House of Lords: Working Practices

Baroness Royall of Blaisdon Excerpts

Monday 27th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon]

My Lords, this has been an excellent and enjoyable debate. Just last week, we debated for two days the role, function, powers and composition of your Lordships' House: what we do and why we do it. Today, we have debated the working practices of this House: how we do it. Both are important and we need to get them both right.

Working practices are challenging, but they are not an impossible subject. In the other place, the issues looked daunting, but thanks to the work led by Dr Tony Wright, the Commons has brought in a significant series of reforms to help make the Chamber work better. What is before us today is broadly the equivalent for this House—a set of reforms to improve our working practices. One of my Back-Bench colleagues, who has long championed such changes, said that they were beyond what could conceivably have been hoped for when the discussions that have led to today's report first began.

Of course, there are reasons for how far and how fast these issues have moved—the decline of trust in politics and politicians, disengagement with traditional politics and perhaps especially with parliamentary politics, the burgeoning numbers of Members in this House—all these and more have led to pressure for change, for reform of the way that Parliament works.

I, too, pay tribute to those whose hard work and application has brought us this far—to the Lord Speaker, to those who chaired and served on the Lord Speaker's discussion groups, to those who served on the Leader’s Group whose report we have before us today, to the Clerk and especially to the excellent chairman, the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad, and to those among us who have pressed for this kind of reform to your Lordships' House for many years.

We have before us separately the proposals from the coalition Government on further large-scale reform of your Lordships' House, which have now been referred to a Joint Committee for scrutiny. We do not know what that Joint Committee will produce but we believe that whatever happens to the Government’s wider proposals we should proceed with the broad programme of reform set out in the report before us today from the Leader’s Group.

We on these Benches welcome the report from the Leader’s Group. It is a very good report and makes sensible and constructive proposals that offer a clear way forward for this House. I am delighted that there has been such a positive response this evening, but clearly not all Members of your Lordships' House are as enthusiastic about or as comfortable with some of the reforms proposed. Indeed, on these Benches, we do not necessarily agree as individuals with each and every recommendation contained in the report. I was of course pleased to hear that the ears and door of the Leader were open. This should, as one noble Lord said, be a process, not an event.

So many proposals have been raised today, including the new one from the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and my noble friend Lord Parekh in relation to responses which come from the Government after a debate. I very much welcome that specific proposal. The Leader of the House is right to take the report forward through the range of means and mechanisms available to us including both through the Procedure Committee and the Liaison Committee and he is also right that this should be done promptly.

I would like to touch on a few of the recommendations which seem to me to be of especial merit. There are many, of course—for example, the role of the Lord Speaker in relation to the role currently carried out by the Leader of the House or the recommendations on delegated legislation or the recommendations on Private Notice Questions. I would like to mention three issues in particular, all of which have been well discussed this evening already.

First, I agree with all noble Lords who believe that the proposal for a legislative standards committee is a very welcome development. Regardless of whichever party is in power, all too often in this House and in the other place we see legislation being brought before us which, at times, is barely finished and requires extensive amendments, not by the Opposition but by Government, who have on occasion introduced legislation before it is in fact ready to be introduced. Those who have been in government know why and how this happens. The pressure of events sometimes makes it inevitable but it happens too often for what should be a proper and considered legislative process.

The establishment of a legislative standards committee, as recommended by this report, in setting agreed criteria against which government legislation would be measured in terms of technical and procedural compliance rather than policy, would be a considerable step forward for the standards of government legislation, for the legislative process itself and for public regard of the work that we, as politicians, do. We believe that the House should move as quickly as possible to establish such a committee and we commend the recommendation to the House. While agreement on the committee with the other place would of course be preferable, in relation to Bills starting in this House we believe there is a strong case for this House proceeding with this reform alone if necessary, as the report proposes. Allied to that, we very much welcome the group’s recommendations for extending pre-legislative and post-legislative scrutiny, but I do so with one reservation, to which I will return.

Secondly, we very much welcome the proposal for new sessional committees. My noble friend Lord Adonis has argued cogently that the House of Lords’ committee structure does not provide for proper scrutiny of whole areas of government policy and that new committees should be set up to fill this gap, especially dealing with a range of cross-cutting issues on areas such as infrastructure, welfare, or public services. We have had that argument put very strongly this evening. We are glad that the Goodlad group has taken up this idea and is recommending its adoption in the form of two new sessional committees. We believe that the House should again move as quickly as possible to establish these committees to harness the knowledge, experience and ability of Members from all sides of the House to scrutinise what otherwise can very often be overlooked areas of government activity.

The report does not specifically recommend a review of our current system of committees, though my reading of the report suggests to me that the group thinks it has done so. However, the intention of the Leader’s Group is clear from the report and we would strongly support such a review. At the same time, I hope that the Liaison Committee will look at innovative ways of working to ensure that the recommendations for the various new committees can be met.

Thirdly, the Leader’s Group report makes a strong case for a Back-Bench business committee to take on the responsibility for debating days currently assigned to non-party Back-Bench business—that is, the one Thursday each month currently allocated to balloted debates. I hear what noble Lords have said but I believe that making the case for what it calls “intelligent selection”, the Leader’s Group points to the establishment in the other place of such a committee. This has been a successful innovation in the other place and we on these Benches believe it would prove equally successful in your Lordships’ House.

Good though it is, the Goodlad report does not dispose of all the issues about reform of our working practices and some difficult issues still remain. For example, many Members on my Benches who are not in their places this evening have drawn my colleagues’ attention to the Leader’s Group’s proposals for the increased use of Grand Committee and in particular to recommendation 20, as detailed in paragraph 122 of the report. That proposes that all government Bills introduced in the Commons should be considered in Grand Committee, apart from Bills in three specified categories: major constitutional Bills, emergency legislation and what is termed “other exceptionally controversial Bills”. We have concerns about what constitutes such concepts and how they would be defined and deployed. Given that much government legislation by any political party in office is often inherently controversial, any threshold of controversy would have to be sufficiently high so as to ensure that this Chamber was able to consider such legislation.

We also have concerns about proposals on the timing of Grand Committee sessions, especially among Members across the House who work outside it, as they are entitled to do. As has been pointed out this evening, there would be conflicts with committee work. One suggestion might be for Grand Committee sessions to be in the evenings rather than the mornings. While we value both the opportunity to take legislation to Grand Committee and the work done there, we believe that fuller and further consideration needs to be given to this proposal and to the exceptions—and definitions of the exceptions—that are proposed. We believe that the issues involved need to be considered with care before any move is made in this area. Indeed, if there were more Committees taken in Grand Committee, consideration should perhaps also be given to more amendments at Third Reading.

I mentioned earlier our approval for increased pre-legislative and post-legislative scrutiny. The noble Lord, Lord Jenkin of Roding, mentioned the committee which considered the draft Bill on human fertilisation and embryology. I did not sit on that Committee but, as one of the Ministers who steered the Bill through this House, I benefited enormously from the pre-legislative scrutiny process. Yet I also have a reservation. The recommendation that all Bills embodying important changes of policy, particularly constitutional legislation, should be the subject of pre-legislative scrutiny is a good one and we support it. I acknowledge that the coalition Government have introduced pre-legislative scrutiny for many Bills, but still not enough—and not for the important constitutional legislation that we have had before us. The way that this Government have introduced important constitutional legislation has been, to use as neutral as possible a word, deficient in many ways. Any process which would help to prevent any repetition is indeed to be welcomed.

There is a question about the mandate that this coalition has for many of the actions it has taken, but we recognise that a Government who have been voted in by the electorate want to get on and put into place legislation that they believe people have voted for. We did that in 1997 with our own programme of constitutional reform so, while we wish to have pre-legislative scrutiny for each and every Bill, we understand the reservation that the proposal on this issue from the Leader's Group might place restrictions on a new Government that might not sit appropriately with the swift discharge of their electoral mandate. Again, this proposal perhaps needs fuller and further consideration on that point. I also wonder whether the noble Lord might consider the current problem of pre-legislative implementation in which enormous changes are introduced, for example to the health service or in abolishing RDAs, before legislation has completed its parliamentary process.

On current working practices, we particularly welcome the report’s reaffirming not just that there should be changes for the future but that some of the House’s current practices should be fully reinstated and properly adhered to. In particular, it stressed that the minimum intervals between stages of a Bill should be properly respected, that the House should have reasonable time to consider government business and that the firm convention that the House rises by 10 pm should be respected.

This is a good programme for reform. It needs working through and some of it needs further and fuller consideration but it is a very good way forward. We must all now work to try to ensure as high a degree of consensus as possible on the direction in which this report points. Our principal focus should be on giving full consideration through the appropriate committees to all the issues involved in working towards implementation as soon as possible. We on these Benches look forward to working to make that happen.