High Speed Rail (London–West Midlands) Bill

Lord Elton Excerpts

Thursday 8th May 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, I will intervene very briefly. I continually argued in the Commons, when I was involved in the usual channels, that we needed to find a different procedure for this sort of highly technical and potentially extremely lengthy Bill, which involves and engages a small number of Members for an inordinate amount of time. It is not quite so bad in this House, because we do not have representational responsibilities in the way that Members in the Commons do, but it is an arcane procedure. I tried to get the clerks and the legal people in the other place to think about this much more.

This is now the most significant—and will be the longest and most technical and difficult—Bill that either House will have seen for many a long year, and I wonder whether the Government have thought of any other procedures or ways of dealing with it. It puts Members in a really difficult position, too, because of interests such as whether they travel on the train and whether they have ever met the owners of the track, the trains or whatever. It is an incredibly difficult procedure to get Members involved in and it really is about time.

While I am on my feet, I am bewildered why the business of the House is not organised more effectively more regularly. When I used to have weekly meetings in the Commons with my noble friend Lord Grocott, who has just left the Chamber, he used to be absolutely clear with me about what we could and could not do so that Members knew when they would be here and when they would not. I suspect that if we as a Government had changed the Queen’s Speech at the last moment, the then Opposition would have gone berserk. We really need a bit more organisation in the way that the business of this House is conducted.

[Lord Elton (Con)]

This may be a matter for the Procedure Committee in the long term but we have an immediate issue. I remind the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, that the objectors to the Bill and those who have an interest do not wish to be summoned twice to repeat their evidence. There is a very pressing argument in that respect for carrying forward at this stage.

[Baroness Kramer]

My Lords, we are dealing with a Bill that is already in the other place. This is a standard Commons practice for hybrid Bills, because they are, as other noble Lords have said, so much longer and so much more complex than a typical public Bill. To give your Lordships reassurance that there is precedent for much of this, the Channel Tunnel Rail Link Bill was carried over two Prorogations and the Crossrail Bill was carried over two Prorogations and a Dissolution for a general election.

We face a Prorogation, which most of us expect quite shortly, so it is important, as the Bill is in the Commons, that we have a carryover in place. We also, for the first time, know when the next general election will occur because we have a fixed-term Parliament. We are in a position now to be able to do the carryover, as the Commons has done, to cover that known event at the same time. As other noble Lords have said, this is actually rather important, especially for the petitioners, because it gives them comfort and the knowledge that they will not have to resubmit the evidence that they have worked hard to pull together to present their case, as is entirely appropriate.

I hope the House will understand that this is a formal procedure; that the equivalent procedure has already passed in the Commons; and that it is particularly of assistance to people who wish to petition—I think all of us wish to give them the maximum support that we can. However, it does follow precedent, and the particular feature of a fixed-term Parliament gives us the capacity to provide additional certainty that we might not have been able to without a fixed-term Parliament. So I hope very much that the House will provide its support.