Procedure and Privileges Committee

Lord Wolfson of Tredegar Excerpts

Tuesday 5th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Etherton (CB)]

My Lords, I would like to speak about the potential loss of expertise of those who are performing public service duties apart from being in this House. There are many people here who, by virtue of their position in the House as Peers, are asked to carry out inquiries or to chair committees or hospitals. In my own case, I have been asked to chair an independent review. It is quite impossible for many of those people, certainly in my case, to conduct a review and to get people from literally all over the country, whether as witnesses or as civil servants to support the team, before about 10.30 am. It would be impossible to carry out those tasks if the House were to start at 1 pm on the two days that are mentioned.

This is important because the people carrying out those public service functions, which should complement the work of this House, will be able to contribute a great deal of expertise which they have gained from that work and thereby enhance the reputation, knowledge and expertise of this House. I am not a diehard person who will not change. I am in favour of change but very concerned about those people who, by virtue of their position here, are performing other public functions and would find it very difficult, if not impossible, to perform that task.

[Lord Wolfson of Tredegar (Con)]

I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord; I think he was giving way. Can he comment on the fact that the point he is making is all the stronger because of our convention that if you are not here for the first speech in a debate, you are scratched from it, and our other convention that if you are not here for the Second Reading you are expected not to participate in Committee? That would mean that if you were not here for the start of Second Reading, which could be at 2.30 pm or 3 pm, it could have serious consequences for the passage of legislation generally.

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, I want to bring before your Lordships a matter that has not yet been mentioned very much, although briefly by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, just now. That is the impact of these proposals on committee work. A great many committees meet, of course, on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings—not on Monday mornings—on Thursday, and sometimes in the afternoons.

I have either chaired or sat on committees in this House for yonks—a terribly long time of 25 or 26 years —and done my best for those committees. I confirm from experience that, quite often, they go on after 12.30 pm and until 1 pm, and sometimes even after that because after the witnesses have gone an enormous amount of work tends to be done. There is an enormous amount of work in the morning as well, before the committee sits and we get the witnesses in. There is a lot of paperwork which has to be read. What would this 1 pm start on Tuesday and Wednesday do for that? The answer is that if the committee has not finished, or finishes at 1 pm, that does not give time for anyone even to go to the washroom, let alone have a bite, before they have to be in the Chamber for the early Questions.

In this digital age which we are moving into, it seems to me that these committees are greatly valued. They produce a lot of very good reports; some, I agree, just gather dust on the shelves and are never seen again, or go straight into the wastepaper basket, but a great many of them have considerable impact and greatly increase the esteem in which your Lordships’ work is held. That is very valuable and will get more important in the digital age because on these committees you can go into scrutiny in detail, rather than just accepting the knockabout of the Chamber’s exchanges at Question Time. Their scrutiny can drill right down into what the Executive are up to. Those committees are going to be an increasingly important part of the future and the control of the Executive, as my noble friend Lord Cormack reminded us earlier.

There really is a very important aspect to be preserved. If the 1 pm rule is going to narrow, hasten, accelerate and make more difficult the whole pattern of committee work and examination, that is a minus for the present. It is an even bigger minus for the future in the digital age where people will look increasingly to these hearings, which can be, and are, televised—sometimes they make rather better television than scrutiny in the whole Chamber. They will be increasingly valuable and important in communicating our work to the public. That aspect has to be considered before your Lordships reach any point on this.

I think it was Woodrow Wilson, oddly, who said once when talking about parliaments generally—I suppose it was about the American Congress in particular—that the Chamber of parliaments was parliament on show and that the work of committees was parliament at work. That is true; in terms of scrutiny, increasingly in this complex age, it needs the committee atmosphere to penetrate what the Executive are really up to and what is really happening, rather than the enjoyable debating exchanges in the Chamber as a whole. Unless I have a satisfactory answer to the contrary, that certainly leads me to support my noble friend Lord Forsyth’s amendment and the subsequent amendments as well.