House of Lords: Working Practices

Lord Rooker Excerpts

Monday 12th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rooker]

My Lords, the title of the debate includes the words, “the case for reviewing”. I think that the case was made before we started. Therefore, we can limit the evidence we have to give because the Leader’s Group will look at it in some detail. I do not think that we can escape the fact that questions will have to be asked about what we are here for. It will get inexorably linked with the other debate that we are going to have. I have been here eight years. Some of us on the informal groups—last year, I had the privilege of being on one of them—asked: how do you get any change in this place? That was the starting point. Who do you go to? What do you do? What is the infrastructure to get some change? We discovered that it was not there. In the other place, there is more of a structure. I was told about the Procedure Committee, but others advised me that that was not the proper route.

I have two words at the top and the bottom of my notes, which I would ask the Leader’s Group to think about. My noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours knows what I am going to say. The words are “trial” and “pilot”. Do not come back with anything that looks like it will last for ever because the House will not buy it. To be honest, that is my experience. Offer every suggestion that comes to the House on a trial basis, perhaps until the next Parliament, for the whole of a Parliament or for a Session, depending on the menu. I do not think that the Members of this place, who are by and large more experienced than me, if I may put it that way, and slightly more conservative with a small “c”, want to buy a lot of change. But trial and pilot should be offered and we can see how we go. The way to get change is quietly.

I am very pleased that the third report on governance is encompassed in this. To be honest, I had no involvement in that whatever. Like everyone else, I read the report when it was produced and it worried me more than the other two. I say that because people in this House who have experience on outside bodies that are governed by codes of practices and procedures for appointment and governance and finance do not recognise what they have read in that report. I think that the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, and her team were right to bring those matters to the House and I hope that they will find some favour with the Leader’s Group. But at the least they should be put to the House because, in the end, Peers have to decide these things.

I think it would be whistling in the wind to think that, if we ever get elected Peers—I do not want to get into that debate—they will arrive here and not use the powers. The restraints we put on ourselves will go out of the window, a point touched on by the Leader of the House in his opening gambit. If we are going to have some rules, we have to codify them, otherwise it will be absolute chaos.

I am not going to speak for long so I shall make just a couple of points. The issue I raised last year in the debate on the Queen’s Speech was about having flagged up the bits of Bills that have not been looked at before arriving here from the Commons. That idea came to me while I was driving home one day when the House was not even sitting. I would have had a job explaining that to Bill Cockburn and his committee, who asked us what we did as Peers—how we clock on and clock off and so on. I was thinking about how we could make Bills better. I realise that someone has had a look at this suggestion and I know that it is not as simple as it appears, although it has a seductive appeal. I realise that sometimes a clause of two lines can bring in a schedule that might be 50 pages long. Which bits would you say were not debated? Generally speaking, if there is an elephant at the door, we recognise it, and therefore I think we can recognise the parts of the Bill that have not been debated or scrutinised, and then we can choose whether to look at them. We may decide that it does not need to be done, but those parts need to be flagged up in a systematic way. I cannot believe that there is not a way of doing that, and it is important.

For Bills that start in this place—personally, I do not think that they should, although that argument is not going to carry the day—certainly we need different procedures. Some major Bills have started in this place. The Climate Change Bill started here because I brought it to the House, as did the 2002 police reform legislation. It is true that politically contentious Bills generally do not start over here, but some major ones do, and we need to take a serious look at that.

The idea of a pre-legislative committee is also important. I do not want to criticise parliamentary counsel, but there is some slipshod work being done in Whitehall—under pressure from Ministers to get Bills before Parliament. Sometimes they say, “Slip it into the Lords first”. I have been there when these discussions have taken place. Parliamentary counsel say, “We’re not quite ready”, and they are told, “That’s all right. Put it in the Lords. They can sort it out because they have got more time and are more flexible than we are”. That is not an effective way to produce good legislation for our fellow citizens. It would be a power to parliamentary counsel if we had that kind of committee.

I would not have raised the next issue if it were not for what happened today—and I have sat through all the debates today, including on the Statement. The noble Lord, Lord Cope, might say that we all failed, but no one was brave enough to stand up at the beginning of the Statement and say something when one of our Members took 25 per cent of the time available to the whole House.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

I stood up.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Rooker]

Only after the event, and that is the difficulty. The argument for taking Statements in Grand Committee is powerfully made. Five minutes were taken up by one person when there are only 20 minutes for questions because there is no mechanism for getting some order into the system. If there was, I would not say anything, but going into Grand Committee is important.

I want to raise an issue which I know from some of the speeches is controversial. By the way, I agree with everything that has been said, but the role of the chair, particularly at Question Time, is not an unimportant matter. Between 2005 and 2007, the noble Baroness, Lady Amos, was the Leader of the House and I was the Deputy Leader, I had responsibility for Question Time. I have kept all the daily papers from that time. I have got them in a box, and I know exactly who got called, when they were called, and their party, for every Question Time for those two years. I can produce the figures. They were difficult to do, but nevertheless I kept all the papers because I just walked out of here and chucked them into a box.

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope]

Those papers are bound to have a value on eBay.

[Lord Rooker]

No, no. There was almost a competition between us. My noble friend Lady Amos would say, “I once got 36 supplementary questions through. How many did you get today?”. I usually managed 24 or 25 supplementaries in half an hour, which is pretty good going when you think about what happened during the Statement today. I want to repeat a point I made last October in the debate on the Queen’s Speech. There is a serious problem in that with the expertise in this House and the range of Questions that can come up on a daily basis—we are not constrained like the other place—I think that there are hundreds of Members of this House who are reluctant to try to ask a supplementary question. That is because the method of doing so is to enter a bear pit.

I have no experience of it. In fact, last week I stood up for the first time ever and asked a supplementary question at Question Time. I had never done it before, and it was an easy one because no one else stood up. However, it can be a bear pit and many people just will not do it. But if you were to ask them whether they had something to say, they would reply, “Yes. I had a good point to make but I wasn’t prepared to join in. If I could have been called, I would take my luck with everyone else”. I know that this is a tricky one because, in a way, it would give the chair the authority of the Leader. It is important because I do not think there is another legislature anywhere in the world where the Executive decides who is asking the questions that scrutinise the Ministers. That is intrinsically wrong for a start. It has got to be a bad principle in terms of democracy. The Government decide which Member can ask the Government a question. I know it is done fairly because for two years I supervised it myself, but it looks wrong. The Lord Speaker could do it in terms of the blocks as people stand. My noble friend Lady Jones is not here, although I am pleased to see my noble friend Lord Grocott in his place.

When I referred to this last October, I said that I had not done any research on it, but I did say that we keep hearing from the same noble Lords at Question Time. After that, someone did some work on the figures, and we had them today. Over a whole Session, half of the supplementary questions—over 1,500 of them—were asked by 8 per cent of Peers, which is 57 Peers. The same people asked all those questions because they are prepared to bully and shout and intimidate others into sitting down. That cannot be conducive to proper scrutiny at Question Time. A few people dominate, and we know who they are because we see them all the while—the same 57 people ask half the supplementaries. So I appreciate the fact that that research was carried out.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws]

I would be interested to ask how many of them are women. I think that women are particularly intimidated by the way in which Question Time is conducted.

[Noble Lords]

No!

[Lord Rooker]

To be honest, there are quite a few women among the 57 Peers, but I do not want to go down that road, and I have reached the end of my time. I just think it puts people off.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

Can I ask my noble friend where the noble Baroness, Lady Gardner of Parkes, comes in?

[A noble Lord]

Gardner’s Question Time.

[Lord Rooker]

Many who would stand up if they could be called are put off, and they are world experts in the variety of issues that this House deals with. Peers should be asked about this, and I am pleased that when the Leader talked about how the silent majority were going to rule, I think that that is what he was referring to: those who are not here as opposed to those who speak. There ought to be some questionnaires from Leader’s Group asking people what they think before proposals are brought back to the House for decision.

I shall finish with my two key words. When decisions come back, pilot them and trial them. That way, we might make a bit of progress.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord McNally]

I know what the votes were. You know what the votes were. I am just giving you the statistics.

I close this debate as Deputy Leader of the House and a loyal No. 2 to my noble friend. I am pleased to say that we approach our task today with a complete unity of purpose. I am delighted that he has given such priority to the reform of working practices so early in this Parliament. I am also pleased that he has chosen to do so in a way which benefits from the groundwork prepared by his predecessor, the noble Baroness, Lady Royall. This debate and the announcement of the immediate setting-up of a Leader’s Group to look into the matter in the first few weeks of this Parliament means that the reform of working practices is more than a declaration of intent: it is work in progress. I am delighted to say that my noble friend has persuaded the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad, a former chairman of the Constitution Committee, to be the chair of the Leader’s Group. He will lead it with the independence and rigour that it demands.

This has been a stimulating debate. Thanks to the customary enthusiasm that noble Lords have for this subject, nobody need fear that the Leader’s Group will be wanting for inspiration, advice or input. It is not my intention to set out the Government’s views on the suggestions that have been put forward by noble Lords—they are House matters for the Leader’s Group to reflect on—but I shall make brief mention of a few individual contributions. Many noble Lords paid tribute to the ad hoc working parties chaired by the noble Lords, Lord Butler and Lord Filkin, and the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, which originated from the Lord Speaker’s work in this area. The Hansard report for this debate will provide an excellent first evidence paper to the Leader’s Group.

Looking back even over the past 18 months, we have made a number of advances in this House’s ability to scrutinise legislation and to hold the Government to account. We have adopted an additional set of arrangements for scrutinising fast-track legislation, based on the recommendations of the Constitution Committee, which should ensure that the House has at its disposal the information it needs to give proper consideration to such Bills and to the case for fast-tracking legislation. We have introduced a new procedure for scrutinising national policy statements, an innovation intended to enhance the House’s ability to scrutinise government policy formulated under the Planning Act. We have put in place a panoply of procedures for exercising the new powers that the House now wields in respect of European Union policy and legislation as a result of the Lisbon treaty and the entry into force of the European Union (Amendment) Act. We have conducted successful experiments with Question Time for Secretaries of State. They were successful, and have not been abandoned. We just, at the moment, do not have any Secretaries of State in this House—hope springs eternal, as they say. We also have a new approach to scrutinising Law Commission Bills, which I very much welcome. I could go on. My point is simply that we have been steadily adding to the armoury of tools at our disposal, and I am confident that the Leader’s Group will both refine existing practices and propose new ones.

[Lord Rooker]

I am not aware that the House debated or voted on any of the examples the Minister just gave. Something has been missing for change, and this is why we were advised not to go down the Procedure Committee route. No one is asking the Leader’s Group to put the whole agenda forward but, when it has considered issues, it should bring to the House not just recommendations about those issues that it agrees with, but other issues for the House to decide. We do not want to be told that the Leader’s Group has agreed all these things and to be asked whether we agree with them. What about the things it may not have agreed with? The House might have a view and therefore it must make the final decision about what goes on the agenda, not the Leader’s Group.

[Lord McNally]

This House is its own master. The Leader’s Group will report to it, and there will be full discussion and a full debate. I gave a list of procedures that have been put to—oh! I have been passed a note; I have always wondered what these notes said.