---

House of Lords: Working Practices

My Lords, as one, I presume, of the 57 Peers whom the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, had in mind, I am very glad not to have had to bully, shout at, or intimidate anybody to get into this debate. I am very sorry to hear that he might think that I have had to do so in Questions. The House has changed enormously since the days when I joined it, which were, I admit, 37 years ago. That change has accelerated rapidly since the removal of the rest of my hereditary colleagues. In my early days in the House, to have to shout in order to get into Questions, or not to give way to a Privy Counsellor or somebody who had more experience, would not happen. The increasingly rapid flow of new Members into the House has made it more difficult for the traditions of the House to be handed on to the new entry. If it were possible in some way to instil in the new entry, in a block brainwashing scheme, the principles of good manners, on which the House used to conduct itself, we would become a much more efficient as well as a much more agreeable place to work. I shall not talk about the detail of the papers—except in one respect—because that can be done in response to whatever consultation comes out later on. I shall speak instead about the context in which the consultation is taking place and which I fear from time to time slips from our consciousness. We need, as three Peers have said before me, to remember what Parliament is for: it is to control the Executive. The House of Lords is there to assist the House of Commons to do that and supply what the House of Commons either cannot or will not do, or has not done. A lot of that is in legislation. In a recent debate, I pointed out how, on 10 and 11 March 2005, we prevented the House of Commons allowing the Government what amounted to a lettre de cachet, renewable every 90 days, to put people into detention without trial. That is the big thing that we are there for; it is made up of a lot of little things in the way of legislation. Governments like making laws; they like getting their own way; and they like getting it easily. The noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope, used the nice term "institutional interest". It is an institutional interest that we have to watch here: the interest of Her Majesty’s Government, of whatever party, in securing their legislation as swiftly, as easily and in as large a bulk as possible. Like, I am sure, the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, and many other of your Lordships, I have been in the position of being a new junior Minister and finding Permanent Secretaries, or, sometimes, slightly less senior civil servants, put it across that really what sort of a man or woman you are will come out of how big a slice of legislative time you can get for your department. That is built into the Civil Service and Governments need to resist it. To the extent that they do not or cannot, they need to be supported by Parliament to see that this great inertia of legislation has a brake put on it. Grand Committees were invented to take the brake off. There did not used to be Grand Committees; all Committees were on the Floor of this House until relatively recently—for those who are of my generation. They were invented, I think, in Margaret Thatcher’s day—I regret to say it, but I may be wrong—to free up the logjam in the Chamber that we keep hearing about, although I have not noticed there being one at the moment. But whose logjam is it? It is a logjam of government business. Most of us are agreed that there is too much of it. Therefore, I am not of the chorus which says that we must have more Grand Committees; I am in the very small group which says, "Actually, we could do better with none, but let’s stick with one". As my noble friend on the Front Bench said in opening the debate, there is spare capacity there now, because the number of Bills that have gone through Grand Committee recently is not as high as in the peak. So let us not start messing about with more Grand Committees. I have to follow the noble Lord, Lord Luce, and others in saying that all this inexorably links to the question of reform, because what you do in this House and how you do it depends on what it is made up of. We are at a critical point in the process of evolution. We were at one stage much larger than now. I have heard people say with hushed voices in case they should be overheard by the public, "We’ll soon have 800 Members". When I joined the House, there were 1,084 Members, and it grew after that, but the House was nothing like as crowded as it is now at Question Time, because there was no incentive to come here to talk unless you had something worth saying and knew that people were going to come and listen to you. That meant that you had a very much higher quality of input and a very much shorter list of speakers. We are now moving towards a decision to have a much smaller body, elected. Instead of a vast crowd from which hundreds of experts in very narrow specialisms can be called when they are needed, we will have a small group of jacks-of-all-trades who will work simply from briefing that they are given every day, just like Ministers working from the same briefs. Where is the improvement in quality of legislation in that? I pray that we may not get there. In the mean time, we are right, are we not, to continue to plan the reforms in our procedures and governance to work with the system that we have got? I think that that is something worth fighting for. I hope that your Lordships will take away the importance not of widening or increasing the streams of legislation that go through this place but, rather, of focusing them and giving them more expert attention. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch—I have not seen her in her place since she spoke—said that the House of Commons spent three times as long as we did on scrutinising legislation. It does not say much for the level of its scrutiny when, in particular, not only do the things that it has scrutinised come with glaring mistakes in them but vast rafts of the stuff come from there not scrutinised at all. The figures that the noble Baroness quoted do not accord very closely with those that I got from the Library earlier today. I merely put this in at the end to focus on the importance of the legislative process that we do for the nation—our country, as the noble Lord said. If we are going to do that at our best, we need to do it in a focused way with a large reserve of individual experts on specific things who are not coming in, frankly, in order to get benefits but in order to contribute to the work which is vital to this country.