Procedure Committee

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Monday 18th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab)]

My Lords, I have been known in the past to express some concerns about this issue and, on this occasion, I want to make it absolutely clear that the Senior Deputy Speaker should be commended for the work that he has done. It has been a long and detailed exercise carried out withMy second point is in relation to committees. The more ignorant observers of this House seem to think that getting up, asking questions and making speeches in this place, as I tend to do from time to time, is the only important work that this House carries out. That is as far from the truth as one can get. This House carries out a huge amount of detailed, painstaking and important work in committees. Incidentally, I tried to get the producer of the three documentaries on the Lords to film some of them. I was told that it was too boring. It may be boring, but it is very important—some of it is not boring, by the way.

We should try to get this message over, especially on these Bills. My noble friend Lord Elder and others served on the high-speed rail Bill. He spent hours, days and weeks on it for almost no public recognition or, even more importantly, awareness of what he was doing. We need to take every opportunity—I know the Senior Deputy Speaker and the Lord Speaker will do this—to shout from the rafters and explain, when we go to schools and other institutions, that a great deal of work by this House is done outside this Chamber and is not fully recognised.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, my noble friends have made some very interesting comments on this report. I join in congratulating the Senior Deputy Speaker on what he has achieved. One other thing we possibly ought to look at, given the fact that there may be two or three more hybrid Bills coming on HS2 and maybe other projects in future, is whether in certain circumstances there should be Joint Committees of both Houses, which would save quite a lot of reading time for MPs and your Lordships. More radically, we should consider using the same procedure used for building motorways these days through the Infrastructure Planning Commission—I think it is called that—and build railways that way. Railways are built with hybrid Bills for historical reasons—there were no motorways when the railways started and everything had to go through both Houses. It is a bit ironical that a motorway can be built using one procedure and a railway can be built using another. Maybe it is time to start looking at them both to see whether there are benefits in doing them all one way or the other.

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, I take the opportunity to very strongly reinforce the words of the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, who put very clearly the point that there are a vacuous and ignorant few outside the House for whom the only measure of activity is what goes on in and is spoken in this Chamber. The noble Lord is entirely right. A vast amount of work goes on not merely in parliamentary and sessional committees but in all-party groups and less formal groups connected to the outside, such as charities. This aspect of what the House of Lords does has so far not reached most of the media. It is time that we reinforce this message powerfully to get over the truth of what we really do.