House of Lords: Working Practices

Lord Cope of Berkeley Excerpts

Monday 12th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cope of Berkeley]

My Lords, I have shared responsibility for the arrangement of business as a Whip in both Houses over more decades than I like to think about, both in government and in opposition. As the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, said, this debate is part of a continuum. The procedures and practices of your Lordships’ House have been under almost continuous scrutiny and change for the past decade and more. That is well set out in the Library note issued before this debate, as the noble Baroness the Leader of the Opposition pointed out.

I welcome the setting up of the committee by the leaders to consider these matters, but I agree with the noble Lords, Lord Maclennan and Lord Kakkar, that there is a problem with how this fits together with the proposals for changes to the constitution of your Lordships’ House. The proposals that are before us—from the four reports and so on—are all for changes to the present House. A fully elected House would both need and want different procedures to reflect the fact that the elected Members would each have to take an interest in a far wider range of questions—those issues that concern their constituents—than your Lordships currently do. We each have our interests and, for the most part, we do not interfere with others.

The time pressures on an elected House are much greater, as those of us who have been involved in the management of or been Members of the House of Commons know well. That is why the other place has, over the years, adopted guillotines, the selection of amendments, the grouping of amendments and all the other things for speeding up the business and trying to fit more into the time available.

In considering procedure, we should recognise clearly that the provisions that are appropriate to a House such as your Lordships’ House, which contains a large number of Peers who are high in expertise on specific matters, are very different from those that are appropriate to a House in which everyone has to take at least some interest in practically everything. Of course, if this House were to become a hybrid House—partly elected and partly appointed—it would need hybrid procedures, as it were; it would need some parts from both. Even that would mean a significant change to the procedures and practices of the House. It is important to remember these differences, particularly when considering the adoption of some of the Commons practices.

I was surprised to read in the report from the committee of the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, that the usual channels are considered opaque. The usual channels are defined in the Companion with some care. I was a member of them as opposition Chief Whip from 2001 to 2007. The results of their daily and more or less continuous negotiations are announced to the House in the form of agreed business, together with frequent Statements to the House by the government Chief Whip about particular modifications and what is happening. Speaking with personal experience only of my party, and with only hearsay from the other parties and the Cross Benches, no one is more accountable to the members of their party than a Chief Whip in the Lords.

Every week the Chief Whip reports to the party group—the Association of Conservative Peers in our case—the results of the usual channels’ discussions on the business of the House, is openly questioned and pressed on various matters, and has to do his or her best to respond to what is said and wished for. Every week the Chief Whip also has a private meeting with the officers of the Association of Conservative Peers. What is more, every day the Chief Whip is about the House, open to informal questioning or lobbying. I can assure noble Lords that Members approach the Chief Whip every five minutes, it sometimes seems, about one matter or another. They do not always say the same thing; they press alternative views and different points, which is the central difficulty. It is impossible to please everybody all the time. All you can do is try to please as many people as possible within your group for as much of the time as you can.

The report of the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, acknowledged, as has been said, that some process of this kind is necessary to lubricate the business of the House. That is right. The Chief Whip, the Leader of the House and the leaders of the various other parties are under pressure from other directions—from the Government themselves, the other place and their colleagues. These are pressures to which the Chief Whip and so on are subject, in a sense, on behalf of the House. There are many other people who are interested in and affected by the progress of legislation, as well as the membership of your Lordships’ House.

It is suggested that it would improve the transparency of the usual channels if the Leader of the House were to have a weekly question time. I think that is an error. Such a procedure would not have the intended consequence. The Leader would quickly be asked questions designed to score political points, not to elucidate information about the scheduling of business. Those who have listened to Leader’s Questions in another place know exactly what I mean. Every week the Chief Whips and the Convenor are formally questioned in the group meetings. That is the better way to proceed. By the way, this is a highly detailed point but the usual channels are nothing to do with the refreshment department’s hours, as is suggested in the report, except to suggest to the refreshment department when the House is likely to be at its fullest. That is obviously right.

As I say, one cannot please all the people all the time. That applies in spades to appointments to committees. All appointments to official committees of your Lordships’ House are put to the vote on the Floor of the House. It is very rare that any amendments are made when the recommendations come forward. That is because of the very wide consultation which takes place between the parties about balance and the individuals who might serve. The difficulty is that Peers are reluctant to serve on some committees and have to be persuaded to do so. On the other hand, other committees are extremely popular and the difficulty is to select the right people to serve on them. There are a lot of other proposals in the various reports—far too many for me to respond seriatim. I record my support for the remarks of my noble and learned friend Lord Howe of Aberavon and for his proposals on tax simplification. However, as I sat on his working party, I suppose that I could be expected to support those.

To my mind the most important recommendations are those concerning pre- and post-legislative scrutiny. There are some valuable proposals there. I should also like to see renewed consideration of how Bills are drafted. A very important report by our late lamented colleague Lord Renton was published a few decades ago. The recommendations of that excellent report have never been properly implemented by any Government between then and now. Like others, I am strongly in favour of a self-governing House but wish to make it clear that that obviously calls for self-discipline and self-restraint. However, that is not the whole thing—self-governing means that the House is governed by everybody in it and that we are all responsible for the rules being followed not only by ourselves but by other people as well. Peers can, and should, draw attention to possible breaches which they think may have occurred, either openly in the Chamber or in the committee—that is sometimes done—but also privately outside if somebody has said something which is not within our normal rules. Each of us is responsible for all of us in a sense. I remember very well—as I am sure some of your Lordships do—the occasion when the late lamented Lord Russell thought that a Minister had been rude to him and invoked the Standing Order on asperity of speech. We all voted on whether the Clerk should read that Standing Order. The vote was carried and he did. Lord Russell was a notable expert on your Lordships' customs, but that is not something which should be allowed to fade entirely into oblivion. Let us adapt our customs but do so in a thoughtful manner, conscious of the unintended consequences.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Cope of Berkeley]

I apologise for interrupting the noble Lord, but I was not joking at all, particularly in my remarks, to which he drew attention, about the prospect of the Leader of the House answering questions. That would not be a positive improvement, and would not achieve the results which the noble Lord’s sub-committee sought.

[Lord Butler of Brockwell]

I was not suggesting that the noble Lord was being frivolous. I, too, seriously suggest that if it is important that the House should be self-governing, which it is, widely giving Members the opportunity to put points of concern to the Leader of the House when they can during the week would increase the sense of involvement and participation and make the House more collegiate.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Rooker. I say that because he and I have been studying these things across both Houses for a number of years. I enjoyed his speech and I concur with absolutely everything he said. What I want to try to do with the short time allocated to me is argue that we really do have a new set of circumstances surrounding this debate. Whether or not it was a shot fox, as the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, said, I welcomed the announcement as soon as the coalition was formed that we were going to have a Leader’s Working Group. I hope it will give consideration as to whether it should be a standing group; the noble Lord, Lord Norton, is right about that. I am relatively new here. I have never experienced a Leader’s Working Group and I therefore do not know what the rules of engagement are or how its members are selected. I suspect the answer is “through the usual channels”, which takes us back into the loop we heard about earlier and whether or not they will have influence. I hope that the style and approach of the work of the Leader’s Group will be open and transparent. There is a case for electing Back-Benchers to the group; otherwise it will be far too easy for party political groupings to put forward members who may have grudges and form on issues.

There is a majority for change in this House if it is handled properly. At my first political demonstration, I followed Jo Grimond, marching towards the sound of gunfire. What was the chant? It was, “What are we for? Moderate change. When do we want it? In due course”. I am now in the coalition and a holy warrior for change: I want change and I want it quite soon. I can put a time on it now because the difference with this debate today is that we know we are going to have five-year Parliaments. There is high risk that this House, this important institution, could be facing profound change by 5 May 2015. That does not sound a long time and we have a great deal of work to do if we are to have a modern legislature that is capable of anticipating that change, facing it and planning for it. We do not know what will happen to us, but if we do nothing it will be worse.

There is a new urgency about what the Leader’s Group will bring to the House. The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, is right. We need to pilot things and think carefully about them. I am very pleased to be the chair of the Information Committee. I was fingered by a Whip and told that I was to be chair of the Information Committee, which was very interesting. I thought, “Do I not need to face an election?”. “Oh no. Nothing as bizarre as that”, I was told. My role is to try to help in outreach, which is a horrible word. My predecessor, the noble Lord, Lord Renton of Mount Harry, produced a fantastic report called Are the Lords Listening? Creating Connections between People and Parliament, and noble Lords such as the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, and the Lord Speaker are doing wonderful outreach work in explaining the House to people. The noble Lord, Lord Luce, said that there is “profound ignorance” among the public about what we do here. He is not exaggerating; that is an absolute statement of the current position. If that is the case, we should spend 25 per cent of our time—I shall certainly spend 25 per cent of my time—in Parliament for the next five years trying to explain to people what we do here.

It is not difficult. I have visited one or two schools as part of the schools outreach programme, which I recommend to noble Lords. You get mostly positive feedback, some of which is amusing and entertaining, and you always bring back anecdotes to tell down the pub on a Friday night. It is worth doing. We need to get into a position where people understand that we are legislators. That is all we need to say: “We are legislators”.

I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Luce, who made the point that substantive debates were influential on government policy. People say to me that it would be helpful to use the IT and social networking sites that are available as these could provide the opportunity for an effective dialogue. People want propositions tested. For example, if they are against the genetic modification of crops, or whatever, they would want to raise a debate but not, for heaven’s sake, move for Papers and then withdraw the Motion. Try explaining that to a 15 year-old. I have tried and failed. We have to get the terminology, the language and the formality of this place in tune with people who do not know what Papers are because everything is done digitally. The noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, and his colleagues have done an enormous amount of viable work in this direction but we must do more. Explaining how we work and what we do should not be difficult. However, we do not have an endless amount of time in which to do it.

The Information Committee organises and supports the work in the Library and we need to consider extra resources to support the working practices. There are 400 active Members of the House. How do I know that? Because the lists are in the Library. People are in and out of the Library, calling on resources and using them productively on the Floor of the House in order to do the work they are bidden to do in Parliament. Those 400 people need better support. Why? Because we are getting bigger in number and the facilities need to be properly promoted. The struggle for resources is a constraint on us all. We get valuable assistance from the Library and we need to keep up its quality. However, I warn the House that, unless we put resources in over the next five years, that quality is bound to slip and become diluted. There are plans for extra members in the Library in the new island site when it comes on stream but, as chair of the Information Committee, I give notice that I will be making a robust but sensible application for continuing support for individual Members who are trying to do their work in this House. I shall also look for support from colleagues to do outreach work.

We have to consider how we shape the perception of the House. The Robert Burns quote of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, was apt but she missed the last two lines:

“O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us

To see oursels as others see us!

It wad frae money a blunder free us,

And foolish notion:

What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us

And ev’n devotion!”.

It is an old, superior Scottish culture and I could not resist it. I had to refer to the book to get the quote right, but I hope the accent was better.

I was lucky to be part of the governance committee under the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy. Again, the noble Lord, Lord Luce, set the tone of the debate when he said that there needs to be an independent review of governance. I was a House of Commons Commissioner for a long time and I was very nervous about this. I was the external spokesman for the commission during my time in the Commons and, when we had the Braithwaite review, the scales fell from my eyes. Someone from outside—no one particularly special—came in, sat down, went round, asked some quiet questions with no axes to grind and produced a devastating report on what was happening externally and where we were deficient. We should not be frightened of doing that. although we shall have to do it quietly and sensibly and we cannot throw the baby out with the bathwater and so on. We need an internal standing committee, as suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Norton, to look, with external help, at the issue of governance.

The noble Lord, Lord Cope, busily defended Whips—the poor souls—and said that people speak to them every five minutes. That is a great shame; what a load it must be if people talk to you a lot. I was a Whip and I know that Whips look after party interests. However, those are not the only interests here. The government Chief Whip and the Leader of the House look after the executive interest but in the House of Lords there is also the holy grail of the institutional interest which the Lord Speaker should hold tightly in his or her grasp. I think that the usual channels do not take a sufficient overview of the institution and have too much influence. However, you always think that if you are not a Whip and think the reverse if you are and nothing much will change in that direction. However, it is not sufficient to say it is okay; that the usual channels have got it fixed and it all works. It does—and I am grateful to the people who do it—but we need to have a completely new transparency and consider how it looks from the outside. People need to see what is happening so that they can be confident that what they are being told is fit for purpose.

[Lord Cope of Berkeley]

There are differences between the way in which Whips in this House and Whips in the other House operate. Of course, Whips in this House look after the interests of their party among other things, and they also have a great responsibility, as they do in the other House, for the institution as a whole, but the Whips in this House have in addition a great responsibility for the members of their group, be it their party or the Cross Benches. If they do not look after them, they do not get on very well. They are also extremely open to both public and private scrutiny.

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope]

I defer to my noble friend’s greater experience: I have never been a Whip here nor do I intend to apply to become one. The usual channels need somebody to oversee what they do. There needs to be more constructive tension between the Government, the Whips, the usual channels and the Lord Speaker. We need some sensible, adult thought about that.