My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing on the Order Paper in the name of my noble friend the Lord Privy Seal. As we meet today, we are still in the grip of a global pandemic that has significantly impacted all our lives and the working of our Parliament. The first national lockdown began on 23 March 2020. Two days later, when our House adjourned early for the Easter Recess, it was far from clear to anybody how or when we would return. That we were able to return after Easter, as scheduled, on 21 April was thanks to the extraordinary efforts of the staff of the House.
However, it was clear from the outset that those early virtual sittings would need to serve as a stepping-stone to a more sophisticated system.
A little over a month later our hybrid House, as we now know it, was up and running, and shortly after that we started voting remotely. These changes were developed and implemented in a matter of weeks. While they have worked well in their own terms, we all knew they were never going to be perfect or a proper substitute for our normal arrangements. There have been unintended consequences and opportunity costs as well as frustrations. Nevertheless, we have continued to meet and to scrutinise, revise and pass legislation, which is our primary duty, and—albeit not in an ideal fashion—your Lordships have continued to hold the Government to account.
The hybrid House arrangements have seen us through this unprecedented time, which has included two further nationwide lockdowns and all the social distancing and shielding measures in between. Notwithstanding that, we have always perceived these measures to be a temporary fix to a temporary problem; and that is the basis on which we proposed the changes to the commission and to the Procedure and Privileges Committee.
Before we get into the debate, I want to clarify what we mean when referring to the “hybrid House”. I suggest that there should be three separate and very distinct elements to it, which are often wrongly conflated. The first element is remote participation in business that would previously have required all participating Members to be present in person. The second element is remote voting. The third element, which can be separated from the other two, consists of all the procedural changes which have been made independently of, or are not dependent on, remote participation in the Chamber or Grand Committee or remote voting. This includes things like the increased time allocated for Oral Questions each day, the taking of evidence from witnesses remotely in Select Committee meetings, and the selection of Oral Questions by ballot rather than first come, first served.
My Lords, it is a very great pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Howe. He has spoken clearly and persuasively and there is hardly anything he said with which I would disagree. I tabled this resolution because a number of colleagues, particularly those who have been attending regularly, have spoken to me and discussed these things. We thought it might be a good idea to have a resolution before your Lordships to give a little more point and purpose to the debate. I reserve the right to divide the House, but I shall listen very carefully indeed—as will others. Whether there will be a Division at the end of this debate or not, I genuinely do not know, but I certainly accept that there is a great deal of good sense in what my noble friend Lord Howe said a few moments ago.
The period since 23 March last year has been one of the most remarkable in our long parliamentary history. To those who made possible first the virtual and then the hybrid House, we all owe a great deal, as my noble friend said. As someone new to the technology, I would like to add a very personal thank you to the digital support team, who have been truly remarkable in the 24/7 service that they have offered. It would be very easy to be seduced into the comfortable way forward: to continue to speak from our homes and even to vote from our beds, as I understand some have done. It would be easy, but it would be wrong—emphatically wrong—for the House we have at the moment is one dimensional. As the Constitution Committee has made plain in its latest valuable report, the first of this Session, there is no opportunity for spontaneity or intervention and no real opportunity for human contact between colleagues, without which no institution can work effectively.
Parliament, and that means both Houses, must be at the centre of any thriving democracy. Good governance means that the Government must be held effectively to account, both formally in the Chamber, in committee and, as my noble friend touched on, informally, in conversation and personal meetings. One of the great deficiencies of the present system is that statutory instruments pile up—the Constitution Committee referred to this in its report—leading to retrospective legislation and to confusing the public by blurring the difference between legislation and guidance. That is thoroughly undesirable. As my noble friend also touched on, debates without opportunity for challenge and intervention become a series of written statements, delivered without any reference to others. They are a series of personal utterances, not a debate; there is no cut and thrust. There is not even the opportunity to know how what one is saying is going down with one’s colleagues. As for the voting system, it is far too easy and remote in every way.
My Lords, during a long career in theatre, I supported many understudies. As they shook in their shoes waiting to go on, there were only ever two notes worth giving them: “Remember your lines” and “Try not to bump into the furniture”. So far, so good. I have been a Back-Bencher all my political life, so it is a huge and, frankly, unexpected privilege to be asked to understudy my noble friend Lady Smith of Basildon, who is unavoidably absent on personal business today. She is a star in your Lordships’ House and I know my place, but I hope that my recent membership of the House of Lords Commission, my current membership of the Procedure and Privileges Committee and my service as Deputy Speaker, as well as my experience on the Back Benches, will give me just enough credibility to take the edge off your Lordships’ disappointment that my noble friend is, as we say in the theatre, “off”.
I start by adding my thanks to those already given by the noble Earl and the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, to our many staff colleagues who have worked so hard, first to invent the virtual House and then to create the hybrid House and keep it going. It is an extraordinary achievement and we owe them a huge debt of gratitude. As a result of their patient efforts—as the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, has already alluded to—lots of us have even become modestly competent users of technology that we had never heard of a year ago.
This is an important debate, as the noble Earl, Lord Howe, and the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, have made clear. The noble Earl has set out the Government’s position very clearly and unambiguously. While I do not disagree with everything that he said, or indeed much of it, there may be some additional points to make. After a challenging year, the House is faced with some critical choices. Fortunately, last week’s excellent report from the Constitution Committee of your Lordships’ House, which has already been mentioned, sets out the issues very clearly and concisely—including, by the way, some trenchant comments on the current state of play with restoration and renewal. I do not propose to dwell on that but hope that someone else will. The whole House will be grateful to my noble friend Lady Taylor and her colleagues; they have certainly made our job today easier. I agree wholeheartedly with their conclusion that the House needs to reflect on its experiences before deciding next steps.
My Lords, 15 months ago, we could not have imagined that your Lordships’ House would be discussing the extent to which it retained—not introduced —a range of ways of working that, at the time, would have seemed impossible, both politically and technically. So I, like other noble Lords who have spoken, begin by expressing my thanks to the staff who have worked so hard to implement the very widespread changes that we are debating today. I also acknowledge that many Members of your Lordships’ House now have a proficiency in new technologies that, 15 months ago, they would have thought impossible.
I had Covid in March and I therefore decided that, as soon as the House started meeting again, I was at less risk than my colleagues and that I would come. I have attended virtually every day since the House resumed, probably more than any other Member of your Lordships’ House. I have therefore seen at first hand, from in here, what it has been like as we have changed our procedures. As members of various committees know, I have chafed at the restrictions—many of which I have thought to be petty and overdone—with which we have had to put up over the last year.
As the country returns to normal, we now face the challenge that many other organisations are facing: how far should we simply revert to the ways we have done things in the past, and how far should we make permanent the changes that have been introduced, in an emergency, during a crisis? In making the decision, we have to begin by acknowledging the particular characteristics of Parliament, as the noble Earl, Lord Howe, and the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, have set out so eloquently. It is a place for debate, for weighing the strength of argument, for exerting influence over colleagues, and, particularly in your Lordships’ House, for working together across parties on a daily basis. The conventional wisdom, which I support, is that this is best done face to face. It is undoubtedly the case that it is impossible to adequately hold Ministers to account through the sanitised environment of Zoom.
My Lords, I am grateful to the Leader of the House and her colleagues around the House for arranging today’s debate. It is a privilege to be the first of around 80 Back-Bench speakers contributing to the debate on the Motions before the House. We can already hear that there will be strong and divergent views expressed today. I do not want in my contribution to set out my own personal prescription for the way forward for the House. What is important is that this is part of a process in which people listen to each other.
I very much support the recommendations by the Constitution Committee that any draft proposals that it or the Commission or the Procedure Committee make for change should go out to consultation before any firm recommendations are put to the House for decision. I would add my own prescription that provision should be made for review, so that we go step by step with the changes. In our considerations, I suggest that we follow the prescription from Albert Einstein, which we were reminded about in the House earlier this week. He said that if given an hour to solve a problem, he would spend 55 minutes looking at the problem and only five minutes looking at the solution.
I hope that we can find common ground—and it has emerged from speeches already today. The essential problem we have collectively to solve is how we ensure that the Lords functions at the highest standards and as effectively as it can in its essential tasks of scrutinising and improving legislation, utilising the expertise and experience of its Members through committee work, and, above all, and centrally, holding the Government to account.
That ability has been degraded and our capacity to fulfil our role has been downplayed. The ways in which this has happened have already been spoken about, and they are set out in the report of this House’s Constitution Committee and in the Government’s response to the House of Commons Procedure Committee report, which included the words
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The Lord Bishop of Birmingham
My Lords, I share, from these Benches, our gratitude for all those who have worked so hard, with agility and rapidity, both the staff that serve the House and those who manage the business of the House, in a very challenging and, in fact, a unique time, as has been referred to several times already.
The noble Earl, Lord Howe, said that every aspect of life has been affected by the coronavirus pandemic. Even churches have become hybrid. Families have been separated and have kept in touch by Zoom. Employers and employees are now negotiating home and back-to-work settings. Online parents’ evenings at schools have become more popular than ever. As has been said already, I join those who are at a moment of learning lessons from what has happened to us, unexpected and unprepared, over the past 15 months. This great disruption means that we will face further change, not just here but in society as a whole. The decisions we have to make are about what to keep that has been beneficial, or surprisingly new and advantageous, and what to go back to, as what works well for our purpose today. We do so in the context of an uncertain journey ahead, on the road map, and also with the priority to keep everyone safe and well in this terrible time of virus, as I believe we have tried to do in this House.
I have no doubt that your Lordships will want to do this learning on the basis of the principles of our primary purpose. As was said in Question Time on Tuesday, I think, structures follow purpose—it has been well articulated here, and I do not have to go through the details—but this, I believe, is best fulfilled in person. Yet, at the same time I agree with those who have said we should not simply stop and revert without attending to what we have experienced in some detail and to see what might be beneficial in the months and years ahead.
Let me just reflect for a moment on the experience of the Lords spiritual in our purpose of scrutiny. One of my colleagues has been quite clear that this has been stifled by the medium of Zoom. Then we come on to the whole business of accountability, our major passion in this House, to allow the Government—whatever kind of Government—to be held to account in the rush and tumble of our current way of doing things. Colleagues would say that it has been harder to press the Government to accountability, not least at this time when we have had to make lots of decisions by secondary legislation or, as was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, by statutory instruments.
Of course, there is the important matter of legislation itself: our role as part of the Parliament, the legislature in our organisation, especially at a time when there is tension and a contested power struggle between legislature, Executive and judiciary. This is much better done in person rather than remotely. The Lords spiritual is a distinctive group in your Lordships’ House—when writs are issued, it is done in the name of the Lords spiritual and temporal—bringing with us our regional experience and our responsibilities from all around the country. As has been mentioned, we have found it to be positive that committees, in the way they operate, have an advantage, in part, in their proceedings by having remote access, particularly when witnesses are being called. There is a much better reach, even internationally.
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Birmingham, and I agree with much of what he says. I associate myself with the thanks so many people have already expressed to the staff who have made this remote Parliament possible. I also agree with the right reverend Prelate about the importance of being here in person.
I also congratulate the commission which has, in advance of this debate, anticipated what we were going to say by relaxing the rules today. I make that point partly as a criticism, because I would have thought it would be better to wait for the debate before deciding what relaxation should be considered—but then I am old-fashioned; I have this idea that we are a self-regulating Chamber.
Let us face it: the experience of this virtual Parliament has not made this House look particularly good in the eyes of the outside world. We have been subject to a degree of mockery. The clue really is in the name: Parliament—“parley”. It is about being able to parley and engage with each other, and remote operations have certainly not enabled us to do so. If this House thinks that the other Chamber can relax its rules and go back to normal and that we should do nothing, it is on the way to extinction, in my view. I will not repeat the points made by my noble friend Lord Howe in opening this debate, but I will say that, probably for the first time, I agree with every word that has come from the Front Bench today—except, perhaps, the last sentence, where my noble friend suggested that it was for the commission to come forward with its views. It is for this House to come forward with its views.
I think we should have a care for the Government, who have the duty to carry forward the legislative programme. My noble friend Lord Howe mentioned the sudden increase in the number of Divisions. I am a believer in markets and, therefore, I am not surprised that we have seen a large increase in the number of people participating in voting and in the proceedings of our House when the incentives are such—but perhaps I am rather cynical.
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The Leader, the Chief Whip and I have always been consistent in our position on remote participation and remote voting. We believe that, once the social distancing guidance allows it, the House should return to its full physical capacity, and remote participation in the Chamber and Grand Committee should cease, as should remote voting. A parliamentarian’s place is in Parliament. This is not just a sentimental view; it is a practical view of how the innumerable interactions between Ministers, Peers, officials and staff all contribute to the way that Parliament should work. That is what Zoom, for all its technical wizardry, cannot provide.
I do not intend to go into full detail about all the practical implications of retaining remote participation or remote voting, but certain considerations are important to mention to set the context of this debate. First, keeping any remote participation in the Chamber or Grand Committee, even if only in exceptional circumstances, would have significant implications for our ability to return to the House as we knew it before and would entail continued costs of just over £90,000 a month for the extensive broadcasting team. Even if we enabled only a small number of Members to contribute in this way, the bulk of this monthly cost would still be incurred.
Secondly, we are a House of Peers. An important element of the hybrid system has been the principle of maintaining general parity of treatment between physical and remote speakers. Unless in some way or to some degree we take steps to remove that parity and introduce procedural limitations for those noble Lords who are not physically present when speaking, the consequences would be an inability to return to interaction and interventions in the Chamber for all participants equally.
Remote participation, to however limited a degree, necessarily brings with it procedural millstones: advance notice and pre-planning of speakers’ lists; allowing time for Members to sign up; allowing further time for broadcasters to organise the necessary connectivity; and retaining time limits for items of business that did not have them before. Even if no virtual speakers sign up for a particular piece of business, we would still be left with wasted time because of the need to plan the order of business in advance, just in case. Let none of us think that just having a few people taking part in our debates remotely would allow us to return to the flexibility that this House once enjoyed and took for granted.
While the matter of remote voting may be more a matter of principle than practicality, it is significant to note that since we introduced remote voting more Members are voting and Divisions are more frequent. During the 2017-19 Session, there was an average of one Division every three days. Since remote voting, we have had an average of one Division every day—a threefold increase. This has had practical implications for the timing, scheduling and progress of business.
I make a plea for the Government. With no in-built government majority in the Lords, Ministers work hard to make their case and try to win the argument to win Divisions. Is it not right that Members are here to listen and give them a fair hearing before casting their votes? That aside, with the rest of the country coming back to work physically, how could we credibly defend parliamentarians doing something different?
Our present arrangements have allowed us to carry on to the best of our abilities within unprecedented limitations. However, they have added little or no value to our pre-existing procedures. From a ministerial viewpoint, we fully appreciate that the technical constraints have made the Opposition and Back-Benchers feel that their ability to scrutinise the Government effectively has been restricted. At the same time, the Government have found their ability to progress legislation more difficult and this House’s unique self-regulating nature has been curtailed. Indeed, at times it has felt as if the House has had one hand tied behind its back.
I have heard it said that, with remote participation, our debates are a shadow of what they once were. “Sensing the mood of the House” is a phrase that is now almost devoid of meaning. There is simply no way of determining who the House wants to hear from or for how long and, without the interaction that comes with a physical House, speeches are increasingly disconnected from one another and can often be tiresomely repetitive.
It is interesting that our hybrid arrangements have not increased average daily attendance. The difference that noble Lords may have noticed is that a great many more Members than before are speaking in our main items of business. As we are all painfully aware, the result of that has been to restrict speaking times to one or two minutes. I am the first to acknowledge that that renders any attempt at healthy debate and scrutiny almost impossible. Members with genuine expertise and experience, whom the House would benefit hearing from at greater length, are crowded out. There is frustration all round.
I do not believe that I am alone in holding the view that there is immeasurable value to be gained from noble Lords participating physically in Parliament. Virtual proceedings cannot replace or adequately substitute for the interactive dynamic of the Chamber, conversations in the corridors or face-to-face engagement on important legislation and matters of the day. When voting on legislation, Members benefit immensely from being in the House to follow the debate, listening to the responses and voting among colleagues in the Division Lobbies. This communication between Back-Benchers and Ministers, Government and Opposition, friends and colleagues, is, I believe, our bread and butter and vital to the proper functioning of this House. This building is our Parliament. It is where we all belong and it does not work as it should without us being here, in person, together.
As I said at the start, at the outset of the pandemic we viewed remote participation and voting as a temporary solution to a temporary problem. This House has evolved its procedures and practices over many years and it is not in our nature to permanently alter or curtail them as a result of decisions made very rapidly out of temporary necessity. Having said all that, where smaller changes do not impact on the practicalities or principles of our traditional ways of working or our ability to participate and vote physically, we perhaps need to be more open-minded. These are the procedural changes I mentioned a moment ago as the third element of our hybrid House. I am thinking of things such as the time allocated for Oral Questions, the elimination of reading out Statements and the way in which Select Committees decide to hear from witnesses. There may well be good arguments for holding on to these changes on a long-term basis.
These should perhaps be viewed as second-order issues because we think it important for the House to return to normality before considering whether any of these sorts of procedural changes should be retained in the long term. However, if there is a genuine and thought-through demand for one or more of them, the Leader, Chief Whip and I stand ready to take forward discussions, as appropriate.
My task today has been to make the Government’s position on remote participation and the Hybrid Sittings of the House clear, which I hope I have done. However, I do need to emphasise that this is not a matter for the Government to decide upon; it is a matter for the House. The Leader, the Chief Whip and I felt it was right to facilitate the debate today, so that all noble Lords would have the opportunity to air their views. While I am sure that my noble friend Lord Cormack will speak persuasively to his amending Motion, we also believe that the main aim of this debate should be for views to be expressed, and not for binding decisions to be made. Our intention was, and is, for the views of noble Lords as expressed today to be synthesised in a careful and nuanced way to enable your Lordships’ commission to make appropriate recommendations to the House. My noble friend the Leader, alongside other members of the commission, are here to listen. I beg to move.
Our Constitution Committee is wise to say that we will need to assess our former normal working methods, but I agree emphatically with my noble friend: first of all, we need to get back to those methods. After all, a significant number of Peers have had little or no experience of our normal methods: those who have been ennobled in the last two years. Some have had no experience whatever of our normal working day. I believe that we need to get back to where we were in mid-March 2020 before assessing what, if any, changes should be made to the working of our self-regulating House. The only practice that we should maintain is that of allowing distant witnesses to appear remotely when giving evidence, but before a proper committee, assembled in a proper Committee Room.
The Commons, we are told, will return on 22 June. The longer after that that we delay the move, the more irrelevant this House will become. Ideally, the changes should be concurrent in both Houses, but I put 6 September as the latest possible date in case there is a general wish to take just a little longer in your Lordships’ House. I hope that there will not be, but it would have the added advantage of making sure that everyone was able to have a vaccination.
Before I finish, I want to give a warning. When we decamp during restoration and renewal, we must not look at the virtual and hybrid House as something we should return to. That would be totally wrong. We would merely deserve the riposte that, if that is the case, what point and purpose is there in a second Chamber? If those greybeards cannot transmit their wisdom other than via Zoom, would the nation not be better served by another television channel? We need to be here—or wherever Parliament is sitting—or we will become an irrelevance, tweeting and twittering into the twilight.
I have just been reading the diary of Alan Don, who was rector of St Margaret’s and subdean during the war years; I commend it to your Lordships. He talks about this House and the other place sitting in Church House, the Robing Room and the Royal Gallery, and the Commons moving here, but meeting all the time during the Second World War—never, never giving up. This has been a very difficult period, but it has been nowhere near as difficult as the Second World War, when the bombs were falling on both Houses. If they could do it then, we can and should do it now.
Today’s debate is the essential first stage in that process. Each Member’s experience of the hybrid House has been different and we shall hear a wide range of views this afternoon. Everyone with some part to play in considering what the House should do next must, first and foremost, as the noble Earl said, keep an open mind —and listen. That is why I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, to whom I listened closely and for whom I have a very high regard, as I think he knows, will not press his Motion to a vote. Today should be for considering, not for deciding.
For me, the key observation of the Constitution Committee’s report comes in its summary, where it says that
“changes to House of Lords procedures as a result of hybrid proceedings … has resulted in Parliament’s essential scrutiny role becoming less effective, including its capacity to hold the Government to account. This presents significant problems for both members and ministers.”
The University College London Constitution Unit recently warned that
“parliamentary accountability and control over decisions have diminished to a degree that would have been unthinkable before COVID-19”.
I think there are few who would disagree. The constraints that have particularly affected your Lordships’ House—including the lack of spontaneous intervention, the absence of informal contacts and the restrictions on speakers’ lists and speaking times—are discussed in detail. I am sure that we shall be hearing much more about these issues as the debate unfolds.
However, the Constitution Committee’s report also points out that there have been benefits to the hybrid model, especially for Members for whom, for example, coming regularly to Westminster presents difficulties. It reminds us that our pre-pandemic procedures had shortcomings and frustrations, too. For example, our traditions of self-regulation, to which reference has already been made and which are treasured and jealously guarded by many of us, can be quite intimidating for others. The introduction of speakers’ lists for most business and the calling of speakers from the Woolsack of course has been difficult, but it may have advantages which we must properly evaluate.
Our goal must be to make the House the most effective it can be in its role of scrutinising and revising legislation and holding the Government to account. That, in my view, does not necessarily mean going back to exactly how things were. We should bear in mind, as the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, has already reminded us, that the House has welcomed many new Members in the past year. Most have become impressively active participants in our work, but they have only ever known the House as it is today. This is their normal. I am glad to see that several will be speaking later; their perspective will be particularly valuable.
I would like to highlight a couple of other points. The first concerns Select Committees, which have been operating very successfully in hybrid mode; the Constitution Committee recommends that they should be allowed to continue to do so. Having served on two Select Committees in the past year, I agree that this way of working has been particularly helpful, especially in the ability to attract a more diverse range of witnesses.
The second is electronic voting, to which reference has of course already been made. I believe that PeerHub is an excellent innovation that we should retain and develop. Personally, like the noble Earl and the Government, I would not be in favour of continuing with the remote element of the present voting arrangements once we are fully back in Westminster. But maintaining the electronic system for use on the Estate may have benefits, which I hope we will consider.
I note that the Constitution Committee report does not comment on the earlier start to business that we have become used to in the past year. While I think that, for some, there has been an upside to the current arrangements, it may be outweighed by the additional pressure created, particularly for Front-Bench colleagues, by reduced time available for preparation and for other business. Earlier starts are also less convenient, obviously, for Members who live at a distance from Westminster. None the less, it is a matter we should consider carefully to see if any adjustments to our previous arrangements would be helpful to the House.
Finally, a word on the social aspects—if I may put it that way—of life in the House of Lords. One might include chance meetings in the corridors, being able to invite guests in, or congenial conversations in the Bishops’ Bar. If we are honest, that is probably what many of us have missed the most, not least because these informal contacts, as has been said, help to oil the wheels of the political machine. Let us hope that we can enjoy them again soon. But, as we do, we should remember the many staff colleagues who we depend on and whose circumstances may be very different from our own. We have a responsibility to ensure that their needs are understood and respected.
However hard we try, we cannot erase the impact of the pandemic. It has affected all of us individually and profoundly changed how we live and work together, perhaps for ever. While the idea of reverting wholesale to the old normal is attractive, I am not sure that it is desirable, or even possible. The House has invested a lot of time and money in creating some genuinely innovative systems of which we can be proud, and we have adapted our procedures imaginatively. There have also been strikingly high levels of participation while we have been in hybrid mode. Although the noble Earl and the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, have indicated that there are some downsides to that, it is something that we should note. It would be perverse—would it not?—to set all that experience aside.
We should especially heed the wise words of the Constitution Committee on the importance of applying what we have learned to strengthening the longer-term resilience and business continuity that we must expect to have. We must, I believe, embrace and value the capacity of the House to work differently, because there is no knowing when it may need to do so again. I look forward to the rest of the debate.
Against this, hybrid working allows those who cannot be present physically, because of either health conditions, work commitments elsewhere or problematic travel arrangements, to participate in our deliberations where otherwise they would not have been able to do so. This obviously allows a greater number of participants and a broader range of views. In a parliament, that is a good thing. The easiest option would simply be to turn the clock back and do everything as we did it before. That obviously has the benefit of simplicity, but it implies that the way we did things before cannot be improved upon, or at least cannot be improved upon by any of the innovations of the last year. Surely nobody can really believe that.
As we have more fundamental reform of your Lordships’ House, there is a disparity of view on the desirability of retaining virtually every aspect of the changes we have already made. In order to get a sense of balance among those views, we circulated a questionnaire among Members of the Liberal Democrat group to see what people thought. I thought it might be helpful if, instead of simply expressing my own view, I set out the headline views of my group.
First, while there is unanimity on virtually nothing, there is strong majority support for the following: that participation in the amending stages of Bills be restricted to those who can attend in person; that electronic voting should be retained in some form; that committees should be able to operate in a hybrid manner; and that each committee should decide for itself what degree of hybridity it thinks is most appropriate.
There was also support, by smaller majorities, for retaining a degree of hybridity for Oral Questions, Statements, Second Reading debates, SI debates, and party and general debates, as well as for retaining our earlier starting times from Tuesday to Thursday but reverting to 2.30 pm on Monday to allow those travelling long distances to arrive for the start of business. There was also a recognition that because some people would not be able to easily attend the House in person for some time after 21 June, mainly for health reasons, there should be a transition to whatever final arrangements were made to a point in the autumn, when, all being well, all significant Covid-related barriers to attendance would have lifted.
The only two glosses I put on those general findings, from my personal perspective, are these. First, while I do believe electronic voting should be retained, I accept that very many believe it should be restricted to those on the precincts. There is a good argument for retaining the current system, albeit without voting continuing to qualify for an allowance. But if, as I suspect, this is not a majority view, I hope that at the very least we allow electronic voting on the premises. Spending many hours a year shuffling at glacial speed through the Lobbies should surely be a thing of the past.
I also believe there is a strong case for allowing those who have a disability that makes attending the House difficult to retain the option to participate virtually on a permanent basis. The truth is that the House will not be able to benefit fully from the wisdom and experience of all its Members unless such an approach is adopted, and we will all be poorer as a result. The noble Earl, Lord Howe, says this is not an acceptable way forward, not least because people who participate virtually would not do so on the same basis, so there would not be parity. I do not know how many disabled Members of your Lordships’ House he has spoken to, but I can tell him that, from those I have spoken to, that would be a very small price to pay to have a continued ability to participate in the work of the House.
There are many more detailed aspects of the way we do things—for example, whether we retain speakers’ lists for Questions, or whether we repeat ministerial Statements made in the Commons on the same day here—on which I know Members of your Lordships’ House have strong and differing views. We should proceed with the maximum degree of consensus. This argues for not necessarily deciding on all the changes by 21 June—assuming that the next phase of easing happens on 21 June.
My principal plea, as we return to normality, is not to discard anything that we have done for the first time in the past 15 months simply for the sake of returning to normal. No other organisation is doing that. The noble Earl says that everybody is going back to the office, but, in my experience, virtually no organisation that has a large number of staff is going back on the same terms. People are working part-time and different methods of operation are being undertaken. This is happening everywhere else. It would be bizarre if your Lordships’ House was the one place that did not look to see where it could improve its efficiency and effectiveness by continuing changes it is already undertaking. Surely we want a new normality to embed those changes that have helped your Lordships’ House to undertake its core functions of scrutinising legislation, holding Ministers to account and leading a public debate. The Government want the country to build back better. We should aim to do the same.
“the quality of debate and scrutiny has undoubtedly suffered … scrutiny of Government has been less effective with fewer opportunities for interventions; debates have been reduced to a succession of pre-prepared speeches read out one after the other; MPs have had fewer opportunities for collegiate cooperation to hold government to account … there has been less spontaneity and flexibility and backbenchers have had reduced access to ministers.”
All that is true and is of great concern. It is the problem we need to put right, but the challenge is to do so: to remedy the deficiencies, but not to assume that we can go back.
The noble Lord, Lord Cormack, said that we should beware of “the comfortable way”—the comfort of working from home, the ease of contributing remotely. I agree with him about that, but there is a comfortable way of thinking that the status quo ante is what we need and that there are no challenges at all. As others have said, we were not doing our job perfectly before Covid, and we need to look very carefully to see whether there are things that we can learn, or imagine, from remote and digital working that could, in future, enhance the performance of the House as a whole. I have to say to the noble Earl, Lord Howe, that while I agreed with a great deal of what he said, I thought his list of possible things that might, perhaps, a little bit, be considered for doing things better in the future was slightly minimalist. I think there is real opportunity to do better and to talk about the sorts of things that the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, mentioned, in terms of self-regulation.
I am unashamedly a sentimentalist about Parliament. I have been much happier this week, participating here, than remotely. Politics is a people business, but we live in a world that is ever more digital and changing and we need to find a way forward that understands both those truths.
Electronic voting and the PeerHub have been mentioned. We love the PeerHub. Electronic voting has been used by the General Synod of the Church of England for several years, although some of my noble colleagues find it difficult to remember which of the three options, including abstaining, to press at the right time, which means that electronic life requires us to concentrate even more on the business of the day. Less easy, of course, has been the business of intervening when it comes to the very difficult task—I do not underestimate this—of forming the lists when ballots are involved. Colleagues on this Bench find that the custom of the House to allow an intervention in person is much more effective and easier than just being part of a ballot for which we cannot actually get in. I am sure that as we emerge from the next stage of the pandemic, decisions about rules and practices—comments have already been made about the detailed work that may need to be done in our lessons learned—will include the interests of everyone in the House.
In summary, we on this side of the House feel that it is preferable to be present in person. We express, as has been mentioned, our full humanity, our ability as this extraordinary part of the created order, when we engage with one another by sight—if we have sight—by hearing, by touch, by listening and getting the mood of what is happening. Of course, this is using all the advantages of politics as has been practised over the centuries and I hope will go on being practised in the centuries ahead—although not all of us may be here to experience that when it comes. The same applies in church: we may well go on with hybrid. I am getting a nod and I am going to sit down. Please, may we work together in order to make the lessons learned really important. My final word is a word from the streets of Birmingham to the elders of the city: “If you’re not on Instagram, you don’t exist.”
For those who say, “Well, actually, we have to make allowances for people who cannot come to this House”, I will give one little anecdote. In her latter years, when she was very frail, the late Baroness Thatcher would ring my office—I worked for JP Morgan at the time—to say, “I am thinking of going into the House this afternoon; would you come along and support me?” So I would cancel all my meetings and go. This was happening quite frequently, so I said, “You know, Margaret, you have been Prime Minister. You have saved our country—you don’t need to come as often as you do”—at which point there was an explosion. She said, “Michael, when we were appointed to this House, it was our duty to turn up and participate in these proceedings. And, by the way, how often do you come when I am not coming?” I think that is an important point: we do have a duty to participate, and if we feel that we are not able to do so, or do not want to do so, we should make way for those people who are.
In introducing this debate, my noble friend talked about the temporary nature of the changes made—and they were temporary. However, listening to some of the speakers opposite, I am beginning to think that they are about as temporary as the introduction of income tax. They were temporary because there was an emergency, so the starting point should be that we return to normal. Yes, if we want to make changes, fine—but let us not delude ourselves that what we had before worked perfectly well.
On the issue of committees, I chair the Economic Affairs Committee. In our current inquiry on quantitative easing, we have been able to talk to and have as witnesses central bankers from all over the world and some very distinguished people—who, incidentally, seem to be flattered to be asked to give evidence to our House. That is great, but we could always do that; we could always have witnesses remotely. Of course, we also have the committees sitting virtually. I do not know whether it works well for members of the committee. It is great if you are chairman, because you are in complete control—but you have no interaction. People can put their hands up, but you do not have the same degree of interaction. So I say to those who argue that we should continue our committees in this way that I think we would lose a very great deal.
Of course, we need to think about the staff, as the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, pointed out. I believe that the operation of Parliament is central to the future of our country. Therefore, those people who support us in carrying out our work, and those people in the other place, are essential workers. Why do we not have the courage to stand up and ensure that all of them are able to get vaccines if they wish to do so? That would completely change things. The answer is that we are afraid of the tabloids. Well, let us just take it on the chin from the tabloids, because many of them are no friends of this place.
On the issue of holding Ministers to account, what they say from that Dispatch Box is important. If a Minister says that travelling is dangerous, it affects hundreds of thousands of people throughout our country. We should be able to challenge those statements, and we are unable to do so. It is central to our entire purpose and, if we fail to do that, I am afraid that we will disappear.
Finally, on the impact of this virtual Parliament, we have people reading speeches to a computer screen, unable to interact. Reading speeches actually used to be banned—in the old days, people would start saying, “Reading!” We lose that interaction between us.
So I want us to go back to where we were. If people want to propose changes for improvement as a result of this experience, let them do so. But let us not delay making this Chamber—this Parliament—effective, because that is what the people of this country expect.