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Procedure Committee: Second Report

My Lords, in speaking to this Motion, I shall speak also to the second Motion in my name relating to the committee’s 3rd Report. The bulk of these two reports is taken up with proposals arising out of the Lisbon treaty, which came into force on 1 December 2009, and out of government commitments made during the passage of the European Union (Amendment) Act 2008. Noble Lords will be delighted to hear that I do not propose to explain the Lisbon treaty provisions and the resulting new procedures in detail—in fact, I can see that noble Lords are voting with their feet. Indeed, as far as the Lisbon treaty is concerned, I do not feel qualified to do so, but I am delighted to see that the noble Lord, Lord Roper, is in his place, as he may be able to help me out if I get into difficulty. However, I will give a brief summary. In outline, the Lisbon treaty conferred certain powers upon national Parliaments to submit so-called "reasoned opinions" to the European institutions in respect of legislative proposals which breach the principle of subsidiarity. That principle means that EU action is appropriate only if, ""the objectives of the proposed action cannot be sufficiently achieved by the Member States"." The treaty also established a process whereby national Parliaments may, through their national Governments, challenge recently adopted legislative Acts before the European Court of Justice, also on subsidiarity grounds. It is not for me to comment on the merits or likely impact of these treaty provisions. The duty placed on your Lordships’ Procedure Committee was simply to propose a mechanism by which the House could make effective use of these new powers. This we have done. We expect that in the normal course of events subsidiarity questions will come before the House following a report by the European Union Committee. It will, however, be open to any Member of the House to make use of the same procedure by tabling a free-standing resolution incorporating a reasoned opinion. Noble Lords should be aware, however, that the Leader made it clear to the committee that the usual channels would decide whether to provide time to debate such free-standing Motions on a case-by-case basis, and there can be no presumption that a debate will be facilitated in every case. The other procedures described in this report relate to parliamentary approval for the proposed use of passerelle clauses—I shall not attempt to explain these but they are described in the report—and to scrutiny by the European Union Committees of the two Houses of possible decisions by the United Kingdom to opt in to proposals in the field of justice and home affairs. The latter proposals arise out of commitments made on behalf of the Government by the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton of Upholland, in June 2008. I do not intend to say more about these Lisbon-related proposals at this stage, other than to assure noble Lords that the powers described in the 2nd report may be exercised by each House wholly independently. This House may play its "yellow" or "red" card, irrespective of what the other place does. Similarly, the approval of this House, as well as the other place, is required before the United Kingdom may support a passerelle decision within the European Council. It may be helpful if I now turn briefly to the 3rd report. This proposes new terms of reference for the EU Committee, a revised scrutiny reserve resolution, and a wholly new resolution covering scrutiny of opt-in decisions. The changes to the terms of reference and the scrutiny reserve resolution are largely technical in nature, but are necessary to bring them into line with the revised treaties. I now turn to the other matters covered in the two reports. The points in the 2nd report most likely to be of interest to noble Lords are the committee’s recommendations on Private Notice Questions, and the revised guidance on Motions and Questions, which we have adopted with a view to its inclusion in the forthcoming new edition of the Companion. On PNQs, we have recommended that the Lord Speaker’s decision in respect of the admissibility of PNQs henceforth be made final. The present procedure for an appeal to the House against the Lord Speaker’s decision, which replicates the procedure that used to apply when the Leader of the House made the preliminary decision, is, frankly, unworkable. The Lord Speaker is unable to defend her decision on the Floor of the House, and there is no one who appropriately can speak on her behalf, nor is there any way in which the House can, formally, make its views known. As the report states, there was no consensus on how to address these problems. However, the majority view of the Committee was that the Lord Speaker’s decision should be made final. We have a Lord Speaker; she has certain duties assigned to her by the House, and most Members of the Committee felt that on this particular issue, which creates real difficulty for her in performing those duties, we should trust her to get on with it without second-guessing her decision. That is the essence of our recommendation. Turning to the guidance on Motions and Questions, we were particularly grateful to the Clerk of the Parliaments for bringing forward this major revision and consolidation of all the available rules and guidance. We believe that this new guidance, once incorporated in the new edition of the Companion, which is almost ready for publication, will be of enormous assistance to noble Lords, their researchers and assistants and staff of the House. I emphasise that there is nothing new in the guidance. It is a summary of existing rules and conventions, but set out in a much more comprehensive, coherent and helpful way. The new guidance does not affect the fundamental principle that noble Lords will remain responsible for the content of their Questions, subject to the sense of the House. Finally, I wish to touch briefly on the second item covered in our 3rd report—our recommendation that the time limit within which Questions for Written Answer are expected to be answered should be changed from the present fortnight to 10 working days. This is a small but significant change that will not affect the vast majority of QWAs, but which will help Government departments to produce timely answers on those occasions—chiefly the Christmas and New Year holidays and perhaps, to a lesser extent the Easter Recess, when two or more bank holidays fall close together.