House of Lords: Remote Participation and Hybrid Sittings

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Thursday 20th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, it is a very great pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Howe. He has spoken clearly and persuasively and there is hardly anything he said with which I would disagree. I tabled this resolution because a number of colleagues, particularly those who have been attending regularly, have spoken to me and discussed these things. We thought it might be a good idea to have a resolution before your Lordships to give a little more point and purpose to the debate. I reserve the right to divide the House, but I shall listen very carefully indeed—as will others. Whether there will be a Division at the end of this debate or not, I genuinely do not know, but I certainly accept that there is a great deal of good sense in what my noble friend Lord Howe said a few moments ago.

The period since 23 March last year has been one of the most remarkable in our long parliamentary history. To those who made possible first the virtual and then the hybrid House, we all owe a great deal, as my noble friend said. As someone new to the technology, I would like to add a very personal thank you to the digital support team, who have been truly remarkable in the 24/7 service that they have offered. It would be very easy to be seduced into the comfortable way forward: to continue to speak from our homes and even to vote from our beds, as I understand some have done. It would be easy, but it would be wrong—emphatically wrong—for the House we have at the moment is one dimensional. As the Constitution Committee has made plain in its latest valuable report, the first of this Session, there is no opportunity for spontaneity or intervention and no real opportunity for human contact between colleagues, without which no institution can work effectively.

Parliament, and that means both Houses, must be at the centre of any thriving democracy. Good governance means that the Government must be held effectively to account, both formally in the Chamber, in committee and, as my noble friend touched on, informally, in conversation and personal meetings. One of the great deficiencies of the present system is that statutory instruments pile up—the Constitution Committee referred to this in its report—leading to retrospective legislation and to confusing the public by blurring the difference between legislation and guidance. That is thoroughly undesirable. As my noble friend also touched on, debates without opportunity for challenge and intervention become a series of written statements, delivered without any reference to others. They are a series of personal utterances, not a debate; there is no cut and thrust. There is not even the opportunity to know how what one is saying is going down with one’s colleagues. As for the voting system, it is far too easy and remote in every way.

Our Constitution Committee is wise to say that we will need to assess our former normal working methods, but I agree emphatically with my noble friend: first of all, we need to get back to those methods. After all, a significant number of Peers have had little or no experience of our normal methods: those who have been ennobled in the last two years. Some have had no experience whatever of our normal working day. I believe that we need to get back to where we were in mid-March 2020 before assessing what, if any, changes should be made to the working of our self-regulating House. The only practice that we should maintain is that of allowing distant witnesses to appear remotely when giving evidence, but before a proper committee, assembled in a proper Committee Room.

The Commons, we are told, will return on 22 June. The longer after that that we delay the move, the more irrelevant this House will become. Ideally, the changes should be concurrent in both Houses, but I put 6 September as the latest possible date in case there is a general wish to take just a little longer in your Lordships’ House. I hope that there will not be, but it would have the added advantage of making sure that everyone was able to have a vaccination.

Before I finish, I want to give a warning. When we decamp during restoration and renewal, we must not look at the virtual and hybrid House as something we should return to. That would be totally wrong. We would merely deserve the riposte that, if that is the case, what point and purpose is there in a second Chamber? If those greybeards cannot transmit their wisdom other than via Zoom, would the nation not be better served by another television channel? We need to be here—or wherever Parliament is sitting—or we will become an irrelevance, tweeting and twittering into the twilight.

I have just been reading the diary of Alan Don, who was rector of St Margaret’s and subdean during the war years; I commend it to your Lordships. He talks about this House and the other place sitting in Church House, the Robing Room and the Royal Gallery, and the Commons moving here, but meeting all the time during the Second World War—never, never giving up. This has been a very difficult period, but it has been nowhere near as difficult as the Second World War, when the bombs were falling on both Houses. If they could do it then, we can and should do it now.