House of Lords: Working Practices

Baroness Hayman Excerpts

Thursday 1st November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman]

My Lords, I join others in congratulating and thanking the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, for introducing this debate. The noble Lord, Lord Judd, referred to him as a dedicated engineer. I was grateful for that, because it is much better than the phrase I was going to use, which was “terrier-like”, to describe his devotion to improving the working practices and the quality of the work that is done in your Lordships’ House. That of course is part of a wider, bicameral agenda to strengthen Parliament—an agenda that I believe is extraordinarily important.

It may be that those of us in the two Houses want to put behind us everything that went wrong in the disaster of the parliamentary expenses scandal. However, it permeated public consciousness very deeply. I felt at the time, and still feel, that in order to regain respect and trust, we need not only to put our financial houses in order—which we have done—but to strengthen Parliament, and to do our job better so that it serves the public better. In that way will we regain respect. That is why I agree with others who have said today that this is a very important time to take on this particular agenda. It is an opportune time because we now have a gap, a moratorium, on the big bang proposals for election to your Lordships’ House. There is no longer the argument that we will put everything right when we have the big, all-singing, all-dancing Bill. We are not going to have that. It is incumbent upon us therefore to take our fate into our own hands in the ways that we can and to make things better.

Luckily, there have been very good speeches already about three proposals that I should like to endorse, so I can do so very briefly. One is about using the device of a Back-Bench debate committee to inject more topicality into the agenda of the House. It is a real weakness when an issue is on the front pages and everyone is talking about it in their offices or the pub or wherever but we are not talking about it in Parliament. We could do better on that.

Given the volume of secondary legislation, we need to look at how we have not a take-it-or-leave-it situation but an opportunity to influence secondary legislation better. The proposals in the Leader’s Group and those of the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas of Winchester, were extremely interesting. The Legislative Standards Committee, to which the noble Lord, Lord Butler, referred, is tremendously important. I put in a plea for it to be bicameral. We have to improve the performance of Parliament as a whole, as others have said. We do not want to ape the lower House—we want to be complementary to it—but we do not want to pretend that we are not part of the same institution doing the same job. That is tremendously important.

On the other area of taking control of our destiny, I shall end with a couple of sentences about issues of composition. I believe there is a threat to this House—not in being too large but in having too many active Members. I became a grandmother this week. This has made me think about a lot of things, including the ageing process. It is tremendously important that in this House we have a balance, a range, and that that range does not become top-heavy with too many of us who are too elderly and too detached from the current experience that the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, spoke about.

We have to look seriously at the difficult issues of reducing the size of the House. The proposals in the coalition document, as my questions show, are phrased about representing the proportionality of those who voted in the last election. However, it is possible to produce proportionality and fairness when reducing as well as increasing the size of the House.