Procedure of the House (Proposal 1)

Lord Grenfell Excerpts

Tuesday 8th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lloyd of Berwick]

We considered this question at very great length when we had the Select Committee on the Speakership of the House six years ago. My view then was, and still is, that intervention at Question Time is a job for the Leader of the House as leader of the whole House and not as a member of the Government. If the Leader is not present, then it would be a job for the Deputy Leader of the House as deputy leader of the whole House. It was never my view that it was a job for the government Front Bench and therefore I do not understand the terms of Proposal 1, which refers to the job being,

“currently performed by the Leader of the House or Government front bench”.

That is not the job that we conferred on the Leader of the House six years ago. To insert “Government front bench” at that point in the proposal seems either to beg the question or, at any rate, to muddy the waters.

The question for the House is quite simply this: have the present Leader of the House and his predecessors on this side of the House impartially performed the function that they were then given during the past six years? I believe that they have. My only criticism, if I may say so, of the present Leader of the House is that when everybody is shouting together to get in, he does not intervene quickly enough. It is very important that he should intervene as quickly as he can when that situation arises. If in future he does intervene quickly, I see no possible advantage in transferring the job from the Leader of the whole House to the Speaker and I see many disadvantages, some of which have already been mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham. Inevitably it will, in the end, lead to a loss of self-regulation.

[Lord Grenfell]

My Lords, I am not particularly happy with this proposal and never have been. My views have been somewhat confirmed by what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick, has just said. However, I wish to take up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Geddes, who has several times in recent times referred to the “slippery slope”. I simply do not buy this argument about the slippery slope for the following reason: in a properly self-regulated House, the House does not need to go anywhere it does not want to go. It has the power to say, “This far and no further”. Whatever changes might be made, they do not automatically mean that we are living in fear of a slide down a slippery slope because they can always be stopped.

My second point is that I am not very keen on trial periods. The trouble with a trial period is that the determination of whether that trial period has yielded positive or negative results is very difficult to judge and can be extremely contentious because we do not have clear criteria about how we judge whether they have been positive or negative. Making that determination could simply cause more problems for the House.

On the whole, I feel that the House works well enough with the system it has, provided, as the noble and learned Lord said, the Leader of the House and others on Front Benches take the responsibility necessary to make it work. If they do not, then you are inviting a tsunami of requests for some sort of reform which would probably in the end destroy the self-regulation of the House.

[Baroness Boothroyd]

My Lords, I intend to support the proposal before us this afternoon. I am in a great minority of one in believing that this House is self-regulating. I have not found that to be so. I have found it alien to me that a member of a political party who sits on the government Front Bench, whichever party may be in power, as a Minister of the Crown intervenes, interferes and determines which group in this House should be next to put the question. That is not a decision for a Minister of the Crown—a political animal, if I may put it like that—to take. To me that is for the judgment of an independent body, and that is the Lord Speaker, in whom we all have confidence. We would abide by the decisions of that Lord Speaker. I would therefore like to see this for a trial period, and I favour the proposition that is before us this afternoon.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

The noble Lord opposite says, “Rubbish!”, but some of us, including the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd, watch what is happening on the government Front Bench during Question Time. The noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, very effectively seeks to have some influence on what is going on in the Chamber and often talks among her colleagues on the Front Bench as to who should be called. We are pointed to by Ministers on the government Front Bench, almost inviting us or identifying us to intervene during the course of the debate.

[Lord Grenfell]

This may be a hypothetical question, but it comes to my mind. When the noble Lord says that it should not be in the gift of the Leader of the House because of the political implications, would we now be granting those powers to the Woolsack if we still had a Lord Chancellor—because he was a political figure, too?

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

We do not have a Lord Chancellor; we now have an independent Lord Speaker. I am arguing that we should take that role away from the political and give it to the independent Chair of our proceedings, thereby enabling early intervention in a House which, during Question Time, is often unruly, and which has led to public criticism when people see adults on television standing screaming, shouting and bawling at each other across the Floor of the House. Anyone in this House who can claim that that is a dignified spectacle misunderstands what is expected of this House.