House of Lords: Questions

Lord Hunt of Chesterton Excerpts

Monday 9th November 2015 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton]

To ask the Leader of the House what plans she has to change the arrangements for the tabling of parliamentary questions to give priority to those who ask few questions, so that more members of the House can ask questions.

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton (Lab)]

Parliamentary Questions are an essential and valuable part of parliamentary procedure. They probe the Government and hold them to account. However, what is not in the official version is that these Questions have a much broader role in this House and in the other place. They also enable the Government to respond by querying the possible policies of the Opposition, as we have been seeing recently, although this is generally done politely and discreetly. I have also found that parliamentary Questions enable Peers to learn about the concerns, experiences and knowledge of other noble Lords. It is not clear whether they can be asked about constitutional or procedural issues. I was not allowed to ask one for clarification on the Pepper v Hart rule, which is an arcane but important part of our procedure. However, Questions are part of the glue which binds our Chamber together.

This is now a topical issue: with the House expanding as rapidly as it is, we need to think about PQs. If we accept this broader point of view, we could look at the procedures of the House for selecting Questions. We should review our procedures to encourage more noble Lords to ask Oral and Written Questions. I am grateful to the House of Lords Library research services for some statistics. During 2014-15, the 444 lead oral Questions were asked by only 181 noble Lords, who asked at least one each. Given that there are 760 to 790 eligible Members, nearly 600 therefore did not ask a Question. However, about 314 asked Written Questions, so some 100 asked Written Questions but not oral ones. The media criticism of the House of Lords, which is justified only to a limited extent, is that many Members are not sufficiently visible. Since it is a great honour to be in this House, the view from the outside is that people should be seen. When I joined this House, some people said they looked forward to watching television and seeing a person they knew perform. Even my colleagues in the United States asked what I was doing and why I was not performing more often. That is a slightly trivial remark but it is part of what is being discussed.

The procedure for Oral Questions is that they are tabled up to four weeks before they are asked. They have to be accepted by the Table Office and improved. I do not make any criticism of the Table Office—it is helpful and often makes good suggestions about how Questions should be written—but we need to find a way in which more Questions can be asked by the non-askers. One way, perhaps, is that the non-askers and the people who ask very seldom, should be given priority. That is not the case at the moment.

Members, of course, can ask one Oral PQ and a Topical Question if chosen. The staff of the Opposition and the Government offices help their Members to promote questions. This facility is not as available to Peers from other parts of the House. The maximum number of questions is up to seven Oral Questions/PQs per year. It is a theoretical maximum because few people get up to that level. When Questions are asked, priority is given to Members who apply in person, which is reasonable, but they can also be asked by phone and email. That needs to be well understood.

Topical Questions are an important part of our procedures and are normally the fourth Question asked on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. From my experience, the Table Office operates some selectivity in suggesting what constitutes a Topical Question. There is a tendency to see Topical Questions as the kind liked by the more popular parts of the media—questions not necessarily about boring, serious events such as critical meetings of international bodies, which may well be rather more important.

What is the result of the procedure that we have? I will not go through the whole list, but 85 Peers asked one question per year; 21 asked three questions; and five asked seven questions.

It is interesting to note whether there is any correlation with the number of years that someone has been in the House. The total number of lead Parliamentary Questions from people who have been here from nought to 10 years, and 10 to 20 years, is about the same, so there is no dropping off. That is rather encouraging. However, beyond 20 years and up to 50 years, the statistics, not surprisingly, show some falling away. Nevertheless, there are finite numbers even after so many years.

The few points I have made need to be considered. I suggest that the arrangements be reviewed in order to enable greater involvement of Peers and more issues to be covered. One way to perhaps do that is to have a survey of Peers, something I have not seen since I have been here.

[Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen (Con)]

My Lords, as this is last business, each Back-Bench Peer has up to 10 minutes to speak rather than seven—except for the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, who is speaking in the gap, who has only four minutes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Earl Howe]

I am quite sure that that is a very good general point to make. I am not at all sure that new Members of the House receive enough guidance when they arrive—on a variety of issues, this being one of them.

My noble friend Lord Trefgarne favoured introducing a slot for a fifth Oral Question. As other noble Lords pointed out, that was trialled in the past—I think it was in 2002 to 2004—but not taken forward after that. It was also not supported in the Procedure Committee when its revival was proposed in the last Parliament. I agree with my noble friend Lord Attlee that, rather than adding to our proceedings, the perception was that a fifth Question tended to switch people off, and that the energy and momentum of Question Time, which I think we all appreciate, rather dwindled as a result.

Another point to be made here is that we now often have Urgent Question repeats taken in the slot immediately after Questions. I would be surprised if the House wanted effectively to take six Questions before starting on the day’s business. For similar reasons—and I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, on this—I would not support extending Question Time to 40 minutes.

My noble friend Lord Trefgarne raised some issues about Private Notice Questions. As my noble friend knows, the system for PNQs has been considered several times without any changes being agreed. I certainly believe that there is a case for bringing forward the deadline by which decisions about PNQs are made. However, I am not sure that there is wide-ranging support for changing the decision-making approach as such, although I know that my noble friend is trying to put this forward for the Procedure Committee’s consideration. The key point here is that the decision on whether to grant a PNQ is one for the Lord Speaker. The Government provide the policy background to assist the Lord Speaker but do not have a say as to whether the PNQ is allowed—and that presupposes that the PNQ relates to a matter of government responsibility. The Companion states:

“The decision … rests with the Lord Speaker, after consultation”.

My noble friend Lord Trefgarne also raised the possibility of having Oral Questions on a Friday. We sit for only around five hours on a Friday if we are to rise at 3 pm, which is generally the time when noble Lords are keen to make tracks homeward. Fridays are a particularly valuable time for noble Lords to discuss Private Members’ Bills and, although it is worth a discussion, I am not convinced that people would want the time to be taken up by Oral Questions.

My noble friend Lord Sherbourne came up with the interesting idea of a countdown approach, with eight minutes per Question. Maybe it should be seven and a half minutes, if we are not to exceed the 30 minutes in total. I was very struck by that idea. The Clock already indicates the time taken during Oral Questions and the current system allows some flexibility in the lengths of those Questions, some of which run short of eight minutes as well as running over the seven minutes. My personal view is that there are some merit in the existing system over the one that my noble friend suggested, because it has flexibility built into it. We have to allow some measure of flexibility. It is always difficult for the Clerk of the Parliaments to judge this but in general he does it very well indeed.

The noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, proposed a general review. I am not personally averse to that idea, although we have reviewed the whole system of Oral Questions in a series of forums, including the Leader’s Group at the start of the last Parliament and in the Procedure Committee on repeated occasions in the course of that Parliament. We have also had several votes on aspects of Questions: for example the issue around reading out Questions in full. I would very much welcome a general conversation about this. I am not sure we need to go as far as having a formal, full review. We have had a number of good ideas put forward this evening and we could encapsulate those in a general conversation of the kind that I am proposing.

My noble friend Lord Trefgarne, the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, with whose points I very much agreed on this subject, bemoaned the tendency for supplementary questions to be over-lengthy. The Companion is very clear about this, stating:

“Supplementary questions … should be short and confined to not more than two points”,

and where they are not, the House should make its views heard. Again, I received with sympathy the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, that the Leader and Deputy Leader should perhaps be more proactive in the way that we guide the House on this issue. We can only urge noble Lords to respect the guidance in the Companion but, again, there may well be greater scope for new Peers to have this point impressed more firmly upon them. For that matter, Ministers’ replies to supplementaries should also be short and crisp.

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton]

Does the Minister not think that some survey of all the many tens of new Peers who have come would be a good idea? How else is he going to find out this information? There is a small group of people here. People may write in or read Hansard, but some signal needs to be given that we really want to hear what all the new people joining the House of Lords think about this.

[Earl Howe]

Yes, I am sure that that idea deserves full consideration. I think we would all agree that it is getting to a stage where we must impress on all Members of the House, not just the new arrivals, that we have rules which are here for a purpose and have been carefully thought through over the years—and that it is in all our interests to adhere to them.