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Queen’s Speech

My Lords, without any conspiratorial intent, I, too, will address the constitutional aspects of reform of your Lordships’ House as a means of strengthening Parliament against the Executive. In some ways the House seems reluctant to change; and yet, long before I came here, the House was four or five years ahead of the other place in the televising of Parliament—something for which credit has never been given. How do we change anything here? There is no mechanism for a Member or Members to seek change, and I am reliably informed that the Procedure Committee is not the route to change. I have a few small suggestions. My initial point, which underpins them all, is that we should try change. We could adopt all my suggestions for six months or a Session and, if they do not work, we could reverse them. My first suggestion concerns Question Time. It must be better managed and we must complete the process of change that started some time ago. Four Questions in 30 minutes can put a Minister under real scrutiny compared with the Commons: it is almost like a mini-Select Committee. However, self-regulation militates against this. Long-winded supplementary questions off the subject, long-winded supplementary answers and arguments over who asks supplementaries are all negative and to the advantage of the Executive. In addition, it must be unique for a Parliament anywhere to have the referee of any dispute on the government Front Bench. I was in this role for two years, from 2005 to 2007, when the noble Baroness, Lady Amos, was Leader of the House. On a trial basis, the Lord Speaker should both call supplementary questions and insist that they are taken in order, as should be the answers. It would change Question Time. I have not done a massive analysis, but we hear a lot from the same noble Lords at Question Time. I ask myself why. I know many noble Lords who do not wish to get involved in a slanging and shouting match in order to get the Floor, but who would stand up to be called by the Lord Speaker if that was her role; they have a contribution to make that they are not prepared to make at present. My second suggestion—none of these is original, by the way—is that Committee stage should be taken off the Floor and into Grand Committee for a pilot. If we have a dispute, we could start splitting Bills; but we should do it as a regular process. My third suggestion is that any Bill starting in your Lordships’ House should always go via a Select Committee. We could pilot this. These are Bills that have not been in the Commons. We are not revising them. We kid ourselves, but we are not revising Bills that start here. We need some evidence before we start our process, and the Select Committee is the route to this. I will give two examples of Bills that I was involved in, and which were not my day job. When I was at the Home Office, the Police Reform Bill in 2001 started in this House, as did the Climate Change Bill. In both cases, it would have benefited our debates and deliberations if we had had more evidence. We did not have the evidence from debates in the other place. I suggest also that for Bills that come from the Commons, we should decline to take any amendments on Third Reading. This avenue leads to a slipshod approach to legislation. When I was a Minister and there were arguments in departments, I would so often hear somebody say, "Oh, don’t worry, we can leave it until the last stage in the Lords". That is a route to slipshod, last-minute legislation that later turns out not to do what we intended. I think that we could pilot a Bill on advice from parliamentary counsel, which is, after all, responsible for the drafting in the first place. That would give parliamentary counsel more influence in obtaining clear policy direction from Ministers, because the root cause of the problem is that the policy directions are not clear. If, for Bills coming from the Commons, we declined to take amendments at Third Reading, that would be a catalyst for change: this would be a second Chamber with slightly fewer but more targeted opportunities for amendments, which I think would send a wake-up call to Whitehall. My fourth suggestion is also very simple. We should insist that when a Bill arrives from the Commons, the Chamber of primacy, it is accompanied by a simple certificate listing the clauses and schedules that have not been scrutinised.