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House Committee: Parliamentary Passes

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon, for the way in which he has moved the Motion. The House Committee performs invaluable service to your Lordships' House, and I am usually loath to disagree with it, but on this occasion, I believe that it has got it wrong, although it may have made its decision with the best of motives. Paragraph 4 in the committee's report is the only justification issued for withdrawing MEPs’ passes. It states: ""The decision of the House of Commons in practice cannot take effect without the assent of this House"." That is surely the case for almost every decision that the House of Commons makes. We challenge its right to make unilateral decisions in all sorts of important legislative proposals. We say to the House of Commons, "Think again. Have another look", because we think that it is not necessarily following the best course. If we can do that on anti-terrorist legislation, the abolition of certain trials without jury, identity cards or length of detention without trial, surely we are entitled to say to the other place, "Look at this rather messy, shoddy administrative proposal to deny passes to Members of the European Parliament, who have enjoyed them for past 29 years"—without, as far as I am aware, having produced any problems. Of all the issues on which we can say, "Think again", this is one of the least significant but symbolically most important. As I said, our system has worked for nearly 30 years without problem. It is important, because one or two noble Lords suggested to me that there is no reciprocity, to know the terms of the letter written by the three party leaders in the European Parliament to Mr John Bercow, the Speaker of the House of Commons, in which they state: ""For the record, Westminster MPs visiting the European Parliament in Brussels and Strasbourg can make a one-off application for a pass which then gives them completely free access to both sites of the European Parliament"." They suggest in their letter alternative ways of approaching this problem. I do not want to go into them in any detail today, but merely say to the House Committee that it should take this back for the sake of good government and good decision-making, look at it again and suggest to the House of Commons that it does the same. I say in conclusion, as I said at the outset, that I very much appreciate the way in which the Chairman of Committees has approached this today. With that sort of spirit, the House Committee can find a resolution for this small issue, which will otherwise become a serious irritant between ourselves and the European Parliament at a time when, with the extension of codecision in the Lisbon treaty that we have now approved, there ought to be a closer relationship with European parliamentarians, not a more distant one. I beg to move.