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Lord Trefgarne: My Lords, before the noble and gallant Lord sits down, perhaps he can help me with one point. He said that he felt that these proposals, as they may eventually come forward, should be in place by the next Session. Given that some of our arrangements have been in place for very many hundreds of years, why is that necessary?
Lord Craig of Radley: My Lords, that was the view of the group.
4.14 p.m.
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe: My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to take part in this debate and to commend to the House the recommendations of the group that was appointed to consider how the working practices of the House could be improved. I must, of course, immediately declare an interest in that I was selected to be a member of the group, even though I am a relatively new Member of the House. I come to the subject as one of the many Peers appointed in 1997, and since, as a working Peer. I am
a Member of the Select Committee on the European Union as well as being chairman of one of its sub-committees. So, as one who attends regularly, I think that I have been here long enough to have begun to understand not only the accumulated wisdom of this House, but to develop a deep respect for the House.I come from a background in which change has been a significant feature of the past two decades; namely, in the Civil Service and the trade unions. I know the difficulties that change brings in its wake, but I know, too, the advantages. I found it particularly interesting to hear Her Majesty's reply to the Loyal Addresses of both Houses, in Westminster Hall, when she said that,
- "Change has become a constant; managing it has become an expanding discipline. The way we embrace it defines our future".—[Official Report, 30/4/02; col. 563.]
We all know that change is a condition of life on this planet and that it can be for the better or for the worse. It is in the application of change that the hand of man and woman can affect the consequences. The problem often lies in trying to come to a nice judgement about what is better. But what is true is that our instincts, and the instincts of this House, are for pragmatic change, evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and that we must hold on to accumulated wisdom while trying to find a more effective way of using it.
This House has already seen some quite substantial recent changes, which many would argue were for the better. Indeed, just last week, no less a person than the Leader of the Opposition, the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, referred to the House's successes since 1999. These have led to the House increasingly being seen to be at the heart of the legislative process.
Politicians recognise that it is even more important now than it was in the past to connect with the electorate. The electorate expects change, especially of those who, through legislation, expect change of them. It is in the House's own interests to demonstrate its willingness to change.
This report on working practices embodies, in my opinion, the virtues of the House. It represents a considered and cautious examination of the issues. This examination began as long ago as last summer with the aim of securing better, more effective scrutiny, and the more efficient use of the time of all Members of the House. It has not been an easy process. The Leader of the House is to be commended for his patience and desire to proceed by consensus and agreement. Concessions have had to be made by all.
Although the report is not all that I would have wished it to be, I am sure that it is more than others would wish it to be. I am sure that it does not meet all the aspirations of the noble Lord, Lord Peston, who should be congratulated on and thanked for initiating this process quite some time ago by means of a Back-Bench debate in this Chamber. Noble Lords will recall his despair and frustration with the House's committee structure, which had consistently failed to deliver the changes that many Peers had been calling for over the
years. None the less, I believe that this report goes a long way towards meeting his and other Back-Benchers' aspirations.I trust that the report's cohesiveness will not be undermined, nor its implementation delayed, in the Procedure Committee to which it will be referred. However, wherever we end up, I believe that fairness and the democracy of 2002 require that this Chamber should have the final say on what is implemented. Regrettably, the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Denham, would prevent that. If it is taken to a vote—I still hope that it will not be, particularly given the urging of the Leader of the Opposition—I would hope that the House will reject it.
Lord Denham: My Lords, I wonder whether the noble Lord will give way. He said that if my amendment were carried, it would be the end of the matter. But, all that I am asking for is the time limit on the Procedure Committee to be removed. It may do what it has to do within the time limit in any case. It is not a wrecking amendment by any means.
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe: My Lords, I would argue that if the time limit were lifted, we would have the problem that my noble friend Lord Peston referred to when he introduced his debate—that the Procedure Committee never brings back issues and changes are never implemented. There is that possibility.
We were conscious that some of the changes might be seen as eroding some of the rights and powers of the opposition and that some proposals might be regarded as making it easier for the Government. But, that is not the case when viewed in the round. We should always remember that governments are in opposition some time, and if they have treated the opposition unfairly, they will suffer the consequences in due course.
The report also places many additional burdens and checks on government, as previous speakers have said. Indeed, it also places additional burdens on the staff of the House. I join others in commending the hard work that was undertaken by the Clerk and his assistant. The extension of legislative scrutiny to virtually all major government Bills as a matter of course is a significant change for all, which, it is to be hoped, will be ultimately beneficial to the public at large.
I am conscious of the Chief Whip's gentle pointer to the advice of the Companion on the length of speeches. We spent some time in the group discussing the Companion, how to get better compliance with it and how to avoid repetition. In recalling those discussions, your Lordships will be relieved to hear that I do not intend to go through all the recommendations in the report and tread in previous speakers' footsteps.
The area in which I have experience is in scrutinising legislation emanating from the European Union. As your Lordships undoubtedly know, the two Houses adopt quite different ways of attempting to scrutinise European legislation. The other place looks at all the documentation with an eye to its political and legal implications. This House has always added an element
of in-depth scrutiny which has found a faithful readership even in the European Commission. But it is an inescapable fact of life that the tide of paper increases in proportion to the numbers handling it. The European Union is on the threshold of quite dramatic enlargement. One consequence of that will be a further stimulus to the legislative output of Brussels. We must attempt to meet that challenge.Apart from a quantitative increase, we are faced at the same time by the deepening of the Union where common practices and regulation now extend to areas of our national life to a far greater extent than they did when we joined nearly 30 years ago. The current convention that is examining how the European Union should organise itself to deal with enlargement and to reconnect with its electorate has identified scrutiny by the national Parliaments of member states as an important element in the future design of the Union.
I particularly believe that the time has come for us to consider some way of using the resources and skills of both Houses to deal with this tide of legislation. It has been growing apace, but the time that both Houses devote to it has not. It is a change which I feel the country would want to see.
This package of reform must be taken as a whole. The moment when we start to pick off particular items that we do not like in the package, it will inevitably start to unravel. In seeking minor change in one area, we risk losing the lot.
The electorate has a right to expect better of Parliament and of this House. If we do not embrace these sensible proposals, we cannot simply revert to the status quo. Change is inevitable and it is better that we have a hand in shaping it.
4.24 p.m.
Lord Trefgarne: My Lords, I shall try to be as brief. Three separate questions need to be addressed this afternoon.
First, is there a need for improvement in our procedures, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Williams of Mostyn, seems to think? I am not persuaded. Of course, it is well known that when the House sits late Chief Whips of all parties have difficulty in detaining some noble Lords, but that has been the position for as far back as I can remember. I believe that when my noble friend Lord Denham was a distinguished Government Chief Whip, he had as much difficulty then as I dare say the noble Lord, Lord Carter, has now in keeping his noble friends here late at night to vote.
That is part of the political process that has been inherent in our system for as far back as any of us can remember, and indeed a great deal further. The idea that we shall somehow improve our proceedings by avoiding the need to sit late is not necessarily self-evident. I do not think that that case has been made for the wholesale improvement in our procedures.
I turn to the second question and the procedure by which so-called improvements will be arrived at. This is the second time in recent memory that we have had a Leader's Group to inquire into our affairs. Such groups are naturally staffed by eminent Members of your Lordships' House. The Leader of the House himself chaired this one and my noble friend Lord Strathclyde assisted him. The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, the Leader of the Cross-Benchers and a very distinguished member of the Liberal Democrat Party, also sat on the committee. Such committees tend to develop a momentum of their own, and they come to the House with proposals that have been recommended from a high source. Perhaps slightly more respectful noble Lords than myself are bowled over by such recommendations and tend to nod them through. I am afraid that I am not prepared to do that, but it will be recognised at once that I was not well brought up and perhaps I should learn better manners.
Be that as it may, such committees are not formally constituted committees of the House. They are selected by the noble and learned Lord the Leader of the House. I do not disagree with that, but let it be clear that they have no authority, save their own self-interest. Your Lordships should take their proposals on that basis.
I turn to the merits of the proposals. I shall not run through each one from (a) to (n), but they are all designed to facilitate the passage of government legislation. There is nothing wrong in the noble and learned Lord introducing proposals that will enable him to get his business through the House more quickly and easily, but your Lordships should see them for what they are. The noble and learned Lord is seeking to reduce the capacity of the House—I suppose that that means the Opposition—to question, delay, reform and revise, which is the role of your Lordships' House.
That would be a mistake. I hope that the noble and learned Lord will not seek to shackle the Procedure Committee, not least by asking it to steam through its consideration of his proposals and to make its recommendations as early as 8th July. I, therefore, support the amendment moved by my noble friend Lord Denham. I hope that the House will agree to it, and I hope that your Lordships will give careful scrutiny to the recommendations of the Procedure Committee when they eventually come before us.
4.28 p.m.
The Lord Bishop of Birmingham: My Lords, I shall be brief. I have only three comments to make.
First, there is a moral good in conducting our business effectively and also humanely. If the recommendations of the Leader's Group will help the House to do its work better, use its Members' time more effectively and help them to get to bed at a reasonable hour, they are to be welcomed.
Secondly, I note that the subject is the working practices of the House. These are a matter of housekeeping, not about building the kingdom of heaven. In such matters, we look for improvement,
not perfection. We know from experience that all reforms have unintended consequences. The only way to find out what those are, unless we can truly lay our hand on our heart and predict disaster, is to put the proposals to the test of practice, and then review them in the light of experience, as is proposed.Thirdly, by standing back from the recommendations, I observe that they are one more sign of the increasing professionalisation of the work of the House.
There is an increasingly heavy load of work to be done, not least in the scrutiny of legislation and in the work of government. That work has to be done thoroughly by persons who have both the time and the competence to do it. I am not concerned to pass any judgment on that development; I simply note it. But I also note the consequence for people such as those of us who sit on these Benches. Our primary duties in life lie elsewhere. The more demanding the work of this House becomes in terms of time and attention, the harder it is for people like us to pull our weight and fully participate in the kind of work that has to be done. I note the fact. How does that lie with the benefit to this House of those who are not members of the political class and who bring with them their day-to-day experience of life and responsibilities that are exercised primarily elsewhere? I ask the question.
4.31 p.m.
Lord Brabazon of Tara: My Lords, I speak as chairman of your Lordships' European Union Select Committee. My comments will be confined solely to the contents of the paragraph under the heading, "Select Committees", in which the committee I chair is singled out for uniquely close attention. I am grateful to those noble Lords, including the noble and learned Lord the Leader of the House, who have been kind enough to make kind references to the work of the committee.
In passing, I wonder why the work of the European Union Committee was the only one which the group decided to have a look at. I suspect that the reason may lie in the membership of the working group in the form of the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe, but there are, of course, other valuable Select Committees in your Lordships' House, including particularly the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, which does such useful work on scrutiny.
Turning back to the European Union Committee, the noble and learned Lord the Leader of the House, as chairman of the Leader's Group, wrote to me last December asking for comments from our committee on the working methods we follow and on some more general matters relating to the House's consideration of European business. The committee had the opportunity to consider the request in some detail and responded in January. That response is available in the Library. I should also add that the committee authorised me to appear before the Leader's Group to give evidence should I have been invited to do so, but no such invitation was in the event received.
I turn to the recommendations of the report as they relate to European scrutiny. Your Lordships will note that there is a recommendation for,
- "a review of the House's scrutiny of European legislation".
I should add that, not knowing what the House will make of the other recommendations of the Leader's Group report, if one of the consequences of what is agreed is that there is more time on the Floor of the House for debates on committee reports in prime time, my committee would very much welcome that. I am encouraged by what the noble and learned Lord the Leader of the House said on that issue in his opening remarks.
Tied up with the question of debates is the question of how seriously the Government take our scrutiny work. I have recently received a government response to a very thorough report by one of our sub-committees which can best be summarised in the phrase, "Thank you for your letter, the contents of which have been noted". I shall not name the department concerned—it will by now have received a strongly worded letter from me making clear that that is not good enough and demanding a proper response—but the case does illustrate that, in addition to the House having the responsibility to discharge its duty of scrutiny thoroughly, the Government have a duty to consider and respond in an equally thorough manner.
I turn now to the details of paragraph 30 of the report before us today. The suggestion made in the report for a review of European scrutiny includes a review of,
- "the appropriate balance between the scrutiny of general policy and that of specific legislative proposals".
There is a strongly argued case that your Lordships can have most impact at an early stage in the process. This is because the detailed scrutiny of European legislation by the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers is not a process in which your Lordships' House, or any other national parliament, is directly involved in the same kind of detailed way as we are in passing United Kingdom legislation.
The suggestion for a review also refers to,
- "the desirability of a greater number of shorter and more focussed reports".
The report from the Leader's Group also refers back to the debate on our committee's report on the possibility of a second parliamentary chamber for Europe and cites the speeches of the noble Lords, Lord Howell of Guildford, Lord Williamson of Horton and Lord Desai in that debate. Without asking why those noble Lords were singled out for particular mention, I am sure that the House will be pleased to learn that the committee has already taken steps to follow up many of the matters raised in the debate. For example, the noble Lord, Lord Williamson of Horton, proposed that more attention should be paid to scrutiny of the Commission's Annual Work Programme. We have already heard evidence from senior Commission officials on that topic and next week we shall see a senior official from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and we shall then produce a report on how we might take that matter forward.
I should also add that a number of points made in the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, are not matters on which the committee can itself take a decision. For example, one of the suggestions was for the whole European scrutiny business to be made "mandatory and legal". I am not quite sure myself how such a development could be taken forward—it would certainly require a resolution of the House and, indeed, possibly primary legislation. Neither of those are matters which the Select Committee itself can deliver, but it would be happy to give the House the benefit of its views should the House wish that. It would be in that spirit that I would invite the Select Committee to take forward the suggestion in the report and consider those matters.
The paragraph on Select Committees concludes with an invitation to the European Union Committee and the Procedure Committee to explore some of the suggestions made in the second chamber debate. As I have already said, we have already taken some steps in that direction. But if the House through this debate gives the green light to this recommendation in the Leader's Group report, I shall of course report back to the Select Committee and we shall begin work on those issues. We would need to consider taking evidence
from, among others, the party leaders in this House, other elements of the Government and, indeed, other national parliaments, to name but a few, to see how we could take our work forward constructively.If such a review is to be done, it would, of course, need to be done properly. For that reason I am assuming that, whatever the result of the amendment tabled today by the noble Lord, Lord Denham, our committee need not feel under pressure to produce its report by 8th July.
To sum up: I shall invite my committee to take note of the recommendations of the Leader's Group report and in this debate and, if the Motion is carried today, to carry out a review along the lines suggested, building on the work we already do to keep our scrutiny procedures under review.
4.39 p.m.
Baroness Gould of Potternewton: My Lords, I should like to start by congratulating the Leader's Group on producing a unanimous report. I am sure that that is a fairly rare event. It is to the great credit of all the members of that group that they were able to use their skill and expertise to produce a unanimous report.
In moving his amendment, the noble Lord, Lord Denham, is clearly very suspicious of the recommendations contained in the report. I am equally suspicious that the motivation for the amendment is to prevent change, particularly as the ultimate decisions will not be taken today but will be presented to the Procedure Committee, which will have to report back to this House before the decisions are approved. I do not believe that it would be impossible for the Procedure Committee to consider those recommendations in the space of seven weeks. There is no reason to suggest that the process should be delayed. Having been a member of the Procedure Committee, I know that the proposals will be scrutinised in depth, not least taking into account the question of resources that has previously been raised.
During a similar debate almost exactly two years ago, introduced by my noble friend Lord Peston and referred to by my noble friend Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe, it was suspected that the object of calling for change to our working practices was to make matters easier for the Government and to dilute our scrutiny of the executive. The expression then used was "to make the House more government friendly", about which we have heard a little more today. That is completely wrong. This package clearly does not do that—quite the reverse. I would not support any changes unless they related to efficiency, to doing our job of scrutiny better, to making good law and to making the House more people friendly. These proposals are not about changing the ethos of the House or cloning the Commons; nor are they about diminishing the right of Back-Benchers or introducing timetables and guillotines. If that were the case, I would strongly oppose them. They are not merely about getting through government business, but improving that business.
The measures presented to us today show that, with skill and thought, it is possible to restructure and reorganise our working practices, while at the same time increasing the ability of this Chamber to scrutinise in more depth and detail. We should not lose that opportunity.
It seems to me that the recommendations fall neatly into two, but interrelated categories: those relating to improving the level of scrutiny, which is not always done as well as we pretend, and those designed to provide more sensible working hours. I make no apology for specifically referring to a number of them and to the reasons that I support them.
Whether or not we like it, the makeup of this House has changed, giving rise to changing expectations. There has been a significant drop in the average age of Members; the number of women has increased; more Members have young children or care responsibilities for the young and old; more Members have full-time occupations outside the House, and very differing work patterns.
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