---

House of Lords: Working Practices

My Lords, the Leader of the House with his customary suaveness has shot the fox that a number of us were pursuing, in that we expected that we would have to spend some time arguing the case for a Leader’s Group with wide terms of reference. He has taken the wind out of our sails and I am delighted that he has done so. This must, of course, mean that our debate will finish that much sooner this evening, which will be a comfort to us all. I will confine my remarks to two points: first, the working group on the scrutiny of primary legislation, which has been referred to previously; and, secondly, some points on governance. First, the cross-party group, of which I was pleased to act as convener or chair, set out a number of recommendations. I shall speak to the most important of those, which has been touched on briefly by the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar. It is essentially the argument that, before legislation enters this House, the Government should commit to ensuring that it is properly prepared and ready for this House. This, of course, causes no fear to the Leader of the House as his party, like mine, was never guilty of a sin in that direction, as I am sure he will concur. However, to be more serious, all parties sin in this respect at times. I think the paper is suggesting that, before legislation is introduced, the Government should have set out: the policy argument and evidence as to why they are legislating; the underlying policy objective that the legislation is part of a process of achieving; what they seek to achieve—in more specific terms, what success might look like and by when—and the processes by which they will achieve those objectives, of which legislation is of course only a small part in many cases. The purpose of all that is not to be tedious and to employ civil servants, but to try to ensure that when this House is scrutinising legislation it does not just dive for the detail of clauses—which it must do, of course—but looks at the larger picture and actually holds the Government to account as to whether their policy objectives are clear and whether or not they are likely to achieve them. We spend little time in our legislative scrutiny processes on such an agenda, but we spend a lot of time repeating—as has been mentioned —the detailed, clause-by-clause element. We would be better served if the process I described were to be carried out. It is not that difficult. It would do for primary legislation essentially what the Merits Committee already does for secondary legislation. There should be a set of standards set by the Cabinet Office which the Government of the day say they would seek to fulfil, and the House should have a process looking at whether those standards are met, and make a report at Second Reading.