Arrangement of Business

Lord Pannick Excerpts

Wednesday 31st October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Strathclyde]

My Lords, let me quickly confirm that. The answer to that is yes.

[Lord Pannick]

Did the Leader of the House consider inviting the House today to suspend consideration of the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Hart, but allowing the Committee to proceed with the other business under this important Bill, which many of us were prepared today to come along to attend to?

[Lord Strathclyde]

My Lords, I am grateful for the support of the noble Lord, Lord Martin of Springburn. I think that it was support not just for me as Leader of the House but for the correct procedures and processes in this House of Lords. What he said was extremely important and I hope that noble Lords will think very carefully about how they proceed having heard what he said and perhaps having read it in Hansard.

The noble Lord, Lord Richard, made a perfectly good point about who decides these matters. The fact is that we do not have a Speaker. We ultimately can decide these things for ourselves, but we have probably the best set of clerks in the world, who give us authoritative advice about these matters. My view is, and it was my view when I was Leader of the Opposition, that if the clerks take a view on something like this, we would accept it.

On what the noble Baroness the Leader of the Opposition said, I was not aware that a counsel had been taken on the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Hart, and an opinion sought and received which will be made available. I am sure that that will be very useful to noble Lords who like to read that sort of thing, but I do wonder whether we really want to go in the direction of reaching for our lawyers every time there is an issue of disagreement. It is not so long ago when this House was the last court of appeal in this country; I think that we are a lesser House for having removed that function from it. So it is not something that I would greatly encourage.

I gave an answer to the noble Lord, Lord Reid. He was right to raise his question in a tone of incredulity. There is incredulity here that any noble Lord would wish to continue once the House had taken a view. I say in response to the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, that I did not consider the option that he described. I dare say that it could have been open to us, but I felt that very few people in this House had any knowledge of what had happened yesterday afternoon and that I should bring it to the attention of the House as early as possible, which is what I have done, and allow for a period of reflection over the course of the next few days to see whether this can be sorted out and how to proceed.