Business of the House

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Tuesday 28th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, following on from my noble friend, can the Chief Whip tell us precisely how many noble Lords will be able to take part physically in the Grand Committee proceedings?

I want also to raise an issue on procedure. We all understand the need for accommodation to be made in respect of hybrid proceedings and, for as long as there are safety considerations, that will need to continue. However, there is a fundamental contradiction between the first and the second line in the Motion before the House. The first line states:

“The procedure shall follow, so far as practical, procedure in Grand Committee”.


However, the second line states that

“no member may participate unless they have signed up to the Speakers’ List”.

It is stark staring obvious that Members do not need to have signed up to the speakers’ list in order to participate in person. That is not true in the Chamber, nor is it true in Grand Committee. This is a particular issue in respect of Committee stages, which of course is what the Grand Committee largely exists for, although some other debates can take place, because of the give and take in Committee. At the moment, we now have the utter absurdity that in order to intervene after the Minister, if you are in the Chamber, you need to email the clerk who will email the Lord Chairman sitting on the Woolsack, who will then call you. If, as I found once, you do not get your email in fast enough, you cannot be called after the Minister even though you are actually in the Chamber and you can catch the eye of the Lord Chairman. This is palpably absurd. The reason for it is the levelling-down mentality that nothing that cannot be done in the virtual House should be done in the physical House.

We are all trying to make the best of these procedures and I even had some sympathy for that concept when only a handful of Members were participating in the Chamber and it might have been thought unfair that noble Lords who were taking part virtually would not have the same opportunities as those who were present in the House. However, now that we are encouraging Members to come back to the House where they can and we will have Members physically present in the Grand Committee, it seems utterly absurd and contrary to good practice to deprive noble Lords of their rights in the Chamber and in Grand Committee because of the understandable need to bring other noble Lords in remotely.

The Chief Whip cannot change procedures in response to this debate, but I do not think that the arrangements that have been proposed are either correct or sustainable. It is regrettable that they have been replicated in the arrangements being made for the Grand Committee proceedings from September, so I hope that the noble Lord may be able to give us an undertaking that this issue will be considered further—perhaps even before the beginning of September.

On that note, I wish him a happy holiday. I say to him and to the staff of the Clerk of the Parliaments that we are all enormously appreciative of the work that they have done to make the House operate as well as it has over recent months. It is the aim of us all to make it work better and not to take away in any way from the phenomenal contribution that those who have enabled us to continue working during this time of crisis as we have.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, I entirely endorse what the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, just said about my noble friend the Chief Whip and others in the usual channels and elsewhere who have enabled us to function through some extraordinarily difficult times.

However, having said that, I believe that we have to move on. We have to try to get back to as near to normality as possible, as soon as possible. That means encouraging noble Lords in all parts of the House to regard it as the normal thing to be here and the exceptional thing to participate virtually. I must confess that I had never used a computer before. I was determined that I was not going to be excluded from your Lordships’ House, so I made what my noble friend the Chief Whip would probably say were far too many interventions via virtual participation. But I hate it. It is a horrible thing talking into a screen, not being able to see your colleagues and not being able to sense the reaction of the House. We must get back to that and to a self-regulating House as soon as possible.

With these lists, all spontaneity has gone. The Government cannot be held adequately to account because the Minister, whoever he or she may be, can get away with whatever he or she wants. There is not the opportunity to question them save in the very artificial form to which the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, referred in respect of Committee, when you have to send an email and get another email back and then you can ask a question. Some noble Lords, particularly those participating virtually, have abused that system by making a speech that they should have made on the amendment concerned or even at Second Reading. I am glad to see noble Lords on the other side of the House assenting to some of these points, because they are important.

I know that there is a fundamental problem about numbers, which will perhaps remain for a very long time. I therefore put to the House what I have put privately to the Clerk of Parliaments and others: we should give serious consideration to moving the Chamber to the Royal Gallery. In 1983, that happened. The late Manny Shinwell, who had just celebrated his 100th birthday, was nearly killed by a bit of timber falling from the ceiling. Thank God it was not the end of an illustrious career, but, because of that, this Chamber had to be vacated for restoration and, for a time, noble Lords met in the Royal Gallery. As a Member of the other place for nearly 20 years by then, I found this very interesting and in sharp contrast to the war years, when of course—I remembered it because my noble friend Lord Trefgarne was here in 1947 for the first time —the Lords met in the Robing Room. That would be completely impossible, but it would be possible to have more people, physically distanced, in the Royal Gallery. I know that there are problems, but they have been overcome in the past and they should be overcome now. We could have noble Lords sitting on individual seats, or the Benches could be put in and augmented. It could be tiered, as it is for the State Opening of Parliament every year. It is a serious suggestion that I commend to your Lordships for serious consideration.

One or two other things would help edge us back towards normality. We are brilliantly served by our staff in this House, but I find it very sad to go into the Library and find not a single clerk on duty. Surely there could be a rota system—again, I am glad to see noble Lords assenting—because that Library is of fundamental importance to every Member of your Lordships’ House, and there should be clerks on duty so that Members can consult them. I hope that that can be the case, whether we are serving in Grand Committee or on the Floor of the House, when we come back in September.

I have another suggestion which may not command such universal assent. We are brilliantly served by the Clerk of the Parliaments and all the clerks, but, in edging towards normality, although none of them could ever be accused of being anything other than impeccably dressed, it would be nice to see them properly dressed when we come back in September. Again, it would make the place a little more normal and a little more like the House of Lords that we know and most of us love.

I am grateful to my noble friend for introducing this Motion. I wish him success. I wish him a restful and happy summer—no one deserves it more—but when we come back, let there be more of us and let us be functioning in a more normal way.

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, I want to ask my noble friend on the Front Bench to pay particular note to what the noble Lord, Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale, said about travel. He lives in the tropics compared to where some people in Scotland live. I remember that when I was appointed to a committee that sat on a Monday afternoon, I had to give up serving on it because I could not get down from Caithness in time. Indeed, I sat on a Back-Bench committee with the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, which looked at the whole problem of better servicing people who live far away from the Chamber and giving them a fairer opportunity to speak and participate in this House.

I thoroughly agree with what my noble friend Lord Cormack said about the Library. One cannot even use a computer in the Library at the moment; this morning, I came in to do some work and found that I was totally unable to do so.

On voting, I agree with my noble friend Lord Trefgarne. I hope that my noble friend on the Front Bench will give consideration to the idea that, in future, the only people who can vote will be those who are physically here in the Chamber.