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Liaison Committee: Third Report

We have just heard from the Cross Benches; I think it is our turn. I very much support what the noble Lord, Lord Roper, has just said. I was first elected at the other end of this building almost 48 years ago. One strand that has run through the entire time in which I have served in both Houses has been my enthusiasm for the Select Committee system, which all those years ago I believed, very strongly, was the way in which Parliament could better exert its influence over the Executive. I was a member of two of Dick Crossman's Select Committees—the first ones to be set up—back in the 1960s. In the early 1980s, following the 1979 election, I, with my late lamented friend Norman St John-Stevas, later Lord St John of Fawsley, who sadly is no longer with us, set up the departmental committees. I conducted all the negotiations over them with the Opposition at the time. Since coming to your Lordships' House, I have been a member of, I think, three European Union committees. I have been chairman of two of them and I continue to serve on Sub-Committee C. As the noble Lord, Lord Roper, has just said, the work of the European Union Select Committee is widely admired throughout Europe, and I believe that it provides the best scrutiny of European legislation anywhere in the Community. I agree with much of what the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, said about these committees making the best use of the expertise in this House and providing outstanding value for money through the work that we all do. Therefore, I am astonished and exasperated at the suggestion that the sub-committees of the European Union Committee should now be reduced from seven to six. It was only a few years ago that their number was increased from six to seven. When the Leader of the House responds, will he tell us the justification for going back to where we were only a few years ago? When the Chairman of Committees introduced this debate, he said that it was ““appropriate””—that was his word—but I have heard no justification for doing this. European Union legislation is now getting wider and deeper, and it plays a bigger and bigger part in the legislative structure of the country. Instead of reducing the number of committees, we should be thinking of expanding them. I have spoken before in the House about my failure to understand why we do not have a foreign affairs committee. There are whole rafts of foreign affairs issues, of which the Commonwealth is only one, with which Sub-Committee C, covering foreign affairs, defence and development, cannot begin to deal. I profoundly disagreed with the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Filkin—for whom, from previous associations, I have the greatest possible respect—when he spoke about committees being, in his phrase, ““squeezed out””. Rather than squeezing out these committees—particularly the European Union Committee—we ought to see what we can do to strengthen them. I very much support those who hope that when the Leader of the House responds to the debate he will agree to take the matter back and think again.