House of Lords: Working Practices

Lord Bichard Excerpts

Thursday 1st November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bichard]

My Lords, during the past week I have been receiving up to 300 e-mails a day as a result of questions that I asked during a Select Committee being represented as my views on pensioners and work. They are not my views but I have to tell the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, that not everyone holds this House in as high regard as she has suggested. I have been told that we are out of touch, elitist, out of date, self-serving and irrelevant—and those are just some of the comments that I can share with your Lordships today. Many others clearly believe that having seen off one attack, we are going to see off every attack and any attempt to change the way in which we do things. Those are the reasons why I believe that this is absolutely the time to show that we are determined to make this place more effective in how it carries out its responsibilities and more relevant to the issues that people are grappling with in their everyday lives.

In a fast-moving world—I am sorry about the cliché—we need stable institutions such as this, but even stable institutions have to embrace change. There has of course been some change but not, I would suggest, sufficient to address adequately, as others have said, the recommendations of the Leader’s Group on working practices or, indeed, the suggestions that have been made by the noble Lord, Lord Steel, or by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, in previous debates. We do not yet have a legislative standards committee, so the need for new legislation remains insufficiently scrutinised. We do not yet have sufficient post-legislative scrutiny to take a hard look at what has happened as a result of previous legislation, in spite of the fact that we know that much of that legislation has not even been implemented. As a result of just those two issues, we have a crisis. We have unnecessary, poorly drafted legislation that is often not implemented and rarely properly evaluated. This House could play a really important part in resolving that crisis.

As others have said, neither do we have a fair and transparent process for deciding what debates take place in the House, or even which Select Committees we decide to establish. We have a House which is too large and we have not found a way of dealing with that issue. I could go on. Your Lordships will have your own suggestions and other priorities but I would like to make a suggestion. We should reconvene the Leader’s Group and commission a full report on the various proposals on the table, now that the reform Bill has been lost. I also suggest that that group reports back to this House so that we can have a proper debate on all these proposals, which is something that we never managed to do following the Goodlad report.