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Parliament and the Public

My Lords, first I thank my noble friend the Leader of the House for an incredibly constructive and honest summing up. I shall try to use the short time available to me as best I can. I want to pick up on something said by the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox. The noble Baroness knows how fond I am of her, but she made a comment which stunned me momentarily, but now I see that she has done me an enormous favour. She suggested that I was in some way depreciating the framers of the Magna Carta. My instinctive reaction was to say that I was not, but on looking again I can see how that implication might be possible. She is right. I start my introduction to the report with the words, ““We the people””, and go on to quote:"““Government of the People by the People for the People””." It is probably entirely fair to say that the framers of the Magna Carta, Barons as they were, never seriously considered the concepts of ““We the people”” or ““Government by the people for the people””. That was just not within their frame of reference. The challenge we face is to make absolutely sure that, almost 1,000 years later, we are not from time to time guilty of making the same mistake. The noble Baroness made another legitimate point when she said that the report does not pay enough attention to the extraordinary amount of scrutinising work carried out in this House. The motto on our coat of arms should possibly read, ““The devil is in the detail””, but it would immediately be suggested that the motto should be in Plantagenet French, and a lot of its meaning would be lost. I join all noble Lords in congratulating my noble friend Lady Morris of Yardley on her remarkable maiden speech. For five years my noble friend was my boss, and she was a terrific boss. If she is half as good a parliamentarian in this House as she was a joy to work for, I can promise noble Lords that we are all very lucky. I have a couple of quibbles. The noble Lord, Lord Jopling, suggested that membership of Select Committees is less than something sought after in another place. My experience is the exact opposite. I think that the pressure to get on to a Select Committee, certainly that exerted by newer Members of that House, is enormous. Perhaps things have changed over the years. My noble friend Lord Howarth of Newport said that satisfaction levels in the National Assembly for Wales were poor. We looked into this quite carefully and I am sure that he will be interested to know that while it is true that they started from a low base, year on year, things have been improving. That is not unconnected to the communications strategy that has been adopted by the Welsh Assembly. While I am sure there is room for improvement, this offers real hope too. My strongest criticism is reserved for myself. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, and I have had several conversations about the fact that not enough reference is made to the House of Lords in this report. A good psychologist would be able to explain this to me. I think that the reason is that I am so enormously proud, and sometimes even in awe, of the work done by the House that, surrounded as I was by colleagues with less understanding of it, I became too timorous and therefore did not push anything like hard enough in pressing the case for this House. I deeply regret that and I apologise to the House almost unreservedly. Along with other noble Lords, I also thank the Hansard Society. I should say to your Lordships that to go to breakfast with the noble Lord, Lord Holme, then to be asked to chair a committee, to say yes, and then to find that you have taken on a life’s work is something all noble Lords should think twice about. I do not regret it for a moment. It has been one of the great pleasures of my life and my colleagues on the staff of the Hansard Society have been absolutely exemplary. I am particularly grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, for referring to the chart on page 33 of the report. If noble Lords sensed a feeling of frustration in my opening remarks, this is where it lies. By any stretch of the imagination, the organisational structure of the two Houses is daft. It would have been nice had someone put up their hand and said, ““You are right. It is one of those things which has just developed over the years. It makes no sense whatsoever and of course we are going to redo it””. Not so. What actually happens is that the tin hats come on, rather lame justifications are made, and no one has yet said that the structure is a nonsense and will be changed. That may also be why we heard a certain frustration in the remarks of my noble friend Lord Gould of Brookwood, and in those of the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth. It is for this reason that we get frustrated. It is not because we want to in any way to disparage the House or the people who work for it but because we constantly sense that really good ideas, thoughtful ideas—debates such as the one we have had today—end up going straight down some unknown drain into the River Thames. It is extremely frustrating. Perhaps I may make a couple of other small points. The noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter, referred to television. She and I share a background. Please accept that, from our perspective, what goes on here in the way in which this House is projected to the outside world is utterly inexplicable. We are asking the television audience at home to watch something that they never see at any other time of their lives—no cutaway shots, no reaction shots, no close-ups. It is barmy—there is no possible justification for it—and I genuinely believe that it will change. Let me lastly pick up on the interesting point made by the noble Lord, Lord McNally, about the debate on Monday of last week on assisted dying. The noble Lord is absolutely right: it was well trailed over the weekend, it received a great deal of attention and an enormous number of letters were received. At the other end of the Corridor, the Civil Aviation Bill was being debated. I counted six Members present. But the debate that went out live was the one on the Civil Aviation Bill. Our debate was transmitted the following day. Why? It is not the BBC’s fault. The BBC does not have the ability flexibly to schedule the output; it is our decision. At the nub of this is a real worry. If there is—and this may be what the Leader of the House was suggesting—such rigidity and rivalry between the two Houses that that kind of problem cannot be sorted out, then, my Lords, it is just possible that today’s debate has been a fruitless exercise. I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in the debate and I beg leave to withdraw the Motion for Papers. Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.