Liaison Committee: Third Report

Lord May of Oxford Excerpts

Monday 26th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jopling]

My Lords—

[Lord May of Oxford]

My Lords—

[Lord Jopling]

We have just heard from the Cross Benches; I think it is our turn. I very much support what the noble Lord, Lord Roper, has just said. I was first elected at the other end of this building almost 48 years ago. One strand that has run through the entire time in which I have served in both Houses has been my enthusiasm for the Select Committee system, which all those years ago I believed, very strongly, was the way in which Parliament could better exert its influence over the Executive. I was a member of two of Dick Crossman’s Select Committees—the first ones to be set up—back in the 1960s. In the early 1980s, following the 1979 election, I, with my late lamented friend Norman St John-Stevas, later Lord St John of Fawsley, who sadly is no longer with us, set up the departmental committees. I conducted all the negotiations over them with the Opposition at the time. Since coming to your Lordships’ House, I have been a member of, I think, three European Union committees. I have been chairman of two of them and I continue to serve on Sub-Committee C.

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[Lord Filkin]

I would not wish to confuse my good friend, the noble Lord, Lord Winston. I totally respect the importance of science and technology: it could not be more important. The thrust of the Liaison Committee’s report, which I was supporting, was the need for balance—by which I mean, if we cannot do everything, we need to have some space to harness the expertise of this House to those subjects that are almost completely ignored. This process allows us to do so.

[Lord May of Oxford]

My Lords, in the light of what the noble Lord has just said, I have every sympathy with the problem that the Liaison Committee is seeking to address. The past few years have, after all, seen an extraordinary increase in the number of people joining us in this House, adding roughly one-third to the number of just a few years ago. It is of course proper to wish to handle things in such a way that more people can be engaged, and that is very difficult at a time when the resources cannot expand to accommodate it. I am not going to go over again the ground that has been covered, and there will be yet further examples of how extraordinary the Science and Technology Committee has been—but it is not alone in that. However, one of the distinctive and hugely useful features of the House of Lords is the expertise and first-hand knowledge that it possesses. The best of briefing is no substitute for that. We have expertise in law, engineering, science, medicine, economics, social science, the arts, business and much else, and we want to embrace it all.

I have sat on both ends of the Select Committee table—I was also interrogated by them in my five-year stint as Chief Scientific Adviser to the John Major and Tony Blair Governments. The committees were very different entities—they were not just the one Science and Technology Committee. The House of Commons is often excellent, but it rarely matches the expert, knowledgeable, thoughtful approach that is brought forward in this House. In my experience of the other place, particularly with regard to issues of genetic modification, opinion is too often substituted for knowledge and beliefs for thoughtful analysis.

It is against that background that I offer what I hope might be a solution—or at least the elements of a solution—to the conundrum before us, of whether we embrace more people in ways that play to their strength. Let us not forget that, until relatively recently, the Science and Technology Committee typically ran two sub-committees, one of which it has lost. The committee has always co-opted other people. I have looked at the past six years and, typically, a little more than one in five of those serving on the Science and Technology Committee or its sub-committees were co-opted from outside. It therefore has a way of going about enlarging its ambit. The result of losing one of those sub-committees is the loss of some of those opportunities. If we lose the second one, we will have lost—apart from the ability to do the work—roughly half of a sub-committee’s worth of co-opted people.

I am coming to my suggestion. Having come off the Science and Technology Committee, my interests in the last three or four years have shifted; I have become involved with the Bank of England and others in systemic risk in financial systems. It is quite substantial. I am not aware of anybody in the House who has this precise kind of competence, which has not conventionally been something of major focus in the Bank. Therefore, I asked the Economic Affairs Committees whether I could be a co-opted member if and when there were things of this kind. I was told that those committees did not co-opt people. In so far as I have discovered—and I may be wrong—the idea of co-opting a fifth to a quarter of the members, which is habitual for the Science and Technology Committee, is not habitual to the other Select Committees. If this is true—if the others are more like Economic Affairs than Science and Technology—simply by altering that, we could have a much wider embrace of people who were not at that time on committees. The resources mean that we are not going to have more bums on Select Committee seats; it is just a question of how we can embrace a much wider group of people. That is an important approach.

The other proposal in this Liaison Committee report is to use four ad hoc committees. Personally, I think the idea of one or two ad hoc committees is extremely good, for the reasons that we have already heard. I also understand that we have resources for one more fully funded Select Committee. I suggest that we do not go for four ad hoc committees, rather one or two at a time, and keep what is one of the demonstrable jewels in this place, which is the full strength of its input to science and technology in the broadest sense, and with an emphasis on the technology as well as the science.

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[Lord Strathclyde]

The reason is that we are trying to work within our existing budgets. Throughout the public sector there are limits on increasing expenditure. The House of Commons is facing a substantial decrease in expenditure and it would look a bit odd if the House of Lords alone decided to spend even more public money.

[Lord May of Oxford]

Does the noble Lord believe that his second attempt to answer the question of the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, answered it? I did not understand it. Given that he asserted that there was going to be a cost-benefit analysis, I did not hear anything like that in his reply.

[Lord Strathclyde]

It is very difficult to provide a cost-benefit analysis until we have seen the work and the success of the new committees that have been proposed. We are proposing four new committees—they do not exist at the moment—which will be paid for in part by a small reduction—I still say that it is a small reduction—in the amount of money available to the Science and Technology Committee. The best time for a cost-benefit analysis will be at the end of the first or second Session when we have seen how these new committees have worked out.