House of Lords: Working Practices

Lord Elton Excerpts

Monday 12th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Butler of Brockwell]

I was not suggesting that the noble Lord was being frivolous. I, too, seriously suggest that if it is important that the House should be self-governing, which it is, widely giving Members the opportunity to put points of concern to the Leader of the House when they can during the week would increase the sense of involvement and participation and make the House more collegiate.

[Lord Elton]

My Lords, while the noble Lord is on this point, am I right that he proposed half an hour for this? Would that not really be rather excessive?

[Lord Butler of Brockwell]

This is certainly an open matter for debate. I should have thought that 20 minutes would be perfectly sufficient. Clearly, if the suggestion finds favour, the Leader’s Group and the House could look at it.

We suggest that more publicity should be given to the excellent reports of Select Committees of the House by their chairs being given five minutes for a trailer on the day of publication, and we trail our own coats by suggesting slightly earlier sitting times and the ending of the wearing of medieval robes at times when the public gaze, through television, is most likely to be on us. We want to convince the world of the relevance of our procedures, and it is not helpful that we are most often portrayed in the newspapers and on television in our robes.

Not all these or our other suggestions may find favour with all your Lordships. As I said at the beginning, they are intended as an à la carte menu that we hope may provide food for thought, but I am greatly encouraged by the open-minded way in which they have been received by those on the Front Benches on both sides of the House.

I will make a final point about the timetable. It has been said that it would be useful if the Minister replying to the debate indicated the timetable which the Government have in mind for the Leader’s Group. A report by the end of the year would be helpful so that discussion of these matters is not overtaken by the preoccupation with more controversial matters such as the draft Bill on the future of your Lordships’ House.

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[Lord Elton]

My Lords, as one, I presume, of the 57 Peers whom the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, had in mind, I am very glad not to have had to bully, shout at, or intimidate anybody to get into this debate. I am very sorry to hear that he might think that I have had to do so in Questions.

The House has changed enormously since the days when I joined it, which were, I admit, 37 years ago. That change has accelerated rapidly since the removal of the rest of my hereditary colleagues. In my early days in the House, to have to shout in order to get into Questions, or not to give way to a Privy Counsellor or somebody who had more experience, would not happen. The increasingly rapid flow of new Members into the House has made it more difficult for the traditions of the House to be handed on to the new entry. If it were possible in some way to instil in the new entry, in a block brainwashing scheme, the principles of good manners, on which the House used to conduct itself, we would become a much more efficient as well as a much more agreeable place to work.

I shall not talk about the detail of the papers—except in one respect—because that can be done in response to whatever consultation comes out later on. I shall speak instead about the context in which the consultation is taking place and which I fear from time to time slips from our consciousness. We need, as three Peers have said before me, to remember what Parliament is for: it is to control the Executive. The House of Lords is there to assist the House of Commons to do that and supply what the House of Commons either cannot or will not do, or has not done. A lot of that is in legislation. In a recent debate, I pointed out how, on 10 and 11 March 2005, we prevented the House of Commons allowing the Government what amounted to a lettre de cachet, renewable every 90 days, to put people into detention without trial. That is the big thing that we are there for; it is made up of a lot of little things in the way of legislation. Governments like making laws; they like getting their own way; and they like getting it easily. The noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope, used the nice term “institutional interest”. It is an institutional interest that we have to watch here: the interest of Her Majesty’s Government, of whatever party, in securing their legislation as swiftly, as easily and in as large a bulk as possible.

Like, I am sure, the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, and many other of your Lordships, I have been in the position of being a new junior Minister and finding Permanent Secretaries, or, sometimes, slightly less senior civil servants, put it across that really what sort of a man or woman you are will come out of how big a slice of legislative time you can get for your department. That is built into the Civil Service and Governments need to resist it. To the extent that they do not or cannot, they need to be supported by Parliament to see that this great inertia of legislation has a brake put on it.

Grand Committees were invented to take the brake off. There did not used to be Grand Committees; all Committees were on the Floor of this House until relatively recently—for those who are of my generation. They were invented, I think, in Margaret Thatcher’s day—I regret to say it, but I may be wrong—to free up the logjam in the Chamber that we keep hearing about, although I have not noticed there being one at the moment. But whose logjam is it? It is a logjam of government business. Most of us are agreed that there is too much of it. Therefore, I am not of the chorus which says that we must have more Grand Committees; I am in the very small group which says, “Actually, we could do better with none, but let’s stick with one”. As my noble friend on the Front Bench said in opening the debate, there is spare capacity there now, because the number of Bills that have gone through Grand Committee recently is not as high as in the peak. So let us not start messing about with more Grand Committees.

I have to follow the noble Lord, Lord Luce, and others in saying that all this inexorably links to the question of reform, because what you do in this House and how you do it depends on what it is made up of. We are at a critical point in the process of evolution. We were at one stage much larger than now. I have heard people say with hushed voices in case they should be overheard by the public, “We’ll soon have 800 Members”. When I joined the House, there were 1,084 Members, and it grew after that, but the House was nothing like as crowded as it is now at Question Time, because there was no incentive to come here to talk unless you had something worth saying and knew that people were going to come and listen to you. That meant that you had a very much higher quality of input and a very much shorter list of speakers.

We are now moving towards a decision to have a much smaller body, elected. Instead of a vast crowd from which hundreds of experts in very narrow specialisms can be called when they are needed, we will have a small group of jacks-of-all-trades who will work simply from briefing that they are given every day, just like Ministers working from the same briefs. Where is the improvement in quality of legislation in that? I pray that we may not get there. In the mean time, we are right, are we not, to continue to plan the reforms in our procedures and governance to work with the system that we have got? I think that that is something worth fighting for.

I hope that your Lordships will take away the importance not of widening or increasing the streams of legislation that go through this place but, rather, of focusing them and giving them more expert attention. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch—I have not seen her in her place since she spoke—said that the House of Commons spent three times as long as we did on scrutinising legislation. It does not say much for the level of its scrutiny when, in particular, not only do the things that it has scrutinised come with glaring mistakes in them but vast rafts of the stuff come from there not scrutinised at all. The figures that the noble Baroness quoted do not accord very closely with those that I got from the Library earlier today.

I merely put this in at the end to focus on the importance of the legislative process that we do for the nation—our country, as the noble Lord said. If we are going to do that at our best, we need to do it in a focused way with a large reserve of individual experts on specific things who are not coming in, frankly, in order to get benefits but in order to contribute to the work which is vital to this country.

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[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I do not always agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, but I certainly side with the last point that she made. It seems to me that the Commons has shown us the way and that we ought to follow it. However, I do not side with my noble friend Lord Tyler and others when they seem to suggest that in some way the Commons will pal up to us and agree that we should do some things and it will do the others. As was shown demonstrably in the previous Session, the Commons wants to do all the nice things itself, and so it should. Our job is to decide what else needs doing and then to find ways of doing it well or, if we are already doing it, ways of doing it better. If we approach that task in a self-critical frame of mind rather than a self-satisfied one—that is not something we always find easy—take up the suggestion of my noble friend Lord Norton that this should be a continuous operation and pick up what the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, says about using pilots rather than getting too stuck up on what the consequences might be of a change that was not quite right, we shall make good progress. The whole process ought to be one of continuous improvement. It is the way the world outside runs. Frankly, there is plenty of opportunity for it.

To go back to what the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, was saying, this is something we must do as a whole House. We cannot leave this to the usual channels to do at their pace because, to take an obvious example, the whole argument over our expenses was delayed and delayed by the usual channels and tackled only when it became impossible to ignore. The wisdom of the House is on many occasions greater than the wisdom of the usual channels and ought to be employed in these important areas.

I want to concentrate on two areas, the public and Back-Benchers. I know that we are old but, if we are to be a legislature, we must keep up with the way the world is moving. The world is moving in an extremely technological way and the technology is changing every year. We have not been well served by our Information Committee. This piece of junk I have in my pocket that passes for a PDA cannot get the internet properly, twitter or communicate in social media properly. What are we trying to do to ourselves, loading ourselves with that inadequate technology? We are merely cutting ourselves off from the sort of communication that people out there want us to have. Yes, we should get much more involved in those aspects of being a legislature that involve the public. Pre-legislative scrutiny and public evidence-hearing should be what we are really aiming at because it gives the public a chance to participate. We should certainly go for post-legislative scrutiny; I entirely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, that the Digital Economy Act should be a prime candidate for that. It was only half discussed before it was passed into law and is full of controversial stuff. This time next year we shall have a much clearer view of what is happening and the way it should go.

When we have proper scrutiny of a Bill, we should put it up on Wikiversity. We should let people have a real look at the clauses, comment on them, propose changes and work with those Members of the House who are interested to see how individual clauses and aspects of the Bill could be changed. “Wikiversity” may not be a word that many Members know but we should know it. These techniques are out there and are being used to develop ideas between a number of diverse people rather than within a little conclave. That ought to be the direction in which we are heading. For the first time last week I saw an iPad used in the Chamber. That may startle some noble Lords. However, I live my life electronically. Why do I have to print things out every time I come into this Chamber? I want the Bill and all the comments that I have received in front of me. I use an inadequate laptop at the moment but there is plenty of technology out there which would make it much easier to handle the volume of information we ought to be handling in Committee. Overall, we can make this House much more open to the public, particularly to those members of the public who really understand what is going on in a Bill. Our functions would benefit greatly if we did that.

The second thing I want to cover is the role of the Back-Bencher. I say to noble Lords who were not here when we had hereditary Peers in number that we are in the unusual position of having a Government who are in control of the House, as we saw in the two votes last week. Some of us, at least, got used to the idea that the Liberals were the swing voters and that if you had the Libs with you, you won; if you did not, you lost. We had this rather strange business of effectively talking to the Government but actually trying to persuade my noble friends to come with us in order to defeat the Government. Now we have a position where the Government are in control. We on these Benches will have to learn the virtues of rebellion, which those of us who were here when the hereditary Peers were in the majority knew well because that was the only way the House functioned and had respect. We are going to have to find ways of taking back some of the all embracing power that the usual channels have taken to themselves over the past 20 years.

I must say that my noble friend disappointed me when, almost in his first sentence, he talked about a Leader’s Group which, “I will appoint”. That has too many echoes of what we have seen in committees appointed to consider Lords reform—that is, hand-picked committees, chosen specifically so that they will produce reports which agree with the conclusions that the usual channels have already arrived at. We must be much more open on this, particularly when we are talking about the rules which govern this House. Those who are on the committee, or at least a proportion of them, should be on it with the consent of the whole House, having been openly chosen by the whole House. I side with the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, on that. It would make these committees much more powerful. That should also be a characteristic of the House Committee, the Liaison Committee and other aspects of this House.

There is also scope for a greater Back-Bench voice in the selection of Motions. How do they suddenly appear for dinner-break debate and so on? Mine have been chosen an inordinate number of times, and I am very grateful, but whether or not my Motion has been chosen does not seem to have reflected the will of the House.

How should we choose noble Lords to ask Starred Questions? At the moment, there is a sort of queue at 10 o’clock. This inordinate scramble is like some arrangement from the junior common room whereby only those who are prepared to stay up until two hours past midnight actually get any business done. There was a good suggestion in one of the newspapers—I forget which—that we should hold a ballot two weeks ahead and Members whose names are drawn out of the hat can then put down a Question. That would produce a much more even relationship between us.

We have extensively discussed today the selection of speakers during Questions. I very much side with those noble Lords who think that the chair should be allowed to choose. My noble friend, a self-confessed member of the Heinz 57 group, has a well perfected technique of sitting on that Bench—when he rises he cannot see half the House behind him and therefore cannot give way to other noble Lords because he is unaware of their presence. I am not asking for the Lord Speaker or whoever is in the chair to rule on matters of procedure—which clearly they cannot do, given that they are such a long way from the Clerks—but they can choose who is to speak next. That would mean that, rather than quarrelling among ourselves, we would just rise and not have to compete with ourselves to be heard, and it would not be the noisiest or even the grandest who were chosen. We would presumably have to agree to rules on how we expected the Speaker to operate, but if we were to go down that route, we would have a much more presentable system.

We have talked a lot about what else we can do. I agree with some of the suggestions put forward on how we can improve the way that we operate this House from the point of view of the Government. Taking Statements into Grand Committee would be an excellent idea. They take up a chunk of prime House time. Noble Lords who are interested in a Statement are almost never those who are interested in whatever business they are interrupting. If we put them in the Moses Room, we could give them more time and we could make the timing of Statements more flexible, as it is in the Commons, and reach a point where the Back Benches have exhausted themselves—or at least we could experiment with that.

As a keen participant in Committee stages, we could take a lot of them off the Floor of the House. That would give the Government a lot more time.

[Lord Elton]

Why does my noble friend think that we ought to give the Government a lot more time if what we are trying to do is restrain them?

[Lord Lucas]

That is because I want a lot of government time to be taken up by things such as pre-legislative and post-legislative scrutiny, and other good activities on which other noble Lords have commented. We ought to be trying to find the most effective role for ourselves and we cannot take on new things without giving up something else. Anyway, a Committee stage—which is essentially a conversation—taken off the Floor of the House would be a better environment and would mean that the House was working better and more effectively.

In addition, we should look at changing Report stage. Report is a pretty sterile activity at the moment whereby everyone talks, the Minister replies and then you do not have a chance to pick up anything that the Minister said. It would work better if Ministers automatically rose immediately after the proposers of amendments and had a first go. That might bring everything to a close and save a lot of time. On other occasions, it would allow those who were to speak later to do so in a much more informed way, and the Minister’s final reply would be much more fruitful.

Lastly, I wish to pick up a point on intervals between the stages of Bills. Intervals are important if you are a Back-Bencher because it takes time to put amendments together when you do not have staff. You cannot do your job if everything is run together. I welcome this initiative by my noble friend and I am delighted that we are discussing procedures. I very much hope that what will come out of this is a committee which is open to all our views, open in its processes and results in our making real progress on the way that we conduct our business.

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[Lord McNally]

I will not commit myself to that. At the end of the year there will be a draft Bill which will itself go to legislative scrutiny. There is no rushing of fences on this. There is some serious work to be done. A very good agenda has been set up. A standing committee to look at practices and procedures may come out of—

[Lord Elton]

While my noble friend is on procedure, perhaps we may revert for a moment to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Rooker. I presume that the Leader’s Group will produce a report, which will be put to the House with a Motion that it is approved and will be open to amendment. It will include an enormous number of proposals, which could well elicit a large number of amendments. I hope that my noble friend will take on board the need to have perhaps a special procedure or at least a substantial time for us to deal with it.

[Lord McNally]

I think so, but we should first look at the report. Certainly, we will not do what the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, implied; namely, to say, “This is it: take it or leave it”. We hope that the committee will bring forward a range of suggestions which will be open to the House, but it will remain in this House’s power to decide what it wants out of that report.

As I said, this Hansard report will produce a good first working document for the group of the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad. Also, those such as the Hansard Society and other groups who take an interest in these matters will see an open invitation to submit their evidence, as will the parties and individual Members of the House. I hope that it may even consider the suggestion of my noble friend Lord Lucas and open up its workings to the new technologies so that we can get ideas through in that way. I also noted him saying that the Benches behind me should relearn the art of rebellion. I have to say that some of us never thought he had lost the knack for that.

I finish on a thought that comes from my noble friend Lord Campbell of Alloway. He gave us a political warning, and it is one I can feel as a parliamentarian: do not think that you can smooth all the rough edges out of our parliamentary workings. If you smooth all the rough edges away, the House will stop doing its job. Sometimes it has to be awkward and uncomfortable, and indeed sometimes we have to stay late, to make it do its job. I have never wanted to see this House be a kind of rubber stamp for the Executive of the day. My noble friend has put this forward in the real spirit of his job, not as a government Minister but as the Leader of the House—in the spirit of looking after the interests of this House. In this debate he has combined the Churchillian order of “Action this day” with the Maoist invocation to let a thousand flowers bloom.