House of Lords: Questions

Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury Excerpts

Monday 9th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury (Con)]

First, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for initiating this debate. I am grateful to him because Question Time is clearly one of the most important events in the House. The Chamber is always packed and it is one of the best ways of holding the Government to account. It also gives people a chance to jump in with questions, and there is much more opportunity for spontaneity than is perhaps the case in other debates, so it is important that a debate is taking place on the issue of Question Time.

I come to the debate with an initial thought. Many odd things struck me when I came into this House two years ago, but I have got used to most of them. However, the oddest thing I found was the fact that to table an Oral Question, you have to queue for two or sometimes three hours in a very dark corridor. Initially I was attracted to the idea of having a ballot. People should table Questions, put them into a ballot and have them picked out. But the more I looked into this, the less persuaded I became. It is true that the present system disadvantages those Peers who are not full time in the House. Many of the Cross-Benchers, for example, have important outside interests and therefore they do not have the chance to queue. That is a problem.

I think that a ballot was tried out for a short time in the past, but the danger is that the ballot will be flooded with lots of Questions, and it may just be that the business managers encourage their colleagues to do exactly that. But the most important reason I am opposed to a ballot is this. When one tables a Question in the present system, whereby you have to write it out and take it to the Table Office, you take some care over the Question. You make sure that it is reasonably drafted and the clerk will also look at it carefully. With a ballot, people will become much more casual about their Questions and the quality would not be as good. I have a suggestion which perhaps the Minister could respond to favourably by saying that it could go up before the Procedure Committee at some stage. Could there be a ballot, at least for the first three Questions under the present system, which would give a noble Lord the right to table a Question? You would not have to queue because you would not be submitting a Question at that point. The system would work like this: you would put your name in to ask a Question on a particular date, and you are then told by the Table Office that you have won the right to table one. You would then take the Question in person to the Table Office, as you do now, perhaps up to two weeks in advance of the Question being answered. I think that that could be a way of dealing with the problem of having to queue.

I have two other thoughts which take the subject a little wider, one of which I am not sure will meet with the approval of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath. It is whether there should be a self-denying ordinance that supplementaries should not come from the Front Benches, thereby giving all Back-Benchers more opportunity to speak. That is a thought which I put forward in a very tentative way indeed.

My other thought about keeping Questions and indeed Ministers’ responses crisper is this. I suggest that the digital clocks in the Chamber should run down rather than run up. I would like to move to a policy of having eight minutes for each Question, so we do not have any query about when the time has come to an end. A Question would start at eight and you would see the clock running down to zero. When people who are asking questions, and indeed Ministers, see the clock reaching four or three minutes, they would realise that they have to be a bit crisper. Indeed, I would have the same system for people making speeches in debates so that they know that their time is running down.

I have looked at some of the debates on Questions that we have had in the past. There are a million opinions about them, so I will end by saying simply that any thoughts which are taken forward to the Procedure Committee would also involve, I hope, a great deal of consultation with noble Lords.