House of Lords: Working Practices

Lord Luce Excerpts

Monday 12th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Luce]

My Lords, I can say one thing without doubt: the first real improvement in working practice is that today I am privileged to be the first to be called on the Back Benches. I hope that that tradition continues indefinitely.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, for convening the debate and for adopting a positive attitude towards the question of working practices in this House. I welcome, too, the fact that he is setting up the Leader’s Group to study these matters. I speak as someone who has been a member of one of the three committees—which has been working under the title of Strengthening Parliament—and it is from that experience that I wish to contribute a few views. However, I do not think it would be right to do so without putting into context my view on the broader picture of the Government’s proposals for reform of the Lords.

I start from the concept stated by the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, that the powers and role of the House of Lords is likely to remain the same. That puts a heavy onus on the Government and the committee under the Deputy Prime Minister to convince us that an elected or partially elected House will lead to improvements—I use the word “improvements”—in the capacity of the House to revise, scrutinise and persuade the other place to think again. At present, I think that the views put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Steel, for improvements and modernisation of an appointed House are the right way forward. The present policy of the Government looks like a form of populism in order to appease an electorate who are genuinely dissatisfied with Parliament. The Deputy Prime Minister’s description of this House as “an affront to democracy” illustrates this point. What are most needed are hard-headed, practical, unexciting adjustments to improve the performance of this House on behalf of the public. We in this country tend to be better at the rolling, pragmatic, incremental and more coherent evolution of the way in which we operate. In the past decade or two, we have fallen short of that. Our approach has often been shoddy and incoherent. I go along with the view of Edmund Burke, that we should have a,

“disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve”.

I cannot resist reminding the House of the vicar father and his English son travelling through Nebraska. The son said to his father, “You know, Dad, you can fit the United Kingdom into Nebraska”, to which his father said, “To what end, dear boy?” That is the question that we have to ask on every aspect of reform that we consider. We cannot, of course, afford to be complacent; we cannot afford to be self-satisfied in our procedures at any time and we have a duty to the public. But we should acknowledge that there have been many adjustments, in the past decade for example, to the working practices of this House.

The cross-party groups which have been looking at working practices have produced a wide range of ideas, some of which will be acceptable to the House, some of which will not. They are all worth examining as a way to improve the performance of this House. They range from recommendations to improve the scrutiny of primary legislation to ideas for strengthening the means of challenging the Executive more effectively and improving our internal governance and accountability. Many of these thoughts need looking at seriously by the Leader’s Groups.

Without examining all the proposals, which I have no intention of doing, I shall make one or two reflections on them. First, there is a continuing tendency on the part of successive Governments to produce too much legislation. Often, that legislation is badly thought out. It has become too much of a virility symbol for Ministers that they must produce a Bill. But when you look at the quality of the Bill, you really should question it. One of the proposals to come out of the committees’ work is that Bills should be much more fully justified before they are brought before Parliament for examination.

Secondly, there continues to be—it was the case in my day when I was a Member of the other place—a complete lack of contact and understanding between the two Houses. I hardly ever came to this Chamber in 21 years in the other place. But if we are discussing these reforms, including overall reform, there needs to be a much better mutual understanding of how we work. Therefore, I welcome the fact that the working groups recommended a more bicameral approach to many of the issues that we are tackling. I acknowledge that the coalition Government will follow up with a Joint Committee to look at the overall proposals for reform of the House.

The third factor is to redress the balance between the Executive and the legislature. Here, although our procedures are different, we should seek encouragement and learn from the work of the Wright committee in the other House in the previous Parliament. There are certain ideas there from which we, too, can benefit. We had only to see how refreshing, for example, were the recent cross-party elections to the Treasury Select Committee. The proposals of that committee to have more say on the part of the Back Benches in business management of that House are also relevant to this House. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, that the usual channels are an essential lubricant to business, but I also think that Peers on the Back Benches need to have more influence on the management of the House.

My fourth point is that public ignorance of the Lords is profound. Here, we need to seek ways in which we can involve the public more effectively in the affairs of the House. Again, in these working groups there is a recommendation that we should produce proposals for public evidence hearings on some kinds of legislation; there will be other ways to pursue this matter.

Fifthly, the time is coming—I am glad that this has been acknowledged—when the Lord Speaker’s powers should be looked at. There are arguments for extending the powers of the Lord Speaker, perhaps in certain, somewhat limited ways. I will come to the governance point which refers to the Lord Speaker in a moment, but here I come to something which I realise is controversial in this Chamber and where a lot of people, who have had far more experience, would not agree with me. However, for my part I find Question Time pretty undignified. Possibly it is because the attendance in the Chamber has got much bigger and it is much more difficult to handle self-regulation in that way. While I am totally in favour of self-regulation, for my part it makes much more sense for the Lord Speaker of the day to have the say, as opposed to a partial part of the House—even though the Government are totally trustworthy—deciding which group should be called upon next. That might help a bit to get rid of the slightly undignified aspect where sometimes the person who shouts the loudest is the one who gets in.

On the question of non-legislative matters, I would ask the House not to underestimate the value of topical debates. I have been very fortunate to have had two topical debates in the past two years, which I think have brought some influence to bear on government decision-making. The proposal in the working groups that topical debates should be part of a regular weekly one-hour procedure, at whatever time of the week is agreed as being the most suitable, should be adopted. We should have a more coherent system for that.

I come to the question of governance and accountability, which is my last point. I do not know whether I share this with very many other noble Peers, but my ignorance of the governance of the House was almost total until I joined the committee chaired by my noble friend Lady Murphy. I say without hesitation that this House is certainly very lucky to have the present incumbents who look after its governance, led by the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon, and his team of colleagues. However, we need to be not only a self-regulating House but one with a credible system of self-governance which will command public confidence and meet acceptable standards in today’s age. I, for example, do not feel that I can criticise the Press Complaints Commission as much as I could if I am not quite confident that we have the right self-governing system.

The Institute of Government has produced proposals —I think it was last week—for the governance of the other place: for the commission and the Board of Management to be more open and transparent; for a role for non-executives and for the national audit committee; and for occasional external reviews or financial health checks. It would do us no harm to look at those kinds of things to see whether it would strengthen our own systems of governance. At the same time, there is a case for looking at our lines of accountability. I ask myself what would have happened had there been a police raid on one of my noble friends in this House, as opposed to the other place. Would we have had clear lines of accountability and responsibility for dealing with that? I am not absolutely convinced that we would.

There is a strong case, as we recommend, for the Lord Speaker to provide leadership for the strategic governance of the House and to chair the House Committee with an open election system for that committee and the ability occasionally to co-opt if it needs outsiders to help it in that work. At least we should undertake an independent review of our governance system. I for my part welcome most warmly the leadership of the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, in setting up the Leader’s Group.