Procedure of the House (Proposal 5)

Lord Pearson of Rannoch Excerpts

Tuesday 8th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[The Chairman of Committees]

To resolve that where a statement of exceptional length has been made in full to the House of Commons and made available in the Printed Paper Office before it is due to be repeated in this House, the Minister in this House may (with the agreement of the usual channels) draw the attention of the House to the statement made earlier without repeating it; and proceed immediately to the period for exchanges with the Opposition front benches;

That the text of the statement should be reproduced in the Official Report;

That the guidance in the Companion to the Standing Orders on backbench contributions on oral statements should be amended, to indicate that “ministerial statements are made for the information of the House, and although brief questions from all quarters of the House are allowed, statements should not be made the occasion for an immediate debate.”

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

My Lords, I am afraid that this proposal does not really make sense in practice. When a Statement is coming, it is normal practice that the Printed Paper Office does not release it until the Minister or Prime Minister in the Commons has sat down after making it. Under pressure of business in your Lordships’ House, the time between the Minister sitting down in the Commons and a Minister getting up here to repeat the Statement is often extremely limited.

Many of your Lordships who want to contribute by asking questions may be in other parts of the House and do not know when the Statement is coming—it is “at a convenient time” after whatever piece of business has been decided. By the time one gets here and gets into the Printed Paper Office to get hold of the Statement to read it, the Minister is very often several paragraphs down the track. It is rather useful to have the Statement from the Printed Paper Office to catch up with what the Minister has said that one has missed because one did not know it was coming. The monitors over at your Lordships’ House no longer ring the bell when a new piece of business is there, so if you are working in the Royal Gallery or wherever you happen to be, you have to keep a beady eye on the screen to know when the Statement is coming.

I do not feel that this proposal really works. I cannot see why yet again we cannot go on with the existing position. It cannot be taken for granted that, if one wants to contribute to the debate, one will have been able to have absorbed the Statement.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Kramer]

My Lords, surely the most important work we do when a Statement is put before this House is to question it and scrutinise it. Making sure there is adequate time for that and that a full range of views is aired is absolutely central to our responsibility.

I have perhaps a personal prejudice. I find that speeches that are read out are extremely difficult to listen to and a second-hand speech is, frankly, even harder to listen to because no one can put any life into it. I am not sure that listening to the speech gets me a lot further in terms of understanding. Perhaps that also applies to other noble Lords in this House. If we need a time delay to make sure that everyone has had an opportunity to actually do the reading, surely that is something that can be organised. It seems to me that the precious time we have should be spent on scrutiny rather than on a second-hand regurgitation of a speech that is sitting on paper in front of us.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

My Lords, further to what I said earlier, I accept what the noble Baroness has said if there were to be sufficient time to really scrutinise the Statement. Without boring your Lordships’ House too much, in the case of Statements on European Council meetings, one also has to read the European Council conclusions and compare them with the Statement because they are often very different. We need at least an hour and a half for that.

On the matter of saving time, I of course accept that our questions should be briefer, but perhaps this is another opportunity to say that if the answers from the government Front Bench could also be briefer, we would all save a lot of time. That goes for Oral Questions, too.