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Parliament and the Public

My Lords, it has been an excellent and valuable debate, and I take the opportunity to thank the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, for introducing it today. It is also a great pleasure to welcome to this House the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, who made her maiden speech today. As we have heard from other noble Lords, her reputation goes before her from the other place. Her integrity and personal honesty will be very welcome in this House, and I look forward to hearing her speak here in the years ahead. I will say, naughtily, that I rather recoiled at the idea of Offgov, yet another regulatory body. This Government is rather keen on them; I was hoping that she meant it as a joke. The 120 pages of the report, which is indelibly associated with the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, reflect the scale and intensity of the work done by him and his colleagues on improving public engagement with Parliament. I congratulate him and his team on their commitment to that. A great deal in the report is good, but I fear that a good deal also somewhat misses the point. The point is that a major part of the business that we are in is line-by-line scrutiny of complex draft legislation. That will never be exhilarating television, however skilful are the panning shots or enthusiastic the reaction shots that we could imagine during a speech by, say, the noble Lord, Lord Gould, who spoke so eloquently today, or my noble friend Lady Shephard, who brought us news of her work with London University and the Sorbonne. There is no one for whom I have a greater admiration in this area than the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam. But even he would be hard-pressed to take the second sitting of the Grand Committee on the Commissioner for Older People (Wales) Bill to the top of the ratings. The reality—and I follow and extend the reference by the noble Lord, Lord Currie of Marylebone, to a football match—is that if we were to view each group of amendments as a football match, we would play out three or four goalless draws for every game with a goal. Cup shocks—government defeats—come pretty rarely. In 2004–05, 3,306 amendments were laid; 913 were made, but the Government lost only 36 times. That makes one cup shock every 90 games. That is a bit boring and is scarcely the stuff to get people rushing to their screens or to our Public Gallery. We know that in the midst of those obscure proceedings and the dialogue across the Chamber, valuable work is done. Avoidable injustices are avoided. Impending mistakes are corrected. Ministers are careful to consider points that are raised in debate and are ready to alter their view. It is useful work, but it is frequently dull, as the empty seats in the Moses Room or in the Chamber show all too often. If we do not watch every word ourselves, how can we expect the public to do so? We cannot alter the nature of our work, and I do not think that we should. Indeed, concern with procedure—where we have made many major changes in recent years as part of the Williams reforms—obscures the real issue, which is whether the two Houses of Parliament are doing their job to the full in sceptically reviewing the work of the Executive. I do not think that they are. Scrapping the fine old term ““Strangers”” or trying to abolish the office of the Lord Chancellor—part of processional ceremonies that every tourist who visits Parliament has read about in their books—does not bring us closer to the people. It merely drains colour from what we have, as my noble and learned friend Lord Howe of Aberavon described much better than I could. All my life in business says to me that we should spend less time worrying about such trivia and more time worrying about whether our basic business of holding the Executive to account is performing. We should do all that we can, and the report has many valuable suggestions to communicate better and to secure more attention for the work of the Select Committees of this House. We should also try to reach out to young people, although I note that the Prime Minister has had the power of patronage for eight years and the average age of Labour Peers appointed by him in the past two years is 60. The report is full of ingenious ideas about how we could reach out. I most definitely agree that our parliamentary website should be made more accessible, easily navigable and comprehensible. We should not lose sight of the work that the Clerks of this House are already doing on that, but I have no doubt that the report will encourage them to go further. I also pay tribute, as has the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, and others, to the work of my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth and our party’s Commission to Strengthen Parliament. Many recommendations, and indeed many recommendations in the Puttnam report, concerned another place. I am interested in the idea of a petitions committee, on the model of the Scottish Parliament, but would like to know more about how it might work in practice. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, that we must look at easing restrictions on media access to the Palace of Westminster. I am not averse to the idea of committees meeting outside London, but with daily attendances averaging only 388 in the previous Session, we need to be mindful of the pressure on both noble Lords and the staff of the House who would be involved in manning committees of the House, Grand Committees, Select Committees and committees outside London all at the same time. One of the great strengths of this House is the value for money that we represent. Every change we make needs to be measured against that—more politicians and more political staff are not high on the public’s wish list. I commend, in particular, the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, for more post-legislative scrutiny. Let us just look at some recent legislation: the Licensing Act, the Gambling Act, the Prevention of Terrorism Act, and the European Parliamentary and Local Elections (Pilots) Act with its removal of the right to the secret ballot, to name but a few. In all those cases, would Ministers not have benefited from the opportunity to consider how their legislation was working out before it was finally visited on the public? Effective post-legislative scrutiny could help Ministers to pull back from, say, 24-hour drinking and might provide the basis for the swift, agreed amending or clarifying of legislation. Working with existing committees, it could also give Parliament a chance to look carefully at, and propose changes to, all those secondary powers spawned by giant Bills, such as the Communications Bill, which we are never able to look at properly during their passage through this House. Heaven knows, does not this House’s experience with the Home Office’s ill-thought out Bill, amended by ill-thought out Bill. Session after Session, make the case for Puttnam post-legislative scrutiny? Surely we should help the Home Office to get its ideas right before releasing another Rolf Harris pushmi-pullyu of a Bill on an unsuspecting world. I like that suggestion: I wonder what practical proposals the noble Baroness the Leader of the House has for bringing it into effect. I back, too, the idea of putting more effort into education and outreach work, although again resource and member issues are involved. In many ways, we are the junior partner to another place. We have different perspectives and different roles. It would be all too easy for Members of this House and the interests of this House to be put at the back of the queue in joint structures. I end where I began. We must improve communications where we can without losing the essence of what we are here to do. The noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, was a little disparaging about the authors of the Magna Carta in his foreword to the report. But from Magna Carta down we have built precious freedoms: trial by jury; habeas corpus; freedom of movement without a need to identify oneself; and freedom from detention without trial. Too many of those are being eroded, and time and again this House has stood up for them. I have not noticed any lack of interest on those occasions. People are interested in what we are doing when what we are doing is interesting. I doubt whether we need a large communications apparatus to get people to take an interest in our debates about detention without charge. Part of the confusion about what goes on in Parliament results from far too much complex and unnecessary legislation put forward by all governments, far too much otiose regulation that Parliament cannot halt or amend, and far too many priorities chosen by governments that are not the priorities of the public. It is as well to call Parliament to account and to ask us all to communicate better. But government, too, have a major responsibility to help Parliament do its job. Too often this House is treated as if it were the enemy of the Executive and not a partner in delivering better government. As many noble Lords have said today, convincing government to engage with Parliament is a communications challenge of a wholly different order. And it is, I submit, probably even more important and far more urgent than many of the themes set out in this worthy report.