House of Lords: Working Practices

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Thursday 1st November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack]

My Lords, I am delighted to add my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, and to congratulate the new grandmother. I speak as a grandfather.

If we had more time for the debate we could develop these points at greater length. I want to take up the point, however, made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman. The prime purpose of Parliament is to hold the Executive to account, and we are failing as a Parliament adequately to do that. Indeed, there is time for another Dunning’s motion, moved in the other place more than 200 years ago. Then it was:

“The power of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished”.

Today it is the power of the Executive that has increased, is increasing and ought to be diminished.

One of the things that we could profitably do is to co-operate more sensibly with the other place. The Executive consists of the Ministers of the Crown. We have some admirable ones in this place and they serve this House and the country very well indeed. But, understandably, the bulk of the Cabinet comes from another place. I am not one of those who believe that Ministers should come to this House from the other place and speak from this Dispatch Box. That would be wrong. But once a month a Cabinet Minister should come to the Moses Room and a group of Members, using the expertise and breadth of experience that is represented on these Benches, should question that Minister. They could make suggestions that are good for the country as a whole.

My noble friend Lord Higgins talked about the programming of Motions. Of course, part of holding a Government to account is improving the legislative proposals they place before Parliament. We are light years ahead of the other place in how we do that, but we could still do better. I agree that pre-legislative scrutiny should be automatic. Post-legislative is arguably even more important, and we should devote proper attention to it. I believe that an admirable opportunity has been presented to us by the reprieve, to which the noble Lord, Lord Butler, amusingly referred, to improve our act and to do that in co-operation with another place. That is because together we are the two Houses of Parliament. In a country where the Executive are drawn from the legislature, it is more difficult than in a country where there is a separation of powers. Inevitably one sees things differently from the Opposition Benches than from the Government Benches; I have experienced that in the other place and, to some degree, in here. But if we could do away with the great gulf between the two Houses, we would be serving Parliament.

One of the things that has struck me over the past two years, and particularly during recent debates, is that far too few people in the other place understand what this House is all about, and far too few people in this House who have not served down at the other end of the Corridor fully appreciate the pressures on Members at that end. So I hope that we could have more Joint Committees and a monthly session in the Moses Room. I hope that we can do other things that will bring Parliament together for the benefit of the people because that, after all, is our fundamental role and task.