House of Lords: Working Practices

Lord Desai Excerpts

Monday 27th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, first, I join many others in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad, on producing an excellent report. Having said that, I am going to disagree with it—but only with one aspect of it, about which I care passionately. I shall disagree with paragraphs 29 to 42, which relate to Question Time and the Speaker’s powers in the Chamber. I was a member of the Speaker's Committee when we were first asked to formulate the duties of the Speaker. I think it was understood among the members of all different parties—the noble Lord the Leader of the House was a member of it—that if we were going to preserve self-regulation, we could really have only a Speaker with minimal duties in the Chamber.

Unlike many noble Lords, I am not distressed that occasionally at Question Time we have a bit of a kerfuffle. What has happened is that, first, in the past year we have had many new Members who are eager to make a contribution, which is a perfectly good thing. Question Time is more crowded than I remember in my 20 years here. Secondly, there is a structural problem. The coalition is a new thing and because it is new to the coalition itself, not only to the rest of us, it did not quite make up its mind whether it was one party or two. When it comes to holding the balance between different groups about who gets a turn, it is a difficult thing for the Government Front Bench because within those behind them there are two views on whether they are two parties or one. We on this side very much wanted to enforce the idea that it was only one party so that each time a noble Lord opposite got a chance, we had to have a go—as, of course, did the Bishops and the Cross Benches. I think things will settle down.

As I have not come from the House of Commons, I am not at all enamoured of its culture in this matter. I very much appreciated what the noble Lord, Lord Martin, said with his experience as Mr Speaker but I do not want us to get into that culture at all because what will happen is that there will suddenly be 10 people standing up to attract the attention of the Speaker. It is like a Mexican wave in the House of Commons; every time something happens, 15 people get up. I do not know why they do. What do they mean to accomplish by that?

There have been difficult times for the House but, usually, the noble Baroness who is the Chief Whip or the Leader of the House have managed to calm nerves down and we have had business done. I am not one of those people who want to hurry us, even gently, towards having a more powerful Speaker within the Chamber. If we do that and adopt the recommendation of the Goodlad committee, I very much hope that after the one year of experiment we are given a genuine option to reject. We should not blindly go on renewing something like that because that way lies the thin end of the wedge, and very soon we would have the Speaker intervening in Statements and debates and so on.

Self-regulation can be preserved. During the debates on the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill, the House got into a very bad mood about filibustering and this and that but then it came back from the brink and re-established itself as a self-regulating Chamber. I very much hope that we trust the House to do its thing. We hope that the newly arrived Peers will get a bit more mentoring and that we will all get better manners and calm ourselves down. I hope that we do not begin to lose self-regulation and boost up the Speaker. I can see noble Lords shaking their heads because they come from another place and they want to bring that old heaven on earth here, but I say no. I have lived on this flat earth and I want to go on living on it for a long time.