House of Lords: Governance

Baroness Noakes Excerpts

Wednesday 8th December 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Noakes (Con)]

My Lords, the very helpful briefing provided by the Library for this debate under- lines what a mess your Lordships’ House is in. There have been reviews of the structure, governance and administration of the House almost constantly for the last 30 years. They have increasingly focused on managerialism at all levels of the House, but it is far from clear that any of them have made our House more efficient or more effective, and I have not seen any cost-benefit analyses on either an ex ante or an ex post basis. What is clear, however, is that cumulatively they have served to increase the distance between the Members of your Lordships’ House and how the House is run. The reviews have never focused on what the House is about or what would make it carry out its functions better. Rather, they have become ever-more elaborate deckchair rearrangements, and we should be in no doubt that they have driven the costs of your Lordships’ House up.

During this accretion of change and reorganisation, we seem to have lost sight of the defining feature of the House: that it is a self-regulating House—or at least it was in the past. That should be the guiding star which leads us forward. We should look at each change, whether in the pipeline now or proposed for the future, through the lens of whether it enhances or impairs Members’ involvement in the House. I generally believe that we should not go back and seek to recreate the past. The past never was as glorious as we remember it, and not all change is bad or unwelcome. We must set our eyes on the future and work to improve things.

I believe that the weaknesses that we should focus on are threefold. First, we should ensure that the commission, together with all the committees and structures that sit beneath it, genuinely acts on behalf of the Members of your Lordships’ House and is accountable to the House. It is not superior to Members; it should resist the temptation to issue edicts and it must be more transparent. Its modus operandi needs to include far more genuine consultation with Members.

Secondly, we need to be clear about the relative roles of the administration and the Members of your Lordships’ House. I believe we have lost sight of the fact that the administration exists to serve the House and its Members. Some of this can be laid at the door of the various reviews, but I suspect that the problems go deeper than that. How did it come to pass that the clerks abandoned court dress and wigs in the Chamber of your Lordships’ House without the House’s authority, as referred to by my noble friend Lord Howard of Rising? How did the clerks’ furniture at the table in our Chamber get replaced with chairs that belong in a call centre? What lay behind the shift from the customary address of noble Lords collectively as “My Lords”, which we ourselves use, to the more demotic “Dear all”? These may be small things individually, but they are symbols, and symbols are often more powerful than structures and rules.

Thirdly, Members, particularly Back-Bench Members, need to be more involved in decision-making. This is partly about consultation, to which I have already referred, but we also need to look at how the appointments of Members to the key committees are made—whether we can get better Back-Bench involvement through the existing appointment mechanisms or whether those mechanisms themselves need to be reformed.

A part of me wants to review the effectiveness of some of the structures created in recent years. Is the commission adding value? Why does it have a remit of giving “political direction”, as the Library briefing tells us? Why do we have a Finance Committee as well as an Audit Committee? Is the Services Committee Member-focused? Does a slavish following of private sector governance by the inclusion of outsiders on both the commission and the management board achieve anything for the effectiveness of the House? I am in danger of setting up another series of reviews, but that would be the wrong solution and would not address the essence of our problems.

We need to become more focused on what Members do in your Lordships’ House and become Member-driven again. This means ensuring that our structures work for Members. But that does not need another review—it needs a paradigm shift.