Procedure and Privileges

Lord Tyler Excerpts

Tuesday 13th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tyler (LD) [V]]

My Lords, tempting as it is to dive straight into the minutiae of the committee’s report and the associated Motions, I will spend my allotted time on the wider issues facing your Lordships’ House. What is the context in which we are taking these decisions? There are two crucial issues we have to address before we get too absorbed in the detail.

First, it is not good enough simply to revert to the way we operated pre-pandemic. We were not doing a perfect job then and pretending that we were, and trying to repeat the way we operated, will not be good enough. We have a chance to do better. I will look in a little detail at one area crying out for improvement, in a moment.

Secondly, we would be foolish and myopic not to acknowledge, and welcome, the notable silver linings there have been to the awful clouds of Covid. Most significantly, the House has found new ways to communicate, engage and listen, thanks to the remarkable efforts of all those who have helped us develop technical solutions to the problems we did not have 18 months ago—as several Members have referred to. This is so obvious that I do not need to say much more on that score, but it is important that we recognise that the recommendations before us are clearly transitory, cautiously tentative and in no way future-proofed for the further technical evolution that may take place. Perhaps we will have to wait for the full restoration and renewal programme to roll out before we can begin to appreciate the potential improvement in the way that the whole of Parliament can work.

Meanwhile, there are specific issues that were not addressed effectively before the pandemic and which our current ongoing review should address. In the interests of brevity, I will concentrate on the scrutiny of secondary legislation. I know from personal experience how effective the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform and Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committees are and, equally, how relatively weak and haphazard the Commons system is. But that is not where the problem lies. Despite all the meticulous examination and advice from the DPRRC and SLSC, a farcical false choice faces the House as a whole, bringing the whole process into disrepute. The current options are to approve an SI without incorporating the necessary improvements recommended by those committee colleagues, on the one hand, or to refuse point blank to do so, on the other. As a result, we hardly ever do the latter, and have to fall back on pathetic regret Motions, which Ministers blithely ignore.

Ever since the report of the 2006 Joint Committee on Conventions, whose recommendations both Houses approved in toto, there has been pressure to find more practical and positive ways forward. Should there be a middle way? Should we have an amendment possibility for SIs? Should we have a specified delay of implementation while Ministers have to consider amendment? Should we be able to have a Motion that sets out reservations and invites the Minister to reconsider, or some mixture of those alternatives? I know that the Hansard Society, the Institute for Government and the UCL Constitution Unit have been thinking through possible improvements. We should invite them to advise us, as we go forward.

Meanwhile, tinkering is not enough. Extending Grand Committee sittings from four hours to five, as suggested by the report before us today, is surely pointless if the outcome of the SI debates itself remains pointless. It is also true that the Commons would naturally need the same alterative processes. With secondary legislation, we are not in competition with them, since the proposal comes to each House directly from the Government. This is not intra-parliamentary, but a direct exchange between the Executive and the legislature. What is certain is that the experience of the last 18 months means that we cannot simply revert to previous practice.

In the 2006 committee, I recall with enthusiasm the vigorous defence of your Lordships’ House to exercise its right—indeed, responsibility—to refuse to accept inadequate SIs, notably then from the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, Leader of the Conservative Opposition. The clear theme was to assert that there was no point in having a second Chamber if it could not occasionally say no. I wish he had been so forthright when we were faced with clearly inappropriate secondary legislation, under both Covid and Brexit, in more recent months.

I am struck by the extent to which Members of both Houses seem to have become conditioned to accept this major fault in our scrutiny system. MPs and Peers who have arrived since December 2019 may think that this is both normal and immutable. They have known nothing else. Certainly, Henry VIII powers seem to have become dangerously habit-forming for Ministers, and all too many scrutineers, in either House, may have succumbed to that addiction too. The Leader of the House implicitly acknowledged this today.

The failure of Parliament to do its duty with the hugely significant Brexit and Covid secondary legislation, under the inevitably difficult constraints of the last 18 months, is just one of the lessons to be learned. But hoping to revert to the previous system would be insufficient and a clear dereliction of duty. There is no room for complacency. I hope all concerned acknowledge that today’s Motions, and the debate on them, comprise only a temporary and limited step towards more effective analysis of our shortcomings and opportunities for improvement.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) (Abolition of By-Elections) Bill [HL]

Lord Tyler Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 13th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tyler (LD)]

My Lords, we Liberal Democrats have consistently supported this reform, and I endorse every word of the noble Lord, Lord Grocott. I will come back to the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, in a minute.

I want to spend a moment or two thinking about why we are still here, after 21 years, and remind the House of the origin of this problem. Liberal Democrats were not involved in the Labour-Conservative Front Bench stitch-up in 1999. The so-called Weatherill amendment which created these by-elections was a purely temporary measure to make some progress with the then Government’s plans to reduce the size of the Lords by taking out the majority of hereditary Peers.

At that time, my noble friend Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank, on our behalf, made absolutely clear that we could go along with the proposal only along the lines of the 1911 declaration that there would be, in due course, further and substantial reform. Since then, I have been involved in all the efforts to secure reform on that basis, first with the Joint Committee which failed to secure agreement between the two Houses, then I convened a cross-party group of MPs with Messrs Clarke, Cook, Wright and Young to publish proposals in 2003, and then, with many others, I fed into the cross-party process led by Jack Straw which published the compromise proposals in the Labour Government’s 2008 White Paper. In turn, that package was largely adopted by the coalition Government for their reform Bill in 2011, which was exhaustively scrutinised by a Joint Committee and emerged improved but not undermined, despite the best efforts of a minority of Peers on both sides of this House.

The coalition Cabinet, of which the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, was a very distinguished and active member on this issue, gave the revised Bill its full support. That Bill received a huge majority for its Second Reading in the Commons in July 2012: 338, made up of a clear majority of Conservative MPs, an overwhelming majority of Labour MPs and unanimous support from the Liberal Democrats.

That Bill was then the victim of a squalid party game, with the Labour leadership cosying up with the Tory reactionary rebels to deny the Government any programme Motion for its further examination. The noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, who then played a crucial role in the Commons, may be able to cast further light on what exactly prevented reform.

My point is that successive election manifestos from all the major parties have promised to make good that 1999 commitment to fulfil the promise of 1911 to proceed with substantial reform. Had they made good their promises, and stuck to their principles in 2012, there would be no need for the Bill today.

However, as has already been pointed out, we all know that the immediate prospect of government legislation to return to the agreed 2012 package to drag the House into the 21st century is remote indeed. Further, as has already been said, the artificial distortion of the representation in the House caused by by-elections—when we should be doing everything we can to reduce our overall size, along the lines of the Burns report—adds urgency to this problem.

So much has already been said; it will be said again today. Substantial majorities here have regularly indicated their desire to make progress. Surely the time has come to pass this Bill and to challenge Members in the other place to live up to their promises too.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Mancroft]

We are told that this Bill is a simple tidying-up measure, part of the process of modernising the House. That is largely what my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham suggested. It is nothing of the kind. The Bill is simply unfinished business for old Labour.

When your Lordships look at the Bill, the first question we should ask is: what problem is solved by it? What injustice is it seeking to correct? The noble Lord, Lord Grocott, said that by-elections of hereditary Peers are an embarrassment, among other things. I must say I find it hard to believe that a doughty old warrior like the noble Lord, Lord Grocott—who is respected and held in great affection across this House—is quite so easily embarrassed. What I think is an embarrassment is the presence in this House of 94 Liberal Democrat Peers, which is an indefensible constitutional outrage, a disproportionate representation in this House of a party that has been overwhelmingly rejected by the electorate.

[Lord Tyler]

The percentage of Liberal Democrat Peers in this House is precisely the same as our last election result. If we had proportionality in the House of Commons, we would have rather more Members there too.

[Lord Mancroft]

I am most grateful to the noble Lord for clarifying that, but it goes beyond that. There is no getting away from the fact that his party has been rejected by the electorate.

I am becoming bored by the facile comparison of this House with the Chinese National People’s Congress, with its membership of almost 3,000. The problem with the National People’s Congress is not its size, any more than that is the problem with this House. The problem with the National People’s Congress is that it is an assembly of party appointees, reflecting the views of the establishment of the day, and that is increasingly what is happening here. This House of Lords is the only second Chamber in the world that is being used as a retirement home for Members of its first Chamber, whose seats are needed by leaders’ acolytes who have little to contribute to this House.

My noble friend Lord Cormack, who I was going to say I am delighted to see in his place, but who has obviously slipped out for technical reasons, frequently reminds us—indeed, he never tires of telling us—that this is a House of experts. The primary activity of this House is not expertise in obscure subjects—fascinating although that is for all of us to listen to—it is the scrutiny and revision of legislation. Members of the House of Commons do minimal scrutiny of legislation so acquire little expertise in that particular skill. What the House of Commons does do is adversarial party-political banter, an activity increasingly despised by the electorate and a new and unwelcome feature of your Lordships’ House, but which Members who make the trip from the green to the red carpet bring with them, to the frustration of the rest of us.

The supporters of the Bill would have us believe that it is a small measure, an incremental and sensible reform, but on the Clapham omnibus and in the newspapers, there is no clamour about hereditary Peers’ by-elections. There is increasing outrage at the possibility of appointments of candidates such as John Bercow and Tom Watson, who by any reasonable measure should not even be considered.

The deal done in 1999, which has been referred to so many times this morning and will be referred to again, was that hereditary Peers would remain here until substantive reform took place. The noble Lord, Lord Grocott, argues that, although no such reform has taken place, after 21 years, it is time to dispense with that deal for no substantive reason except the passage of time. Back then, it was argued that the House of Lords was working reasonably well: “It wasn’t broke: why fix it?”. Now, after the constitutional and political chaos of the past year, no one could reasonably argue that this House is working well. Why, therefore, at this stage, enact a measure of no practical value that removes the incentive for a larger and now much-needed reform which I think most people would support?

Referendums

Lord Tyler Excerpts

Wednesday 12th February 2020 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, I look to debating my noble friend’s Bill when it comes before us for Second Reading. I think it would be premature for me to set out the Government’s position on the Bill today. We will do so, as we do with all Private Members’ Bills, at the Second Reading, but I can assure my noble friend that we shall approach it with an open mind.

[Lord Tyler (LD)]

My Lords, do the Government accept that the worst failures with the 2016 referendum were concerned with transparency and funding? We still do not know who paid how much and for what and whether some significant sums were from illegal foreign sources. Strong recommendations have been made by a number of official bodies that the Government need to act on this, yet we have had no response. The long-awaited ISC report on Russian influence may be very relevant here. When will the Prime Minister authorise its publication?

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, the first duty of government is to safeguard the nation, and we treat the security and integrity of our democratic processes extremely seriously. We have no evidence to show that there was any successful interference in the EU referendum. However, as I said, we take any allegations of interference in our democratic processes extremely seriously. My understanding is that the report referred to by the noble Lord has been released by the Prime Minister.

House of Lords: Appointments

Lord Tyler Excerpts

Thursday 30th January 2020 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Tyler]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to review the criteria for appointments to the House of Lords.

[Earl Howe (Con)]

My Lords, the House of Lords Appointments Commission is an independent, advisory, non-departmental public body. It plays an important function in vetting appointments for life Peers to ensure the highest standards of propriety.

[Lord Tyler (LD)]

My Lords, could the Minister tell your Lordships whether the criteria for appointment of political nominees to your Lordships’ House are exactly the same as those for independent Cross-Bench Peers? If not, why not?

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, as the noble Lord knows, there are various established criteria for appointments to your Lordships’ House, whether distinguished service in a particular field or the potential contribution that the individual can make to the work of your Lordships’ House—or, indeed, both those things—subject to vetting for propriety. I come back to that point because it is central to the issue he has raised. All nominations are subject to independent vetting for propriety by the House of Lords Appointments Commission before appointment. That must underpin any future consideration of this matter.

Constitution, Democracy and Rights Commission

Lord Tyler Excerpts

Wednesday 29th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My noble friend makes a very good point. Constitutional reform is a term that could encompass many subject areas. One reason why the Government are taking a bit of time over deciding the commission’s remit is that, if the remit is too wide, the task becomes too unwieldy and lengthy; too narrow, and it risks creating policy that is not properly joined up. The scope needs to be substantial but sensible.

[Lord Tyler (LD)]

My Lords, following the point that the Minister has just made, do the Government accept that there are some priority steps required to, and I quote from the Conservative manifesto,

“protect the integrity of our democracy”

that are probably so urgent that they cannot wait for the proposed commission? Has the Minister seen, and does he note, the recommendations of the APPG report, Defending our Democracy in the Digital Age, which follows the work of Select Committees in both Houses, and the recommendations of the Information Commissioner and the Electoral Commission? Do the Government recognise that there is a dangerous connection between digital campaigning and potentially illegal funding—the huge sums of money from foreign sources, from Miami to Moscow, seeking to influence both elections and referendums?

[Earl Howe]

I fully recognise the concern expressed by the noble Lord. Indeed, we have debated these matters in the past, albeit cursorily. These are matters that the Government are determined to grip. Whether the commission will be doing that is something that unfortunately I cannot be specific on at the moment.