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House of Lords: Working Practices

My Lords, I very much enjoyed listening to the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson—she was very interesting. I congratulate the chairman, the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad, and the committee. It is a first-class report. The noble Lady, Lady Saltoun, made a good point. She is quite right. When someone uses the term ““you””—the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, is here and was the Deputy Speaker, and I wish I had a penny for every time she stood, as the occupant of the Chair, and told people to be careful of using the term ““you””. Using ““you”” puts some heat into the situation. The noble Lady, Lady Saltoun, also makes another good point. We should go carefully about throwing some of our old traditions away. These traditions are valued not only by us but by the public who come here and are made very welcome indeed. It is right because of the bad-tempered and perhaps shambolic nature of our Question Time that we should have a trial of putting the burden on the Lord Speaker. I use the term ““burden”” carefully because it will be a burden for the Lord Speaker to pick who shall be called on a supplementary. We should be careful because we keep talking about an overly powerful Executive; if there is anyone with power to call someone, an Executive will try to make approaches—““Call Lord such a one before the other Lord””. The Lord Speaker has got to resist that. No Member of the House of Lords should approach the Lord Speaker before Question Time to say they would like to get in Question 4 or Question 3 or fall out with the occupant of the Chair because they do not get called. That happened down the Corridor and I would not like it to happen here. I would welcome the monthly business of the Lords because our Government, for good reason, have said we will have to cut back. As we speak, some of our dedicated staff, cleaners and ancillary workers, are being faced with redundancies. Why should we not have a monthly Question Time to find out how our staff, who look after us so well, are getting on? I have expressed an interest in apprenticeships and training and I want to know more about it. Also, about three years ago this House jointly with the other House invested £8 million in refurbishing the Press Gallery. I would like to know whether that money was well spent because I said when I opened the gallery that we had had not one bit of bad publicity about this matter. In fact, we have had no publicity at all. We could ask whether the £8 million has been money well spent. On Oral Questions, once again I go back to what the noble Lady, Lady Saltoun, said: it is time-wasting to read out the Question verbatim. Visitors to the building, watching the proceedings, can have the Order Paper we have and online. The organisation we have broadcasting is, I think, called PARBUL—at least, that is what it used to be called, and it was chaired by the Chairman of Ways and Means in the House of Commons. PARBUL can make arrangements when our Questions are being televised to include the words of the Question. There is no need for the Questions to be read out. It is sufficient to say Question 2 or Question 4. Also, it is a bad practice for noble Lords to read supplementaries into the record. How do they know what the Minister is going to say before they read the supplementary? In other words, they are indicating that they are not interested in what the Minister has to say—they are reading into the record and it makes it look good in Hansard. It is not good, it is artificial. The noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, initiated a wonderful debate. I sat here and listened and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was about the female agents who went into occupied France. It was excellent. Each speaker had only three minutes. That debate was a tribute to those wonderful women who sacrificed so much—some of them their lives—for us so that we could have this democracy we enjoy today. Had it been any less than three minutes there would have been no proper tribute at all. Thank you for listening to me.