Adjournment

Debate between Lord Adonis and Lord Taylor of Holbeach

Thursday 14th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis]

I am not giving way. The noble Lord can speak after me and it is open to him to do so.

In this circumstance I cannot understand why it is in the public interest for noble Lords to proceed now to debate another string of no-deal Brexit regulations. Surely the right thing to do in the crisis situation in which we find ourselves, where the one certain fact is that we will not be proceeding with no deal, is not to proceed with these regulations, but to adjourn the House and for Her Majesty’s Government to come back in good order on Monday with actual proposals for the change of the law that is required to change the exit date. They should also come back with an apology to Parliament and to the public for the billions of pounds of public money that has been wasted on no-deal preparations. This should all have been devoted to dealing with the issues of real concern to the public—the NHS, the education system, the state of our public services—and not this complete and shameful waste of money in preparations for a no-deal Brexit, which virtually no one in the country supports.

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach (Con)]

My Lords, I shall ask the noble Lord to withdraw his Motion. We have seen the events of recent days in the House of Commons and it is likely that there will be further votes this evening and certainly during the course of next week. While the House of Commons continues its deliberations I think the best thing for this House to do is to continue with the thorough and measured scrutiny of the legislation before it. In fact, the House of Commons is continuing today with its scrutiny of the very same SIs that we are doing. These statutory instruments are not being forced through; they have been scrutinised by the JCSI—a Joint Committee of both Houses—and the SLSC and are being debated in the usual way. We have already discussed, in the Private Notice Question, the legal position on a default no deal. Until there is legal certainty in respect of the alternative course of action, the Government are behaving entirely responsibly by continuing to prepare for all eventualities.

Quite aside from that, the noble Lord has given no notice of his intention to adjourn the House today. Our procedures are open and they allow all noble Lords the flexibility to do all the sorts of things he is asking the House to do now, but that flexibility comes with attendant responsibility. It is the responsibility of us all. I hope the noble Lord will not seek to test the opinion of the House on his Motion to Adjourn. If he does, I trust that every responsible Member of this House will vote against it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Adonis]

Does the Government Chief Whip intend to respond to my noble friend Lord Harris?

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

A number of suggestions have been made. The truth is that during the course of today, both this afternoon and this evening, it is likely that a number of decisions will be made in the House of Commons. To a certain extent, our business is always guided by what is happening in the House of Commons. If it helps noble Lords, I will consider in particular the Moses Room being the venue for the debate on the Spring Statement. If noble Lords wish, I will discuss that in the usual channels. The usual channels in this House are active and consensual; we do not always agree with everything suggested, but we generally try to do things by collective agreement and I shall continue in that vein. In a way, I regret that the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, raised this without proper notice. It is a subject worthy of discussion, we have had a discussion about it, I have taken note of what has been said, and we will do our best to make sure that this House is a credit to the parliamentary process.

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, I make no apology whatever for raising this matter in the way I have this morning, nor do I think I owe any apology. We are in a crisis situation. The House of Commons did not resolve clearly until 8 pm last night what its view was on no deal. Our job is to be responsive and to rise to the level of events, not to delay constantly. It is two weeks until the United Kingdom leaves the European Union, so for the Government Chief Whip not even to be in a position to undertake to come to the House on Monday to tell us what course of action the Government intend to pursue is very far below the level of his public duties. Patience is not at all an issue—the country is impatient, and rightly so, because it expects the Government to have a strategy for dealing with the crisis in which we find ourselves, according to which we will be out of the European Union in two weeks unless the Government take emergency action. As a very patient person, I would be perfectly content to wait until Monday for a way forward if the noble Lord would undertake even to make a Statement on Monday, but he has not yet done so. Is he prepared to do so?

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

I think I hinted that I would consider the business of the debate on the Spring Statement, and I am certainly prepared to do so. I cannot make a Statement as to what will be considered in this House until such time as I have had a chance to talk to the usual channels about that, and I will not be able to do that until Monday.

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, I take that to be a substantial move towards the opinion of the House, which I welcome. I think the noble Lord understands that there will be a significant argument in the House on Monday if we meet and the Government are not in a position to tell us how they intend to handle business, including not proceeding with these ludicrous and deeply damaging no-deal regulations, which are inflicting huge cost on the public purse and huge inconvenience to the public.

Venture Capital Funds (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2018

Debate between Lord Adonis and Lord Taylor of Holbeach

Tuesday 22nd January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, with very great respect, the noble Lord has not answered the question, which is about the impact assessment. It is not about the wider issues to do with the—

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Adonis]

I am not giving way to the Chief Whip until I have completed the point.

[Noble Lords]

No!

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

This is a point of order. In debate it is customary for Members to speak only once. The noble Lord has made a point. The House has listened to his point. If he wishes to press his point, he has to press his point. I ask him to accept that, on what has been approved by the committees and has been presented to the House today, he should be prepared to accept the word of the Minister.

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, the noble Lord was intervening on me. It is not a question of accepting the word of the Minister; the Minister has not replied to the point. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, has added further confusion because he said that the impact assessment is available and it has just not been laid before the House, whereas I took the Minister to say that the impact assessment was not available. He told the Grand Committee last week that it would be published shortly. He is clearly still not in a position to lay it before the House. The House is being expected to agree a statutory instrument that will have a vital impact on a major national industry and we do not know the basis on which we are agreeing it. There is confusion between the noble Lord who chairs the relevant committee and the Minister as to whether an impact assessment is even available. The point that my noble friend Lord Rooker made seems to be completely correct. Essentially, we are legislating in the dark this afternoon, and that is a wholly unsatisfactory situation.

House of Lords: Sittings

Debate between Lord Adonis and Lord Taylor of Holbeach

Thursday 20th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis]

I have a very high opinion of your Lordships and their ability to persuade the House of Commons to do the right thing. There is not much point in our meeting—ever—if we take the view that the opinions we express are going to be rejected by the House of Commons. We are here in this House because we believe we do make a difference, not because we are irrelevant, although if the noble Lord and others think they are irrelevant there are options for them to avoid being a burden on the taxpayer. But that is not the view that I take.

I come back to the serious issue that we are discussing. This is what Mr Heaton-Harris said yesterday is involved in the no-deal preparations which the Cabinet yesterday agreed to intensify because of the likelihood of there being no resolution to the Brexit crisis before us. He said that,

“we have taken further steps to ensure that people and businesses are ready. That has included publishing more than 100 pages of guidance for businesses on processes and procedures at the border in a no-deal scenario; contacting 145,000 businesses that trade with the EU, telling them to start getting ready for no-deal customs procedures; advising hundreds of ports of entry, traders, pharmaceutical firms and other organisations that use the border about the disruption that they might experience so that they can get their supply chains ready; and producing a paper on citizens’ rights”.

It is hard to exaggerate how serious those preparations are outside wartime. The legal arrangements for a no-deal Brexit are still not fully in place. The preparations are a huge expense to the taxpayer and a massive drain on the resources of Whitehall. Mr Heaton-Harris said:

“More than 10,000 civil servants are working on Brexit with a further 5,000 in the pipeline, which will allow us to accelerate our preparation”.—[Official Report, Commons, 20/12/18; cols. 879-80.]


I am not sure what it means to be a civil servant in the pipeline of Brexit; none the less, more than 5,000 are in that happy condition. As I say, short of being in a war situation, it is hard to conceive of a more alarming position in which the Government could place the country.

Surely our duty in Parliament is to see that this crisis is resolved as soon as possible. We have an opportunity to do so by meeting earlier rather than later in January. I believe we have a duty to do so. Therefore, I beg to move.

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach (Con)]

My Lords, I shall not answer the proposal of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, point by point. I think politicians delude themselves when they believe their own rhetoric, and I am afraid he is a perfect example of such a delusion. I propose to deal with the practicalities of how this House can deal with the fact that it wants to give time to deal with this most important topic.

I start with the fact that the day suggested in the noble Lord’s Motion is a national bank holiday in Scotland shows, in my view, an appalling ignorance of how important it is for the United Kingdom that we recognise each other’s bank holidays in this respect. I do not take that casually. I also do not take it casually that his proposal would mean that not only Peers but members of staff would have to curtail their holiday arrangements to be here to meet his requirements. I would rather concentrate on what we are planning to do.

Yesterday, we issued a Forthcoming Business in which there were two days of debate scheduled to deal with the take-note Motion on withdrawal. We have had to abandon one and will have to start again. As noble Lords will know, as a result of conversations in the usual channels I have agreed to extend that debate to three days. So we will be discussing these very subjects, which I appreciate that the noble Lord takes very much to heart, on 9, 10 and 14 January. I think that gives everybody proper time to absorb the situations as they exist and I hope noble Lords will appreciate the time that has been given. I cannot accept the noble Lord’s Motion and I hope that the House rejects it.

Arrangement of Business

Debate between Lord Adonis and Lord Taylor of Holbeach

Monday 10th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach (Con)]

My Lords, it is quite appropriate that we should continue and conclude our debate today. We have already had two days of spirited debate in which noble Lords have been contributing their bit to this general discussion. Many noble Lords have already asked questions of my noble friend Lord Callanan, and I am sure they want to hear the answers. Other noble Lords who also had their names down to speak have waited patiently for their turn to make a contribution to this debate. I do not see that it is any way justified—except to make a political point, which may lie behind the suggestion that we adjourn—that we should discontinue our debate. Each House is in charge of its own proceedings and today is no different.

Lastly, I think the noble Baroness the Leader of the Opposition made it clear that in earlier discussions I had with her I confirmed that should the Government decide as a result of other negotiations to come forward with any further proposals, whatever they are, we will find time to debate them fully and to have Motions tabled in respect of any further issues arising. In the meantime, the documents on which we based our debate lie before this House, and I suggest that the right and proper thing is that we should proceed with the debate.

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, this is a complete farce. The Government are pulling the debate in the House of Commons on precisely the terms that we are supposed to be debating this afternoon. Is it not open to my noble friend the Leader of the Opposition to move the adjournment of the House, which I think would be the appropriate step in the circumstances, rather than us continuing with a farce that, as the noble Lord, Lord Newby, said, actually prevents those of us speaking in the debate later on today from learning what Her Majesty’s Government’s policy actually is? Surely we should adjourn this debate, not continue it in these farcical circumstances.

House of Lords: Sittings

Debate between Lord Adonis and Lord Taylor of Holbeach

Tuesday 24th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach (Con)]

My Lords, perhaps I can address at least the basic elements of the Motion that the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, has proposed. In some ways it is a Chief Whip’s dream—Parliament constantly in session, there to pass government legislation —and I understand that the noble Lord has proposed that we could pass 10 Bills during this time, although there is very little demonstration as to what they might be.

[Lord Adonis]

I have written an article, but I do not think the noble Lord reads the Guardian.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Adonis and Lord Taylor of Holbeach

Report: 6th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 8th May 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, I strongly support the amendments, but I wish to ask about what I thought was a remarkable statement made by the Deputy Speaker after the previous Division. She announced that the result for the Contents in the Division on the single market amendment was out by two. The vote in the Contents in that Division was 247 rather than 245. I ask the Minister, in the interval before he replies to the debate, to explain to the House what happened. This is now the fourth Division on the EU withdrawal Bill where figures have been misreported to the House.

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach (Con)]

Perhaps I may explain. There was an error in transmission between the votes presented by the tellers and the clerk’s note handed to the noble Lord, Lord McAvoy, consequently. That was the reason. I am sure that the clerk would wish me to explain what had happened. I accept that there is always a slight problem because the votes we declare when we come forward are the votes that we have telled, but some votes are taken at the Table, and they appear separately on the total in front of the clerk and, in this case, unfortunately, they were missed. It made no difference to the result and the matter has now been corrected.

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, perhaps I may comment a bit further, because I think there is a serious problem in the conduct of Divisions in the House when large numbers of Peers are voting. We have had only 14 or 15 Divisions on the EU withdrawal Bill, but this is the fourth amendment where the result of a Division has been misreported in the House. On three previous occasions, there was a difference in the tallies between the tellers and the clerks, which I think is a serious business. The majorities have been quite large, but if they had been small, we would not know what was the view of the House by the way that the Divisions have been conducted.

We have now had a serious misreporting of a vote. It takes an inordinate time for Divisions to be conducted because the procedures of the House were not conceived for the number of Members that we have but—more importantly, I think—because the new electronic system of recording votes is very inefficient. I simply note this for the attention of the Clerk of the Parliaments, with whom I have now raised this twice. I should note that he has not replied to my last letter to him on the subject. I think this issue needs to be looked at by whichever is the appropriate body in the House responsible for the conduct of business.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Adonis and Lord Taylor of Holbeach

Report: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 25th April 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

I am mindful that the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, is in his place this evening. I do remember him getting extremely hungry.

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

It was later in the day.

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

Perhaps it was. Part of the difficulty here is that we had agreed via the usual channels to have a break, and had agreed more or less where we would have it; it was going to be before the consideration of the amendments which we are now at. I do not want to defy the majority view of the House, and I have to accept that the numbers suggest that the will of the House is to carry on with proceedings. With that in mind, I suggest that we move on to the next group of amendments. However, I will ask the usual channels in future to be much more specific about what they intend when they ask for these facilities.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Adonis and Lord Taylor of Holbeach

Committee: 7th sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Wednesday 14th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, we are now well into the 11th hour of consideration of the Bill. There has been no break of any kind since lunchtime. I do not believe that noble Lords have been guilty in any way of prolonging the debate unnecessarily; I think the discussions have been perfectly reasonable, and the contributions have been precisely what we would expect of this House. To expect us to carry on with no break whatever is treating the House with contempt. I will oppose this Motion, and subsequent motions, unless the Chief Whip is, very graciously, prepared to allow us to behave in a reasonable manner in respect of the Bill.

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach (Con)]

My Lords, the arrangements for debates are frequently discussed through the usual channels, as the noble Lord will be aware. The Statement that we have just listened to occupied the dinner break. I am afraid that the noble Lord had the opportunity, if he wished, to get sustenance. A number of noble Lords have not had dinner up to now, but no doubt they will find opportunities to do so.

[Lord Adonis]

Is the noble Lord saying that it was inappropriate for me to be present for the Statement on Russia repeated by the Leader of the House because I should have taken a dinner break then?

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

Dinner breaks are always filled with other business, or usually so. I am happy with the answer that I have given the noble Lord.

Arrangement of Business

Debate between Lord Adonis and Lord Taylor of Holbeach

Wednesday 28th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

The noble Lord will know that the House has to take all precautions. We are not expecting to sit late. The spirit in which I have been discussing this within the usual channels is that we hope to see the Bill move a bit faster than it has been and, by giving it extra time, Members will have the opportunity to scrutinise it properly. However, it is often the case that the House has to sit on Bills after 10 o’clock in the evening. It is not my intention to do so, but I am suggesting that it may suit the House that that is the case.

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, the Government Chief Whip’s statement was somewhat convoluted in the first part. Assuming that we will be continuing until 10 o’clock, did I take him to be giving a definite commitment that there will be a break for dinner? Is he aware that there was considerable resentment in the House on Monday that we sat for nine and a quarter hours in debating the Bill and the Government did not grant us a break? The noble Lord needs to be aware that some of us are not going to be starved into submission.

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

I am sure the noble Lord would not expect that that was my intention. Following a communication from the noble Lord, I discussed this matter with the usual channels to find a way of giving those who are dealing with the Bill an opportunity for refreshments. For example, this evening there will be a couple of repeat UQs. These will be taken in a half-hour period, when the House will resume and the Committee stage will be suspended. It is my intention that we should always have a half an hour, at any rate, where people can be relieved of attention to the Bill before the House.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Adonis and Lord Taylor of Holbeach

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 21st February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach (Con)]

My Lords, I wonder whether it might not be an idea to hear from the Minister at this stage. I have been watching the debate and it is clear that we are covering a lot of ground that we will cover in Committee. We are in Committee now and not at Second Reading. It would be appropriate if we heard from the Minister.

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, I do not think that the noble Lord should intervene to cut short this debate. There are many amendments that have not yet been spoken to and my noble friend on the Front Bench has not had a chance to speak. Many other noble Lords seek to speak, too. The Minister should speak at the end of the debate after noble Lords who wish to speak have had a chance to do so. These are the most important issues that will face this country over the next generation and I do not think that we should be told by the Government Chief Whip that we have been speaking for too long.