Scrutiny of Secretaries of State in the House of Lords

Nigel Mills Excerpts

Wednesday 20th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Patrick Grady]

I thank the hon. Gentleman—another important parliamentary convention has now been observed with his intervention in the Adjournment debate. I am grateful for and agree very much with the point he makes, and we will look at all that in a bit more detail. Indeed, most of us will be familiar with the context that he started to describe.

The Prime Minister announced on Monday 13 November that David Cameron would be appointed to the House of Lords and would serve as Foreign Secretary. Mr Speaker wrote to the Procedure Committee on 22 November requesting that it explore options for enhanced scrutiny by the House of Commons of senior Ministers in the House of Lords. The Procedure Committee, of which I and some other Members present are members, published its report and recommendations—including the key recommendation that the Foreign Secretary should appear before this House to answer questions—on 17 January 2024. Two months later, we are still waiting for the Government’s response.

As I said in my point of order last week, there have been two sessions of FCDO questions since that report was published, and no sign of the Foreign Secretary. In fact, there have been three sessions of FCDO questions since his appointment, and if the usual rota continues, we can extrapolate that there ought to be another three sessions before the summer recess. FCDO Ministers have responded to 10 urgent questions, including one today, and made eight oral statements since the new Foreign Secretary was appointed. There have been 22 written statements from FCDO Ministers in the Commons, three of which have been on behalf of FCDO Ministers in the Lords, including one in the name of the Foreign Secretary himself. As each question session passes, and as each urgent question is answered or statement made, the accountability gap grows wider, the frustration of Members of this House increases and the absurdity of the situation becomes clearer.

[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)]

I welcome this debate. As Lord Cameron has agreed, and as has been re-instigated, he is now taking half an hour of questions in the Lords directly to him, not to other Ministers. In the House of Commons we get no minutes and no questions to the Foreign Secretary. That cannot be right for a democratic Chamber, can it?

[Patrick Grady]

Absolutely. That is precisely why it is important that we have the opportunity to draw these points to the Government’s attention. Incidentally, I do not know whether he has written it down or said it anywhere, but around the time of his appointment there were indications from Lord Cameron that he would be happy to co-operate with accountability mechanisms, but they do not seem to have been put in place, and I will come back to that.

Accountability is particularly important, as the hon. Gentleman suggests, because we are living through times of significant global turmoil, with perhaps some of the biggest threats to the established rules-based order of peace and security since the second world war. There is no guaranteed or permanent mechanism for Members of this elected House as a whole to directly question and scrutinise the work of the Government’s chief diplomat, their roving ambassador on the world stage, their voice in the corridors of foreign powers: His Majesty’s Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, the right hon. David Cameron, Baron Cameron of Chipping Norton.

--- Later in debate ---

[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Rochdale (George Galloway). I agree with every word he said, and I am not sure that I have ever been in a position to say that.

I rise to make a few observations about the Procedure Committee’s report, which was not an easy one. I do not think that any of us came into this place with the idea that we would willingly invite Members of the House of Lords to come and sit on these green Benches and address us, and I do not think that any of us want to accidentally encourage this Government or future ones to appoint more Secretaries of State in the House of Lords because they can get away with it. Finding a bit of accountability does not make it all right. However, the simple fact is that the Government appointed somebody from the House of Lords as the second most important member of the Government at probably the most dangerous time in the world in my adult lifetime, resulting in a situation whereby we cannot question him or impress our views on him before he goes around the world, and we cannot hear from him about what he has said at all his meetings.

I actually think that the appointment of Lord Cameron was a very good one. He is an incredibly able politician and, from the look of it, he has been working incredibly hard to represent our national interests around the world. I will not criticise the individual who has been appointed, but surely the Government can see that this is not a tolerable situation for the elected House to be placed in.

The Procedure Committee tried to come up with some sort of solution that gave us a bit of accountability, accepting that we could not find a perfect solution. We started with our predecessor Committee’s views on the appointments of Lord Mandelson and Lord Adonis back in 2009. The Committee recommended having question sessions in Westminster Hall every couple of months, but the problem we had with that is that Westminster Hall is not big enough. If Lord Cameron were to appear in Westminster Hall to answer general questions about foreign affairs, or even on a single topic, we might find that substantially more MPs would want to ask questions than could be safely accommodated, which would equally apply to any Committee Room in this place. Then we would have to work out whether we would have balloted questions in advance, which is not generally done in Westminster Hall. We would have to put in place a whole load of arrangements that we have never had before for the relatively short time left of this Parliament.

I hope that Lord Cameron is Foreign Secretary for a long time, which would mean that such arrangements are needed for a lot longer, but if we rule out Westminster Hall and any Committee Rooms, the only thing we are left with is conducting question sessions in the House of Commons Chamber. We did not have general support for the idea of having a Member of the House of Lords sitting on a green Bench and addressing this House from the Dispatch Box, and there is not a great deal of precedent for that. It leaves only the Bar of the House as the place to conduct such sessions. We even talked about the idea of Lord Cameron beaming in from the screen, like President Zelensky did or like Boris Johnson did when he was answering Prime Minister’s questions when he had covid. Not having the Foreign Secretary here, so that we could look him in the white of his eyes, would have been imperfect too.

If we believe that this House should have some level of scrutiny of the Foreign Secretary, there is no alternative to it taking place in this Chamber, and the Procedure Committee came up with the least bad option of that happening at the Bar of the House. We would have no problem with the Government saying, “Let’s have him on that Bench and at the Dispatch Box,” but it would be equally imperfect to have him here for general Foreign Office questions. We could have recommended that he come here for a dedicated half-hour question time, like he does in the House of Lords. The problem is that that would give the one Secretary of State in the House of Lords greater accountability in the House of Commons, because he would answer questions for a whole half an hour a month, whereas any other head of Department probably answers only a handful of questions in their half an hour of question time. We could then have more scrutiny of the Secretary of State in the Commons than in the Lords, which would not be perfect either.

All the options we have are terrible, but this was not the starting point of the Committee or the House; it was the position we were put in by the Government and we were trying to find the least bad way of fixing it. I hope the Minister does not resort to nit-picking about individual ideas. I hope he engages with the general principle that if the Government choose of their own volition to have one of the great offices of state held by someone who is not a Member of the House of Commons, there should be opportunities for the House of Commons to have regular scrutiny of that individual. We should be able to question them on what they are doing and try to impress on them the views of this House, so that they can present them around the world.

Alternatively, should we just leave it and accept that this is the way it has always been, given that Ministers in the Lords do not appear in this Chamber? I think that the balance we need to strike is that if someone of that seniority is dealing with issues of the level of importance we are seeing at the moment, we have to find a way forward in this situation. I have great regard for the Minister for Development and Africa, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), but with the best will in the world, he is not the Foreign Secretary. We need to be able to question the Foreign Secretary on the big issues.

Hopefully the Minister will give us the good news that the Government have come up with a preferred way for this to work, so that we can get on with this rapidly. That is what a modern democratic Parliament has every right to expect. If we are going to have Ministers in senior positions who are not Members of this House, we must find a way of scrutinising them, as is done in nearly every Parliament around the world that appoints Ministers who are not in that Chamber. They find a way to do it. This is not rocket science, and it is not without precedent. We can find a way of doing it, so let’s get on and do it.