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[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.

[00:00:25] Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy. Coming up this week.

[00:00:28] Ruth Fox: Offside. Is the Football Governance Bill being filibustered in the House of Lords?

[00:00:32] Mark D'Arcy: Has the Commons just voted for electoral reform and proportional representation?

[00:00:37] Ruth Fox: Spoiler, not really. But what are your fantasy parliamentary reforms?

[00:00:51] Mark D'Arcy: But before we start, this is a special edition of the pod. It's a first for us because we're recording before a live audience at the 60th anniversary conference of the Study of Parliament Group. The uber parliamentary nerds, the practitioners, the anoraks here in Westminster. So listeners, you may hear a slightly less manicured version of the podcast than usual.

[00:01:09] But joining us is former Commons Clerk Paul Evans, whose job is to inject an extra dose of parliamentary wisdom into the discussions. So, Ruth and Paul, first of all, the Football Governance Bill. Now, this is intended to follow on from the Tracy Crouch review of the state of football that happened quite a while ago now.

[00:01:27] It actually started life as a bill under the Conservatives. The incoming Labour government picked it up, slightly reversioned it here and there, and it's now in the House of Lords, where proceedings are going very, very slowly. So, Ruth, what exactly is going on behind this?

[00:01:42] Ruth Fox: So, Mark, this is the bill to essentially regulate football, the top tiers of English football.

[00:01:48] Those of you with memories will perhaps recall, even if you're not interested in football, will perhaps recall that there was a breakaway attempt by Premier League clubs to form the European Super League, which prompted Tracey Crouch's review, and then there was problems in communities, towns across the country where football clubs are facing prospective closure.

[00:02:08] And it was decided politically that there was a need to introduce a regulator and deal with the funding of the football pyramid. So this bill brings together two of my favorite subjects, football and delegated legislation.

[00:02:21] Mark D'Arcy: It doesn't get much better than that.

[00:02:23] Ruth Fox: It's quite a decent sized bill, 125 pages.

[00:02:26] It's 42 delegated powers, 10 Henry VIII Powers. Which we will perhaps come onto. And it's in committee in the House of Lords. And basically what's happened is that it was agreed between the business managers that there should be five days in committee on this bill. And they've now done, I think, three days.

[00:02:46] And by the end of day two, they'd not got much further than page one of the bill. And it's clear that there are attempts being made by a number of Conservative peers to talk at considerable length about essentially the purpose of the bill. And to be honest, they've got a point. Clause one says, the purpose of this Act is to protect and promote the sustainability of English football.

[00:03:11] But nowhere really in the bill does it define what is meant by sustainability. It doesn't define what is meant by English football. It doesn't define what leagues and what competitions.

[00:03:22] Mark D'Arcy: Or even what football fans are.

[00:03:24] Ruth Fox: Or even what football fans are. That is all to be decided by regulations made by the minister at a later date.

[00:03:31] So from their perspective on the opposition benches, they're not very happy about this and think it should be on the face of the bill. There are Labour peers who are also not very happy with some of the drafting. I mean, there's a hundred plus amendments laid down by two Labour peers and a crossbench peer.

[00:03:46] And basically, it is taking a very, very long time. And the whips are getting very frustrated. They are alleging that these conservative peers are trying to drag their feet on the progress of the bill. And I think it's fair to say they're going to have to add some time. So they've said five days, I think there's going to have to be a sixth day added at least.

[00:04:05] But it's bringing together all those sort of debates about what is the attitude of MPs and peers to regulation? What is the attitude to what should be in a bill and what should be in regulations? Broader debates about how do you fund the football communities, and of course, a lot of the clubs are in particularly Labour constituencies, not universally, but predominantly.

[00:04:26] Mark D'Arcy: It's striking, isn't it, that there ought to be a cross party consensus about this bill, but I mean, I had a message from a Conservative, I won't give the name, but quote, we are never going to rubber stamp a substandard bill just because Sunak published it in the last Parliament. And it's worse now. So, there are a lot of people who just think this is regulatory overreach.

[00:04:46] The state has no business mucking around in the structure of football, and that should be left to, uh, football.

[00:04:51] Ruth Fox: Yeah, and obviously you're dealing with a lot of clubs at the top of the football pyramid who've got a lot of money, and putting in a lot of lobbying effort into this. Because it's the House of Lords, you've got a member of the committee that is the vice chairman of West Ham United Football Club, so the Premier League have effectively got a person in the committee who is leading the charge on some of these issues.

[00:05:12] And, yeah, I think they have got a point about the delegated powers. But then, you know, from the Labour perspective, they will say, well, you know, you wouldn't have been complaining about this had the bill gone through in the last parliament under the Sunak government. So we will have to see what happens.

[00:05:24] But the other thing that is raising its head, and I hate to get into these really, uh, procedural issues, but one of the reasons it's said that they are not defining things on the face of the bill, partly because they want to make it more administratively convenient to enable changes to happen in the future, the usual arguments that are made for delegated legislation and ministers being given powers.

[00:05:47] But one of the arguments is they don't want to define on the face of the bill, what football leagues are involved, because if they were to, then you'd be talking about rendering the bill hybrid.

[00:05:58] Mark D'Arcy: And this is probably a good point to bring Paul in as our Freudian figure of procedural authority to explain what a hybrid bill is.

[00:06:06] My understanding is that it's a bill that affects some interests differently to others, so it's a law that bears down particularly on private interests rather than just applying equally to everybody. Is, is that fair enough?

[00:06:16] Paul Evans: Well, it's not quite fair enough. Um,

[00:06:18] Mark D'Arcy: Oh, surely not.

[00:06:20] Paul Evans: I should perhaps, before I intervene on this particular topic, say that to say I don't give a fig about football would be vastly overstating my level of interest.

[00:06:28] And um, a hybrid bill affects a class of people differently than the general population. Yes. But the big question is how you define a class. So if it's accountants, it's a bill regulating accountants, that's an easy class to define, and it doesn't become hybrid, if the law only applies to accountants and accountants are all included.

[00:06:51] But if you have a class which is in this case presumably professional football clubs and some are included and some are not, you're running the risk of the bill becoming hybrid because it's affecting the same class of people in two different ways.

[00:07:05] Mark D'Arcy: And what happens if, with a great fanfare, the bill is found to be hybrid?

[00:07:10] First of all, how do you go about finding that a bill that started life not being hybrid is hybrid? And then what happens to it if that happens?

[00:07:17] Paul Evans: Normally, a hybrid bill will be referred to the examiners before second reading. Because people think it might be hybrid. And the examiners are a mysterious cabal of parliamentary officials who make a very judicious decision about whether or not the bill affects the same class of people in two different ways.

[00:07:36] It very rarely applies to a government bill. But where the government introduces a bill and it's had its second reading, you wouldn't normally go for the hybrid question. It could be raised. And back in the mid 1970s, for example, the then Labour government, struggling with its majority, introduced the Aircraft and Shipbuilding Industry Bill, which was going to nationalise the aircraft and shipbuilding industries.

[00:08:00] But crucially, they left out some of those industries. And one of those groups petitioned the House to say that they felt they shouldn't have been included or they should not have been included. And the examiners went away and they examined the bill and they decided it was indeed hybridly defected. The same class of people in two different ways, which would have meant it had to go through the private bill procedure.

[00:08:21] It involves a lengthy process of hearing petitioners who are affected by the bill. A private bill would normally just affect a small area or a small group of people or whatever. And it's the system Parliament uses for making sure those people are protected from over mighty regulation, as it were, or oppressive legislation.

[00:08:40] Mark D'Arcy: The big recent example of a hybrid bill was the HS2 bill, for example. Yes. Or the Crossrail bill going across London. They're almost essentially planning matters.

[00:08:50] Paul Evans: Well, indeed, and they affected the people who are on the route. Yeah. Differently from all other citizens. So if a bill is, after second reading, discovered to be hybrid, it causes all kinds of procedural difficulties.

[00:09:02] What the Labour government did in the 1970s with the aircraft and shipbuilding industry is introduce a motion to say. We don't care if it's hybrid, we're going to go ahead with it anyway. And this caused quite a rumpus, famously involving Michael Heseltine swinging the the mace around the chamber as, the, all hell broke loose in the chamber on the decision. It's complicated, it's all to do with the tied vote

[00:09:25] Ruth Fox: Is that where he got the moniker Tarzan?

[00:09:28] Paul Evans: He'd got the Monica Tarzan, but the Labour Party squeezed the motion through that said we don't care if it's there was a tied vote and it was discovered that someone had cheated on their pairing and this is what produced the rumpus.

[00:09:43] So it wasn't really the hybridity, it was the cheating on the pairing. But anyway, that was the most famous case. So if this bill were to be found hybrid, it would have to go through a whole separate process.

[00:09:53] Mark D'Arcy: And it would take a great deal more time?

[00:09:55] Paul Evans: It would potentially take a great deal more time, especially since the number of potential petitioners seems pretty large.

[00:10:01] Mark D'Arcy: Hundreds of football club owners, for example?

[00:10:03] Paul Evans: Football club owners, and possibly fans, and possibly other people as well.

[00:10:07] Mark D'Arcy: Is it very likely, do you think? I mean, I know you won't be an expert on the bill, but it would be quite a, quite a big thing to turn over.

[00:10:13] Paul Evans: It would kind of surprise me if the government had stumbled into this by accident.

[00:10:18] Because Parliamentary Counsel are supposed to stop them from making such a mistake. It could be that the bill were amended to make it hybrid at some point, which would introduce more complications. But it may be that some of this rather extensive secondary legislation is designed to prevent the bill becoming hybrid at this stage, and it then can be applied differentially at a later stage through secondary legislation.

[00:10:44] There is a class of thing called hybrid instruments, but there is actually beyond my procedural knowledge.

[00:10:51] Ruth Fox: We've reached the bottom. I should say in the interest of transparency that one of the Labour peers who's putting down lots of these amendments is actually my boss, Baroness Taylor of Bolton, who is as big a football fan as I am, and was involved in the rescue of Bolton Wanderer's Football Club some years ago, so cares passionately about this.

[00:11:11] And I think it's fair to say, look, we're at committee stage in the House of Lords, and this is different to committee stage in the House of Commons. So at committee stage in the Lords, they are looking to make, you know, probing amendments to try and get ministers to say things on the record and then hold them to that in the future.

[00:11:26] And these probing amendments might be picked up in the, in the Commons by MPs. Perhaps. I cannot see that some of these amendments, which they've been advised would lead to hybridity, will be pressed, not least because they don't want to lose the bill. So it seems highly unlikely. But clearly this is something that the Conservative peers have definitely latched onto and are looking to pursue.

[00:11:49] And I don't think we can rule out the fact that some of this is perhaps politically related to how the Conservative peers are thinking about their approach to legislation in the context of the Hereditary Peers Bill as well.

[00:12:00] Mark D'Arcy: I mean, there is a sort of sense of a sort of practice run.

[00:12:03] Ruth Fox: Yeah, broader sort of political context to this.

[00:12:06] Paul Evans: Just as a footnote, I want to say that the last bill to be declared hybrid by the examiners, rather surprisingly, was the Holocaust Memorial Bill, quite recently, a year or two ago. It was upheld that it was hybrid, the examiners said it was, because it affected some users of the small park, in which it is going to be situated, differently from the rest of the population.

[00:12:26] And that was a controversial decision. And the bill is now, it's been to the House of Commons, and it's now going through its second reading. private bill stages, hearing of petitions, etc. in the House of Lords.

[00:12:36] Mark D'Arcy: But I suppose the bottom line with this is, it's not a fatal thing for, to have the bill declared hybrid.

[00:12:41] It doesn't stop it in its tracks and the government throws up its hands in despair and junks the whole process. It just means it's going to take that bit longer. And the process is going to be that bit more torturous.

[00:12:50] Paul Evans: And you can read all about it in my blog for the Hansard Society in February last year.

[00:12:54] Ruth Fox: We'll put it in the show notes. I mean, I think, Mark, we shouldn't underestimate the importance of this bill getting through. I mean, football is an 8. 2 billion industry. 4 billion goes apparently to the Exchequer. It supports 90,000 jobs across the country. And money is at the heart of this. I mean, essentially, there is an independent regulator that's going to be created that will judge everything from whether or not you can change the colour of your club's shirts and the badge, whether you can move your club several miles out of the local community.

[00:13:26] But fundamentally, it's about money, and it's about how much the clubs are going to get in the pyramid of English football. And there's a, there's a broader picture as well, which is that UEFA, that normally does govern football at the European level, it is unhappy with this, and there's sort of broader context that UEFA has expressed its concern because it would reduce its control over the governance of the game, and it's not happy with that.

[00:13:50] It would be the first time it's happened. So there's an awful lot of political wheels, both nationally and internationally, whirring on this bill.

[00:13:59] Mark D'Arcy: So even though my interest in football is at about the same level as Paul's,

[00:14:03] Ruth Fox: I'm

[00:14:03] trying.

[00:14:04] Mark D'Arcy: Been

[00:14:04] trying to educate me. There's plenty here for a parliamentary nerd to sink their remaining teeth into.

[00:14:08] Ruth Fox: There is indeed.

[00:14:10] Mark D'Arcy: Well let's turn now to some of the other parliamentary action that's been going on this week and to Hosanna's from the Liberal Democrats, a 10 Minute Rule Bill was brought in this week supporting a change in the electoral system to something proportionately based. And this came from the Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Olney and somewhat to everybody's surprise was both put to the vote and the vote was won. But this was not a vote on the principle of proportional representation. This was a vote on the principle of introducing a bill on proportional representation.

[00:14:42] So hair splitting from the very start here and a certain amount of procedural interest. So does this mean that we're now firmly on the yellow brick road to PR in some form?

[00:14:52] Ruth Fox: No. So basically this is a 10 Minute Rule Bill which is, I think we describe it as policy aims put into legislative language in order to get a 10 minute speaking slot in the chamber in prime time on a Tuesday or a Wednesday.

[00:15:07] It's a form of private members bill. Essentially, Lewis Cocking, the Conservative MP, stood up after Sarah Olney, the Lib Dem MP who was proposing this, after she spoke, and he gave a ten minute riposte and put it to a division. It was not, this house supports proportional representation for parliamentary elections and for local government elections.

[00:15:27] It was that leave be given to bring in a bill. It's an important distinction, which the Liberal Democrats have, uh, understandably from their political perspective, uh, glossed over, and it was won by two votes. So it's 138 voted aye, and 136 voted no. But essentially, what it, what's happened to it is that this bill will have a second reading on Friday the 24th of January.

[00:15:53] I checked the order paper this morning, Mark. And, uh, well, it's been sent to the legislative gulag of 12th in the queue on the fourth private member's bill Friday of this session.

[00:16:03] Mark D'Arcy: In other words, it will never actually be debated.

[00:16:05] It may be formally scheduled for a second reading that day, but it's just not going to happen by 2 30 that day. They won't have got through the previous 11 bills on the list and had time to deal with this one as well. So, nice little parliamentary moment for Sarah Olney, but not actually particularly productive. But it does signal something else. I mean, one of the few things that you could say the Liberal Democrats have in common with, say, the Reform Party, is that they both want to change in the electoral system.

[00:16:30] They both feel that historically, at least, I mean, the Liberal Democrats less so in the last election, but historically, at least. Smaller parties have done very badly out of first past the post elections and want to do better. Nigel Farage will wholeheartedly buy into that proposition when he looks at however many votes it was he got and the five MPs he got for them.

[00:16:49] And also the Greens, also I noticed that the, uh, bill was supported by Jim Allister of the, uh, Traditional Unionist Voice Party in Northern Ireland, for example. And interestingly also, there were 50 plus Labour MPs. A name that caught my eye was Luke Akehurst, who's now a Labour MP in North Durham, but was a long standing sort of National Executive Committee apparatchik, who's a reasonably influential figure.

[00:17:13] So there are some, you know, quite big names in the Labour Party who've chosen to support this, even though PR is a bit heretical for most of the Labour Party.

[00:17:22] Ruth Fox: With that Mark, shall we take a break? But before we do, I should say I've got to fess up to something that I talked about on the last episode last week.

[00:17:30] So we were contacted by actually Sarah Olney herself this week who says, I love the podcast, avid listener, but she wanted to draw my attention to the fact that I said last week on the Tobacco and Vapes Bill that the Liberal Democrats had split. That eight of their parliamentary group had voted against their colleagues in the lobbies on the Tobacco and Vapes Bill, which they did, but it turns out it was a free vote.

[00:17:53] They were not breaking the whip. So probably should have thought of that. That was one of the avenues and byways we went through last last week without perhaps tracking the record. But it does highlight one of the problems that one of our listeners raised in a recent urgent question, which is how on earth do you know what whip is being applied because it's not published, you know, it's known in and around the precincts of Westminster, but it's not necessarily something that's public for the rest of us.

[00:18:16] So Sarah apologies for that. But thank you for letting us know. Carry on listening to the podcast. Hope you're finding it useful. She said it was still an excellent episode. And, uh, acknowledged that our broader point, that it was interesting that the Liberal Democrats split on the question of whether or not to support the tobacco and vapes provisions around banning young people from ever smoking again was indeed an interesting reflection on, on what the Liberal Democrat Parliamentary Party thinks about its concept of liberalism these days.

[00:18:45] Mark D'Arcy: It's a fair cop, society's to blame. See you all in a minute.

[00:18:51] Ruth Fox: Well, we're back. And Mark, I think we should start talking about fantasy parliamentary reforms for the Modernisation Committee. We're at the Study of Parliament Group conference. We're talking about the past, present and future of parliamentary reform. So, um, I thought we should talk about what a sensibly reforming government might do to sensibly reform parliament.

[00:19:11] We did a little bit of prep yesterday to brainstorm some ideas. Thank you And, uh, I think the two of you have a difference of view that's worth exploring. We'll disagree agreeably, as the phrase goes.

[00:19:21] Paul Evans: Only one of us is right.

[00:19:24] Mark D'Arcy: Kind of you to concede that.

[00:19:27] Ruth Fox: And, uh, this concerns pre appointment hearings for the cabinet secretary.

[00:19:31] So you'll, uh, be aware that in the last week, Prime Minister has appointed a new cabinet secretary to replace Simon Case. Sir Chris Wormald from the Department of Health. And Mark, you thought that given the seniority and importance of this appointment, this should be subject to a pre appointment hearing of some kind by a select committee, but Paul, you disagreed.

[00:19:51] So, gentlemen, over to you.

[00:19:53] Mark D'Arcy: Ah, yeah, well, I, I, just think, this is the most senior post in British government. This is someone who ultimately might one day have to raise a majestic hand and say, no Prime Minister. You can imagine the Robert Armstrongs and the Burke Trends cabinet secretaries of the past having the authority to do that.

[00:20:10] But more recent cabinet secretaries seem to have rather a lot of footprints all over them. And I just wondered why? This post wasn't subject, at least to some kind of parliamentary pre appointment hearing. Not least because it might help a future cabinet secretary in a future situation be able to stand up with a bit more authority.

[00:20:27] They've been approved by Parliament. Perhaps a minor buttress to their authority, but it didn't strike me as insignificant. And if you have pre appointment hearings for school inspectors, and Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee members. Why not for the biggest official in all of Whitehall? Paul, on the other hand, disagrees.

[00:20:46] Paul Evans: I do, not passionately perhaps, but civil servants should be anonymous, invisible, and silent as far as the public is concerned. They are not individuals. They are emanations of their minister and they do what they are told. And that's an important principle of our constitution. Civil servants don't have a separate constitutional identity, by and large.

[00:21:09] People who are subject to pre appointment hearings are, by and large, you could call them regulators of one kind or another. That covers the broad scope of them, including the chief inspector of schools and various others. And they stand in a kind of in loco minister post. They have significant powers over other people.

[00:21:30] They are not politicians, they're not elected, and they're not answerable directly to Parliament. And therefore they do need to be tested against the standards that a pre appointment hearing should look at. But I feel, by subjecting the Cabinet Secretary to that same kind of process, the risk of politicising the appointment far outweighs the benefits of people happening to be able to recognise the Cabinet Secretary if he sits down next to them on the number three bus.

[00:21:56] And so, I would say, no, that's, that's too far.

[00:22:00] Mark D'Arcy: I'm not arguing for it to make them a, a, a sort of big bella figura in the Whitehall firmament. I'm arguing that a bit of parliamentary control over officialdom, over the quangocracy, would actually be quite a useful thing to have. And I'm possibly conflating two different things there.

[00:22:18] Paul Evans: The quangocracy, yes, absolutely. That's what pre appointment hearings are for. I don't think, myself, that cabinet secretaries form part of the quangocracy. I mean, it's an arguable case.

[00:22:27] Mark D'Arcy: Well, the cabinet secretary does get to make judgements, you know, the investigations into whether prime ministers broke the rules.

[00:22:32] Oops, oh, sorry, I'm accused of breaking the rules as well, so I can't, as happened over, over Covid. That was a tad awkward. But often the cabinet secretary goes around investigating ministers. So I think they're a little bit more than just a sort of constitutional emanation, as you put it.

[00:22:46] Paul Evans: Yes, it's an arguable case.

[00:22:47] I just feel uncomfortable with the idea that Parliament should be deciding who the Cabinet's Chief Advisor and Controller is because I think it's a private relationship in the end, not a public one. But I do take your point about certain things that the Cabinet Secretary has to do in private by and large which require strength of character and a good grasp of ethics and one would like to think that we knew whether they had those.

[00:23:16] I mean, you know, as I say, it's an arguable case. I feel the risk is a bit high.

[00:23:19] Ruth Fox: Well, I think, without being too cynical about this, I think having seen Mr. Wormald's performance at various select committees, I'm not sure he'll be queuing up to be, uh, subject to further scrutiny. Right, Paul, let's turn to your fantasy reforms, if you have them.

[00:23:33] So I know that you are very keen on what we might describe as a festival of the estimates. Yes. Discuss!

[00:23:44] Paul Evans: I'd just like to say that this is not going to happen. Um, you know. That's why it's a fantasy. It is a fantasy. But there are probably three key areas I would like to talk about. There's legislative process, standing orders, clarification, and this one, which is financial procedure.

[00:24:00] Financial procedure is massively complex, takes up huge pages of Erskine May and standing orders, and nobody notices it, least of all MPs. And there is a disjoint between the huge amounts of money that are being voted and spent regularly and the way in which Parliament deals with them. And what that produces is, to me, a great poverty of understanding in the public at large about what kind of choices are being made and how they're being made.

[00:24:29] It's not discussed. They don't understand what Parliament's doing. There was a staggering survey by quite a respectable polling company, which I saw, I haven't been able to dig it out again, just a week or two ago, which asked members of the public what were the two largest areas of public expenditure.

[00:24:44] And they got one of them broadly right, not quite right, which was the NHS, that was number one. And the second one was Parliament, members wages and expenses. And you say, what is wrong with the nation? I mean, the cost of Parliament is perhaps 0. 02 percent of gross public expenditure, and yet the public out there, actually a significant number of them, think Parliament is the second most expensive thing we do after the National Health Service.

[00:25:11] That's bonkers. So the Festival of the Estimates is an occasion when it's centered around the budget. So we have the budget speech, we get rid of the boring four day debate afterwards, which nobody's interested in, nobody listens to. The select committees, the week is set over to the select committees. The ministers are all told that they are not allowed to leave London during this week, and they must make themselves available to select committees at a moment's notice.

[00:25:38] The select committees then take evidence on the implications for their department of what has just been said in the budget, from ministers. They don't have to make reports, they just take evidence if they want to. Meanwhile, in the village halls and parish pump rooms of the, of the country.

[00:25:57] Ruth Fox: Dog and duck.

[00:25:57] Paul Evans: No, I don't think in premises which serve alcohol. Probably not wise. So in, in various places, MPs or their apparatchiks are holding public meetings to discuss the trade offs that are being proposed in expenditure and savings. and taxation in the budget. This is known as the festival of the estimates because it's a very catchy title.

[00:26:20] Preferably there will be a bank holiday on which and we will get a dialogue going between parliament and people about what those really, really difficult decisions, those really massively difficult choices are, between how much tax you raise and how much you spend and what you spend it on whether you have another aircraft carrier or ten more hospitals or whatever it is.

[00:26:45] Because I just think people have no idea what's going on. And this balancing of taxation and expenditure is the absolute heart of parliamentary control of government. It's much more important than making laws. It's the fundamental business of Parliament. But Parliament has, for not altogether bad reasons, delegated all that to the Treasury and ignores it.

[00:27:07] Mark D'Arcy: I think what's really striking, I remember when I started as a reporter in Parliament, what's really striking is how empty the rituals of financial control in Parliament actually are. I remember seeing one day on the agenda, proceedings on the Supply and, um,

[00:27:22] Paul Evans: Appropriations.

[00:27:22] Mark D'Arcy: Appropriations Bill. Oh, this is going to be terribly exciting.

[00:27:26] Billions of pounds going hither and yon. The whole thing was over in about a femtosecond. Yes. It was just astounding. And a Parliament that once beheaded a king to assert its control over the national purse strings now casually waves through billions of pounds in spending decisions and barely blinks.

[00:27:42] And there's almost never anybody in the chamber bar a couple of people moving motions as the Speaker calls them.

[00:27:47] Paul Evans: And we probably don't want to go back to examining every line of the estimates line by line, as they once upon a time, because that's boring and pointless. But discussing the big questions which underlie the estimates would be a valuable thing, and I don't think they really get done.

[00:28:01] Mark D'Arcy: And there's no forum, really, in which MPs could say, let's spend ten billion less on this, and ten billion more on something else. There isn't a budget committee that studies the budget. It's one of the things that the Treasury Committee does in passing.

[00:28:14] But the Treasury Committee is usually looking at the big sort of macroeconomics of the budget, rather than the balance of the spending within it.

[00:28:20] Paul Evans: Yeah, and those choices are very hard, and I'm not saying they make no difference. I think we just educate the public about what choices are being made and the select committees, which are the aspect of Parliament, which most people can understand, follow and grasp.

[00:28:34] And I'll be using this phrase again several times later in this. They have a human kind of procedure. They are the place where these kind of issues could be discussed. in a way that people could understand.

[00:28:46] Ruth Fox: And there's actually, there's something, um, not too far away from this already in New Zealand, in the New Zealand parliament.

[00:28:52] So they have set up what they call scrutiny week. In fact, they've been doing it this week. So they have two scrutiny weeks. They've only got 12 subject select committees, but two scrutiny weeks, one after the budget each year, which for them is, was June. And then they look at the government spending plans in that week.

[00:29:10] And then one in December, So this week, where they look back at what the public entities have achieved with the spending in the previous year, and they are armed with information from their office of the Auditor General. And it's kind of a similar principle to sort of get into the detail of it and to get into the trade offs and to get into thematic of analysis of what's being spent where and why.

[00:29:32] It hasn't got this idea of uh, the festival out there in the uh, the public in towns and cities across the country, but it's partway there.

[00:29:41] Paul Evans: Yes. I don't know, New Zealand's so small you don't need to worry about that kind of thing.

[00:29:45] Ruth Fox: Don't need to worry about the public in New Zealand. I think some of our New Zealand listeners might disagree.

[00:29:51] Okay, so that's the Festival of the Estimates. You mentioned also Standing Orders, which is also one of my favourite subjects, because it endlessly frustrates me that MPs, with very rare exceptions, really don't get into the rules of the House that is their workplace. I learned from a House of Commons library briefing some years ago that the collection of Standing Orders has only been reviewed formally about five, I think five or six times since the Second World War.

[00:30:20] Most of those at the behest of the government, only once at the behest of the House, and that was Robert Rogers, when he was Clerk of the House about ten years ago, and he wanted to do a sort of gender review of the wording of the Standing Orders, and some other tidying up, which went nowhere. But we get government making ad hoc changes to standing orders, bringing forward motions for things like, uh, EVEL, English Votes for English Laws or, you know, whatever changes it may be that they need to bring in.

[00:30:48] But they're not reviewed as a body and they're not looked at as a sort of a collection of rules and they're not looked at as a way to try and explain what the rules are and how the house operates. The House of Lords, in contrast, has a companion to the Standing Orders that is much more understandable for lay people looking on, but the House of Commons has never made a similar effort.

[00:31:08] So, Paul, what would you do with the Standing Orders?

[00:31:12] Paul Evans: Well, I think it's important to understand that members don't need to know all the rules. I mean, they have clerks for that, so that's fine. About 50 years ago, I moved from a soccer school to a rugby school. And I'd never seen a rugby game in my life. And I turned up to the first one and had no idea what was going on.

[00:31:31] And watched it for a while, wandering around. And then a loose scrum formed in those days. And I got the hang of it after. I went and got hold of an arm that was sticking out. And started trying to break it over my knee. And um, the games master said, Evans, A game! So I went off to the A game. And I still didn't know a single one of the laws of rugby.

[00:31:48] And I spent two years as a loose head prop. And occasionally representing the school, with still no clear idea of it. And if the ball ever came in my direction, I was absolutely terrified because I had no idea what to do with it. All you needed was brute force, and that was it.

[00:32:03] Mark D'Arcy: And this is an analogy for the role of the member?

[00:32:06] Paul Evans: This is the analogy for the role of the member. They don't really need to know why they're there or what they're doing. Most of the time.

[00:32:16] Ruth Fox: All those new MPs know you do know what to do.

[00:32:19] Paul Evans: No, but what they don't need is a detailed grasp of the rules. But what's disappointing about the Standing Orders is that they are incomprehensible.

[00:32:27] Even if you make the effort to read them and understand them, without knowing a huge amount of what goes around them, you have no idea. My favourite is the one that reads in totality that the house shall not be counted at any time.

[00:32:42] What on earth does that mean? Well, you only understand it if you know, that until 1963, you could test the quorum of the House by calling for a count. And the division bells were rung, and 40 members had to turn up within two minutes of the division bell being rung, and were counted by the clerks. And if there weren't 40 members there, the House adjourned for the rest of the day.

[00:33:00] And this was a trick often used by the opposition to try and frustrate business, especially on private members days. And they decided to abolish the count. So they put a little line in that saying, saying the House shall not be counted at any time. And nobody knows what it means, except me and a half dozen other people.

[00:33:17] You have another rule that says, the rule against speaking twice shall not apply in the following circumstances. And then you look for the rule against speaking twice. But the rule against speaking twice is nowhere written down. So you have to know all these things to understand what the Standing Orders are repudiating, or correcting, or abolishing.

[00:33:36] And they've made no attempt to make them coherent. So that's the problem. They've just accumulated over a century and a half, or two centuries nearly now, and they make very little sense to any human being. I sat down once, because I've been going on about this for years, to try and write down, as if I were writing the rule book for a golf club.

[00:33:52] And it started off, the House of Commons comprises all the members elected for all constituencies in the UK and, you know, it is chaired by the Speaker. I thought, oh God, this is boring. I mean, and it goes on for hours and hours and hours before you even got to anything.

[00:34:04] Ruth Fox: Well, that's just golf.

[00:34:05] Paul Evans: Yeah. But nonetheless, there's plenty of opportunity to change the language, to make them self explanatory, to take out a lot of boring detail that you could put in appendices or schedules or annexes so that you had a relatively slim volume, which if you wanted to know what happened during procedure in the Delegated Legislation Committee, you could find out and it would be straightforward and it would be self explanatory.

[00:34:31] It's a big job. We've been talking about it for decades and it really needs to be done.

[00:34:36] Mark D'Arcy: It's the old joke about 50 shades of Erskine May. Boom, boom.

[00:34:42] Paul Evans: I'll think about that.

[00:34:45] Mark D'Arcy: But there is some use in members having some master of procedure. I mean, we were refighting the Aircraft and Shipbuilding Industries Bill.

[00:34:52] I think the, I won't say the villain of the piece, but possibly the hero of the piece, was I think Robin Maxwell Hislop, who was the procedural expert on the Conservative benches, who had actually made the supreme sacrifice of understanding the rule book.

[00:35:04] Paul Evans: Yes, absolutely. And there were half a dozen or a dozen Robin Maxwell Hislops dotted around the House in those days.

[00:35:10] The most terrifying sight I ever saw was a member entering a standing committee that I was clerking with a copy of Erskine May tucked under his arm. And I thought, oh my god.

[00:35:18] Mark D'Arcy: Something to send a thrill of clerk's heart, I'm sure.

[00:35:22] Paul Evans: Yes, members should be able to understand the standing orders. They ought to be made to understand some of the standing orders.

[00:35:28] But they don't have to do all the expert stuff, because they do have people to do that for them. But, they should be able to understand them if they choose to do so. And they should be understandable to people.

[00:35:37] Ruth Fox: Including in this room.

[00:35:39] Paul Evans: Would be nice.

[00:35:40] Ruth Fox: Okay, any other fantasy reforms, Paul, you'd like to throw our way?

[00:35:44] Paul Evans: I mentioned financial procedure. I'm going to mention the legislative procedure very briefly, but I just wanted to endorse what Baroness Taylor said this morning about programming has gone horribly wrong. Well intentioned reform, rational on the surface of things, which has gone horribly wrong.

[00:35:57] Ruth Fox: So programming is the the timetabling of legislation?

[00:36:01] Paul Evans: Yeah, and it really needs a proper look at it so that it brings back control to the house. It's handed over huge amounts of control and this has gone hand in hand with abject customer service style of running the house. in which people are supposed to get what they want. And that's just not right. So, the most fun intellectually I ever had as a clerk was crafting a selection list for a report stage back in the days before programming.

[00:36:33] And you had to get groups which were just narrow enough that the chair could rule people out all easily, and just broad enough not to be too many of them, and not boring, And you could get to in a day and a half or two days, which is what you were aiming for in those days were a poor stage. And they had to be intellectually coherent.

[00:36:49] It was beautiful. Now, selection is just one big group. Nobody knows what's happening. It's amorphous. The minister is not put on the spot at all. They don't reply to the points raised in the debate. The amendments are pointless because they've disappeared into this huge morass of things. So there's no forensic nature to the debates.

[00:37:10] What I would like is procedure on legislation will be more human, more comprehensible. In committee in particular, stop talking about clause by clause, talk about theme by theme, get in the witnesses you want at the beginning of every sitting about that theme, just that theme, not the whole bill. The expert witnesses, including ministers, civil servants, and parliamentary draftsmen, and the occasional outside expert as well.

[00:37:34] Go through the bill, and find out what it means and what it's doing and then the bit about voting on amendments you could do at the end in half an hour at the end of each sitting and people would be able to understand this conversation that was going on between members and these witnesses rather than the incomprehensible business of moving that may should be replaced by might in clause 46 and so on and so forth and finally on the standards leg of the Modernisation Committee's remit I did write for the Hansard Society again, a blog a couple of months ago, about the oath.

[00:38:08] The Oath of Allegiance, which is sworn by all members at the beginning of every Parliament. Completely pointless exercise. There is a person in the audience

[00:38:16] Ruth Fox: Writing the blog, or the

[00:38:19] Paul Evans: It was, actually. There is someone in the audience who will tell me off for saying it was an empty ritual, because she believes all rituals have content.

[00:38:27] But in my view, it is an empty ritual. It is completely meaningless ritual, which nobody can understand, neither the members why they're doing it, nor the people watching them do it. And it is also used to exclude certain categories of people. Fewer and fewer, but still Sinn Fein. I would like to see the oath replaced by a declaration by members.

[00:38:47] Telling them what their job is, what they have to do, and what their obligations are to the disciplinary codes, the, the, uh, codes of conduct, etc, etc. So it was actually something, if they were going to do it, you could get rid of it completely. But if they're going to do it, it's something which embeds in them, as with a police constable, an army officer, a judge, there are many, many other people who have to take oaths of office.

[00:39:09] It says, you must do this, you must do that, and you mustn't do the other. And then it would have some meaning. So I'd really like to see the oath. swept away and replaced by a sensible declaration of some kind. Those are my three or four.

[00:39:24] Mark D'Arcy: Well, I think this is probably a good moment for us to start inviting some thoughts from the audience, both on what we've been talking about, our pet suggestions, and indeed your own.

[00:39:34] SPG Member: Robert hazel from the Constitution Unit at UCL. Do you think there should be an investiture vote at the beginning of every newly elected parliament or when a new Prime Minister has been elected as leader of their party before formally they become the Prime minister. And by that, I mean the procedure that happens, for example, in the Scottish Parliament, where before the First Minister can formally be appointed by the monarch, there has to be a vote in the Scottish Parliament, in effect, electing that person as the First Minister.

[00:40:11] I would like to see the same thing happen at Westminster. Thank you. Hmm.

[00:40:15] Mark D'Arcy: I rather like that idea. I think it would be a test of confidence. In, I imagine, most cases, it would be a formality. You'd know which party had a majority in the House. That party's just elected a new leader by whatever process. That leader then takes over, puts themselves before the House of Commons and gets a visible demonstration that they do command the confidence of the house. If you had a hung parliament, I think things might get a little bit spicier.

[00:40:42] SPG Member: And it would help in a small way towards public education about our parliamentary system of government because I think for many of the electorate at a general election they think we're electing the prime minister as if we had a presidential system and it would be a small formal but also symbolic illustration. No, in a general election we're electing a parliament and it's a two stage process and it's up to parliament then to decide who's going to form the next government?

[00:41:16] Mark D'Arcy: Absolutely agree with that, and apart from anything else, I think the moment you become Prime Minister almost would be when you win that vote, rather than when you kiss hands with the Sovereign. And maybe that, in a 21st century democracy, would be no bad thing either.

[00:41:30] Ruth Fox: Would it result, Robert, in a delay to the appointment?

[00:41:32] Because one of the things about our system is the turnover in a general election, new Prime Minister, we wait a couple of weeks for the King's Speech, but the Prime Minister's been in, in Downing Street since, uh, the early hours after election day. So is there any transition question that would arise.

[00:41:48] SPG Member: Indeed there is. And there would have to be a delay until Parliament could meet and until Parliament had chosen or endorsed the new Prime Minister. But in other Westminster systems, they typically have a period of a week to ten days, in Canada, in Australia, after the general election, before the new government takes office.

[00:42:10] And during that transitional period, the old government remains in office, but as a caretaker government and no major disasters have happened in either of those places. It has the added benefit that for the incoming government, who are completely knackered, having fought a five week or so election campaign, they've had no sleep.

[00:42:32] On the night of the election count, then in the next 24 hours to form a new government is crazy. So it would give them a break, a bit of a rest, time to think about the formation of the new government in slower and more measured time.

[00:42:48] Ruth Fox: Dare I say, we might even be able to fit in some induction, some further induction of MPs.

[00:42:53] Paul Evans: Ha ha!

[00:42:56] Ruth Fox: Okay, Paul, so there's the sniggering, the sniggering to my left here.

[00:42:59] Mark D'Arcy: Paul is a zen master of the cynical laugh.

[00:43:03] Paul Evans: Yes, I'm sure you'll be able to fit in some further induction MPs in that period. I mean, it works in Scotland and Wales, and in a different kind of way in Northern Ireland. And you could of course have it on the same day as you elected the Speaker if you wanted, the day after.

[00:43:15] You don't have to wait for the King's Speech. And it would be another excuse for allowing people to vote without having taken the oath.

[00:43:24] SPG Member: Tony Barker, formerly University of Essex. I'd like to return us back to the internal question, which has been touched on, of the tension and rivalry between Parliament and the executive on the passing of public expenditure.

[00:43:38] The essence of the problem is what is the quality of the input into the House, and then of course the quality of the challenge to the government based upon that information. Members of Parliament have never grasped the nettle, in my opinion, the only effective way to achieve this is to have experts examining the expenditure plans, uh, reporting on them nowadays, of course, through modern select committees and MPs have never seriously considered giving over the powers of examination to their clerks or their expert attachments to this committee and sit back and listen to the debate and then judge,

[00:44:17] judge the exchanges between what the government people say and what the committee's people say, as they do in Washington. To some extent the vanity of MPs has always prevented them from thinking that anybody can ask systematic questions as well as they can.

[00:44:35] Ruth Fox: Vain MPs, surely not Tony. Um, so Paul, do you fancy being a clerk doing the scrutiny of the estimates?

[00:44:42] Paul Evans: In a slightly idealized version, what Tony has described is the what most people would like. And indeed, a few years ago, the Procedure Committee did a report on, on having a budget committee, which included having an Office for Expenditure, as it were. While one doesn't think Parliament can or should waste its time going into the microscopic detail of expenditure as it did under Gladstone, it could certainly do it better.

[00:45:08] And I think there is a will there. And I think the willingness to use outside expertise has changed in the last 50 or 60 years. And it could work if the will was there to put the system in place.

[00:45:19] SPG Member: David Howarth, Cambridge, on the financial question, I think the real problem is not within departments. It's between departments.

[00:45:27] And, and, and the government's overall judgment about whether expenditures should take place in one department rather than another. So even though i'm sympathetic to the select committee idea, in fact, I think I once proposed it as an amendment to the CRAG Bill, it doesn't quite work for the big policy decisions which are to do things like reduce corporation tax instead of reducing student fees which is presented to the department as increased student fees or cut FE. Those kind of judgments are not subject to any parliamentary debate, but they could be.

[00:46:02] They could be if we allowed votes on the Red Book. And, um, the Red Book is what the Treasury puts out at the budget. It explains, or lists, all the different changes in expenditure, which are proposed, pluses and minuses, and all the tax changes that are proposed, pluses or minuses. But the budget debate itself, technically, is only about tax.

[00:46:23] It's never about expenditure. But what we could do is some, an equivalent of what's done in local government, which is to say that you can propose amendments which, as long as they don't challenge the overall budget judgment, as long as they don't increase or decrease the deficit.

[00:46:38] Mark D'Arcy: So sort of take this 10 million from one department and put it in another department?

[00:46:42] SPG Member: Can shift, um, tax or expenditure around. To do that you would need expert judgment, so you couldn't do it on the spot. And so it would need some sort of budget committee to do it, and it would need expert advice from the OBR. But local government's been doing this for hundreds of years, and I can't see why the Commons shouldn't at least be able to vote on the kind of things that the electorate thinks people are voting on, which they never do.

[00:47:07] They never do vote on this kind of balance between tax and spending and different sort of spending in different departments.

[00:47:12] Paul Evans: I'm going to make a slightly light hearted request as whether you wanted me to explain the rule of ground initiative at any point.

[00:47:22] The heart of what David is talking about is a constitutional convention, not a law, that parliament cannot propose increases in expenditure, only approve or reduce what the government asks for from it in terms of expenditure. And it cannot impose a tax without the consent of the crown either. This hobbles the public expenditure debate because it's precisely you cannot do that we went out the aircraft carrier we'll have the hospital instead kind of thing because you can't increase the expenditure on hospitals you can get rid of the aircraft carrier or as in the only occasion in history and parliament has reduced expenditure the lord chancellor's bathroom you can get rid of those. But you can't put that money elsewhere. Once you've got rid of it you have to wait for the government to do that.

[00:48:11] Ruth Fox: Question from Oonagh at the back.

[00:48:13] SPG Member: I'm Oonagh Gay, retired House of Commons Library official. On top of Robert Hazel's point, Surely we should be able to bring back some elements of the Fixed Term Parliament Act and actually allow the Commons a vote as to whether they should be dissolved or not, you know, rather than hand it back to the royal prerogative.

[00:48:34] And then just to be provocative, should not select committees have some statutory powers to require witnesses, say like one Elon Musk or whoever, to actually appear and give evidence? Is there a case for a much more clear cut power as you see in United States Congress?

[00:48:54] Mark D'Arcy: Hang on, on the Elon Musk point. Was it Henry IV? I can call spirits from the vasty deep, aye, but will they come?

[00:49:01] Parliament can desire the attendance of Elon Musk as much as it wants, he's a US citizen, we can't have him unless he consents to come. But, in general, yeah.

[00:49:08] Paul Evans: The Sergeant at Arms could detain him if he landed in the jurisdiction.

[00:49:12] Mark D'Arcy: Well, hope springs eternal. But it's, you know, one of those uncomfortable facts that Parliament's powers to summon witnesses are out of date, ineffectual, non compliant with human rights, unworkable, and you couldn't easily send the Sergeant at Arms to go and detain anybody because I think the Sergeant at Arms doesn't have those kind of police powers.

[00:49:32] But yes, I'd quite like Parliament to have a kind of a steel edge to its ability to summon witnesses for a start. Your other point was having a dissolution vote. I'm pretty much in favor of that. I think ever since the 2019 prorogation, when parliament was basically quietly shut up by executive maneuver and never had any decision over itself.

[00:49:54] It makes Parliament look pathetically weak that it can just be sort of rolled up and put in a box anytime a prime minister fancies and goes and advises the sovereign. So I'm very much in favor of Parliament having a vote on whether or not it's prorogued, and indeed whether or not it's dissolved.

[00:50:10] Obviously you have a final shelf life for a parliament, and after a certain point it has to have an election. But, within that, I'm not a big fan of the idea that a prime minister can simply wake up one morning, drive down to Buckingham Palace, and wind up a parliament and call an election pretty much on their own.

[00:50:27] Ruth Fox: I have a slightly different perspective, and that's partly selfish reasons, because I think of all the time my life that was consumed giving evidence to select committees on the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, which proved to be a bit of a waste of time. Um, yes, I can, I can see the principle, but in the grand scheme of the number of reforms I like, it would be pretty low down my, uh, my list.

[00:50:50] Yes, of course, the principle that the Parliament should decide whether it's dissolved, yes, but the practicalities are, if the Prime Minister, if the government has got a majority and wants to pursue a dissolution, it will get one. I'm not sure that it's adding a huge, a huge amount. Of course, if it's, uh, if it's a minority government, you're in a different scenario, but of all the reforms, it wouldn't be on my fantasy list.

[00:51:11] Let's put it that way.

[00:51:13] Paul Evans: I mean, I think it's, no, no, I'm not entirely, I think it has symbolic value, but I'm just thinking we should think about, it

[00:51:19] was quite amusing last July, June, July, when Mr. Sunak went to the palace to seek a dissolution. And a lot of members of his party were running around saying, but why can't, parliament hasn't voted on this!

[00:51:30] Um, you know, it's a ridiculous idea. What a stupid idea to have an election now. We should have a vote to say you can't, which probably would have failed because the Labour Party would presumably have voted for it.

[00:51:40] Mark D'Arcy: I think they're almost trying to install a new leader who could then quickly nip up to the sovereign kiss hands and say, and I don't want to dissolve Parliament after all.

[00:51:47] Paul Evans: Yes, but what I'm saying is it depends on, you know, there's a Fixed Term Parliament Act with a few flaws is perfectly respectable. The removal of it was unnecessary and daft, but you're probably right that it's not a key issue at the moment, but I think it has symbolic value.

[00:52:00] Ruth Fox: But, I mean, the, the dissolution for the general election this time raised also a sort of a broader question, not just about parliament, but also about the role of the cabinet.

[00:52:08] I mean, the fact that he didn't even consult his cabinet about having a general election.

[00:52:12] Paul Evans: That's because they would have said no.

[00:52:13] Ruth Fox: Right. Fair enough.

[00:52:14] Paul Evans: You don't ask, you don't ask the wife for, you know, for, I mean. I

[00:52:19] Multiple speakers: Ha.

[00:52:19] Mark D'Arcy: We, we may be getting into trouble with Mrs. Evans here.

[00:52:23] Ruth Fox: That might have to be edited out.

[00:52:27] On Oonagh's point about giving select committees more statutory powers, the one reservation I have about that is that the more you give them those sort of statutory powers, the more you also have to put in place rules and procedures for witnesses that turn it ever more into a more legalistic framework.

[00:52:45] And I do worry as somebody who gives evidence to select committees on a fairly regular basis, I'm used to what to expect. I'm used to how it's My expectations are managed. But for a lot of people who might get called to a select committee, yes, they're not going to be the Elon Musks of this world, or those people who refuse to appear before committees and come under pressure, Dominic Cummings.

[00:53:09] But if you put a quite highly legalistic framework around it, it really could be quite off putting to ordinary witnesses. That is my reservation.

[00:53:17] Mark D'Arcy: I mean the Dominic cummings case is, is quite an interesting one here because you have someone who's held in contempt of Parliament who nonetheless was made Chief of Staff to an incoming Prime Minister not that long afterwards.

[00:53:27] It demonstrated that Parliament wrapping someone on the knuckles had no practical effect.

[00:53:32] Paul Evans: Well, see my evidence to the Privileges Committee's seriatim, but um, to pretend you have a power which you can't exercise is just embarrassing and silly. Yeah. So you have to make a choice, and you, you may come down on your side, Ruth and say we don't want all the paraphernalia, but we don't have, we're not pretending we have a power or you have a power, but the present situation is absurd and makes parliament look absurd as Dominic Cummings demonstrated very forcefully a few years ago.

[00:54:01] Mark D'Arcy: And enjoyed every minute of doing so. Next question. Who else we got?

[00:54:07] SPG Member: Robert Saunders, Queen Mary University of London. You started off by talking about the House of Lords, and we've got a relatively unfamiliar situation there in terms of recent years now, that the Labour Party has a huge majority in the House of Commons, but is hopelessly outgunned by the Conservative peers in the House of Lords.

[00:54:24] So I wonder how you think the Conservative peers will or should use their voting strength in the House of Lords over this parliament.

[00:54:31] Mark D'Arcy: The great thing about the House of Lords, I think, is that it's kind of self limiting because it knows if it goes too far it'll get its wings pretty seriously clipped.

[00:54:39] So the House of Lords has an inbuilt set of inhibitions about pushing too far on things. Perhaps the most dramatic outburst of Lord's procedural resistance to a government was in 2010 when various coalition legislation was kind of stopped cold in the House of Lords by what was basically a filibuster.

[00:54:58] I know you're not allowed to call it a filibuster unless the chair rules it's a filibuster. But it was a filibuster. You know, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and tastes good in orange sauce, you know. They will doubtless want to use their numbers while they've got a numerical advantage over the Labour Party, and Labour will doubtless be appointing lots of new peers in due course, they'll doubtless want to try and use that to twist the government's tail.

[00:55:21] I think they would be very, very foolish, and know it would be very, very foolish, to just try and stop the government's legislative program cold in the House of Lords.

[00:55:30] Paul Evans: Yes, this is politics, not procedure. But obviously those peers who are under sentence of expulsion, have very little to lose, the 90 odd of them.

[00:55:41] So they can do what they like, and they probably will. But that's fine because they probably won't bring a majority with them. And the procedural point always to remember is that not only peers have the self limiting sense of their constitutional role in the back of their minds, they must also bear in mind that if they kill a bill, the government brings it back next time and they don't have any chance of changing it at all.

[00:56:02] So they're throwing away their ability for influence by and large by killing a bill. Because it will be brought back under the Parliament Act, they will have no say in it whatsoever. So that is, in the end, sort of, sort of Damocles, I think, that really hangs over their heads. If they want to make any difference to the law, they've got to negotiate.

[00:56:21] And they've got to play along.

[00:56:22] Ruth Fox: I think another factor is to what extent Conservative peers

[00:56:25] view themselves as the sort of the core focus of opposition to the government given the weaknesses of the parliamentary party in the House of Commons and the fact that they know that MPs don't spend the time on scrutiny of legislation that they do in the lords and therefore is there a developing mindset within the Conservative Party in the in the Lords. The Conservative group. I don't know at this stage, too early to tell, but is there a sort of developing mindset that they see themselves as needing to put the government through the grinder a bit on some of its legislation, perhaps more than they might otherwise, to be that opposition?

[00:57:01] And we're seeing it as we started the podcast with the Football Governance Bill, and we'll have to see what happens with the other legislation.

[00:57:07] Mark D'Arcy: Next questioner, please.

[00:57:09] SPG Member: Meg Russell from the UCL Constitution Unit. And you've got me started now, because Robert started talking about the Lords. So, following on from that The Hereditary Peers Bill is having its second reading in the House of Lords next week, and it will be going into committee stage in the new year.

[00:57:26] Today we've had a very micro change coming from the government, in terms of stating that in the future political parties will have to make a statement as to why people are suitable to be appointed to the House of Lords, which is pretty remarkable that that doesn't happen already. They seem to have stopped short thus far of giving any more actual power to the House of Lords Appointments Commission, putting it in statute, giving it control over the suitability of people put forward, notwithstanding these statements. And we certainly haven't yet seen a cap on the size of the House of Lords. Given what you're saying about the dynamics of the House of Lords now, I wonder whether you think there are any opportunities and whether it would be appropriate for the House of Lords, where these people care passionately about these things, to actually force some change on the government, to maybe insist that the House of Lords shouldn't be bigger than the House of Commons, which are polled by the Constitution, and it shows only 3 percent of the public think it should have an unlimited size.

[00:58:21] And whether we should actually strengthen the House of Lords Appointments Commission and it might be appropriate for peers to be pushing that during the committee stage of the Bill.

[00:58:28] Ruth Fox: Well, certainly on HOLAC, yes. Again, I should be slightly cautious because, again, my boss is a member of the House of Lords Appointments Commission with one of her other hats.

[00:58:36] The question about this statement, I mean, it is a very small statement. We've not got any further news on what they're going to do about the age cap, whether that is going to go. So there's a whole host of things around laws reform that they could be doing, some of which they promised, some of which they've rolled back on.

[00:58:52] Yeah, I mean, it's just this smallness of it, frankly, which is depressing. You know, the statement today about that you're going to have these almost nomination statements about why the parties want these particular peers. What are they going to do with them exactly? Where do they go? Who scrutinizes them?

[00:59:10] How are they going to be held accountable to them? You know, what's the next step? Fine having the statement and it might, I suppose, weed out some of the, uh, peers that have been appointed previously who would have had a fairly, um, should we say dilute statement.

[00:59:23] Mark D'Arcy: Did a fantastic job operating the photocopier at Downing Street.

[00:59:27] Ruth Fox: No names, no petrol. But, uh, yeah, what's going to happen to it? What's going to happen next? So it just seems rather small, but, um, If peers at least could be seen to be pushing forward on some of the bigger reforms and putting the pressure on the government, that would be good.

[00:59:41] Mark D'Arcy: I would have thought that if Conservative peers wanted to embarrass the government, they put down an amendment saying why not give a veto power to the House of Lords Appointments Commission, that if they blackball someone they don't get appointed.

[00:59:54] Which would, I suspect, do a lot to weed out some of the more egregious ennoblements of recent years. The big donors who don't really have much else to offer. Low level party apparatchiks who have been promoted for loyal work running the party apparatus, but again, don't have much to offer the wider house.

[01:00:11] You can see that if they wanted to try and outflank the government on this. I mean, the, the objection to that, I suppose, if you were a Conservative peer, is, uh, their own record, or at least their party leader's own record, which, uh, might be used in evidence against them. But I'd like to see people in the House of Lords trying to toughen up the criteria for being in the House of Lords in any number of ways, because I think that would make it a much more efficient and perhaps more respected institution.

[01:00:37] Paul Evans: When I was at university, and my teacher asked me Had I read X, I would, if I hadn't, I would say not systematically. And, um, and, um, I must remember that one. The parliamentary equipment of this is, I'm not familiar with the architecture of the House of Lords bill, but I think it's an opportunity for those to show a willingness to reform itself, isn't it?

[01:00:58] And not be reformed necessarily by the government, which would be an excellent way forward and might produce some political dividends. On the size, I mean, we all know that's ridiculous, but

[01:01:09] Ruth Fox: So on the size for our listeners it's, uh, what 800 plus now?

[01:01:12] Paul Evans: Having been 650 on the expulsion of the bulk of the hereditaries in 1999.

[01:01:19] Ruth Fox: Be the size of the Commons.

[01:01:21] Mark D'Arcy: Time for one final question I think before we run out of time.

[01:01:25] SPG Member: Hi there, James Strong, Queen Mary University of London. We've talked a lot about parliamentary reforms that you're in favor of. I'm interested to hear which ones you're against. What is the worst idea for parliamentary reform currently doing the rounds?

[01:01:39] Paul Evans: From this morning's discussion, for those of you present, I would say, I'm being deliberately controversial here, unlike me normally, is giving select committees more staff. They don't know what to do with the ones they've got already.

[01:01:51] Ruth Fox: So speaks a former principal clerk of select committees.

[01:01:57] Paul Evans: I think you need to know why you're doing it.

[01:02:00] And, and what this really boils down to is, in, in fact, committees used to publish three or four reports a year, and now they publish eight or twelve. I think that's probably an underestimate in some ways. I think the market is flooded. I think there are too many select committee reports, and they do too much, and the government has stopped paying any attention to them.

[01:02:19] So I think doing less better, which was another slogan that came up this morning, doing less better, David Davis said this, because he said, do less better. I agree with that. He said, give the select committees more staff. Only if they're going to do something less better, rather than more of the same.

[01:02:36] Because, not even the select committee members read their own reports, never mind the government. There are just too many of them. And there are just too many of them, and they're too diffuse, and they're too scattergun. And they're not followed up properly, and so on. It'd be much better to focus on things, solve some problems, do the follow through.

[01:02:54] Multiple speakers: Mm hmm.

[01:02:55] Paul Evans: So, I'm skeptical, it's not my pet hate, but I'm skeptical about increasing resources unless you have a very clear plan about what you're going to do with those resources and why it would be better than what you do now.

[01:03:08] Mark D'Arcy: Can I just add actually one other bête noire parliamentary reform of mine, which is the idea of moving parliament to Bradford or, uh, Birmingham or, uh, anywhere else.

[01:03:20] Not so much an attack on those places, but the point about Parliament is that it can only really function effectively in scrutinizing the government if it's right next door to the government. If you want a ministerial statement and the minister has to hop on a three hour train journey to get to you, there's a problem.

[01:03:35] So I'm much more in favor of moving Parliament to somewhere else if you're moving the entire government alongside it, but otherwise you're actually weakening its ability to scrutinize. So, uh, that's another favorite, favorite one that I loathe.

[01:03:49] Ruth Fox: I think mine, of the ones that are being discussed that are supposedly circulating among new MPs at Westminster and are being submitted to the Modernisation Committee, so not ones that are coming from others in this group necessarily, but certainly coming from new MPs, is this idea of having a three day week at Westminster.

[01:04:06] I have to say, I have real worries about the rationale behind that and what that would mean. I am all in favour of taking a completely different approach to the parliamentary calendar. Rethinking sitting times. I'd get rid of things like the King's Speech, I'd get rid of sessions. I know there's implications for that in the House of Lords and so on, but let's rethink the concept of time in the Parliament and how it's used.

[01:04:29] I'd have weeks where the chamber doesn't sit and you have dedicated committee weeks, for example, to be able to do some of that post report scrutiny and drill down on some of the work that the committees have done. But the idea that we might have MPs who are only in Westminster for three days, which in practice probably means two and a half, when you take account of sort of travelling arrangements, does concern me.

[01:04:50] And it concerns me because what it says about what they think is their principal responsibilities and prime drivers, and it goes back to the whole debate about whether MPs should be allowed to be in Westminster for two and a half days. sufficiently prioritized their role as legislators and politicians at the national level with national responsibilities, as opposed to local representatives with their constituency responsibilities going about doing that sort of social work style campaigning.

[01:05:16] So that will linger on and I can see. Quite a number of people in this room probably being called to give evidence to the Modernisation Committee to discuss it.

[01:05:25] Mark D'Arcy: And with that I think we've pretty much run out of our allotted time for this afternoon so thanks very much indeed to the audience for those contributions.

[01:05:33] My thanks to Paul Evans for joining us to dispense his hardcore parliamentary wisdom and that's all folks.

[01:05:40] Ruth Fox: Thanks very much everyone.

[01:05:51] 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.

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[01:06:09] Ruth Fox: And Mark, tell us more about the algorithm.

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