howe, although it does not take me to the same conclusions. Let us not forget the water-cooler moments before a meeting—the discussion, chat and gossip that make for team-building and good, collaborative functioning.

Remote participation must have been very difficult for members—and sometimes for witnesses—who had to join by phone or had low bandwidth. Parity of treatment probably means different things to different people, but everyone being online does not necessarily produce parity. Committees could surely remain hybrid if that would enable everyone to take part.

We could not have functioned during the last few months had we not been able to take evidence remotely. With some witnesses—academics, for instance—I do not think that we have been disadvantaged. We have been able to hear from some who would have had to make a disproportionate effort to come to Westminster. I trust that, now that we have the gear and the experience, we can regard this as an additional facility, but we should not assume that online suits every witness or works on every occasion. Experts by experience of certain situations may be more relaxed if they are communicating with people they can see properly. I guess we all regard ourselves as experts by experience now. I hope there are common threads to be extracted from our debate today.