House of Lords: Working Practices

Lord Martin of Springburn Excerpts

Monday 27th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Martin of Springburn]

My Lords, I very much enjoyed listening to the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson—she was very interesting. I congratulate the chairman, the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad, and the committee. It is a first-class report.

The noble Lady, Lady Saltoun, made a good point. She is quite right. When someone uses the term “you”—the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, is here and was the Deputy Speaker, and I wish I had a penny for every time she stood, as the occupant of the Chair, and told people to be careful of using the term “you”. Using “you” puts some heat into the situation. The noble Lady, Lady Saltoun, also makes another good point. We should go carefully about throwing some of our old traditions away. These traditions are valued not only by us but by the public who come here and are made very welcome indeed.

It is right because of the bad-tempered and perhaps shambolic nature of our Question Time that we should have a trial of putting the burden on the Lord Speaker. I use the term “burden” carefully because it will be a burden for the Lord Speaker to pick who shall be called on a supplementary. We should be careful because we keep talking about an overly powerful Executive; if there is anyone with power to call someone, an Executive will try to make approaches—“Call Lord such a one before the other Lord”. The Lord Speaker has got to resist that. No Member of the House of Lords should approach the Lord Speaker before Question Time to say they would like to get in Question 4 or Question 3 or fall out with the occupant of the Chair because they do not get called. That happened down the Corridor and I would not like it to happen here.

I would welcome the monthly business of the Lords because our Government, for good reason, have said we will have to cut back. As we speak, some of our dedicated staff, cleaners and ancillary workers, are being faced with redundancies. Why should we not have a monthly Question Time to find out how our staff, who look after us so well, are getting on? I have expressed an interest in apprenticeships and training and I want to know more about it. Also, about three years ago this House jointly with the other House invested £8 million in refurbishing the Press Gallery. I would like to know whether that money was well spent because I said when I opened the gallery that we had had not one bit of bad publicity about this matter. In fact, we have had no publicity at all. We could ask whether the £8 million has been money well spent.

On Oral Questions, once again I go back to what the noble Lady, Lady Saltoun, said: it is time-wasting to read out the Question verbatim. Visitors to the building, watching the proceedings, can have the Order Paper we have and online. The organisation we have broadcasting is, I think, called PARBUL—at least, that is what it used to be called, and it was chaired by the Chairman of Ways and Means in the House of Commons. PARBUL can make arrangements when our Questions are being televised to include the words of the Question. There is no need for the Questions to be read out. It is sufficient to say Question 2 or Question 4.

Also, it is a bad practice for noble Lords to read supplementaries into the record. How do they know what the Minister is going to say before they read the supplementary? In other words, they are indicating that they are not interested in what the Minister has to say—they are reading into the record and it makes it look good in Hansard. It is not good, it is artificial.

The noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, initiated a wonderful debate. I sat here and listened and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was about the female agents who went into occupied France. It was excellent. Each speaker had only three minutes. That debate was a tribute to those wonderful women who sacrificed so much—some of them their lives—for us so that we could have this democracy we enjoy today. Had it been any less than three minutes there would have been no proper tribute at all. Thank you for listening to me.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Strathclyde]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Baroness the Leader of the Opposition for her speech. As I made clear at the outset, my intention in leading this debate was to provide an opportunity for noble Lords of all sides of the House to comment on the recommendations that the Leader’s Group has made. Forty-three speakers have taken that opportunity. It is now my job to try and respond to them. There have been a lot of speeches and a lot of points made in each speech, so this may not be as neat a wind-up as noble Lords might like. Because I do not mention a recommendation, it does not mean that I am either against it or for it. However, there needs to be a process for moving them on from here.

The noble Lord, Lord Filkin, said that there was a broad measure of support for these recommendations, and I agree with him. It is a testament to the committee that that is the case. My noble friend Lord Tyler said that the report was pragmatic and not doctrinal. He was right about that; it crosses party lines. Even in this debate, different Members have taken different views on some of the details, but the broad thrust has been basically supportive.

Even the Leader’s Group recognised at paragraph 9 of its report that only a subset of its recommendations could be implemented with immediate effect but, as I made clear, I believe that a good number of the group’s recommendations fall into that category. That is why I intend to ensure that the House has the chance to approve or reject proposals for implementing a range of the group’s recommendations on the basis of reports from the relevant committees of the House at the earliest available opportunity.

There are of course other recommendations from the Leader’s Group that could not be put into practice without further detailed consideration being given to their practical ramifications, including costs and possible unintended consequences. The noble Baroness herself just mentioned one or two of those. While I am on the question of costs, I was impressed by what my noble friend Lord Lucas and the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, said about that issue. That is what I mean: around the House, the clerks, the House Committee and the other committees can look at our priorities. If we want two new Select Committees, we should look at how we can shave some costs elsewhere. It may be only 1 per cent off the total cost of the House but that does not mean that we should not search for efficiencies. I would not want cost to stand in the way of doing some of the very good things that have come out of the report and which the House clearly wants.

I was amused by my noble friend Lord Lucas’s suggestions on hereditary Peers. However, I am thrilled that as from today my noble friend will be able to write to the Clerk of the Parliaments, taking permanent retirement. That would save us some money, and he would be leading by example. Others may be following in his footsteps, although he would not know that when he wrote his letter.

It is only right that the House should not be invited to take a definitive view of all the recommendations in one go until they can each be presented in their full context. That is not about delay; it is about practicality.

What has changed in the House? There has been change over a long period of time. I do not think that anything immediate has happened, apart from some things that are obvious—the general election, for instance, and Labour going into opposition. I think that some 75 per cent of the Labour Party in the House of Lords had never known opposition in this House, so inevitably that is a bit strange. Coalition has thrust up a whole bunch of challenges, such as how we deal with Questions. In fact the greatest benefactors of that have been members of the Labour Party; they get between 40 per cent and 50 per cent of Questions at Question Time. I do not mind that because one of the features of good scrutiny is that the main party of opposition should be in the vanguard of that scrutiny.

There are many more former Members of Parliament who are now Members of this House. What I have found about former Members of Parliament is that they are so used to the firm smack of discipline from the Speaker that they find it quite odd coming here—but more of that in a moment.

There has been a substantial increase in the number of Peers, more than 100 in the past 12 months. There have been issues of assimilation. There is a great deal of expertise. A lot of people have high expectations when they come into this House and there are a lot of high expectations of them among outside groups, but of course when they get here it is all a lot more difficult. We have also had a more substantial and far more active Cross-Bench group. These are all good things, and of course Peers want to justify why they come here so they want more activity. One of the best things that has come out of the report is that we are going to give Peers more opportunities to get involved, to speak in committees and to take part in pre-legislative scrutiny and post-legislative scrutiny and a whole bunch of other things. That is one of the reasons why I think that we have to change.

The noble Baroness the Convenor of the Cross Benches said something good at the start of her speech: if only half the recommendations were implemented, that would transform the House. I am sure that we will do far better than half, but that is a sign of what can be achieved.

The noble Lord, Lord Brooke, asked about statistics. My understanding is that the really wonderful annual report of the House of Lords, which has clearly not been required reading by the noble Lord, has an enormous amount of statistics on all the kinds of questions that he asked.

I was surprised that the issue of the Leader’s Question Time did not come up more often. I think the House knows how much I enjoy being at the Dispatch Box. It is only because I do not want to hog it selfishly that I am not here far more often.

The noble Lord, Lord Martin of Springburn, raised a question about redundancy. I am glad to be able to tell him that no member of the House of Lords staff has been made redundant due to savings cuts. However, those are not really matters for the Leader. They are quite properly matters for the Chairman of Committees—

[Lord Martin of Springburn]

I was referring to the whole Palace of Westminster, and my understanding is that there is a 60:40 split. There are staff in this Palace who have been made redundant, but I am glad that, so far, no one in the House of Lords has been made redundant.

[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.