House of Lords: Remote Participation and Hybrid Sittings

Earl of Kinnoull Excerpts

Thursday 20th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Kinnoull (CB) [V]]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the forthright noble Lord, Lord Lilley. I add my thanks to the staff of the House, who made virtual happen. I will speak only about virtual committees this evening, giving a little bit of quantitative analysis, some qualitative analysis and one or two conclusions. For the quantitative analysis, I am grateful to the Committee Office, which has supplied me with a considerable amount of statistics and chatted to me about them.

Attendance for regular committees in the 2017-19 Session was 9.67 Members per meeting. In the virtual world, this has risen to 11.57, an increase of 19.6%. The number of committee meetings has also risen. This is quite difficult to analyse because there were general elections et cetera, but we were agreed that a good way of expressing it was to say that they have risen by about 20%. The number of witnesses who have appeared before committees has risen as well, by about 25%, and the number of reports the committees have prepared for the House has risen commensurately with those numbers. It is therefore reasonable to conclude that the committees of the House have been 20% more active in the virtual world.

I turn to some qualitative remarks, speaking as the chair of the European Affairs Committee and having been intimately involved with the many members of the family of European Union committees before. In private meetings, the increase in attendance that I have just referred to was immensely helpful to the quality of the debate. Committees have adapted to a new rhythm and I pay tribute to all Members who have contributed to that, because it is different from holding a conversation face to face. Meetings take longer; it is simply not as efficient to be on a telephone. Things are slower and conversations do not quite flow in the same way. I find that discussions of difficult areas take significantly longer and that has a significant impact on the effectiveness of committees, although I am not aware of any discussion that did not get there in the end, and with the right answer. Agreement of reports is, of course, a subset of this and that too has been significantly impacted and takes quite a lot longer.

Public evidence sessions have been greatly improved by the extent of witness availability. I was much taken by what the noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, said in his very good speech about being able to take evidence today from witnesses from Sydney and New York at the same time. This is tremendous. However, I think all would feel that the quality of ministerial sessions has gone down. It is simply not possible to put the Minister under the same scrutiny pressure remotely as when he is physically sitting in front of you. It is a less flexible format, and this too can make a difference.

That brings me to my conclusions, the first of which is how very hard the staff of the Committee Office have worked during this period and how they deserve our thanks. The numbers show it: the same number of people have produced 20% more work. Secondly, as the noble Lord, Lord Hain, and others said, we must have regard as we open up to the interests of our staff. Many of our staff are sufficiently young; they have had no jabs so far, so there are also health interests for them. We must have regard to them in deciding how we open up for committees. Thirdly, I very much support the noble and learned Lords, Lord Hope of Craighead and Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, and the noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Ipswich, in saying that the virtual format is a very useful tool for any committee to have. I therefore feel that we must retain this option in the way that it is developed today. Fourthly, just for my part, I say that ministerial evidence sessions should be physical, as should those meetings where committee reports are agreed.

There is a general principle in life that an organisation that does not continuously change and adapt is a dinosaur and will become extinct. For that reason and those I have given about committees, I fear that I cannot support the Motion of the noble Lord, Lord Cormack. But I very much welcome the words at the start of this debate from the noble Earl, Lord Howe, which I thought showed great intention to bring the House back to some semblance of normality, albeit improved and adapted.