Procedure Committee

Lord Grocott Excerpts

Tuesday 21st May 2019 Lords Chamber

[The Senior Deputy Speaker]

In case noble Lords did not get that, I repeat: the new clocks will flash when speaking time limits, both formal and advisory, are reached.

The fourth section of the report recommends that the trial of attaching explanatory statements to amendments should be rolled out to all Bills from the start of the next Session. We hope this will be welcome news to the many Members and others who gave positive feedback about the trial.

The fifth section relates to dinner and lunch break business. The current rules do not allow the flexibility for dinner or lunch break business to be taken around the time intended every day. These recommendations allow the House to take the business at the time expected notwithstanding the progress of other business.

The sixth section relates to Oral Question tabling time on days when the House sits in the morning, and recommends that the deadline for tabling Oral Questions on such days should be moved from 2 pm to 10.30 am. Priority will continue to be given to those who attend in person, as on other days.

The final section of our report relates to procedural changes resulting from the extended parliamentary Session. Now that the Session looks likely to extend beyond two years, we recommend that the limits per Member on the number of Oral Questions, balloted topical Oral Questions, balloted debates and topical Questions for Short Debate should be reset on 1 June, and that the usual arrangements for Thursday debates should run from the first sitting Thursday in June to the end of the current Session. I beg to move.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, I am one of those who strongly welcome what has been said on the powers of the Lord Speaker. It is two years since we had a debate on precisely this subject; 12 people spoke in that debate and 10, in one way or another, said that it was important to enhance the role of the Lord Speaker in the operation of the procedures in this Chamber. As the Senior Deputy Speaker has already said, the main reason most people advanced this was that it is bizarre to anyone sitting in the Gallery to see a stately procession with presumably quite an important figure walking into the Chamber each day, arriving on the Woolsack and then—unless someone has died or left the House—proceeding to do absolutely nothing other than look decorative. Added to this, there is the situation, which seems absurd to me, in which in a Chamber of 800 Members, the only Member not allowed to speak during Question Time is the Speaker.