House of Lords: Remote Participation and Hybrid Sittings

Baroness Tyler of Enfield Excerpts

Thursday 20th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD) [V]]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Addington. It is quite hard to have completely new insights at this point in a debate, so I will focus on those things I feel most strongly about. I have listened very carefully to the debate and there are essentially two camps. I have a very clear and simple view on this issue: the ability to participate remotely through our hybrid proceedings, although developed to deal with the pandemic, should continue in certain specific forms to give everyone in your Lordships’ House an equal chance to participate.

As we have heard, virtual participation has had some important benefits, including enabling Members to participate who might otherwise find it difficult to attend the House in person. This includes Members with disabilities, long-term and sometimes fluctuating health conditions or caring responsibilities, as well as those who are geographically distant from Westminster. It was deeply moving and humbling to hear the contribution from the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell. I totally support her view that remote participation should be classed as a reasonable adjustment—something any decent employer would do and, frankly, is obliged to do. We make the laws of this country; how can we possibly say that they do not apply to us?

The needs of Members with caring responsibilities are something we very rarely talk about, but they are a real constraint for some of them. We heard powerful contributions on this from my noble friends Lady Humphreys and Lord Bradshaw. At a time when we are rightly promoting better support for this in the workplace more generally, we should also apply these considerations to ourselves. Remote participation has contributed to levelling the playing field for parliamentarians with caring responsibilities, many of whom are women.

Unlike other noble Lords, I do not see that retaining some hybridity for those who need it as being in opposition to doing a good job of exercising our scrutiny function and holding the Government to account. As most Members happily return to the House physically over the coming months—and I look forward to doing so when it is safe—the two can happily coexist if there is a will to make it part of a broader modernisation agenda. It will make our representations more representative of the overall population and, frankly, make us seem more relevant to the world at large. As many noble Lords have said—the noble Baroness, Lady Quin, was particularly eloquent on this point—at the moment virtually every organisation is fundamentally reviewing its working practices to retain the benefits of flexible and remote working and we should too; otherwise we will, in the memorable words of the noble Lord, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth, simply be preserved in aspic.

Speaking personally for a moment, remote participation has been a godsend for me following knee surgery last autumn and a very long recovery period when I simply would not have been able to come in physically because of my restricted mobility. Participating remotely has been my only realistic opportunity to make a contribution to proceedings. I would be very unhappy if that opportunity was not available in future, so I agree with Professor Meg Russell of University College London’s Constitution Unit that decisions about the workings of Parliament need to be underpinned by the fundamental principle of equal participation. That fundamental principle should extend beyond the pandemic and become enshrined in our ways of working.

It is quite wrong for us simply to ape the arrangements in the other place. We have heard the charge many times today that as it is going back to the old normal so we must too, but such an approach fundamentally fails to respect the fact that we are meant to be a different type of House with part-time Members as well as full-time Members. We should take seriously the real benefits of having Members who are still actively engaged in external work, be it paid or voluntary, who are able to bring up-to-date expertise into the Chamber. Part-time Members need to be able to plan their work commitments on a sensible basis, and that requires some flexibility. It is quite different from the Commons and requires a different set of working arrangements, so I respectfully disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, on that point.

There is one point I would like us to learn from the Commons. We should review our working hours and try to bring them into at least the 20th century, if not the 21st. The Commons has managed to do this to provide greater certainty about hours and the timing of votes to allow more predictable planning more in line with modern expectations and caring commitments.

On Oral Questions, I strongly support the line that many noble Lords have taken in support of a list. Our old habit of shouting and baying and the bear pit at Question Time frankly often brought this House into disrepute, and the loudest voices too often drowned out those with the most to contribute.

To summarise, I strongly support the views of the noble Baronesses, Lady Finlay and Lady Bennett, my noble friends Lady Bowles and Lady Bakewell, and many others—they do not all begin with “B”—that this is a great opportunity for us to embrace a long-overdue modernisation of our working practices, to get rid of some of our more anachronistic ways, which were designed for a very different age, and to adopt a new normal which appears far more relevant to the outside world.