Lord Ralph Lucas - written evidence (CIC0004)

 

House of Lords Constitution Committee

Inquiry into the Constitutional Implications of COVID-19

 

Keeping the Lords Virtual

 

 

  1. We should use the virtual, and now hybrid, arrangements that the Lords have adopted as an opportunity to re-examine our working practices, and to make ourselves a more effective and efficient house of parliament.

 

  1. We have made a good fist of keeping the House functioning as a hybrid House.

 

  1. We have demonstrated a number of potential virtues of a hybrid House: that it makes it easier for us to combine work in the Lords with our lives outside the Lords – an essential feature of a House that boasts its wide and current expertise, that it makes for much increased fairness of who gets to speak on (formerly) informal occasions like starred questions and statements, and that it makes it easier for members who are are geographically distant from Westminster to participate, with large long-term potential benefits for the breadth of current experience in the house, and that it makes participation easier for disabled peers.

 

  1. We are, slowly, approaching Restoration and Renewal. We may be able to save the nation many hundreds of millions of pounds if we keep the House hybrid, as it is clear that such a House requires much less space, and more commonly available space, than a fully physical House. Cost savings of this magnitude place on us an obligation to take the option of remaining hybrid seriously.

 

  1. Should the government persist in its ambitions for parliament to spend some years in York, having a well-developed hybrid system would make such an event much less disruptive.

 

Improving the hybrid House.

  1. We clearly need to make some improvements to the hybrid system.
  2. Committee stage, in particular, needs to get back some of its conversational nature. I see no impossibilities here – just some substantial software development so that it becomes easy to signal at very short notice a wish to intervene.
    1. The cumbersome back office procedures that we are living with at the moment need to be improved through investment in systems. Having a speaking order is, to my mind, an advantage – though it should prioritise speakers who have amendments in the group – but other lords should be able to add their name to or remove their name from the list on the fly. Speaking after the minister, several times if need be, should be similarly easy.
    2. Lords regularly working from home need to be doing so on a better level of kit, so that it becomes easy to have (for instance, I would suggest) the Bill, the marshalled list, the groupings and speaking notes all on screen at the same time. Fibre to the premises should also be supported where practicable.
    3. We are currently (notably on the Agriculture Bill) not getting through business at a good enough rate. Partly this is because participation is so much easier, partly because the allowances scheme incentivises participation, partly because our current back-office technology does not allow us to sit late (verbosity is nothing new). Improvements are needed in the latter two areas, and (see below) we could usefully think through how we should make the committee stage process work better.
    4. Given some determination, I expect that we could get to a point where our performance on committee stages approached that that we are used to.

 

  1. House of Lords committees seem to me to have adapted well to online life. They too need some serious investment in technology to make the experience as good as it could be: a more purposefully organised online knowledge base, well indexed and easy to interrogate, might be an example of a useful technical upgrade.

 

  1. We also need, on occasion, to meet each other physically. Human relationships work better when supported by having met each other in person in relaxed circumstances. The Good Schools Guide, the business that I run, has been virtual for the last 20 years; we have found regular get-togethers to be essential. While we are away from the Palace of Westminster, that need might be provided by our taking over one of the many well-appointed London hotels.

 

  1. To my mind, a long period of years as a hybrid House of Lords is deliverable and would be as effective as, if less congenial than, current arrangements.

 

Reviewing and improving our practices generally

  1. We should not just look at whether we can be as good as we are. We should look also at what a virtual existence enables us to do better, and what current arrangements look less than perfect.

 

Allowances

  1. Allowances should be reworked from the ground up. Peers should be sensibly rewarded for the value that they add to the political process within the mandate of the House of Lords, taking into account the time actually expended not just the time spent in the public eye. Under current arrangements, our rate of “pay” varies from £10,000 per hour – pausing briefly to vote in accordance with the whip’s request – to £10 per hour – heavy involvement in the committee stage of a bill, including groundwork with the people affected by it.

 

Bills

  1. Committee stages of bills are at the core of our raison d’être. The slow pace of the Agriculture Bill, for example, is reason enough to review whether we are achieving all that we could as expeditiously as we can, especially given the availability of technology.
    1. The purpose of committee stage is to persuade the government either to make changes to the bill or to offer commitments and elucidations as to how the powers in the bill will be used.
    2. On issues where the government needs persuading and might possibly be persuaded, the minister arrives with a well-formed brief, and it often takes a series of well-argued cases from around the house, and serial questions after the minister has spoken, to tip the minister into offering discussions between committee and report. This seems to me to be an effective and useful process, given the breadth and depth of peers’ expertise, and well worth the time that it takes.
    3. On many occasions, however, the government agrees with the intent of the amendment, or considers that the bill already covers the point. Having us all sound off at length serves no great function, and we should explore ways of cutting debate down to what is actually useful, for instance by encouraging the minister to speak early, or allowing the government to add a short response after the mover’s explanation of the amendment.
    4. On even more occasions the government is obviously unpersuadable. Here again, I think that an early intervention or a short response on the martialled list would enable the House to focus on what the occasion demands.
    5. Such time-saving changes might also allow the government to be less shy of having small, focussed groupings, making it easier to expect members to stick to a single issue.
    6. We should look at using online meetings between second reading and committee to work through what seem likely to be time-consuming subjects, and to focus the House on the possible rather than the desirable.
    7. We might experiment with providing an online facility for peers to argue for their amendments and for others to post comments ahead of committee, so that we all arrive better informed and with less need to take up time.
    8. Between them, I think that such innovations could lead to a higher quality, less hurried, consideration of bills, and more changes made with government agreement.

 

  1. The other stages of consideration of a bill seem to me to be in less need of attention.

 

Questions and debates

  1. We should look with a critical eye at all the questions and debates that we enjoy, and ask what their purposes are, how effective they are, how we could do better or differently. As a way of persuading us to attend physically, and of rewarding us when we do, they have served us well. But if we now do not need such incentives, we should look carefully at whether they are effective and what effects they have, and whether we could do better or should do less.

 

  1. Questions for written answer are useful as a way of making us informed, and I think that we should review the rules and restrictions on their wording. We should look at changes that might save time and money, for instance by using Library research techniques to point members at information which is already available before members put down questions on the order paper.

 

  1. Starred questions: I remember one, in 1992, which changed government policy. How often has that been the case since? How often is their effect of drawing a subject to a minister’s attention useful, particularly when the question is answered by a minister or whip who is not responsible for the policy? What can we do to increase the effectiveness of this activity? Might they be better replaced by a half-hour Zoom call with the relevant minister? I suggest that we should commission a proper study.

 

  1. PNQs: I have the same concerns as for starred questions

 

  1. Statements: Given that these are almost always repeats of Commons statements that have been made by the responsible minister, it seems to me that we need many fewer of these: interested peers can easily watch or read the Commons debate; the Lords minister will almost never be in a position to say anything interesting.

 

  1. Debates: I have similar concerns as for starred questions

 

Private Peers’ Bills

  1. Private peers’ bills: There are some notable success stories here, mostly when peers’ personal campaigns get adopted by the government. Because they are directed at a specific objective for change, they are much better focussed that debates and questions.

 

Secondary legislation

  1. Secondary legislation. Given the increased use of secondary legislation, I suggest that we should revisit our procedures and find ways in which we could use our powers to become effective in obtaining changes rather than just expressing disappointment. This could easily absorb the energies currently expended on ineffective questions and debates.

 

Committees

  1. The current system seems to me to work well, but our ambition should nonetheless be for steady improvement.

 

Ralph Lucas