Proposed Changes to the Standing Orders of the House of Commons

Lord Tyler Excerpts

Tuesday 21st July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tyler (LD)]

My Lords, I am very glad to follow the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, for reasons that will become apparent in a moment. I have three issues to which I want to refer briefly.

First, as others said last week and have said today, the idea that these proposals affect the other place alone has been blown to smithereens. It is clearly extremely relevant to the powers and responsibilities of your Lordships’ House that these proposals are examined very carefully. The noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, has referred to the proposed changes to Standing Orders and, in particular, Standing Order 83O. I do not know quite why the zero is there—oh, it is an “O”, and obviously very important. For brevity’s sake, I am not going to read them, as there is a whole page of them, but they are headed, “Consideration of certified motions or amendments relating to Lords Amendments or other messages”.

What is here is clearly an opportunity for a subset of the House of Commons to veto what the House of Lords has said, which goes to the very heart of this issue. It is taking a part of the Westminster Parliament and saying that it has a veto over the whole of that Parliament. The relationship between our two Houses is clearly of supreme importance, as others have said, and this alters the supremacy of the Westminster Parliament. It is as important as that. Even more topically, if one devolved subset of our system of governance is given that opportunity, what are Holyrood, Cardiff and Stormont going to say? They will want it too—and why should they not? It alters the whole delicate balance of power and responsibility within the United Kingdom.

The case for a Joint Committee is absolutely clear. If I may say so to the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, the other place can take absolutely no notice whatever of our Constitution Committee—it does not have a comparable Constitution Committee, as he well knows. Perhaps it should have one. By the time that our Constitution Committee has come up with some recommendations, the danger is that the changes to the Standing Orders in the other place will already have been passed.

That brings me to my second point. This is a classic case of the dangers of piecemeal and ad hoc attempts to deal with apparent anomalies in our constitution. Removing one anomaly produces another. Any Member who still thinks, after listening today, that this can be resolved in isolation would do well to read the Hansard report of our brief debate last Thursday and the debate in the other place last Wednesday. I particularly draw the attention of noble Lords to the comments of the former Attorney-General, Dominic Grieve, who said:

“Ultimately, every decision that is taken by an Assembly or Parliament in the United Kingdom has a knock-on effect elsewhere, outside the area of its jurisdiction”.—[Official Report, Commons, 15/7/15; col. 1002.]

Surely, such a wealth of practical experience exceeds what is available to the Leader of the Commons on his own—hence, I believe that a Joint Committee would be entirely appropriate.

There is a head of steam now to go beyond this immediate problem and think about the wider context, so I hope the Leader of the House will persuade her colleagues to look again at the case for a comprehensive constitutional convention, supported now on all sides of your Lordships’ House and widely supported in the other place, as well as being the subject of a Private Member’s Bill in the name of my noble friend Lord Purvis of Tweed.

The noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, is right: just having a constitutional convention is not in itself going to solve this problem, as was clear from the convention in Scotland, which is occasionally quoted as if that were the model. We should be clear that you have to start out with a remit that is agreed, so that all those involved know where they are trying to go. That was not the case in Scotland, as evidenced by the fact that two parties did not want to be involved in the constitutional convention precisely because at that stage, they could not agree to the common remit.

There is clearly a major opportunity, as well as a problem, arising from these proposals. I hope that in the short term there is a Joint Committee of the two Houses—such committees have an enviable reputation for getting to the bottom of things and sorting them out in a way that individually, the two Houses have found difficult—but I believe that in the longer term, this now leads to the need for a constitutional convention.

[Lord King of Bridgwater (Con)]

My Lords, when I sought to intervene, a little too late, on the prompt conclusion of the proposal to the House from the noble Lord, Lord Butler, I wanted to ask him one question. He is proposing a Joint Committee. Recently, we have had an election and seen the arrival of a substantial number of Scottish National Party MPs who previously observed the principle of a self-denying ordinance, but have made it clear that they do not think this quite applies in the same way any more. I wanted to intervene in order to ask: while this Standing Joint Committee is taking place, what will cover any problems arising from legislation in the mean time? We have had some very interesting—