House of Lords: Working Practices

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Monday 12th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh]

My Lords, I begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, for arranging this debate and introducing it in a most constructive tone. Since he is for change and is welcoming suggestions, I shall add a few more to those that he has already received in this long debate. During the 10 years that I have been in this House, I have often had occasion to wonder whether our practices might not change so that some of us on the Back Benches might be able to participate more effectively than we have so far. If one were to ask how we should judge the practices of this House, I would introduce three criteria. First, do these practices help us to better achieve our objectives? Secondly, do these practices make maximum use of the expertise available in the House and give every Peer, including Back-Benchers, some sort of stake in its goings-on? Thirdly, do they save time, since some practices might achieve what we want them to but at a considerable cost in time?

Judged by these three criteria, I want to look at four important aspects of this House’s practices. I begin with Question Time, because during the 10 long years that I have been here I have found it difficult to stand up and ask supplementary questions. That has been so partly because I am not as quick on my feet as I could be, while sometimes I am not good at outshouting somebody else who might stand up at the same time. It is also sometimes the case that one is not able to stand on one’s feet until the House decides in one’s favour. It is as a result of this sort of experience, which many Peers must have, that about 57 Peers—as the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, said earlier—tend to monopolise between them nearly 1,300 supplementaries or thereabouts.

It is not just a question of the 57 Peers. If you break them down into their backgrounds, I would have thought that nearly 75 to 80 per cent of them would have been either ex-Ministers or ex-MPs. They are used to that kind of practice; some of us who have not been to the other place and are simple-minded university professors are not, and we find it rather difficult to adopt it so there must be some principle that guides us in deciding who follows whom when supplementaries are asked. It is also important that some preference should be given to those who are not normally in the habit of speaking and who might be speaking for the first or second time. That job is best done not by the Leader of the House—however well meaning he might be—but rather by the Lord Speaker, who is able to spot who needs to be invited and whose turn it is. In spite of what the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, said at the beginning about not being in favour of passing on this power to the Lord Speaker, I strongly urge that this change is badly needed.

I turn to another area where I have participated more enthusiastically than in supplementary questions: the debates. I would have thought that nearly a quarter of this House’s time is spent debating big issues and about two-thirds dealing with legislation. If as much as 25 to 27 per cent of our time is devoted to debates, we should be asking ourselves how those debates are organised, what they achieve, who participates and whether they are structured in the right way. I shall make three or four important suggestions for improvement.

First, very often we have subject themes for debates which are too general and therefore inevitably too vague to allow us to decide what the debate is about. If I go into the Whips Office and find a subject, it can be interpreted in 20 different ways; one therefore puts down one’s name and takes a particular line on it. In some other legislatures, it is a common practice when a subject is put down for debate to have a paragraph explaining what the proposer of the debate would like to see debated under that rubric. That would not do us much harm. Otherwise, lots of debates that I have sat through lack coherence because different speakers, interpreting the subject differently, approach it from different angles. At the end of the day, there is no meeting of minds.

It would also be useful to ask ourselves what is happening to some of the ideas that we might be able to articulate in those debates. Some of us sometimes spend hours thinking about a subject and trying to see what new things one can say. Having spent that much time, you ask yourself: what is the destiny of those ideas? What is happening to them? The Minister, inevitably, only has a few minutes at his disposal and some suggestions that we might have made get referred to in a sentence or two. What happens to the rest of the points that many of your Lordships might have made? Sometimes, the Minister will write a reply but that is often not as detailed as it could be. It might therefore be helpful if, at the end of each debate, the Minister or his senior officials could provide a fairly detailed reply to all the points that have been made by the speakers. Should that be difficult, there should at least be a meeting arranged with them so that those points can be discussed and clarified.

I also sometimes wonder why the practice of being here not just at the beginning of the debate but sitting until its very end is mandatory in this House. There are second legislative Chambers in the world where that is not so. You must, obviously, be there at the beginning, because that is where frameworks for the debate are set out, and for a couple of speakers before and after you. After that, if you hang around as 20 other speakers follow you, only in the hope that you might get a mention in the Minister’s speech, you might ask yourself—if you think about it realistically and ruthlessly—exactly what the point is of staying on right until the bitter end. One might say it is advisable that you should be there as a matter of courtesy and etiquette. Fine—but should it be mandatory, as it is? I sometimes wonder whether we might not rethink that practice.

I also sometimes wonder whether the four or five days of debate that we have following the Queen’s speech are absolutely necessary. Four to five days of your Lordships’ time are given over to those debates. The same debate then comes up at the Second Readings of Bills. Is it therefore right to have 50, 70 or 80 of your Lordships speaking on any given day and require them to stay from the early afternoon until almost midnight? What would be the point of that?

Going a step further, this year I was particularly struck by the fact that if you take a subject—the Home Office, let us say—a whole day is set aside. Yet the Home Office covers seven or eight different areas. Some of us might want to speak on race, some on police custody and some on immigration. Because the Home Office subjects are not clustered and thematised such that we could put down our names to speak on this subject rather than that, the result is that one of your Lordships speaks on immigration followed immediately by somebody speaking on another subject and the debate tends to lack dialectical engagement or critical coherence.

The third area which we might want to look at a little more carefully is the Grand Committee. Over the years, as the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, pointed out, Grand Committees have increasingly come to play a tremendously important role in discussing general Bills. The physical layout of the Moses Room for the Grand Committee allows for easier communication and more relaxed scrutiny and give and take; it is also less intimidating. It might therefore be better if most Bills went almost automatically to the Grand Committee, unless the House decides otherwise by voting on an appropriate Motion.

Finally, I turn to the question of post-legislative scrutiny. It is an absolute must for a variety of reasons. It allows us to compare the outcome against the intended objectives of the legislation and to learn lessons that can be fed into the work of the department and improve future legislation. We can also, through such scrutiny, build up common guiding principles on good and bad practices in the drafting of legislation. This is particularly relevant because this Government seem to want, rightly in my view, to make a bonfire of some of the existing laws. However, that bonfire simply cannot be made on the basis of what the general public want; it must be done on the basis of certain guiding principles, and post-legislative scrutiny should allow us to do that. Some kind of Select Committee to deal with that would be important.

Debates in this House, from time to time, have parochial orientations. We do not look at what happens in other European countries—in the United States, Canada, India or other places. I hope that when the Leader’s Group begins to discuss this very important issue, it might also conduct a short survey of what practices obtain in other jurisdictions from which we might learn something.