Commons Scrutiny of Secretaries of State in the House of Lords

Procedure Committee

We now move on to the Select Committee statement on behalf of the Procedure Committee. Dame Karen Bradley will speak for up to 10 minutes, during which no interventions may be taken. At the conclusion of the statement, I will call Members to ask questions on the subject of the statement. These should be brief questions, not speeches. I also emphasise that questions should be directed to the Select Committee Chair, not to the relevant Minister. Front Benchers therefore may take part in questioning.

I start by adding my own condolences to the many that have been expressed today to Mr Speaker and his family. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for finding time for this statement and pass my regards to the Chair of that Committee, the hon. Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns).

With permission, I would like to make a statement on the Government’s response to the Procedure Committee’s report on Commons scrutiny of Secretaries of State in the House of Lords, which was published yesterday. Following the appointment of the noble Lord Cameron as Foreign Secretary in November last year, Mr Speaker wrote to the Procedure Committee, asking us to examine how Secretaries of State who sit in the House of Lords could be scrutinised by this House. The Committee published its report on 23 January this year, and following its publication I made a similar statement to this House to explain our conclusions and recommendations. In that statement, I urged the Government to act quickly on the matter, given the strength of feeling across this House. The Government sent their response only after the House had risen for the Easter recess. It is for that reason that the Committee was unable to publish it until yesterday afternoon, once the Committee had met. Despite that, I hope all right hon. and hon. Members have now had the chance to read the Government’s response in full.

It is with regret that I make this statement to inform the House that the Government have rejected our recommendations. The reasons put forward by the Government for rejecting the recommendation that Lords Secretaries of State should be scrutinised by this House at the Bar of the House are that it is “untested” as a method for routine scrutiny, and that our recommendations would have “significant constitutional implications”. I am sorry to say that I find those arguments unconvincing. Our report was clear that while our recommendations may be novel in the modern era, they are not wholly untested. Moreover, our recommendations were limited to this Parliament to deal with issues that this House faces now, without setting a precedent for the future—we were very clear on that. I suggest that the Government have not made the case that our recommendations could have unforeseen constitutional implications, and have failed to adequately set out what they think such implications could be. The Committee is still of the view that the Government should agree to our recommendation to use the Bar of the House to allow questions to be put directly to the Foreign Secretary by all Members of this House.

I thank the right hon. Lady. We will now take questions to the Chair of the Select Committee, and I call the shadow Leader of the House.

I thank the Chair and all members of her Committee for their diligent work, which was carried out in good faith in the expectation that their recommendations would be taken forward. Does she agree with me that there is wide support across this House—cross-party support—for her recommendations, and that the Government have misread the mood of the House? What plans does she have for the House to express its view on her Committee’s report and perhaps to take forward its recommendations, despite the Government’s response to them?

I thank the shadow Leader of the House for her question. She is correct that we as a Committee took evidence from all Members of this House. We listened to representations and we conducted an all-Member survey. It was very clear from those responses that there was a desire to ensure there were opportunities for proper scrutiny by Members of this House of the Foreign Secretary. We are not as a Committee proposing to do any further work on this matter. As I said in my statement, I urge the Government to rethink their response and perhaps come forward with some other suggestions.

I call, as a member of the Committee, Patrick Grady.

I thank the Chair for her statement. Was it not predictable that this was going to be the Government’s response? As I said in the Adjournment debate I had on this topic just before Easter, if the Government had wanted to make arrangements for the Foreign Secretary to appear at the Bar of the House or be otherwise scrutinised by the House as a whole, they could have brought forward such provisions without any reference to the Procedure Committee. That also applies to the point made earlier about Opposition days. The Government can at any time bring forward recommendations and changes to Standing Orders. Would it not make more sense if the Government presented us as a Committee with their recommendations, which we could scrutinise, rather than asking us to come up with recommendations that they then reject out of hand?

I thank the hon. Gentleman, who is a fellow member of the Committee, for his question. I think he is reflecting the sense of frustration that was felt in the Committee when we met yesterday afternoon. It is in the Government’s gift to change any matters they wish to change. They control the Order Paper and can make such decisions. As a Committee, we stand ready to scrutinise and to be consulted on proposed changes. However, it is often helpful if the Government give us some indication of the changes they may want, so that we can at least spend our time productively in giving advice on those recommendations, rather than see our recommendations rejected out of hand.

I call, as a member of the Committee, Kevan Jones.

I thank the right hon. Lady for her statement and for her work as Chair of the Committee. She mentioned the announcement this week that the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) has been appointed Deputy Foreign Secretary, and she will also know that the Foreign Secretary has specific responsibilities for oversight of MI6. He or she appears before the Intelligence and Security Committee, which I sit on, and obviously the nature of some of those issues cannot be discussed publicly. Does the right hon. Lady have any information on whether the remit of the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield has been changed so that he can reply to non-secure questions that Members might have, for example on the operation of MI6?

The right hon. Gentleman makes a very good point. The appointment of a Deputy Foreign Secretary is what happened in the past—there is precedent for that, for example when Lord Carrington was Foreign Secretary and in previous times. It is something that we had been keen to see, because it means that the House has more opportunities to scrutinise a senior member of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office team. I am afraid I do not have sight of the changes that may have been made to the portfolio of my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield, and perhaps that is something that the Leader of the House, who is in her place and listening intently, could inform the Committee about at some point.

In principle, no one should be in government who cannot be scrutinised in the elected Chamber representing the people of this country. That is the principle that all Governments should apply, and I do not think that this appointment should have taken place until that issue was sorted out. Is there a view from the Foreign Secretary himself, Lord Cameron, on whether he should be here answering questions in this Chamber?

The hon. Gentleman tempts me, but that is definitely above my pay grade.

The Chair of the Committee has, in the view of the Liberal Democrats, done great work on trying to bring the noble Lord Cameron to the Bar of the House. She is right to say that the last time one of the four great offices of state was occupied by a Member of the other place was 1982. Lord Carrington resigned from the role of Foreign Secretary after Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands. He did so partly because Back Benchers in the House of Commons had been warning about that possibility, and there was a feeling that the Foreign Office had not heeded their warnings under Lord Carrington. Given that the UK’s relations with some of it adversaries are as tense as they have been since the early 1980s, does the right hon. Lady think that the noble Lord Cameron might want to avert such an outcome by answering questions at the Bar of the House?

The Committee considered all the points carefully, and looked at the evidence and at precedent. That is why we came to the conclusion that the Bar of the House was the right place for scrutiny of Secretaries of State in the House of Lords. We were keen to ensure that proper scrutiny could be done by this place, because we as elected representatives will often reflect what our constituents are telling us and what we are seeing on the ground in a way that no other body in this place can do. Members of the other place do extremely good work in scrutinising the Government, but without constituents they are perhaps not able to reflect what we hear from people on the ground. Likewise, members of Select Committees do not generally ask constituency-based questions in their work; they tend to ask questions on a theme or on the overall topics of the day. We have that unique role in this place, and that is why we were keen to ensure that there could be some form of scrutiny. We are disappointed that the Government have rejected that.

I thank my right hon. Friend for the work she does on the Committee, and for being so mild-mannered in reporting to the House today the feelings of the Procedure Committee. Does she accept that there is strong anger on the Committee, not so much about the response from the Government—we expected that they might reject our recommendations—but about the nature of that rejection, and the failure to answer any of the points or put forward any detailed justifications for rejecting our recommendations? Does she agree that it almost makes us members of the Committee feel that we are held in contempt by the Leader of the House?