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Lord Peston: My Lords, I am not for one moment suggesting that, at some point—I hope sooner rather than later—noble Lords who so wish will not be able to move that this or that recommendation should be deleted. I entirely agree with the noble Lord that your Lordships will decide the matter. We may differ on what we may like to delete, but we do not differ on that. I have no doubt at all that this Chamber is sovereign.
Lord Lucas: My Lords, I am delighted that we agree on that. The authorities of the House should therefore take note that, if the report comes back in its current form, I shall have half a dozen to a dozen amendments to table to it. We should also ensure that we can debate the report in a sensible manner, committee style, rather than having to take all the amendments at the end of the debate. I am sure that the authorities of the House can find a sensible way of dealing with the matter if the report's rough edges are left unsmoothed.
The first specific proposal I shall deal with is pre-legislative scrutiny, a concept of which I thoroughly approve. The report, however, does not define pre-legislative scrutiny. On a previous occasion, the Government published a Bill which we had one month to consider. Two weeks later, they published the final Bill. That was considered pre-legislative scrutiny.
Does such a process justify carrying a Bill over to the next Session? We must have some rules on what constitutes proper pre-legislative scrutiny. In some cases with which I am familiar, the effect of pre-legislative scrutiny has been to fossilise Bills, making it much harder to amend legislation as it is considered by the House. There are so many conversations and deals with outside parties, and so much is agreed between civil servants and various pressure groups, that it becomes extremely difficult to make even small changes to legislation.It is very important that Back-Benchers who wish to be involved in the pre-legislative scrutiny process have the chance to do so. Under the proposals, it is possible that pre-legislative scrutiny will be done entirely by another place. However, if it is done by this place, those who take part in the process will be chosen by the Front-Benchers. As my noble friend Lady Gardner of Parkes said, that would be neither sensible nor acceptable.
We already effectively form ourselves into groupings in committees, which are composed of noble Lords who wish to participate and the Front-Benchers' choice of who should participate. We need a similar arrangement for the creation of such committees for pre-legislative scrutiny. Participation in the committees should be open to the whole House. If it is not so open, Back-Benchers may find themselves excluded entirely from the opportunity to influence the legislative detail, as everything may have been decided by those chosen by Front-Benchers at the pre-legislative stage.
As my noble friend Lord Dean of Harptree said, we need to consider details such as the interface with the Parliament Acts. Currently, those Acts seem to allow the Government to choose whether to use those powers when we have either taken more than one month to send carry-over legislation back to the other place or failed to do so by the end of the Session. We have to consider such details, and I would welcome it if we could get them right.
It is important that Back-Benchers should have a say on who is appointed to the committee that will consider the Finance Bill as it is going through another place. It does not seem right that Front-Benchers should choose the membership. If a Back-Bencher truly wishes to participate on the committee, why should he not be able to do so? Such a committee would surely not suffer from having one or two more members. It seems undesirable to put the matter within the gift of the Front-Benchers.
Front-Benchers would also exercise control under the proposals for a statutory instruments select committee. They would appoint that committee, which would be this House's only instrument to amend statutory instruments. If I as a Back-Bencher objected to a statutory instrument, I would not have the power to amend it; only the committee could do that. That might be a reasonable arrangement, but it would not be reasonable for the committee to be chosen exclusively by the Front-Benchers. The committee membership must be within the gift of the Back-Benchers. As I said, for very good reason, the other
place is moving in that direction. If we accept the proposals, we shall be creating three more extremely powerful, very influential and very important committees that will make decisions that are crucial to the lives and effectiveness of Back-Benchers. Consequently, we Back-Benchers should have at least some say on who sits on the committees. Perhaps we should also be able to talk to the committees and influence their decisions, particularly in relation to statutory instruments. It would be ridiculous if I had no way of asking the statutory instruments committee to amend a statutory instrument about which I had specific knowledge.If we are to have an amendment process, which I presume will be judiciously used, surely it should be a public process that takes place on the Floor of the House and not locked away in a committee. The committees would not have access to the specialist expertise of other noble Lords, but would consist of those chosen to sacrifice a very large part of their lives to look through an endless succession of statutory instruments. I think that the Procedure Committee should consider that point. If it does not, we shall certainly consider it when we again consider the report.
As for a 10 o'clock cut-off, I think that that should be a matter for the House as a whole to decide. I would favour an 11 o'clock cut-off. I think that if one is here for the night, one is here for the night, and there is nothing much that one can do at 10 o'clock except go home to bed. I do not know why I should be forced to sit up and watch television for an hour until my natural time for going to sleep. It should be a matter for the House. If one is down here from Scotland, one is down here from Scotland. Why should one have to spend more days coming down here from Scotland when one could sit through to 11 o'clock? We should be allowed a voice on such issues, which I do not think are crucial to the proposals. Moreover, if one had dinner from 7.30 to 8.30, there would be only an hour and a half of debate remaining, which is scarcely enough time to get into a good argument. One would have time to deal with only one or two groups of amendments, if they were at all serious. An additional hour would allow us to have a decent session in which momentum could be built up and a fair amount of business could be dealt with.
Lord Dubs: My Lords, surely there are other things in life than sitting here in a debate after 10 o'clock or going to bed.
Lord Lucas: My Lords, I do not know what the noble Lord does after 10 o'clock and I shall not ask.
- "The precise sitting hours of the Grand Committees should be settled to suit the convenience of the key players",
The paragraph which I assume should be numbered 30 mentions nine specific suggestions by my noble friend Lord Howell of Guildford. I cannot find those suggestions. I do not know where they are. They do not seem to be in the Printed Paper Office or in the Whips' Office. Perhaps I could have looked more extensively, but it seems that we are being asked to approve proposals that have not been included in the report and to which we have no access. Unless I have simply overlooked the suggestions, I do not think that our approval of the Motion can be taken as approval of those suggestions.
Lord Grenfell: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, for giving way. Perhaps I can enlighten him. The proposals were made by his noble friend Lord Howell of Guildford during the debate about a second chamber for the European Parliament.
Lord Williams of Mostyn: My Lords, I refer the noble Lord to footnote 15 on page 6 of this admirable document.
Lord Lucas: My Lords, unfortunately, I do not have my glasses with me and I am incapable of reading such small type. Depending on what the Leader of the House tells us about the meaning of his Motion, I do not think that we should regard something that is not spelt out as being an instruction to the Procedure Committee to accept. We should look at the issue in its full form, and not merely by way of a footnote, which I cannot read.
6.41 p.m.
Lord Clement-Jones: My Lords, I wish to make a brief contribution to the debate. It is clear that the report deserves serious reflection, and having reflected and listened to the debate, I believe that the report goes largely in the right direction. I am therefore 95 per cent in favour of the recommendations.
However, at a time when we know that the composition of the House will be considered by a Joint Select Committee of both Houses, I believe that it would be wrong to change working practices on the basis that we have, or can have in the immediate future, full-time working Peers who are able to switch between morning and evening working. That is the assumption lying behind the decision to recommend that the House should sit at 11 a.m. and rise at 7 p.m. on Thursdays. I firmly believe, despite discussions with the Leader of the House, whom I thank for his courtesy, that this is the thin end of the wedge and will lead to morning sittings as a regular occurrence.
I and many other colleagues would find morning sittings even on one day a week a major problem. As an opposition Front-Bencher, it would be virtually impossible for me to fulfil my professional and political commitments if we sat on Thursday mornings. I only undertook my professional
commitments in the first place knowing that they were compatible with membership of the House. I do not believe that morning working is a reasonable expectation until we are an elected and remunerated House. I recognise that that proposal may suit the interests of those who live out of town, but catering for those interests means that we are moving towards a three-day week when we may only in reality call the Government to account on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays.The noble Lord, Lord Sheldon, aptly described from his long experience the way in which the process has gone down a rather slippery slope. He emphasised that we should not ape another place. Indeed, we should recognise the impossibility of doing so, given the current make-up of this House.
The Leader of the House stressed the package aspect of the proposals. They stand or fall together. But the package has to be right in the first place. I hope that it will be a package in due course that can be backed by the majority of the House. I hope that the Leader of the House will therefore reconsider whether the Thursday morning working suggestion should really be part of the core package. The Leader of the House in the other place, Robin Cook, had to agree to delete elements of his original package. If the Leader in the other place, with its huge majority had to agree to that, why cannot we do that here, where the Government do not have a majority?
My opposition to Thursday morning sittings is not just born out of my own circumstances and, I suspect, those of many other colleagues. It comes from considering whether the changes will add to or subtract from our ability to hold the Government to account, as we should. I believe that the morning sitting proposal will subtract from that. It will be easier for the Government to keep house; it will assist Ministers; and it will make it more difficult for the working opposition—Front and Back-Benchers—to attend. We shall therefore have less effective scrutiny.
I should like to give the report a fair wind, but I cannot do so currently. I therefore hope that the noble Lord the Lord Privy Seal and the Procedure Committee will have serious thoughts in the meantime about Thursday morning working before coming back to the House.
6.45 p.m.
Lord Dubs: My Lords, I fully accept that the working practices of this House are not the subject of passionate debate in the real world outside. I do not think that the man or woman on the Clapham omnibus gives the matter a thought.
Nevertheless, when people do consider what we are about, I suspect that most of them think that if we sit beyond 10 or 11 at night, we are plain silly. When I was in the Commons, my local party members used to say, "If you must sit all night and are daft enough not to change the system, don't blame us because you are tired the following day". The public, whom we are here to serve, cannot believe that legislation is scrutinised
better because we do it at midnight. Ministers are tired by then, so they will not do better, and opposition Front-Benchers will not do better; they have to work the following morning. All in all, we do not do ourselves much credit; nor do we provide the public with better scrutiny of legislation. It is plain silly, and in our heart of hearts we must admit that.Some years ago, before I was a Member of this House, I was talking to a Member of the Canadian Senate who told me that they had embarked on a study of how hard various western legislative assemblies worked. On the basis of hours worked, number of sitting days, and so on, they concluded that the hardest-working legislative assembly in the western world was the House of Commons. Given that I am talking here, there are no prizes for guessing that the second hardest-working legislative assembly was this place. I do not know whether that is still true; perhaps we work harder than the Commons now. There are not many prizes for working the hardest. It is output which counts, not the number of hours spent getting there.
I make no bones about the fact that I am delighted with the report. I trust the six colleagues of all parties who produced it, and I believe that they have come up with a package that will make the House more modern and more in touch with the present century, without sacrificing the effectiveness of the House. I do not believe that the proposals are aimed at benefiting the Government; they provide a balance, and in some respects will make the task of government more difficult.
I could join other noble Lords in unpicking the package and saying that I have this or that idea. But it is best to let the package go to the Procedure Committee in its entirety, without the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Denham, as that would simply kick it into the long grass. We can then get it back and see what happens.
With regard to the amendment, I cannot think of any aspect of British life outside the Palace of Westminster where we would say that we want something, give it to a group of people to take it further, and then say that there was no deadline. Would anyone in business not set a deadline? Surely any self-respecting commercial business or public body would set a deadline for the plan to take the changes that they want further.
Why not do that here? Why adopt standards that we would not expect any self-respecting business outside to adopt? I do not understand that.
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