House of Lords: Working Practices

Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope Excerpts

Thursday 1st November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hughes of Woodside. I enjoyed his speech. I agree with him on two things. Certainly, the role and functions that we invite the Lord Speaker to oversee and moderate need urgent reconsideration. I do not have time to develop that point but I believe that the Lord Speaker, whoever it may be—it is an elected position for which we can all vote—should have the overriding responsibility to protect the institutional reputation of this House because in my view no one else holds that position at the moment. No one else exclusively looks after the interests of the wider concept of the House of Lords and its Members. The Chairman of Committees and the Leader of the House have other overriding priorities. That is something we need to address.

I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, has just left as I was about to say something nice about him. I do not believe what I read about him in the papers. He is correct that we should take this opportunity to make a suggestion to the Leader of the House. It may seem quite soon to do so given the recent work carried out by the Leader’s Group. I commend those Members who performed that extremely valuable service for the House. People forget that we now have a planning date. It might not hold because politics is never certain but we have until May 2015. After that, things will change as we enter a new Parliament. We should use that time sensibly to plan what we want to happen in the new Parliament when it starts in 2015. The vexed question of elections is off the agenda for that period.

I pick up a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, who referred to the importance of piloting change. I am an enthusiast for change and I think that there is a majority for change. However, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds rightly said, we want to make sure that it is incremental. I think that we should pilot it. I absolutely agree with him that to give comfort to those who are nervous—one or two colleagues have made perfectly valid and powerful speeches about hastening slowly—we should adopt as a matter of course piloting of any change that we introduce into this place. That would give comfort to some and would mean that we could try things and if they did not work we could revert to our previous practices. This is a very important debate and a very important time. We must not waste the next two years.

I have a suggestion for the usual channels, which have more influence in this area than they often imagine. As a Back-Bencher, I think that we need to try to open up the usual channels and make them a little bit more accessible, as someone said earlier. After my participation in the most recent major piece of legislation in which I have been involved, the Welfare Reform Bill, it occurred to me that three or four of the active participants in that process could have sat down with both sets of Whips and held a debriefing on our experience of the legislation. The seminars promoted by the Minister were very valuable. The Committee stage of the Bill was held upstairs, which I thought was extremely good although it had been a controversial question. A lot of the Commons clauses had not been debated when they arrived in this House and the use of financial privilege as a way of rejecting House of Lords amendments was unconscionable. Earlier, we heard that we needed to look at secondary legislation again because we cannot amend it. It needs to be more flexible. Therefore, perhaps we should have a sweeping-up process so that we can share experience on that.

As chairman of the Information Committee I believe that we need to make more use of information and communications technology in order to help our processes and improve the service offered to Members of this House. There are advantages and cost savings to be made in that direction. I hope that the Leader will bear that in mind as well.