Business of the House

Debate between Baroness Smith of Basildon and Lord Foulkes of Cumnock

Thursday 17th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

My Lords, I wonder whether the noble Baroness could say a bit more about the Motion before the House. My understanding is that that Motion, which we are not opposing, means that on three Tuesdays the House should sit at 11 am, for long sittings. I point out to your Lordships’ House that the House is now sitting longer and later than at any other time I can recall, either in my time in this place or beforehand.

As an official Opposition, we do not stand in the way of the Government managing their business and getting their business through—but there is a limit to what we can be expected to do. It says in Today’s Lists, “The House may sit late”. The Minister is shaking her head, so I hope she will be able to confirm that that is not the case. Too often this House has been asked to sit far later than is reasonable for good governance and good legislation.

If we are to start at 11 am on those three days, I would like an assurance from the noble Baroness that we will not sit past 10 o’clock. We do not oppose reasonable attempts by the Government to get their business through, but this macho style of government, whereby we have been here until 2 o’clock and 3 o’clock in the morning, and have regularly sat past midnight, is not the best way for us as a House to play our role as effective scrutineers of legislation in the appropriate way. I say that not in a party-political way, but in the interests of this House doing its job properly. Looking at the timings for the Report stage of the Elections Bill, we see that we have already been asked to get that through in three consecutive days. That, too, seems unreasonable to me.

All I would say to the noble Baroness is that although we do not oppose the Motion, we would like an assurance that the House will not be having regular late-night sittings to deal with what is really an overcrowded government timetable.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, we cannot let this go through without a proper debate, and I strongly support my noble friend Lady Smith on the Front Bench. This is unprecedented. I spent 26 years in the other place and I have been here for more than 16 years now—and I have never seen this happen before. Can the Leader of the House tell us whether it has ever happened before? The Government have totally lost control of their business. Why? What is the reason? The Leader of the House may say that Covid did not help, and it certainly did not, but the real trouble is the confusion at the top of government. There is total confusion about the whole process of legislation, and there are more U-turns than in an Isle of Man TT; it is unbelievable how many there have been.

I also object because the Motion means that we will be meeting every Tuesday morning. Select Committees that we serve on meet on Tuesday mornings, and they will clash with this. It is making a total mockery of business. The Government Whips are always quoting the Companion at us. We saw that yesterday, or the other day, in a despicable way, which I hope that we will hear more about later in our business. We keep having the Companion quoted at us, yet it says that our business should be finished by 10 pm—whereas, as my noble friend Lady Smith said, we have been going right through to the early hours of the morning. Indeed, we went into the early hours yesterday.