House of Lords: Working Practices

Baroness Randerson Excerpts

Monday 27th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Randerson]

My Lords, I am of course a new Member of the House and therefore hardly an expert on our procedures. However, what I hope to bring to this debate are some first impressions of how the current system is working and something from my own experience elsewhere.

This House is a giant exercise in corporate self-control. The problem is that not all individuals manage to exercise that self-control. As other noble Lords have said, Question Time is particularly shambolic and undignified. I endorse many of the comments made in evidence to the Leader’s Group and I endorse its recommendations. The group recommended, as a start, that the responsibilities of the Leader in Question Time be transferred to the Lord Speaker. It seems much more appropriate for the calling of speakers to be given to someone who is, by definition, outside party politics. If the Lord Speaker were firmly in charge and following agreed rules we would get through at least another supplementary question to each Question on the Order Paper.

I may be new here, but I come with experience of 12 years in the National Assembly for Wales. There I was a member of the Business Committee for nearly six years and for four years I chaired that committee. In that role, I visited other legislatures to study the operation of their procedures and their own business committees—in Scotland, Northern Ireland and several in Canada. I also chaired the committee that rewrote the Assembly’s standing orders when it gained legislative powers. From my experience, I strongly believe that a business committee would greatly improve the efficiency of this House and would increase, not diminish, the dignity and courtesy of proceedings and improve the confidence that individual Members have in the fairness of our proceedings.

Briefly, this is how it works. The business committee needs to reflect all sides of the House fairly. It is particularly astonishing that the Cross-Benchers, who last week were repeatedly lauded for their outstanding contributions to this House, are not included at all in the usual channels. That is unacceptable.

Business committees usually meet in private but they publish their minutes. That would increase the transparency of decision-making on timetabling of business here. I would envisage that the first task of any such committee would be to agree certain basic principles on the allocation of time for government and non-government business and crucially, the conventions governing the order in which speakers are called. My long experience of such a system has been that, as long as the rules are based on the application of proportionality, when they are applied they are accepted, virtually without question. The end result is that Members argue about the issues in hand not about procedures. That is much more dignified. The only time that scheduled business is argued about is when the usual rules are departed from.

I would go one step further than the Leader’s Group, which recommends a Back-Bench business committee. I believe that the business committee should have oversight of all business and proceedings. That does not mean that it would dictate government business, but it would take account of government business and would be the forum where allotted timescales were agreed and then published. The Leader’s Group suggests that the committee deals with balloted debates and QSDs. It could sensibly also deal with the scheduling of ministerial Statements, Select Committee reports and indicate the time limit for speeches based on the number of Members who wished to speak and so forth.

Such a committee, chaired by the Lord Speaker, whose independence is not questioned, would transform our proceedings with only minimal change needed to the conventions of debate. It should be an invisible calming influence.

We pride ourselves on our self-regulation. We already have rules. The problem is that it is not clear whose job it is to enforce them. A Lord Speaker in charge of the proceedings would do that.