Procedure and Privileges Committee

Lord Taylor of Holbeach Excerpts

Tuesday 5th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord but, if we defeat this Motion now, he will no doubt say, “Actually, the Motion was defeated because it didn’t deal with Thursday and the need to get back early”—that is not an argument. The fact is that the House decided something less than a year ago and it is being brought back for no apparent reason.

My point was that some people think that they will be able to finish at 8.30 pm because there will be an 8.30 pm rule. We already have a 10 pm rule, but I have recently sat here until 2 am; what makes people think that an 8.30 pm rule would make any difference? How long will it be before those who wish to vote for this measure because they would like an 8.30 pm rule succumb to the Whips—whoever is in power—and the idea that we should have a guillotine, like at the other end? That is why we get vast amounts of legislation that has not been properly discussed, debated and considered. The notion that we should try to organise our affairs on the basis of a fixed finishing time is deeply damaging to the very basis of this House.

With the greatest respect, I suggest that it is very naive to think that we will be finishing at 8.30 pm when, in recent months, individual Members have tabled more than 100 amendments to one Bill. In this House, we have the right to speak to all these amendments, so how long will it be before the desire to finish at a particular hour results in the distortion of our procedures?

The noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, might accuse me of being nostalgic, but I remember the other place in the days when we had a 10 pm vote. You knew that, if you were getting the runaround from the Minister’s private office, you could say, “I’ll see your Minister at 10 o’clock and I’ll tell him how unhelpful you’ve been”. I remember that we all had to be in the Lobbies together because we voted at 10 pm, which meant that you were able to talk to colleagues about constituency and other issues.

I also remember the way in which the dining rooms worked: Labour sat at one end and Tories sat at the other, and you had to sit wherever there was a vacancy. You would get hilarious occurrences where Ted Heath had to sit next to Mrs Thatcher, or something else of that kind. That camaraderie and involvement are absolutely essential to the political process.

If we finish at 8.30 pm—assuming the optimists are right—it is too late to go anywhere else for dinner, and noble Lords will either be stuck here or will go home. I suspect that what will happen here will be exactly the same as has happened in the House of Commons: the catering services will lose a huge amount of revenue, because people will disappear, and then close. The effect in the House of Commons has been absolutely disastrous. What will happen then to the staff in the catering departments?

By the way, on the issue of staff, it is extraordinary that not a single member of staff was consulted on these proposals—they are affected by this, including our doorkeepers and the catering staff. Not only that, if noble Lords agree to this Motion today, we will find that in less than three weeks of sitting time it will all have changed. The proposal is that all of this will change as of September, so everyone’s hours will change. I am very surprised, having listened to questions about the importance of consulting staff and everything else, that this Motion should be in front of us.

If this all sounds a bit negative, I have a proposal. There clearly is a problem in our House with the conduct of business, but it should not be addressed by piecemeal changes of this kind. We all know that this is ridiculous; our speaking time can be reduced to a couple of minutes on really important issues of national importance—of which this is not one. Our ability to deal with legislation sensibly involves sending amendments down to the other place that it might conceivably accept, as opposed to amendments which are part of a political platform or campaign, and our ability to ensure the proper consideration of committee reports. On that, committees often sit beyond 1 pm; what are Members meant to do if they are to be here in the Chamber for Questions? All these things need to be considered. I respectfully suggest to the Procedure and Privileges Committee that it might try to convene cross-party agreement as to how we could change our operations in a way which will enable this House to do its best and to draw on the talents within it.

This is the final point I will make. We often tell people that this is a House of great expertise—and so it is—and a polite House which considers things carefully. A move in this direction is a move to a full-time House and away from noble Lords having interests outside the House. I know some people think that it is bad that some noble Lords have interests outside the House, but how are you going to have up-to-date expertise if noble Lords do not have these outside interests? If this is the reason that we tell people that we have an unelected House of expertise, what on earth are we doing moving a Motion such as this, which takes us in the direction of being a nine-to-five, full-time House, paid, and not populated by people who give it their best out of duty to their country and to our parliamentary system of government?

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach (Con)]

My Lords, I hoped that I would not have to move an amendment to the Senior Deputy Speaker’s second Motion, but I am very unhappy, as my noble friend Lord Forsyth has clearly enunciated, with the way in which procedure is being used in this matter. The collegiate nature of this House means that the procedures are being abused by a consultation which was long in preparation—the consultation paper was available in January—but which did not come to us until just before the Easter Recess.

We do not achieve change in this House when there is no consensus. The formula of a take-note Motion and a binding decision being grouped together, as they are today, is not only unusual but, it has been said, unprecedented. I see it as an abuse of the House’s procedures. It could have been handled so differently. We could have had a proper debate and then a consultation, but that was not to be. I am sure the whole House, whichever way it feels about the Procedure and Privileges Committee report of which we are taking note, is grateful that we have this chance today, and we thank the Chief Whip and the usual channels for the extended debate we have this afternoon.

My amendment to the Senior Deputy Speaker’s second Motion is one of four. We have heard from my noble friend Lord Forsyth and we will hear two others; they are all anxious about the consequences of the changes proposed. As has been said, less than a year ago, on 13 July, we discussed these matters: 530 Peers voted on the issue and we had if not a huge majority then a substantial majority of 62. The item was given considerable debate—I looked at it and at the notions that were exchanged. Compare that with 49 individual responses to the consultation. It is the fact that the consultation was, in my view, so poorly handled that has led to us feeling so disquieted this time; it seemed to make no difference whatever to the way that the Procedure and Privileges Committee handled the suggestion in the text of the consultation. None the less, it was a fairly evenly divided consultation.

I do not know whether noble Lords will remember, but we got an email—a parliamentary notice—immediately before we rose for the Easter Recess, when most of us go home and have no contact with our parliamentary email; it is actually difficult to interact with your parliamentary email if you are outside London, and a lot of people were not able to respond to the consultation. I ended up writing a letter to my noble friend the Senior Deputy Speaker—noble Lords will know that we are old colleagues and friends—so I suppose I count as one of the people who was against these proposals.

We were given options. The options were extremely complex and it was quite difficult to choose as to who would start and when and what they would do with them. I am not surprised that the consultation did not attract a lot of individual respondents; just look at the number of Peers here this afternoon, even those who applied in aggregate. I understand that the Lib Dems submitted a large number of supporters for the proposals in aggregate, and we know that the Association of Conservative Peers did so, but how many individuals in this Chamber today actually voted in this consultation? Had we done so, we might have saved the embarrassment of having to reject a proposal that was made in all good faith—we decided on 13 July last year.

When the committee met on 18 November, I think, in any other business a member of the committee proposed that it should consider changing to two days —exactly the proposal that has now appeared. The Procedure and Privileges Committee agreed to work up this proposal. That was made available at a meeting on 21 January. As far as I can see, that is the proposal, more or less, that we are dealing with today.

But Members of the House were not involved—no one asked us. It chose to do so just as we rose for the Easter Recess, and the conclusions of the committee were published the Tuesday immediately after we returned from the Jubilee Recess. Perhaps I am paranoid about this, but I feel there was momentum for pursuing an objective which appealed to individuals in this House without any real input from its membership.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I do not think anyone in this House would accuse the noble Lord of paranoia, because he is held in very high respect. However, frankly, whatever the consultation process—maybe only 49 people replied, although in aggregate there were many more—surely we have the information here today. We have a report and we are obviously going to have a very long debate. What is wrong with deciding on this matter today? I do not understand why the consultation is deemed to be so at fault that it negates the whole operation.

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach (Con)]

As the noble Lord will know, my amendment is based on the idea that we should have change in this House. The House can cope with change—of course it can—but it needs to be less precipitate than this process. The general view on the referendum in Scotland, for example, is that, having had one, we should not have another for 10 or 20 years —once in a generation. I am not suggesting for a moment that this House operates on that sort of principle, but I am suggesting that there has been an impatience to get to this point. Why did we not have a debate today on these proposals and then vote? Why did we not have options?

The report was sent to us after the decision had been made to mandate the chairman of the committee to propose a Motion for change here. That is the wrong way to go about these things. It is mainly because of this that I am on my feet today; I would like to think that we could do things better. We can get agreement in this House for change—we will need some, because it is not functioning particularly well at the moment, if I may say so. Therefore, we ought to have an acknowledgement that the membership of the House is here to contribute to this change and not to be ridden roughshod over.

I fear that this proposal—coming so soon after the House decided that it would like to go back to the hours it had before Covid—is a mistake. I think it will lead to bad feeling in the House and make it a less pleasant, congenial and sociable place to work. Of course it is a place of business and earnest intent, but we are earnest because we are a collegiate body in our thinking. I think of all the assets of this House; it has expertise and people of talent, but it does things together. That is why I propose a different way of going about change, in this case and in future.

In the meantime, I back my noble friend Lord Forsyth’s amendment, because I believe it is the only way in which we can bring the Procedure and Privileges Committee to realise that there is a way of going about these processes.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I have tabled a very small amendment to the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Taylor, purely to ask that we look at having normal voting time ending at 8 pm. I realise that there are all sorts of complications about votes that can be taken on quorums and other things, and that is why I have asked for this to be looked at by this committee.

I ask noble Lords to remember that many of us do not live in London, and if we are going to get home, we need to leave this place at a reasonable hour. The House—particularly the Leader of the House—has resolutely set her face against any form of overnight allowance for those of us who do not have properties in London, so we are faced with a bit of an opportunity: either we stay or we go. We do not seem to have any official pairing system, though I look at the Benches opposite and thank various noble Lords from the Labour Party who have agreed with me when I have said, “Shall we both go now?”

If we are going to get around this body being London dominated, I feel that we have to look at the democratic pursuit of giving a vote. Far too often, I have stayed in this House until 10 pm—