Liaison Committee

Lord Forsyth of Drumlean Excerpts

Thursday 21st March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Marlesford]

My Lords, I support what the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, said. I would take an approach totally different from that which the Liaison Committee seems to have taken. The House of Lords exists; it has just survived a major onslaught and an attempt to dismantle it. For the moment, we are here. It is an incredibly valuable and low-cost outfit, and it is mad not to maximise its capability to do committee work. The constraint should be the availability of Members of the House of Lords to do that work, not some cash-limit approach. We have something that is extremely valuable, and the committee should take a totally different approach on maximising the output of the House of Lords in the national interest.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

My Lords, I am very happy to sit at the feet of the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, when it comes to having lots to say. I have two short questions for the Chairman of Committees. I wrote to him suggesting that we had a foreign affairs committee. In a global world where we have to make progress outside the European Community from an economic point of view, it seems extraordinary that we do not have such a committee. I understand the reasons for constraint on resources, but can he explain why it costs £225,000 to run a Select Committee of this House? Where does the money go?

[Lord Spicer]

My Lords, one piece of evidence in favour of the proposition of the noble Lord, Lord Jopling, is the very high proportion of Questions asked on foreign affairs—which is almost as high as the proportions of those asked on old age and health.

--- Later in debate ---

The noble Lord, Lord Filkin, raised the very real problem of how you follow up once a Select Committee has reported. That is of significant importance, because clearly we would hope that the topics for the ad hoc committees in particular are selected because they are of sufficient importance to lead right the way through, from examination to the formulation of an approach, to implementation and to how far the work of the Select Committee has influenced the development of policy and the activities of government. You cannot just stop it dead once the report is in. However, a number of significant problems have to be sorted out before we can do that. One is that a Select Committee cannot sit quasi for ever, saying, “Well, we haven’t quite got that bit sorted out, and we need to do more work on that”. This is a real problem. The committee is meeting on 11 June, and at that meeting we can at least start to think about how we can address that issue.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

I return to the question of cost. If the cost was an average figure that was arrived at by taking the number of committees and dividing the cost, and if the argument against having a foreign affairs committee is one of cost, presumably the soft power committee will cost the same as the foreign affairs committee, on the basis of the numbers that the Chairman of Committees has produced.