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[TRANSCRIPT]

[00:00:00] Intro: You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production, supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/pm.

[00:00:17] Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

[00:00:23] Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark Darcy. And this is one of our special Urgent Question editions, where we deal with questions sent in by listeners to the main podcast. So Ruth, what have we got?

[00:00:33] Ruth Fox: Well, Mark, our first question is, it's anonymous, they haven't put their name to it, and I'm not sure it's really a question, perhaps more of a critique of our discussion recently about etiquette in the House of Commons chamber. So anonymous says, "listening to your podcast on chamber etiquette was pretty infuriating."

[00:00:53] I'm not sure whether he's - he or she - is infuriated by what we were saying or by the etiquette itself or both but he says, she says, "they all did normal jobs before becoming MPs. In no normal job would they sit five hours with no food, drink or break in order to make a three minute speech on something they are expert on, only to be cut off by the speaker at one minute past three.

[00:01:15] Who cares about looking smart and not using "you" in the chamber? But people should care about the insane waste of everybody's time, that's how debates work, and the snobbishness about doing other work on the phone while waiting their turn. Of course they have to do other work during those four hours and 57 minutes they've got to sit in the chamber."

[00:01:32] He also makes the point, and I think on this he or she is right, "you're also out of date on the use of honourable and gallant. Labour MPs are conspicuously using it now to refer to the large number of new Labour MPs with military ties." I think he's probably right on that. Parliamentary etiquette rules say it's fallen out of favour but they have been using it a little bit more because Labour's got so many military related MPs.

[00:01:54] Mark D'Arcy: I think that's definitely a fair cop, indeed one of their military MPs has been promoted straight in to be the new Minister for Veterans so I suppose Labour are quite happy to be able to gloat about the fact that they've got a lot of military officers and a bit of prestige is therefore reflected upon them. But on the other stuff, I'm not so sure. You can argue about whether or not people should speak to one another in the third person, but this is parliamentary debate.

[00:02:16] It's a very long standing tradition that's designed to take some of the heat and the fear and loathing out of debate, and that's why it's there. And I'm also not sure about the idea that the people should, of course, utilize the time they're sitting on the benches to do other work while they're waiting to speak.

[00:02:31] Well, maybe a bit, but this is a debate. They're not just supposed to read their own thoughts into the record. They're supposed to respond to each other. They're supposed to challenge points being made from across the House. So if they're deep on their device, answering constituency correspondence, they probably won't either accurately hear what other MPs are saying, or they'll just miss it altogether.

[00:02:52] And in either case, they're not really participating in the debate. This shouldn't be a waiting room. And as for how they're dressed, I do think this is like a court of law. This is a serious place. If you turned up in a gold lurex body stocking, it would somewhat undermine the seriousness of the occasion. So I do think suitable attire is something that's necessary.

[00:03:13] Ruth Fox: Yeah. I mean, I do think there's an argument about the effective use of the time of MPs and the amount of time they sit in the chamber versus other commitments and priorities they might want to pursue. But as you say, being a legislator and listening to the debate is an aspect, an important aspect of their role.

[00:03:28] But what we're hearing is that quite a lot of new MPs are very frustrated with some of these rules already. Very, very early on in their parliamentary careers. And, uh, we understand that the Modernisation Committee is inundated with calls for things like speaker lists, which would, you know, regiment the nature of debate.

[00:03:45] Mark D'Arcy: But of course we had that during the COVID period when people were joining into parliamentary debates on Zoom and there was an order and people knew when they would be called. And while that was the best that could be done at the time and was entirely understandable, what it did do was rather drain the life out of debates because there was far less intervening on one another and people basically just stood up and declaimed their speech and then someone else did the same.

[00:04:10] And there was much less interaction between MPs challenging the points that others had made, intervening to reinforce points, or whatever. So it was less of a debate and more of just, as I say, a series of people reading out pre prepared remarks into the record. Far less effective as a way of scrutinising legislation.

[00:04:30] Ruth Fox: Yeah. We've had another related question, I think, from Keith Claridy, who says, "when some MPs are called upon to question a government minister, they'll just say a number rather than ask a question. Why? I gather the question is on the order paper, I think, but why not ask the question out loud? I'm so glad Parliament is back in session because my podcast feed was so empty without you."

[00:04:52] Very kind, Keith.

[00:04:53] Mark D'Arcy: Very kind, Keith, thank you very much. On that one, I think there is a case to be made that people should read out their question. One of the points about Parliament, and particularly about the House of Commons, is it hasn't really adapted that much to the fact that thousands of people are watching its proceedings online, even the most humdrum day, and it will be tens, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, when there's a really big occasion.

[00:05:16] And I think it helps Parliament for its proceedings to be at least a bit intelligible. to people outside without them having to have a pile of documents nearby to refer to so they can find out what question number 22 is, for example. And apart from anything else, I think it would make MPs questions a bit more pithy, because they wouldn't want to have to read out some elaborate, clumsily phrased questions, so they might actually put a little bit more work into getting a nice, pointed, straightforward question that could be read out easily without them getting a sore throat through the effort of having to read out some long convoluted inquiry.

[00:05:49] Ruth Fox: And the Speaker would welcome that because that has been annoying him, the length of questions I think and interventions and debates. So Keith, I hope that answers your question.

[00:05:57] I should just add that at the Hansard Society we've been looking at some of these issues, sort of reviewing the culture, the language, the way the House operates its standing orders. And that's actually one of the things we have in our final report, which we will put out publish and submit to the Modernisation Committee in the hope that they will take up some of these issues and ideas.

[00:06:15] That for the House to be communicating with the public and for its rules and for its debates to be understood, they really need to adapt them so that the watching public, as well as the members in the chamber, know what is going on. And that, that is one of the barriers. So, moving away from the chamber to committee rooms, we've had a question from Laurence Overend, who is a solicitor.

[00:06:38] He says, "I'm a huge fan of the podcast. Undoubtedly one of the highlights of my week is listening to a new episode while working on my allotment. I've been particularly fascinated by your coverage of the intricate procedures surrounding Private Members' Bills. Such was my interest. I watched the most recent ballot on YouTube. My question is, has the ballot always been conducted in the style of an FA Cup draw in the committee room? I'd only add that I believe Parliament should employ someone to provide commentary as the ballot is drawn, much like a football pundit commentating on the white balls drawn for the FA Cup fixtures."

[00:07:12] Should such a vacancy ever arise, then Laurence certainly intends to apply for the post. So yes, history of the ballot. Has it always been like the FA Cup draw?

[00:07:22] Mark D'Arcy: I couldn't tell you when it started but it's certainly been going on for really quite a long time and actually when the current Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle was the Deputy Speaker and it was his job to preside over it, he did it extremely well.

[00:07:34] It was almost sort of like a bingo caller. You half expect him to say legs 11 or number 10, you know, Rishi's den or something. So it's something that's been going on at least as far as my parliamentary memory extends back, but I couldn't tell you what the starting point was.

[00:07:48] Ruth Fox: Well, yes, I couldn't find out. So I pitched the question to Paul Evans, Hansard Society member, former parliamentary clerk, who we've had on the podcast before. And, uh, it, we eventually ended up pitching it also to Dr. Paul Seawood, the recently retired director of the History of Parliament Trust. And the reality is none of us quite know when the ballot started, but you can certainly trace it back to the 18, late 1800s.

[00:08:16] And there used to be, of course, in the days before adjournment debates and debates for backbench members in Westminster Hall and so on, changes were made in the 1990s. But prior to that, there used to be ballots for private members time and private members motions. And this was sort of bound up with private members bill ballots as well.

[00:08:36] And tracing the historical background to that is tortuous, but it does seem to go back to the mid to late 1800s. And what seems to have happened is that at some point, the ballot separated out into its own tradition. And then obviously with the televising of Parliament, whereas it would have been previously something drawn in the chamber by the Speaker or the Deputy Speaker, It became more of a performance, an actual event on its own standing, which was televised and now takes place in one of the committee rooms, doesn't it?

[00:09:09] Mark D'Arcy: Indeed, and it's of course watched very carefully by all the various pressure groups who fancy getting a bit of legislation on the statute book to see if any of their sympathisers have won a high position in the ballot. And instantly the phones of those who have start ringing off the hook as supplicants decide that they want them to press this or that particular Private Members' Bill.

[00:09:28] Ruth Fox: And it also gave rise to the question of, where did the decision about 20 ballot bills come from? Drawing 20 names out of the fishbowl, as it were. And that also seems to be a little bit obscure. There's never been a Standing Order requirement that there has to be 20. To that extent, it's, it was an arbitrary decision.

[00:09:46] Mark D'Arcy: So it's like so many things in Parliament, that's just the way it's been done for a long time.

[00:09:49] Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean, it seems to have been set by the Speaker to make arrangements for the ballot, but there doesn't seem to be any documented rationale for it. I guess, you know, if you think about 400 members, you're taking 20 each session, one in 20 chance or a one in 60 chance of a full day's debate. Perhaps the previous Speakers decided that that was just reasonable odds.

[00:10:10] Mark D'Arcy: For those 400 backbench members, that would have been.

[00:10:12] Ruth Fox: Yes, yeah. Yeah. So, I'm not sure Lawrence that completely answers your question. Maybe much the wiser though. But you did send us off on a nice historical detour. So thank you for that.

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[00:11:17] Ruth Fox: Now we have another question from Australia. We've had some questions recently in from the Antipodes and Matt Carolan has been in touch, says he's a huge fan of the pod and while we've been waiting for select committee members to be announced he's been looking into committee make ups from previous parliaments.

[00:11:34] It's very nice our listeners are digging deep into the procedural detail after listening to our discussions. I couldn't help but notice, Matt says, that a Treasury Minister usually the City Minister is always present on the Public Accounts Committee and I'd love to know how it is possible to be on a committee and also part of the executive and are there any other anomalies like this on other committees?

[00:11:55] Mark D'Arcy: Not that many I think is the answer to that. There is a minister on the Public Accounts Committee's formal membership and that probably dates back pretty much to the days of Gladstone when the Public Accounts Committee was set up with a very carefully considered mandate to examine the effectiveness of the implementation of government policy.

[00:12:14] It was all very carefully balanced at the time. And so a Treasury Minister is on the formal list of members, but I've never known one turn up. It may just be a way of making sure that they get the committee papers.

[00:12:25] Ruth Fox: Yeah, I think that's it. By convention they're sort of on the list on an ex officio basis, they get the agendas, they get the papers, but I certainly can't remember any of them attending.

[00:12:34] But again, looking up some of the historical context for this question, I hadn't realised, or if I had I'd forgotten, that of course Harold Wilson used to chair the Public Accounts Committee while being Shadow Chancellor, um, in 1959 to 1963.

[00:12:50] Mark D'Arcy: A very strange arrangement, at least to the modern eye, but it worked quite nicely for him because he got a rather nice office out of it back in the days when opposition members didn't necessarily, as of right, get much useful office space. He had a nice office on the upper committee corridor with really nice wood panelling in it. So he had a base of operations. So it was quite a smart move from his point of view.

[00:13:12] Ruth Fox: Yeah. And also strategically consolidating his hold on all the key positions and keeping a grip on the party's economic policies.

[00:13:20] And I think Matt, the only other committee that I can think of where there is a role for the executive, kind of, is that the Law Officers of the Crown, they may attend the Privileges and Standards Committee. Certainly the Privileges Committee and I think the Standards Committee, but that's the only other example I can think of.

[00:13:38] And of course on those committees, the Standards Committee, there are also lay members.

[00:13:42] Mark D'Arcy: There are now, that's a relatively recent development. You do wonder, actually, whether any law officers of the Crown turned up when they were considering the Boris Johnson case. That would be an interesting fact to ferret out.

[00:13:52] Oh, one little footnote, incidentally, while we're talking about committee membership. I noticed in my Times this week that they'd done a bit of work on the membership of the Justice Committee and noted that there are now five solicitors and two barristers on the Justice Select Committee, so the legal profession have gone in big time on that particular key committee.

[00:14:10] It's chaired by the Labour MP Andy Slaughter, who's also a barrister, and there's another Conservative member who's a barrister, Neil Shastri Hurst, who's also indeed a medical doctor as well as being a barrister, and there are, as I say, five other solicitors as well.

[00:14:26] Ruth Fox: An embarrassment of riches.

[00:14:29] Mark D'Arcy: I'm trying to think of a collective noun for a group of solicitors, but perhaps we shouldn't go there.

[00:14:32] Ruth Fox: Expensive. It's not a collective noun. An expense. An expense. Right, let's take the question from Barnaby Jackson. Barnaby has contacted us to say, "I see my MP has voted "aye" in line with all of his Conservative party colleagues on an amendment to the second reading of the Hereditary Peers Bill" and he's got two questions about voting by the opposition.

[00:14:53] Why wouldn't a political party that's unlikely to find itself in power for a good few years not be minded to give its members a free vote on most issues, such as this one, and is it printed anywhere on the order paper or elsewhere whether MPs are going to be asked to vote a certain way or is that kept confidential between the whips and the party members?

[00:15:13] Mark D'Arcy: Well, to take the second of those points first, nothing appears on the order paper about whipping instructions issued by the political parties. Those are a matter between the party leadership and its MPs. So every MP will get a whip from their party telling them how they're supposed to vote on a whole variety of issues every day.

[00:15:33] You know, famously three lines under an issue means that this is something where they are expected to vote the party line and woe betide them if they don't. But that's not an official party line. Point it's it's a party point. So it doesn't appear on the official documents of Parliament like the order paper On the point of why don't they get a free vote?

[00:15:52] Well, first of all, I think if you were the Conservative Party you even if you thought that you weren't going to win the next Election you wouldn't wish to imply it publicly. So, I think that they would be reluctant to do that. And there's a matter of kind of party cohesion here. If you authorise your members to freelance on any given issue, you might find that they're sort of grouping into rival factions.

[00:16:14] And that could become a problem. So, you're trying to hold your party together and take it in a particular direction. And it would start to look pretty chaotic, if you were doing anything else, really, you know. "So, leader of the Conservative Party, 80 of your MPs voted this way, and 50 of your MPs voted the other way. That looks pretty silly, doesn't it?" You can see the TV interviewers making mincemeat of a party leader who couldn't hold their party together.

[00:16:39] Ruth Fox: Well, turning now to Northern Ireland, we've had a question from an academic, John McStravick, who's a Brexit and borders researcher at Queen's University in Belfast.

[00:16:49] And he wants to know, Mark, what we think about the Lords Liaison Committee's recommendation that the House should create a Northern Ireland Scrutiny Committee to scrutinise the implementation of the Windsor Framework and relevant EU and UK legislation applying to Northern Ireland.

[00:17:04] Mark D'Arcy: Very much in favour of it. We were saying on an earlier podcast that with the demise of the old European Scrutiny Committee, which Bill Cash chaired for so many years, there doesn't seem to be a single kind of organ of Parliament, certainly in the House of Commons, that's dedicated to scrutinising what may be very important developments in the UK's treaty relationship with the European Union.

[00:17:26] And equally, even more important for many people, are the rules relating to Northern Ireland, which can affect the whole state of the United Kingdom, the Union, if they go sour. So it's an incredibly important issue that at the moment is rather slipping through the parliamentary net. One of the great advantages of the House of Lords committee set up is it's a bit more flexible in the Commons.

[00:17:48] It's not just about shadowing government departments and a few cross cutting committees. They can set up a committee to look at an urgent issue, and this is an urgent issue, and they're setting up a committee to look at it, and I say good.

[00:17:58] Ruth Fox: Yeah. Just a bit of context to this for listeners. I'm sure John is more than aware of this, but some of our other listeners won't be.

[00:18:05] So since 2021, the Lord's European Affairs Committee has had a subcommittee on the protocol on Northern Ireland. And that was renamed, I think, in, 2023 as the Windsor Framework Subcommittee, so you can see what its focus was. But the intention was that they were temporary and they ceased to exist at the end of the last parliament.

[00:18:24] I think what's interesting about this proposal to the House of Lords Liaison Committee is that it's come from the the chair of that European Affairs Committee, Lord Ricketts, and also the chair of that Windsor Framework subcommittee, Lord Jay. They wrote jointly to the committee, to the Liaison Committee, arguing that there was a continued need for this scrutiny of Northern Ireland issues and a real focus on it, arguing that, you know, there's still a lot of work to be done.

[00:18:48] And of course, we've talked about the fact that there's a democratic consent vote coming up, and depending upon the outcome, that will reopen the constitutional questions about the future of Northern Ireland and its relationship with you know, the rest of the UK and the EU. And I think it's interesting that, um, two committee chairs have suggested another committee rather than trying to keep the work within their own purview.

[00:19:10] I mean, this is one of the challenges sometimes with select committee chairs. I have to say, particularly in the Commons, perhaps more than the Lords. The House of Lords is a bit less Yeah, and, you know, not a great desire to sort of be empire building. Very much focused on the nature of the need, the scrutiny need, the range of work that has to be done, the capacity issues that they've all got to do it, and suggesting that this should be a stand alone committee.

[00:19:33] So, I'd be very surprised if the Lords Liaison Committee doesn't accept that recommendation. And, of course, one of the interesting questions will be then how it interacts with the European Affairs Committee in the Lords, but also the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee in the House of Commons, and how they can do complementary rather than duplicative scrutiny.

[00:19:50] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, because you wouldn't want it to become a competitive relationship, really.

[00:19:53] Ruth Fox: No. And interestingly, they're proposing that it should only have a sort of lifespan of a couple of years. It should expire in 2026 and be subject to review, and the Lords Liaison Committee can then decide whether they wish to continue with it or whether they wish to finish with it or fold its work back into another committee.

[00:20:08] Mark D'Arcy: I suppose it depends how much of a live issue it still is by then and what can happen.

[00:20:12] Ruth Fox: Yeah. So with that listeners, I think that's the end of our urgent questions for this week. So we'll see you next time.

[00:20:19] But keep sending those questions in because it's very useful for Ruth and I to know whats baffling people about the mysteries of Parliament or what listeners want to know about that we're not talking about already.

[00:20:29] Yep so you can send your questions in via our website hansardsociety.org.uk. Look out for the podcast entry on the menu bar at the top you can get to the questions submission form there or you can just send them to us via twitter at Hansard Society. See you soon. See you soon.

[00:20:51] Help us to make the podcast better...: Well, that's all from us for this week's episode of Parliament Matters. Please hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast app to get the next episode as soon as it lands. And help us to make the podcast better by leaving a rating or review on Apple or Spotify and sharing your feedback. Our producer tells us it's important for the algorithm to give the show a boost.

[00:21:09] Oh Mark, tell us more about the algorithm. What do I know about algorithms? You know, I write my scripts with a quill pen on vellum and then send it in by carrier pigeon. Well, before we go, a quick reminder also that you can send us your questions on all things Parliament by visiting hansardsociety.org.uk/pmuq. We'll be discussing them in future episodes, including our special Urgent Questions editions dedicated to what you want to know about Parliament. And you can find us across social media at Hansard Society to get more content related to the show and the wider work of the Hansard Society.

[00:21:54] Parliament Matters is produced by the Hansard Society and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. For more information visit hansardsociety.org.uk/pm or find us on social media @Hansard Society.