---

Liaison Committee: Third Report

My Lords, I rise, as a member of the Goodlad committee, to give my warm support to the recommendations of the Liaison Committee and to at least put on the record some of the argumentation as to why the other issues need to be considered and supported by the House. In this report from the Liaison Committee we consider some of the significant areas for improvement to the working practices of this House which, in many previous debates, have been strongly argued for by many Members from all parts of the House. I can be brief because they come to relatively few fundamental points. First, most Members of the House believe that if we spent more time on pre-legislative scrutiny of more Bills, we would have better legislation. This recommendation both makes that possible and starts an increase in the resources going to pre-legislative scrutiny, which is to be commended. Secondly, many of us have argued for years that we should carry out post-legislative scrutiny. We should look, in a sober, thoughtful and informed way, at the effects of the legislation that we pass. The Commons is doing some but we have done nothing. We have not yet brought our considerable expertise and knowledge of many of the aspects on which we legislate to looking at whether the legislation achieves its objectives—and if not, why not—so that we can better inform both that policy area and, more significantly, our own processes of scrutiny of legislation. Thirdly, the Liaison Committee makes a recommendation for a process to bring in additional ad hoc committees. The Leader of the House will know that I would not have brought it in in exactly that way but, nevertheless, it is to be welcomed in terms of what it would allow the House to do. It would allow the House to identify a topic of significant domestic policy interest which is potentially cross-cutting, and so in no way duplicate the work of the Commons; and it would have a short remit of a year in which to bring forward an influential and reflective report. There are two good examples there and I shall spend 30 seconds speaking on one of them. Most of us know that the significant demographic changes in our society will have a fundamental effect on public services—the demand for them, their cost, and the impact of that—and yet no-one in either House has as yet looked at that issue. It cries out for a short, sharp, well-informed and expert committee of this House, drawing on experts from outside. It is a topic to which the House would bring great value. One of the more contentious elements of the Goodlad report was the recommendation that this House should be better at reviewing its committees as they exist. In the past the House has sometimes tried to do this and, for obvious reasons, it is painful. There is great resistance to making any change to the existing architecture of committees. Why so? It is because people develop passion, commitment, and expertise. Everything that the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, said, and everything that the noble Lord, Lord Roper, so eloquently said in his argumentation of the value that the EU Committee has brought to this House, is true. However, unfortunately that is not the point. The point is that unless the House can continue to increase its resources to allow new topics to be studied, there will always be a starvation of the issues that are not being debated because the existing agenda dominates the resources, and existing interests in the House are eloquent in its defence. I respect their doing so—I would do the same myself—but that squeezes out anything new to the disadvantage of the House. If, the House considers that it can have only one net addition, the Liaison Committee would then have the invidious task of deciding that we did not do more pre-legislative scrutiny, that we did not start post-legislative scrutiny, and that we did not have a process whereby we selected a couple of topics of cross-cutting domestic policy to look at each year. That would be regrettable. I regret that the Science and Technology Committee and the EU Committee are to be reduced, but that is necessary in circumstances where we do not have limitless resources. They can both make their case in a year's time as to why they should be increased. However, the thrust of the report essentially is that we would be a better House if we accept these recommendations. It would involve substantially more of the expertise in the House which currently has no voice in our affairs because some noble Lords do not have a seat on a committee of the House and are longing to have that opportunity. For those reasons, I strongly support the Liaison Committee's recommendations.