Procedure Committee

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Thursday 30th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Chairman of Committees for his comments. I have a question for him on the consent to Bills of the Queen and the Prince of Wales, which is referred to in items 12 and 13 in the Procedure Committee’s report.

He will be aware, I think, that the House of Commons Political and Constitutional Reform Committee made six recommendations about this. I am slightly surprised that the Procedure Committee has not chosen to comment on the other five. The evidence in the Commons report and the recommendations do not always seem to connect. I have talked to the chair of the Commons committee about this; I did not get much of an answer but I had a useful discussion. In particular, nobody has commented on the need for the Prince of Wales to give consent to Bills when they affect his private interests. I take a couple of quotations from the House of Commons committee’s report. Dr Tucker said:

“Any involvement of the Prince of Wales in the legislative process is constitutionally unacceptable”.

That is quite strong. Our own Clerk of the Parliaments, David Beamish, commented:

“So in one sense it is not necessary”,

to have consent at all,

“in that this Committee could recommend its abolition”.

Therefore, I ask the Chairman of Committees whether the Procedure Committee could look at this whole issue again and comment on all the recommendations, possibly after reading the whole of the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee’s report, if it has not already done so, and come back with six recommendations?