House of Lords: Remote Participation and Hybrid Sittings

Lord Stoneham of Droxford Excerpts

Thursday 20th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stoneham of Droxford (LD)]

My Lords, it has been a long debate, which, I have to say, I have enjoyed more than I expected. I too thank all the staff for the work they have done in enabling the amazing facilities that we have used over the past 18 months.

I shall start by making several general observations and conclude by talking about areas where I think there is a broad consensus that we need to look at change. I think that everybody accepts that a “functioning”—the word used by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge—Chamber and committees is what we want to get back to; it is not necessarily getting back to how we were, but getting back to where we can have the Chamber and the committees as the focus of our activities. We need to get back to being able to have more personal contacts and meetings—those are all essential characteristics of politics. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, talked about the “pressure of the room”. That sums up why we need to have more of us back in the Chamber.

It was slightly ironic that one of our new Members quoted from our oath, as did several others, as a reason why we had to be here. It is an oath which I presume has origins in the 13th century, when a boat or a horse were the main means of transport and of facilitating being present, and burning beacons were the main means of mass communication. Incidentally, Parliament met around the country, and there has been lots of change since then, including in how we can be present. The real question—this is my second observation —is how we can use the crisis and experience we have been through to learn anything that can help us improve the work of the House. Every single organisation in the country is doing this. Are we not going to be part of that process, just looking at things we can learn from the experience we have had over the past 18 months?

Looking around this House—I say this it with no disrespect to those who have taken part in the debate—I think the majority of us rather enjoy the old processes. We like the give-and-take, the late nights, the Lobbies, the dining and the gossip. But a lot of people who come into this House, whose experience and skills we want to use, are put off by the “in group” who enjoy these sorts of things and want to see more modern practices. We have to look outwards, to consult widely and to learn from that consultation. In the 21st century, we have to be conscious of our lack of diversity and how we can improve facilities for the disabled. We should always try to improve, as a number of speakers said, how we work and how we make sure we are fully representative of the four nations.

Let us not be sidetracked by the unintended consequences of what we have experienced over the past 18 months. The hurried changes in allowances have led to the pressure on speaking slots and votes. It is not necessarily the processes or the technology that have done this; it was predictable. As the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, said, the market works and the consequences were warned against—and actually it has saved us 10 million quid. That needs to be set against the £90,000 a month that the noble Earl said we would have to spend to continue some form of hybrid arrangements.

What changes could we investigate and consult on to get some sort of consensus in the House? The noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, spoke of the value of the virtual facilities for committee work, so we should not rule it out—we should look at that and decide how we can use it to improve our work. Incidentally, we should continue to invest in virtual facilities, not least for our outreach programme in schools.

We have to recognise that the facilities that we have used in the last 18 months are just the beginning of a huge revolution. Let us remember that television started with black and white, so the facilities will improve, and we should keep a hand in there and watch and develop, using them to our advantage and to improve our work. We will have to keep them for contingencies going forward—they will have to be part of our contingency planning.

As I have said, there remains also the huge issue of inclusion and diversity, and we need to counter the London focus of the House. We want more people with experience of disability in the House. We have discovered a way of encouraging and supporting them; we cannot simply take it away again without seeing how we can use it and experiment with it to help those Members of our existing House and those whom we can encourage in the future.

In my view, the hub is a great reform of wartime. I pressed for it in various committees before the pandemic, because I thought that we should have the annunciator on our phones. Lo and behold, it suddenly emerged in wartime, and we should keep it, as we in this country have done before when we have had the experience of necessary reforms created due to a crisis. We should keep it and continue to develop it. We are already using virtual voting for all our elections now, and we should look at ways that we can help to save time and move us on from the old-fashioned Lobbies. We shall probably—certainly, in fact—need it for R&R. If it has to start with having virtual voting in the House, so be it—we should experiment.

There is another possible reform that we should look at, which we had an example of when the system broke down: deferred voting. It worked rather well, actually, so why do we not look at having a system where we vote at an appropriate, convenient time? We do not have to have votes that are ignored or late at night; we could do them the following day if we agreed that. That would be a more appropriate way of proceeding. We should look at this—we experienced it on a couple of occasions during the breakdown of the systems in the House.

The experience of the last 18 months means that we have looked at a number of things. We have looked at and experienced procedure list issues, but we should look at things such as queueing for Questions and the lists for them. Some of those reforms have been great improvements, and we should seek to experiment with them once we are back to normal, rather than discarding them to go back to misguided norms.

Finally, a number of noble Lords have said that we must be cautious for health reasons and not be too hasty in going back to the old practices. People are coming back, and that is an improvement, but we do not want to abandon the hybrid arrangements totally until we can ensure that all can come back. The transition therefore gives us an opportunity for proper, detailed consultation over the summer, so that we can then return to a functioning House and incorporate some of the changes and improvements that we have used and practiced over the last few months. We should do this by having a wide consultation, encouraging participation in that and fulfilling a number of diversity objectives.