House of Lords: Remote Participation and Hybrid Sittings

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Thursday 20th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I unstintingly join in the thanks that this House has given to the staff who have looked after us so well during this pandemic, producing a system that has enabled us to continue in business to great effect.

This debate is an interesting and involving demonstration of how successful a hybrid House can be. To my noble friend Lord Borwick, I say, “Yes, change is best made gradually, but sometimes you need a crisis.” Transitioning a black taxi from a petrol to an electric engine is a substantial change, bringing a lot of other changes in its wake. Sometimes, you need to make that sort of change, and a crisis gives you the opportunity to do so because it forces you to change a lot. The right test that we should apply to all the changes that we are looking at is that advocated by my noble friend Lord Norton: does this make us better at our job?

My feeling about Committee stages of Bills is that it does not work. When we get the chance to come in for Committee, most of us will come in because it works much better if you have large-scale public personal interaction. However, I cannot see the problem with some minimal hybrid participation; I do not follow my noble friend Lord Howe down that path. It may be that some future technology will enable a truly hybrid Committee to work, but, for the rest, I find myself alongside the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, the noble Baroness, Lady Humphreys, and others in thinking that many people who ought to be part of this House have real lives and careers, have caring responsibilities and live long distances away from London. We need those people to be part of this House.

To answer my noble friend Lord Dobbs, the public perception of this House should not be of capital-bound has-beens; we want people who are living in the world and learning from it as well as those with accumulated experience. All of us owe it to this country to do our bit for climate change, which means not requiring travelling when we can avoid it. Travel is one of the really big generators of unnecessary carbon dioxide.

I turn to some of the issues that have been covered. I also like lists for Questions, but I think that it might be an idea to add a golden ticket so that, once or twice a year, Peers can say, “This is my subject—I do not want to miss out.” There has been a suggestion that the hybrid House has reduced access to Ministers. There never was much: you had to hang around in the hope of catching them at the back end of a voting Lobby. If access to Ministers in an informal way is really an important part of what we do, we should take steps to make that true.

Others have said that they object to prepared speeches being read out, one after another. That was true before Covid: the House had been heading in that direction for a long time. If that is something that we care about, that is change that we need to make; we need to do something to reverse that.

My noble friend Lord Howe said that, with remote voting, Ministers do not get a “fair hearing”. As others have said, that was the same before as well: there has been a lot of voting in accordance with Whips’ wishes. Very rarely have we all sat down to listen to what the Minister and the proposer are saying before we vote; most of us make our minds up beforehand.

If we want to change that, we need to change our old ways—we should be holding the Government to account—but how useful were the old ways? I remember a Starred Question in 1992, when the House was still full of World War II warriors, asking:

“What preparations are being made to commemorate the battle of El Alamein”—[Official Report, 11/5/1992; col. 142.]


on its 50th anniversary. The reply was that there were none:

“It falls to the Germans to lead this year’s ceremonies.”—[Official Report, 11/5/1992; col. 144.]


That was a point when you could feel the mood of the House; when has that happened since?

We need to do a lot of thinking about how we can do better, and we should not just turn back to the old ways because they were comfortable.