House of Lords: Working Practices

Lord Strathclyde Excerpts

Thursday 1st November 2012 Lords Chamber

[The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (Lord Strathclyde)]

My Lords, I am bound to say that I, too, am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, and to other Members on the Labour Back Benches, for giving us this platform for today’s debate, and to all noble Lords who have taken the time to contribute. I am rather a fan of these debates with four-minute speeches. They work extremely effectively; we get a lot of Peers in and it concentrates the mind. I have the luxury of having a little bit more time, which I shall use.

Perhaps the most consistent theme running through successive debates in this House on the Government’s proposals for reform has been our reputation as a revising Chamber, a reputation that Members on all sides take great pride in—and it is right that we should. Just over half of the Back-Benchers who have spoken today have had experience in the House of Commons as MPs. I make no particular point about that except to say that we should always remember that this House is very different from the House of Commons. Because the Executive have such an overwhelming and overpowering majority in the House of Commons, and can therefore do virtually what they like, they need the power of the Speaker to help to control that, and to give the voice of the Back Benches. The Executive in this House have no majority. We have a powerful Opposition, and the purpose of the usual channels—although everybody has poked fun at them—is to represent the interests of the whole House. In the end, the House can overturn decisions of the usual channels, although I hope that it will not do so.

I discovered to my horror, while sitting here musing away, that I have been a member of the Procedure Committee for 20 years. You get less for murder. It is an extraordinary thing. But like the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, I am greatly encouraged by the tone of the debate. I did not agree with everything that every Peer said, but I found something to agree with in bits of what every Peer said. We do our job very effectively in this House, through our committees, including the committees that sit off the Floor of the House, through the reports that we make, and by the standing and reputation of individual Members of this House.

Why were we not reformed by the elected House? In the end, I think that there are two reasons. First, there was a perception outside this House that we do the job that we do extremely well. Therefore, there was not that motivation for a great change. Secondly, I believe very strongly that the more the House of Commons looked at proposals for electing this House, the more it feared that we might end up doing our job rather better than it did. That was one reason why I was rather keen on it; I was ambitious for this House. The noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, warned us that political parties might find a populist measure, by which he meant further plans for reform of the House. All I can say to him is that I would not tempt them too much on that; they really do not need it.

What does this extraordinary Chamber do? It assists without threatening the primacy of the other place. It discharges its core duties in a manner that seeks to complement, not compete with, the House of Commons. Why does it not compete? Because we do not have the authority of the people as the other place does, and without the authority that direct election of Members might confer it remains the case that the influence that we exert on another place and on the Government of the day rests mainly on the force of the arguments that we deploy and on recognition outside these walls of the experience and expertise that Members of this House possess, individually and collectively. That is what I think the noble Lord, Lord Judd, was getting at when he talked about his matrix. I very much agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, said about strengthening Parliament. With both Houses together, we should seek to do that, and to some extent this Government have done that. That reputation is the currency on which we trade. It is therefore only right that we consider, as we have done this afternoon, how best to protect and enhance our reputation and to be able to do our jobs even better.

My noble friends Lord Higgins, Lord Kirkwood and Lord Cormack, and the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, made important passing references to the way in which the House of Commons does business. I will not spend any time discussing the House of Commons. It works out the way it does its business best. It has programming and we do not. On the whole, that is an advantage for this House. The House of Commons has selection of amendments and we do not. Here, every Back-Bencher has the right to put down an amendment to any Bill and it must be heard and responded to by a government Minister. That is extraordinarily empowering for Members of this House.

As the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, set out in his Motion, part of the answer to all this must lie in harnessing the skills and experience of our Members and ensuring that they are deployed to best effect. Like the report of the Leader’s Group before it, the Motion identifies three core functions of the House: scrutinising legislation, holding the Government to account and providing a forum for public debate. There is also being topical, as my noble friend Lady Wheatcroft suggested. I slightly regret that the Motion does not make explicit mention of the revision of legislation, which is in my view the chief function of this House and the cornerstone of our reputation. If you ask anybody what the second Chamber does, almost all will say that it revises legislation. That is an important thing.

One of the most frequently rehearsed complaints in this House is that it is asked to consider too much legislation and that the level of preparation and consultation that precedes the introduction of specific Bills is inadequate. I suspect that that complaint has been made for several hundred years. Certainly, I can remember it being made in the 1980s, 1990s and the last decade. It was made again today. That does not mean that we should not take it seriously or find ways of making life easier.

Let me deal with some important issues to do with the Leader’s Group. The noble Lord, Lord Bichard, and my noble friends Lady Tyler of Enfield and Lord Tyler said that all the recommendations in the original report deserved to be debated by the House. They certainly do. That is why a debate on the report and the recommendations contained therein was arranged on 27 June 2011. That was in addition to the debate on working practices held at the very start of this Parliament, in July 2010, prior to the establishment of the Leader’s Group, and the debates of 9 November last year and 26 March this year that informed the decisions taken by the House in respect of specific recommendations. Again, there is this debate today.

The other complaint was that only a few of the Leader’s Group’s recommendations have been brought to the House for decision. I fundamentally disagree with that point. The implication is that only a few of the Leader’s Group’s recommendations have been taken forward. That is a myth. The 55 recommendations amount to 43 specific proposals, because some just affirm the status quo and others spread one idea over many paragraphs. Of those 43, 25 have been put to a domestic committee and another four have been partially put forward or have confirmed the status quo and been implemented. By setting up the Leader’s Group and inviting the domestic committees of the House to consider taking forward the majority of these recommendations, I have probably done more as Leader to bring about change to the working practices of this House than any of my recent predecessors.

There are some proposals that have not been put forward, partly because there seemed no inclination for them to be agreed and partly because there were disagreements within the Leader’s Group and within the Procedure Committee. No fewer than six members of the Procedure Committee went on to vote against the report on Grand Committees. Of those Members who voted against the report—the House will remember the amendment tabled by my noble friend Lord Cormack on the Procedure Committee report—some are exactly the same noble Lords who now say that we should debate and agree all the proposals, such as that on the Grand Committees, which was extremely controversial when we dealt with it on the Floor of the House a few months ago.

I am pleased to say that in one respect at least we may be turning the tide of decades because the Leader’s Group observed that, leaving aside a brief period around 2002, the number of Bills or clauses of Bills published in draft had remained low and the number scrutinised by Select Committees, whether Joint Committees or Commons-only Select Committees, had been lower still. All that has changed over the past two and a half years. In the previous Session, the Government published 11 Bills or clauses of Bills in draft for pre-legislative scrutiny and in this Session we are on course to publish at least nine in only one year. That is good news. At the Government’s instigation, moreover, we have seen a resurgence in the number of Joint Committees conducting pre-legislative scrutiny. There were four in the previous Session and we expect five to be set up in this one. Those trends are no accident: we have deliberately set aside the resources to support an additional pre-legislative scrutiny committee this week.

We have also made progress, as was noted by my noble friends Lady Hamwee and Lord Cormack and by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, in relation to post-legislative scrutiny in response to concerns that, once legislation is passed, insufficient attention is devoted to its implementation and effects. For the first time, we have appointed a dedicated Select Committee to conduct post-legislative scrutiny of the legislation relating to adoption in England and Wales. The committee is due to report before the end of the Session and the intention is that it should be the first of a series of post-legislative scrutiny committees, each looking at a different area of the law with a membership tailored to the Acts under scrutiny, so as to make flexible and targeted use of Members’ expertise.

Although we have made considerable progress on those fronts, enhancing the quality and reach of our scrutiny at the beginning and end of the legislative process, I know that there are still some in the House who are interested in a legislative standards committee. Many noble friends mentioned this: the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, my noble friend Lady Tyler and the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, who I am glad to hear has been receiving so many comments by e-mail—he is no doubt enhancing his reputation by replying to each of them in detail. The Political and Constitutional Reform Committee of the House of Commons is currently considering the proposal for a legislative standards committee as part of a broader inquiry into ensuring standards in the quality of legislation. Two Members of this House—the noble Lord, Lord Butler, and my noble friend Lord Maclennan of Rogart—have given oral evidence to that inquiry and my right honourable friend the Leader of the House of Commons is due to follow suit. Without wishing to pre-empt either his evidence or the Government’s response to any recommendations resulting from the inquiry, I make the following observations.

There is in my view a tension between this House’s role as a revising Chamber and the idea that one of its committees, composed of a small group of Members, should recommend that a government Bill progresses no further. The analogy with secondary legislation and the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee is not apt. Secondary legislation cannot be amended, whereas the very purpose of a Bill’s passage through Parliament is to provide an opportunity for improvement and revision. In that sense, the House is itself a legislative standards committee; that is our primary and principal function. Denying a government Bill that has already passed through the House of Commons a Second Reading on the recommendation of a legislative standards committee would be an extraordinary step. Were the committee’s remit to be restricted to Bills starting in the Lords, it could have the unintended consequence of reducing the number of Bills that start in this House. Even if there were to be agreement on a Joint Committee, as recommended by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, I would remain uneasy at the prospect that a Government in command of a majority in the House of Commons would henceforth need to present a business case for their legislation before Parliament would consider it.

[Lord Butler of Brockwell]

It would be extraordinary if, on the basis of a recommendation from a legislative standards committee, the House were to decide not to allow a Bill to proceed. That would be the nuclear weapon, and I should be very surprised if it ever happened. Of course, the case of the Bill to abolish the post of Lord Chancellor was a very rare occasion when the Government decided to refer the Bill to a Select Committee. I would expect the committee recommending that a Bill should not proceed to be an equally rare occasion. The point is that if there were criticism of the standards to which a Bill had been prepared, I believe, and I think that other contributions have supported this, that that would have a very beneficial effect inside the Government on the standards to which legislation was prepared, without ever reaching a point where Parliament decided to refuse to allow a Bill to proceed.

[Lord Strathclyde]

My Lords, I join the noble Lord in always wanting to find ways to improve the quality of legislation. Sometimes, though, we need to be able to decide what has gone wrong, not just in the past decade but probably in processes over the past 40 to 50 years, and find out why legislation has changed so much and why it has got so difficult and complicated. We have seen this week, in having to pass an emergency piece of legislation correcting something that was not done properly 10 years ago, some of what goes wrong. Whether a legislative standards committee would make very much difference, I am not sure. Like the noble Lord and probably the rest of those who have spoken today, I look forward to the report from the House of Commons before we can take this further.

One question that has been raised by noble Lords and was posed by the Leader’s Group is whether we might make better use of our time in the Chamber. In order to free up time on the Floor of the House, the group proposed the introduction of a rule that most government Bills should be committed to Grand Committee and suggested that we might extend the sitting hours of the Grand Committee by introducing morning sittings. A variant of those proposals was put to the House by the Procedure Committee last March, only to be rejected emphatically. That is the point that I was making about members of the Procedure Committee, as well as members of the Leader’s Group, voting against that recommendation. In due course, I am sure that we will have to look at that again.

The next key question that many speakers raised was the attraction of a Back-Bench business committee—or a debates committee, a description mentioned by, I think the noble Lord, Lord Luce—in the expectation that a sifting mechanism for Back-Bench business might increase the topicality and profile of our debates and might serve the House better than the ballot and waiting-list mechanisms through which we currently select topical questions. My noble friend Lord Faulks pointed out some of the difficulties with this idea. It is not that the Back Benches would be deciding; it would be that some Back-Benchers would be deciding. We would have to go with care to decide whether or not this was actually an improvement. Of course we already have a sifting mechanism for most Thursday debates, which are selected by the political parties and the Cross-Bench group. Our debate this afternoon was selected in that way by the Labour group. We therefore already have some degree of intelligent selection, if one can call it that. It is interesting that at its next meeting the Procedure Committee is going to consider whether we should stop having a queueing system for Starred Questions and replace it with a ballot, so ballots clearly have their uses somewhere.

As for Questions for Short Debate and some of the Thursday debates, I see the ballot as a useful complement to the debates selected by the parties and groups. They provide Back-Bench Members with an alternative outlet for securing debates on subjects that, for whatever reason, did not appeal to their party or group. We have only to consider that a few weeks ago my noble friend Lord Maclennan led a balloted debate on the potential break-up of the United Kingdom and my noble friend Lord Lexden secured time for a QSD on the treatment of homosexual men and women in the developing world. They served to showcase the House at its best.

My main concern is that a Back-Bench business committee would in practice place a new obstacle in the way of Back-Bench Members wishing to secure time for a debate. Rather than Members walking into the Minute Room to table their Motion and then waiting their turn or taking their chance in the ballot, they would, if we were to follow the Commons model, find themselves filling in application forms and arranging to appear in person before a committee to plead their case. If they failed to persuade the committee, that would be that. We would have removed the last remaining vehicles for Back-Bench Members to get their debates on to the Order Paper directly and, in all likelihood, all we would gain in return is to become a mirror image of the Commons, debating all the same subjects. I urge noble Lords who are keen on this to come forward with a proposal that the Procedure Committee can examine.

As others have mentioned, one area in which we have taken major steps to make better use of the skills and experience of our Members is in the appointment of Select Committees. We have now established the new quick-fire, in-depth examination, annual, extra, cross-departmental committees. I think that they are an excellent addition. The government Chief Whip has recently told Conservative Peers that they should consider choices for next year’s Select Committees, and I urge the Opposition, my noble friends the Liberal Democrats and indeed the Cross-Benchers to do the same. I think that these will be really good committees. Over a five-year Parliament, we should be able to deal with 10 committees. That will strengthen our reputation for scrutiny.

I hope that my remarks this afternoon have served to illustrate that we have made considerable progress since the start of this Parliament. We have taken forward a majority of the recommendations from the Leader’s Group and, although some of them have been turned down by the House, I believe that I have done more to change the working practices of the House than any of my recent predecessors. I therefore see the withdrawal of the House of Lords Reform Bill not as a turning point in that process but rather as a milestone.

Talking of House of Lords reform, I noted that the noble Lord, Lord Haskel, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds and many others talked about the size of the House and how it should be reduced. I know that bishops retire at 70, but I think that most noble Lords in this House would regard that as a little young. There are possibly ways that we can find to encourage Peers to retire, but Peers ought to be careful what they wish for. They may discover that culling Peers is more popular than culling badgers. The Steel Bill remains in the House of Commons. Let us see where it goes. As the noble Lord knows, I have no in-principle objection to the Steel Bill, and I think it does some perfectly valid things, but the House of Commons has recently voted for an elected House, although it could not quite follow through.

This has been a useful and interesting debate. I have gone beyond my time, for which I apologise. I will try to pick up some of the other issues that have been taken up. I shall finish with this point: one of the most interesting and senior committees of this House is the Procedure Committee. It has a remit to look at and examine proposals that are laid before it. Any Back-Bench Member can put forward proposals to the Procedure Committee and I suspect that in the next few months we will see a lot more representations being made.