House of Lords: Remote Participation and Hybrid Sittings

Lord Lamont of Lerwick Excerpts

Thursday 20th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick (Con) [V]]

My Lords, nothing that has been said or will be said today detracts from brilliant work of all those who have helped to make hybrid and virtual proceedings work in this House and have enabled us to continue working through the emergency. We are immensely grateful. However, in considering whether we continue with what were temporary measures, it is about one question and one question alone: “Is Parliament sufficiently holding the Government to account?” I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Newby, that we must move as the world moves—but I also agree with the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, that we are not just a business and it cannot be simply a question of efficiency.

There are some aspects of the new procedures that we may wish to continue: submitting questions by email rather than queueing in a draughty corridor seems long overdue. Improvement may also come from more time for Questions. Many will also favour keeping lists for Questions, rather than the bear garden that we dignify with the term “self-regulation”. However, the main questions cannot be divorced from social distancing, and until that has resolved it will be difficult to return to full normality. A House of Lords with social distancing cannot operate as a House of Lords.

Paradoxically, I am speaking remotely but I wish to argue against both remote participation and remote voting. I am speaking remotely because I cannot be present physically in the Chamber for the Leader’s wind-up tonight, and so the convention is that I should not participate in the House. I am sure that remote participation is not a satisfactory mode and it will be illustrated, I am sure, by my speech. Our Writ of Summons commands us to attend at Westminster. A Parliament where people are not physically present is not a Parliament at all. A lot of talking heads on screens suspended from the ceiling may make a good TV programme, but it is no substitute for a lively debate where people argue face to face with each other. What sort of debate is it where people cannot interrupt the wind-up of a Minister who has failed to answer the questions raised in the debate?

As has been said many times in this debate, and I apologise for repeating it, it is necessary to judge the mood of the House to decide whether to force a Division, as my noble friend Lord Cormack is going to have to decide later. But where there is no coughing with boredom, no muttering and no quiet laughter, there is no mood of the House to judge. The House of Lords is very polite House, possibly too polite, but with remote proceedings the politeness has become the stillness of the graveyard. We may not yet have bored ourselves rigid, but we are beginning to bore the public. The number of viewers of House of Lords proceedings on Parliamentlive.tv declined in 2020 compared with the previous year.

How we vote should not be a matter of convenience; it is a question of commitment. Remote voting requires hardly any interruption to whatever a person is doing. Mind you, I suppose in theory that remote voting could be the answer to the numbers problem in the House of Lords. We could have a House of 2,000, with no pressure on the facilities of the Chamber. Of course, that would be ridiculous, but remote voting and being paid for it is going to seem a lot more than ridiculous to the general public. The public will be outraged if life returns to normal and we continue to be paid to vote from the comfort of our own homes.

The noble Lord, Lord Hain, thought that the increase in voting was a sign of democracy that should be welcomed. I fear it may have other causes. Our temporary procedures have distorted behaviour. Speaking lists have become longer, requiring speeches to be ludicrously short. Sometimes the most distinguished people with the most to contribute have not been able to contribute very much. To squeeze more people in for Questions, Ministers are asked to be very brief with replies. Some of the replies would be recognised by Lloyd George, who used to tell the story of how once he got lost in his car when driving in Snowdonia. He stopped and asked a passer-by where he was. The passer-by replied, “You are in Wales”. Lloyd George always said that this was the perfect parliamentary answer: it was brief, it was true, and it told no one anything of any use. That is true of too many of the ministerial replies that we have had under our new procedures.

We agreed our procedures as temporary to cope with an emergency. As the country returns to normality, without doubt we must return to the procedures that were before. Parliament is not holding the Government to account and that is what the public expect us to do.