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Legislation and Public Policy

My Lords, I will come to that in a moment, but this is a time-limited debate and I am not allowed any extra time. I always hold to one principle; namely, that this House should not be the same as another place. I do not accept the argument that we need to become more like the other place, sit on the same days or run our internal arrangements in the same way. I was struck by what the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, said about September Sittings, which may be a way that we should move. There will be an election in a few weeks’ time, after which there will be enormous change. There will be a new House of Commons. Some of the Wright committee proposals no doubt will have been taken up. Because we are part of a process, we should react to those changes and those, if any, that are taken up by the Better Government Initiative. Of course, there is a need for the House to respect the right of the Queen’s Government to get their business. We have respected that right these past 13 years. I hope that if the Labour Party finds itself in opposition, it will do the same and, likewise, on the Salisbury doctrine, as was upheld in the report of the noble Lord, Lord Cunningham of Felling. I am sure that the Liberal Democrats will sign up to that, too. The glory and strength of this House, which I have no desire to see changed, is the right, not given to Members in another place, to table an amendment or a Motion, and to have it heard and replied to by a Minister. Few other legislative bodies have that right—there may be none for all that I know. My noble friend Lord Norton put it very well and he will know the answer to that. But it is an extraordinary freedom that we should maintain. Many excellent arguments have been put forward in this debate, especially that of using technology better, which we should do. I assure the House that having spent 13 years upholding and defending the rights of the Opposition with, perhaps I may say, a very fair hearing from most Leaders of the House with whom I have dealt, I will not change my tune simply because I may change my seat. That would equally be true for any other Leader of the Conservative Party who became Leader of the House. So long as this House continues in the performance of the constitutional role it staked out for itself after 1911, it need fear nothing from any Conservative Government. I have said that the next Parliament will be different. Whoever wins, we will see a very large change in the House of Commons and have an influx of new Members into this House. And whoever becomes the next Leader of this House should take this debate very seriously, and in my view should meet very early on in the next Parliament to decide how to take forward in a positive manner some of the suggestions that have been made so that we keep our processes up to date and improve the work of scrutiny and of holding the Government to account. That is in the interests not just of this House but also of the Government and, in the long term, the people of this country.