Procedure of the House (Proposal 2)

Lord Williamson of Horton Excerpts

Tuesday 8th November 2011 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Williamson of Horton]

As an amendment to the above Motion, at end insert “, except that the time allocated for the three oral questions should be up to 20 minutes in total instead of up to 15 minutes”.

[Lord Williamson of Horton]

My Lords, this amendment was originally put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Low of Dalston, but as he is unable to be present today, I have put it forward in my name. I should like first to stress that I am strongly in favour of the proposal on the Order Paper today to make permanent an arrangement by which Secretaries of State answer questions in this House. The only issue raised by my amendment is whether 15 minutes are sufficient or whether the time should be increased to 20 minutes. We are speaking about a maximum time limit. We have plenty of experience in the House, for example, on the time limit for questions following a public Statement, when sometimes the full time is not used, but more frequently, questions are cut off by the time limit. In the case of a Secretary of State’s questions now being proposed, some part of the time would normally be taken by a question from the opposition Front Bench, and there would probably be a question from the Liberal Democrats, thus the time for Back-Bench questions would be very short indeed. I hope therefore that the House will look favourably on another five minutes, a fairly modest proposal in my view, so that a Secretary of State could answer questions for a maximum of 20 minutes, not 15 minutes, as was the case in early 2010. I beg to move.