House of Lords: Working Practices

Lord Grocott Excerpts

Monday 27th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grocott]

My Lords, as a member of the committee, I must say that I have been enormously encouraged, as I guess other members of the committee have been, by the friendly and positive remarks that have been made about it so far. We were quite a diverse group but we produced a unanimous report, which was important, and we are clearly getting quite a lot of support here today. The fact that our report was unanimous was in no small measure due to our chairman, Lord Goodlad. There are not too many laughs around when you discuss parliamentary procedure, but if there were any, Lord Goodlad normally managed to find one.

I shall confine myself to three or four points that come under the broad heading of making this House more user-friendly. By that I mean user-friendly to the public, to the people we serve and to the people who work here and who help us do our job, and that includes of course the staff who serve us. Number one is the enhanced role of the Speaker. Well, no; the language is wrong there. It is not an enhanced role as such; the role currently fulfilled by the government Front Bench is being transferred to the Speaker. This does, I suppose, enhance the role of the Speaker, but it does not give any more powers—it is very important to note that. This is long overdue and I appeal to anyone who doubts this to please watch a recording—I obviously have not seen it, because it will not have been produced yet—of the first Question at Question Time today. There can be no more serious issue for this House to be exchanging its views on than disability hate crime. There is wide experience across the House—indeed, people we know have personal experience of the subject—and there is a shouting match to get involved. Really, the role must go to the person in the position of every other chairman in every other body, worldwide and historically: the person in the middle who can see the whole Chamber. It is ridiculous, frankly, that it lies anywhere else.

The other aspect of user-friendliness is something which, if I may say so, I feel particularly proprietorial about. The report, in paragraph 38, insists on—or reminds the Government about the importance of—our target rising times. No Government have a perfect record—I am quite sure that figures could be found to show that the previous Government did not do wonderfully well—but we are supposed to finish at 10 pm. I doubt whether we will finish at 10 pm tonight and it is the Leader’s report that we are discussing. There has to be some irony there somewhere. It is the Leader’s responsibility, ultimately, to ensure that the rising times are met—as well as that of the House as a whole. A debate with 44 speakers, which has been known about for some time, was scheduled following Question Time and a Statement that we knew would have to be taken today on the report on the Brussels summit, so we knew we would be short of time today. I simply implore the leadership, the Leader of the House and his colleagues, not to put the clock back on that. It was hard enough getting target rising times in this House.

That also applies to giving the House firm recess dates. That was almost won through blood, as was matching, normally, the recess dates for the Commons. Since we are a bicameral legislature, we should both sit at the same time. Obviously not precisely, but broadly speaking, that should be the case. It was extraordinarily difficult to reach that position and I fear that we are slipping very badly on that. There is not much excuse. I am not going to criticise the Government, because these issues are always very difficult and no Government are perfect, but this Government have a two-year Session. That is a world record—certainly a parliamentary record since World War II—and we should not be sitting late a year before the end of a Session. We have late sittings towards the end of a Session because Bills are jammed, but, please, let us start respecting again—this requires no change of procedure—the target rising times that are laid out in the Companion and the deal about recess dates. I was flooded with gratitude—I am not exaggerating, I really had no end of gratitude from the staff who serve us—when I, or rather the previous Government, initiated the business of announcing recess dates in advance. People are entitled to book their holidays. We can be flexible—we have the enormous honour of being here—but the staff are entitled to know and we should reinforce that.

The final thing about user-friendliness that I want to mention again relates to the public. It should not really be necessary to argue this too much because we could do it ourselves, but I must mention the arcane and only randomly used different titles that we give to one another. I cannot remember half of them myself, but I know that almost the first thing one is told when one arrives in this place is to make absolutely certain that one knows the difference between “gallant” and “learned” and all the rest of it. Well, I roughly do, but I routinely ignore it. I was advised to do so by one of the great parliamentarians of this House—indeed, of any House, in my view—Andrew McIntosh, who said he would never refer, for example, to “the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad”. He did not say that personally, but he would simply refer to “Lord Goodlad”, as I did at the start of this contribution. The heavens did not fall in; I did not hear anyone shout, “Order, order”.

I do not refer to “the other place”; I refer to the House of Commons. What a revolutionary concept: the House of Commons. I say simply that this is only a trivial change, not a big change. We could do it tomorrow. Why not start today, in this debate, and see what happens? Within a very short time we would all wonder why on earth we troubled ourselves with that kind of thing in the past. Just call people by their names. You can inject all sorts of emotions into a simple referral of the name, whether you approved or disapproved of what has been said, or found it boring, but let us stick to the names. Those are my observations, but I say finally: let us do it quickly, because none of these procedures could possibly survive the introduction of a fully directly elected House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Strathclyde]

I hope they will not be, but it would be for the Chairman of Committees to answer those kinds of questions. I am not sure that I would answer in terms of my own responsibilities, as business management is done by the Chief Whips, but that is another idea that could be looked at.

Some noble Lords have welcomed the idea of getting rid of the second Statement and putting it into a Moses Room. There is some merit in that.

On the question of Grand Committees, morning sittings have not found a great deal of favour—they are quite controversial. The noble Lord, Lord Gordon of Strathblane, made the suggestion of having them at night. I think that is a rather good idea. If we are going to have Grand Committees, there is no reason why they should not sit until 9 or 10 pm. The Procedure Committee can look at that suggestion, which is something that is very good that has come out of the debate.

The noble Lord, Lord Brooke, said that I had been opposed to Grand Committees when they were much extended by my very eminent predecessor, Lord Williams of Mostyn. He was right about that, but I conceded the point when we introduced the 10 pm cut-off because I realised that you could not have both: you could not have no Grand Committees and a 10 pm cut-off—the one forces the other. Prior to that change, we regularly sat in Committee at midnight or 1 am, and Lord Williams of Mostyn rightly made the point that we should not make legislation at that time, as 10 pm is late enough. I agree that, if we are going to have the 10 pm cut-off, then we have to have business off the Floor of the House. As more Peers wish to play a part in the business of the House, it means more Bills have to go off the Floor of the House. The House of Lords cannot pride itself on revision and then not actually get enough done to maintain its very excellent reputation.

The noble Lord, Lord Grocott, highlighted the issue—I wrote “Shameless!” on my piece of paper—of the 10 pm closing time. Having been a government Chief Whip, which is a very eminent post in this House, he knows as well as I do that the Opposition decide the times of Bills. There is a recommendation in the report that the government Chief Whip should stand up at the beginning of business to explain why we are going to sit beyond 10 pm, but it should, of course, be the opposition Chief Whip who should stand up at 10 pm to explain to the House why they have spent so much time on an amendment. However, we shall fight that one out on the Procedure Committee.

[Lord Grocott]

On the word “Shameless”, the reason why the House sits longer than it needs to is because of the size of the Government’s legislative programme. No one could sensibly suggest that in one short year you should, for example, have two major constitutional Bills and one huge constitutional proposal without having any effect on the capacity of the House to legislate. What the Leader needs to do—let us have a private conversation about this—is occasionally to suggest to his Cabinet colleagues that maybe one or two of them could possibly postpone one of their Bills until the next Session, and then we would not need to have all these late night sittings.

[Lord Strathclyde]

My Lords, I very much look forward to that private conversation. I can assure the noble Lord that, as a Government, we are not moving any faster than previous Governments have done.

There are so many aspects to the issue of self-regulation, but I was very much impressed by what the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Birmingham said. He observed that self-discipline is the corollary of self-regulation, which is at the heart of everything that we try to do. We have too many lengthy speeches, too many interventions, too many amendments at Third Reading and too many speeches on Bill do now pass. The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, had it right that we break the rules far more than we stick to them. Part of that is lack of knowledge; part of it is that people think that they can get away with it—but that was mentioned by so many noble Lords.

My noble friends Lord MacGregor of Pulham Market and Lord Jenkin, the noble Baronesses, Lady Prashar, Lady Hamwee, Lady Murphy, the noble Lord, Lord Butler, and so many others talked about pre and post-legislative scrutiny. We all want it. This Government’s record so far has been good, given that we are into only the second year of office—I mentioned that when I opened the debate. I am very keen on post-legislative scrutiny, partly because, after 13 years of Labour Government, there seem to be so many opportunities to go back and have a look at what was done in our name and whether it was right.

I was very interested in what the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, said about an expert committee on post-legislative scrutiny as opposed to an ad hoc committee. I have leant towards an ad hoc committee because I want experts to be involved—for example, charities to look at the Charities Act or experts on gambling, I suppose, to look at the Gambling Act. The noble Lord, Lord Bichard, and others have taken a slightly different view, which needs further consideration.

Another big issue in the debate was the legislative standards committee. It was mentioned by, among others, the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, my noble friend Lord Maclennan and the noble Baroness, Lady Royall. I think that I know what the fundamental problem is here. It was my noble friend Lady Tyler of Enfield who said that we should have less and better drafted legislation. I agree with her; I have thought that for a long time. I have not quite got to the bottom of why that does not happen, because people want it and it makes perfectly good sense. The previous Government wanted to do it and failed. We, too, want to do it and I accept that we have not got it quite as right as we would have liked. I have been ambitious in this and it has not quite worked.

A legislative standards committee needs further investigation. I do not give the idea full marks, although I give its underlying intention full marks. Why is that? Well, I listened with interest to what noble Lords said about it. There is a tension between the House’s role as a revising Chamber, which many noble Lords have stressed today, and the idea that one of its committees, composed of a small group of Members, should have the right to “block”—the term of my noble friend Lord Maclennan—the progress of a government Bill. The idea that the Government need to present a business case for their legislation calls into question the basic constitutional principle that a Government with a majority in the House of Commons can expect to have their programme considered by Parliament. It would be a bit odd to have a group in the House of Lords which said, “Well, actually, we don’t like the way this has been drafted”. Presumably, it is not about policy; it is about how it all hangs together and whether a Bill is a skeleton Bill.