Procedure Committee
Debate between Lord Howell of Guildford and Lord Berkeley
Lord Berkeley (Lab)
My Lords, my noble friends have made some very interesting comments on this report. I join in congratulating the Senior Deputy Speaker on what he has achieved. One other thing we possibly ought to look at, given the fact that there may be two or three more hybrid Bills coming on HS2 and maybe other projects in future, is whether in certain circumstances there should be Joint Committees of both Houses, which would save quite a lot of reading time for MPs and your Lordships. More radically, we should consider using the same procedure used for building motorways these days through the Infrastructure Planning Commission—I think it is called that—and build railways that way. Railways are built with hybrid Bills for historical reasons—there were no motorways when the railways started and everything had to go through both Houses. It is a bit ironical that a motorway can be built using one procedure and a railway can be built using another. Maybe it is time to start looking at them both to see whether there are benefits in doing them all one way or the other.
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
My Lords, I take the opportunity to very strongly reinforce the words of the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, who put very clearly the point that there are a vacuous and ignorant few outside the House for whom the only measure of activity is what goes on in and is spoken in this Chamber. The noble Lord is entirely right. A vast amount of work goes on not merely in parliamentary and sessional committees but in all-party groups and less formal groups connected to the outside, such as charities. This aspect of what the House of Lords does has so far not reached most of the media. It is time that we reinforce this message powerfully to get over the truth of what we really do.