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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.

[00:00:24] Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark Darcy. Coming up this week.

[00:00:27] Ruth Fox: The cast list is announced for the detailed scrutiny of the bill to legalise assisted dying.

[00:00:32] Mark D'Arcy: The tumbrils roll as the hereditary peers bewail their impending exclusion from the House of Lords.

[00:00:38] Ruth Fox: And license to scrutinise. The parliamentarians who are to keep an eye on our spooks have been chosen by the government.

[00:00:52] Mark D'Arcy: But first Ruth, once again, the first item on our agenda is the Assisted Dying Bill. It's probably the most eye catching action going on in Parliament at the moment. And this week's development is, as you were just saying, they've announced the cast list for the Public Bill Committee that is going line by line, as they say, to trawl through the wording of the bill, to look at the policy issues it brings up.

[00:01:14] And it's quite an interesting lineup that they've got, a mixture of experience, but quite a lot of first time MPs in there. And our colleague Matthew England from the Hansard Society has been combing through the membership of the committee, and he's come in to brief us about what he's learned. So Matthew, first of all, looking at that cast list, which are the names that caught your eye?

[00:01:34] Matthew England: Thanks for having me on the podcast, it's quite strange to be on this end of the microphone. So the names that stand out first are the fact that there are two ministers on the committee. That's quite normal with a government bill to have ministers on the committee, but with a Private Member's Bill there is usually a minister, but in this case we have two ministers whose portfolios cut across the relevant areas.

[00:01:54] So we have Stephen Kinnock, who is the Minister for Care in the Department for Health and Social Care, and part of his portfolio is end of life care. And we also have Sarah Sackman, who is the former Solicitor General, and is now Minister for the Courts.

[00:02:08] Mark D'Arcy: She was actually quite a short lived former Solicitor General, because she only came into Parliament in July, and she was immediately made Solicitor General by Keir Starmer then, one of the law officers.

[00:02:17] And now she's taken over a portfolio in the Ministry of Justice, and that's the reason that she's now in this committee, in this line up.

[00:02:24] Ruth Fox: So Matthew, it's actually quite a big committee, isn't it?

[00:02:27] Matthew England: It is, yeah. So standing orders allow for between 16 and 50 members. But normally a Public Bill Committee will only have under 20, but this time the committee of selection have nominated 23 members.

[00:02:39] That comes with advantages and disadvantages, so the more members of a committee there are, the wider the representation you can have. But also, you don't want too many members, because the more members you have, the longer people will speak, and the longer the proceedings of the committee will go on for.

[00:02:54] Ruth Fox: So there's a real concern about it being prolonged, and as we know, the Private Members Bills are up against a time deadline, so, uh, there's a balance to be struck. So, there's 23 MPs, two ministers, Kim Leadbeater is the sponsor of the bill is also on there, so we've got 20 backbenchers. I mean, what's the balance in terms of parties here?

[00:03:12] Matthew England: So the balance roughly reflects. the wider party balance in the house. This is something that's roughly required by the standing orders, so when nominating members to Public Bill Committees, the Committee of Selection has to have regard to the composition of the House. For government bills that's a lot more simple because the committee will just divide it along party lines, and they've done so here, and around 65 percent of the committee are Labour MPs, which is in comparison to 63 percent in the wider House, and the rest are divvied up between four Conservatives, three Liberal Democrats, and then, interestingly, one member from Plaid Cymru, the leader of the parliamentary party for Plaid Cymru, Liz Saville Roberts.

[00:03:52] Mark D'Arcy: And they have to reflect not one, but two balances here. There's party balance, but there's also the balance of opinion as expressed about the bill at its Second Reading. How many people are going to be opponents of the bill, how many people are going to be supporters of it, and also possibly the various shades of meaning in between.

[00:04:06] Matthew England: Yeah, so how the Committee of Selection goes about selecting members on that basis is slightly shadowy, and much of it's done in the back rooms. But you're right that for bills that cut across party lines, the Committee of Selection is required, at least by precedent, to select on the basis of any divisions that occur at Second Reading.

[00:04:25] So how that's worked in practice this time is that of the 23 members of the committee, 14 of them voted aye, and 9 of them voted no. Of the 14, two of those are the ministers who have been appointed to the committee, so those ministers will play quite a big role in determining how the proceedings play out.

[00:04:45] The 14:9 division means that in order for an opposition amendment to succeed, three aye voters would need to switch their support to an amendment, assuming that all of the, uh, no voters vote in favour of that amendment. So they've got, as it were, a two vote buffer against any amendments. They can afford two defections, but they can't afford three defections, because in that case an amendment would succeed.

[00:05:06] Ruth Fox: And the interesting question is how the ministers are going to operate, isn't it? Because the government is still maintaining a position of neutrality on the bill, but we talked about, Mark, that you know, there's going to need to be probably some drafting amendments at committee stage to tidy up the bill, deal with some legal questions, technical drafting questions and so on.

[00:05:23] So you'd expect the ministers to be pushing those through and to be voting for those, but we're not clear whether ministers will take a voting stance in Public Bill Committee on the amendments proposed by the other members.

[00:05:36] Matthew England: It's not been made clear what the role of the ministers will be. It may be that they only participate in debates and participate in votes on amendments and clauses on which the government has a collective position. Now, I think those are likely to fall into two categories, so there will be, of course, tidying up amendments that the government wants to make to the bill to make it technically and legally operable. But there will also be votes on amendments tabled by opponents of the bill, which the government thinks have drafting or technical problems, and will therefore want to oppose because of its duty of care to the statute book.

[00:06:11] And it may in those cases. be much more important for the opponents of the bill to ensure that their amendments are legally and technically operable.

[00:06:20] Mark D'Arcy: It was described to me as ministers being in workability mode, that they were concerned that if they were going to have an assisted dying bill, it had to be watertight in legal terms.

[00:06:29] The clauses had to work.

[00:06:30] Matthew England: Yeah, and interestingly, it's expected that the ministers on the committee will not play the role that a minister in a public bill committee would normally play for a government bill. In committee stage, every single clause of the bill has to be actively approved by the committee, and it would normally be a minister who moves the question.

[00:06:48] Clause stand part. The clause stand part of the bill. But in this case, as with all Private Members Bill, Public Bill Committees, it's expected that Kim Leadbeater, the sponsor of the bill, will effectively play the normal role of the minister, and will be moving those clause stand part motions.

[00:07:02] Mark D'Arcy: And do we have a sense yet of the timetable for this?

[00:07:04] How long it's all going to take?

[00:07:06] Matthew England: Well as Ruth said earlier, there's not a formal deadline, so with government bills they're established by programmememe motions, which set a formal outdate by which the committee proceedings have to conclude. With private members bills, they're theoretically unlimited. So, as long as the committee members want to propose and debate amendments, the committee will do so. In practice the committee will want to have its proceedings wrapped up by the first day available for report stage in April.

[00:07:35] Ruth Fox: So this is the eighth Private Member's Bill sitting on a Friday which gives priority then to bills coming out of Public Bill Committee into report stage and it's important for the assisted dying bill to try and get that first slot so that they can make progress and obviously build in time to go to the Lords by the time that they they need to come back possibly for amendments if this bill is to get onto the statute book.

[00:07:56] Matthew England: That's right, so that's the in practice end date for the committee. As for when it starts, you'll remember at the end of the Second Reading vote that the House voted to give the committee the power to send for persons, papers, and records, i. e. to take oral and written evidence. That will happen before the committee starts substantive consideration of the bill.

[00:08:15] So it may be that before Christmas, the Public Bill Committee issues a call for evidence on the bill's provisions, and in mid January the committee actually starts to consider the clauses of the bill having considered that evidence.

[00:08:26] Mark D'Arcy: Because the people who have to give the evidence will have to sit down and contemplate what it is that they're going to want to say.

[00:08:31] They've got to have a couple of weeks in which to think that through.

[00:08:33] Matthew England: Yes, and usually in the week before a Public Bill Committee starts to consider a bill, they'll have oral evidence sessions, and the committee will have to meet in private a few times in advance of those sessions to decide who they actually want to call up.

[00:08:46] Yeah.

[00:08:46] Ruth Fox: Normally they sit on a Wednesday morning for a couple of hours for Private Members Bills in committee. The suggestion is that that might not be enough, that they might actually decide to do a couple of sessions each week, possibly more as they make progress into the bill. So it could be quite a lot of work coming up in those early months.

[00:09:03] Who are the other sort of notable figures on the committee that we should look out for? I mean, Danny Kruger

[00:09:07] Mark D'Arcy: He's kind of the leader of the opposition on this.

[00:09:10] Ruth Fox: Yeah, he, he's been chosen, so you've got a very strong no vote there, but, um, what about some other areas of expertise?

[00:09:17] Matthew England: So we have, as far as I can tell so far, we have two former medical professionals on the committee.

[00:09:23] One is Neil Shastri Hurst, who is a former surgeon and actually has legal experience because he later became a doctor. a barrister specialising in healthcare. The other is, um, Dr. Simon Opher, who is a former GP. So we have some medical experience on the committee, which could come in useful.

[00:09:39] Mark D'Arcy: I also noticed the presence of Bambos Charalambous.there, a big supporter of the bill, who's a former opposition whip. So there are some people who know the parliamentary ropes as well.

[00:09:49] Matthew England: There's another interesting point to make about the relative amount of fervor among both the proponents and opponents of the bill on the committee. So one thing worth noting, I think, is that among the 14 supporters of the bill at Second Reading on the committee, five of them are either the sponsor, Kim Leadbeater, or one of the dozen or so co sponsors of the bill whose names are actually signed on the back page.

[00:10:17] There's also Bambos Charalambous who, as well as being a former whip, was also one of the tellers for the ayes at the Second Reading, so actually counting the votes for the ayes, and usually that's an indicator that someone's quite a strong supporter of a bill. On the opposing side there are fewer obviously fervent opponents of the bill.

[00:10:33] So you have Danny Kruger who was, as you say, the lead speaker against the bill at second reading, but other Kruger, none of the other eight members of the committee. who opposed the bill at Second Reading actually gave a speech at Second Reading. That stands in contrast to the supporters of the bill on the committee where eight of the fourteen members on the committee spoke at Second Reading.

[00:10:55] So that may be a rough indicator of how fervently supportive the members of the committee are.

[00:11:01] Ruth Fox: Do we have a sense of the extent to which members have qualified their support or their objections? Because as well as second reading there were also MPs tweeting letters to their constituents indicating their concerns about the bill and some perhaps more willing to consider amendments and possibly change their support than others.

[00:11:20] Matthew England: Yeah so there's um, what we might call on the one hand constructive opponents and the word was that in looking for members who are willing to serve on the committee, they were looking specifically for opponents who would be more constructive and willing to propose amendments that actually help the bill.

[00:11:36] Mark D'Arcy: So people that engage rather than just vote no at every opportunity.

[00:11:39] Matthew England: Indeed, yes. And I think two of the most notable ones are Jack Abbott, who is a new MP and a backbencher, and Sean Woodcock, who is also a new MP and backbencher, both from the Labour Party. And both of their letters, you'll remember before Second Reading there was a flurry of MPs posting letters explaining their positions, both of their letters suggested that they could in principle see themselves voting for the bill at a later stage if there were improvements made to it.

[00:12:05] Mark D'Arcy: So if the process meets their concerns they could switch sides.

[00:12:08] Matthew England: Exactly, yes. Among the proponents of the bill who voted for it at Second Reading, you also have what we might call, uh, qualified supporters. The most notable, I think, is the Plaid MP Liz Saville Roberts, who's speech at Second Reading explicitly suggested that, uh, support was conditional on adequate scrutiny.

[00:12:27] But you also have members like Marie Tidball who specified in her letter in advance of Second Reading that she would be seeking changes relating to the way in which medics can raise the issue of assisted dying with patients. So at the moment, the bill allows a medical practitioner to raise assisted dying as an option with a patient.

[00:12:46] This is a clause that I think is one of the most vulnerable in committee and one where Kim Leadbeater and the proponents may even offer a concession.

[00:12:53] Ruth Fox: You mentioned there a couple of new MPs, backbenchers. More than 50 percent of the House of Commons now are new.

[00:12:59] It was inevitable you'd have quite a lot of new members. What do those numbers look like?

[00:13:03] Matthew England: 13 of the 23 members of the committee were elected to the House for the first time in the last election. That's about 56 percent of the committee. And as you say, that's in comparison to about 51%. in the wider House, so slightly more.

[00:13:17] Those are mostly Labour members of Parliament, so there's a lot of backbench Labour representation on the committee.

[00:13:23] Mark D'Arcy: I suppose it's difficult, really, to find enough really old hands to completely staff a bill committee, especially one of this size, given that most of the old hands are going to be frontbenchers for one party or another.

[00:13:33] Ruth Fox: And one of the challenges, I think, therefore, is going to be that for many of these MPs, this will be the first piece of legislation where they've sat on a committee to actually scrutinise a bill line by line.

[00:13:44] Mark D'Arcy: And it's not exactly uncontroversial or devoid of emotive issues.

[00:13:48] Ruth Fox: Yeah, yeah.

[00:13:49] Matthew England: I've seen a number floating around that only around 30 percent of the committee have actually sat on a Public Bill Committee doing this line by line or clause by clause scrutiny of a bill before.

[00:13:58] Ruth Fox: Yeah, I think Nikki da Costa, who we had on the podcast, former head of legislative affairs in number 10, we had on the podcast in the Autumn, she was crunching some numbers and suggesting that 60 percent had never sat on a Public Bill Committee, including one of the older hand MPs, who had never done it either.

[00:14:12] Mark D'Arcy: Managed to avoid it somehow.

[00:14:13] Ruth Fox: Yeah, it's not just new MPs. Well, Matthew, thanks for joining us to go through those numbers. One thing to look out for we haven't seen yet is the money motion, which the government needs to bring forward to cover the costs of this legislation. And they need to do that ideally before the bill goes into committee.

[00:14:29] So we're looking out for that over the final few days before Christmas, see if it appears. So there'll be much more to chew over, Mark, on this legislation in the new year.

[00:14:38] Mark D'Arcy: And we'll have to wait probably till mid January to see how all these members of the committee actually play out when they have witnesses in front of them.

[00:14:44] So Matthew, thanks very much indeed for joining us on the pod.

[00:14:46] Matthew England: Thank you very much.

[00:14:47] Ruth Fox: Cheers Matthew. Well Mark, shall we take a short break and then when we're back we'll be talking about hereditary peers again.

[00:14:54] Mark D'Arcy: Fun, fun, fun.

[00:14:56] Ruth Fox: See you in a minute.

[00:15:00] Mark D'Arcy: And Ruth we're back and from one Second Reading of a bill to another because this week the Lords have had the Second Reading of the bill that would remove the last vestiges of the hereditary peerage from those red benches, and, uh, an awful lot of the hereditaries took the opportunity to say how unfairly and meanly they felt they were being treated. It was, uh, I don't want to say whinge fest, but I can't really think of a better word.

[00:15:25] Ruth Fox: No, I think that characterised it in certain quarters. I mean, there was some high flying debate about constitutional principles, about the value of the hereditary peerage, and then there were some quite emotive words used about the Labour government by some hereditary peers who were clearly not happy with it.

[00:15:42] There was talk of political assassinations. What came through is that, certainly on the Conservative benches, they do appear to be lining up for a bit of a fight on this.

[00:15:51] Mark D'Arcy: They're certainly very aggrieved, aren't they? Yeah,

[00:15:53] Ruth Fox: I mean, I was struck by Lord True's words. He's the shadow leader of the House of Lords now, was Leader of the Lords in the, uh, the last government, in about this being a fiercely contested bill, talked about a difficult passage of the bill through the House.

[00:16:08] He talked about if the government doesn't strive to develop a consensus about its wider Lords reforms, that it would affect the appetite of the Conservative benches to be constructive about a lot of this. And he talked about, it need not go this way, you know, if only we could establish consensus and do things in that way.

[00:16:27] Mark D'Arcy: Which of course was the hallmark of previous governments with the House of Lords.

[00:16:30] Ruth Fox: And, and this was the point I think that uh, Baroness Smith of Basildon, the new Leader of the House of Lords, I think made, made quite strongly that the problem with the argument that the opponents of this Bill are putting forward... You know, let's not press ahead with this incremental reform. Let's come up with the whole package and then we can look at it in the round. And then we'll implement it. And that will ensure that the scrutiny function of the House of Lords is not damaged, etc, etc. And she made the point, look, those who argue that no reform should take place until everything is agreed, but with no agreement at all on what everything should entail, in the end nothing gets done. And that's kind of the record of reform over, over the years.

[00:17:07] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, there's a reason why it's more than 100 years since the original reform under Asquith to clip its wings, is that it's incredibly difficult to assemble any kind of consensus behind exactly what the new form of the Upper Chamber of Parliament should be.

[00:17:22] And that's why Government after government has decided this potato is too hot. An all singing, all dancing reform creating a Senate of the Nations and the Regions is something that conferences of constitutional savants can bang on about till Christmas. But at the same time, to get something through Parliament would require a government doing very little else for a year, and no government has that kind of time to do that.

[00:17:43] Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean, Baroness Smith, she talks about it's a track record of stagnation and stalled attempts at reform and, you know, it's got to stop. Interestingly, I think, and I've heard this not just from her in the House this week in the debate, but also from some Peers privately, that the importance of the full stop in the, in the Labour Party manifesto.

[00:18:01] In the manifesto, it said they would deal with legislation to remove the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House. Full stop. And then it dealt with the issues of retirement, age limits, broader reform of the House of Lords. And her point is, it's for the Labour Party, for the Labour government, to decide how to implement its manifesto.

[00:18:21] And its manifesto was quite clear that the first stage was dealing with the hereditaries. That's what they're doing. And the fact that people now want to talk about wider reforms, that's the second stage, and that's going to come later.

[00:18:34] Mark D'Arcy: And if ever there was a bill that engaged the Salisbury Addison Convention, the long standing constitutional rule that the House of Lords does not throw out, a bill that was part of the Manifesto of a party that's just won a general election, surely this is it.

[00:18:47] This is absolutely clearly signalled, and there would be, I suppose, some kind of constitutional crisis if the House of Lords did attempt to throw this bill out, or indeed in any way sort of gut the policy intention of it. That would be a signal for real trouble and might actually goad the Labour Party into pushing harder on some of those issues like retirements and equalising the numbers in the Lords than perhaps they otherwise would. Maybe there's an unspoken threat here, "things get broken, , . constitutional arrangements can get altered, know what I mean."

[00:19:17] Ruth Fox: I mean, Lord True, he said, "I beseech the House to appreciate what I offered inside and outside this chamber", so clearly hinting that there have been private discussions about this, was basically a refreshment and renewal of the convention surrounding the House of Lords and the relations between the Commons and the Lords.

[00:19:34] And he talked about going beyond the Salisbury Doctrine, which was made for the old hereditary house. Earl Kinnoull, if you remember, we had on the podcast, uh, in the Summer, talking about this, he also said there is scope for renewing, refreshing the Salisbury Addison Convention. But at the end of the day, from the government's perspective, yes, this was in their manifesto. So it's going to be very, very difficult for the House of Lords. They can make life difficult. They can spin out the amount of time that's spent scrutinising this bill. But the idea that it's going to be opposed and given that the Commons supported it with such an overwhelming majority, given, obviously, Labour's inbuilt majority in the Commons, the idea that the House of Lords is going to reject it, that's for the birds.

[00:20:14] But what they are trying to use this debate for, I think, is to flesh out the sort of broader arguments about what kind of House, we should have. And this debate about whether conventions need to be reviewed, refreshed, is part of that. But it was also interesting that there was a lot of focus on, if we're going to abolish the hereditary peerage, fine, but what you are then going to replace it with is a house which beholden to appointments by the Prime Minister, and what's worse? And some were making the argument that if you have appointments through the hereditary peerage, or you have appointments through the Prime Minister, well appointments to the hereditary peerage are more independent and more detached.

[00:20:53] Um, which, up to a point Lord Copper.

[00:20:56] Mark D'Arcy: Up to a point Lord Copper, but it tends to come from a certain section of society and it tends to embody a certain idea of Parliament that maybe isn't quite what it used to be in terms of relevance.

[00:21:06] Ruth Fox: And that was the argument put forward by the proponents of the bill.

[00:21:09] Look, can you really defend a scenario in which 10 percent of the seats in the chamber of our legislature basically are determined by dint of birth?

[00:21:17] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, who's descended from one of the mistresses of Charles II or something like that. Yeah, if you were writing a constitution on a blank sheet of parchment, you would never come up with the arrangements that we've got.

[00:21:27] They're an accident, and they're an accident that the government has now committed to the electorate that it will tidy up, and they're now in the process of tidying it up. And there have been some, frankly, eccentric speeches made in this Second Reading debate. A very good place to look for those who want a few fragments of them is the Twitter feed of the great Esther Webber, who made her name as a Westminster journalist, chronicling the more baroque effusions of the House of Lords.

[00:21:50] And she quoted a number of them. There was one pair who was saying, well, you know, in future he won't be able to make game pies for the staff of the House of Lords at Christmas. There was another one who talked about the ancient right to appeal to the barony against an oppressive government and what will the rioters of last summer do now if they haven't got hereditary peers to go to with their grievances.

[00:22:09] Ruth Fox: Yeah.

[00:22:09] Mark D'Arcy: Which didn't strike me as the most plausible line of argument I've ever heard, I've got to say.

[00:22:13] Ruth Fox: No, I mean I think the argument that this was going to have some kind of democratic appeal to the wider public was a bit limited. But what was interesting is the number of them, particularly on the Conservative benches, were sort of making an appeal that almost well, we should return to the Grocott bill.

[00:22:27] Better to have the Grocott bill. Now, this was the bill to abolish by-elections for hereditary peers that Lord Grocott tried to bring in, I think, five times in the last eight years as a Private Member's Bill, which a certain number of hereditaries and Conservative Peers filibustered endlessly to prevent.

[00:22:40] Mark D'Arcy: Yes, Lord Caithness and Lord Trefgarne, I think, were the main players in that.

[00:22:47] Ruth Fox: You had some peers sort of arguing, no, the government bill goes beyond that, and we don't need to go that far. Let's have the Grocott Bill, and I sort of thought, well, that's chutzpah, I think, in making that argument. And, you know, it was dismissed quite clearly by Baroness Smith.

[00:23:01] Mark D'Arcy: And Bruce Grocott himself, the Labour peer, former Labour MP, former Parliamentary Private Secretary to Tony Blair back in the day, dismissed some of this in quite brutal terms.

[00:23:10] Because the justification for blocking his bill had been, oh well it was always promised that there would be some wider reform before the final hereditary tranche was removed. And he turned around and said, no. No, this wasn't a deal. This was blackmail. This was the only way we could get our original reform of the House of Lords back in the Tony Blair years done and we were forced to concede it but that doesn't mean we like that arrangement

[00:23:35] Ruth Fox: And that was because of the numbers because the Conservatives had such a huge inbuilt majority at the time that they, Labour, feared that it wouldn't be able to get its legislative programme through

[00:23:42] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, and indeed it wasn't just that that particular bill would be blocked but lots and lots of other measures that the Labour government was urgently trying to get through back in 1997-1998 would just have been forever stopped by filibustering and blocking tactics.

[00:23:56] Ruth Fox: Another argument that was made was the general unfairness that quite a lot of the hereditaries have a function and role in the House of Lords. They're very active. They spend a lot of time there. One of them is a deputy speaker. They serve on committees and so on.

[00:24:09] Mark D'Arcy: Well, Lord Kinoull, who we spoke to back in the Summer, of course, is a hereditary peer.

[00:24:12] He's also the Convener of the Crossbenchers.

[00:24:14] Ruth Fox: Yeah, and this sort of argument that it's unfair for the Labour Party to essentially be whipping this vote, bringing in Peers who hardly ever turn up to vote, to oust members of the House who do do a lot of the hard yards, the work, the dedicated scrutiny week in, week out, and you know, how, how bad this is.

[00:24:33] And yeah, there is an argument that that's true, that, you know, the nature of this reform is hard edged in that it will remove some of the members who have been dedicated scrutineers.

[00:24:42] Mark D'Arcy: Well there was that wonderful phrase that I think Lord True used earlier, that the assassination will be up close and personal. People will be going through the division lobbies with Peers who are going to be removed, and they'll be able to see the whites of their eyes, as it were.

[00:24:56] Ruth Fox: And the point that you were making about, well, the members will be sort of ousted, they won't be able to have their place in the House, and Baroness Smith, I think it was, who said, well, what do you think happens in the House of Commons? I mean, I'm paraphrasing somewhat, but the same applies in the House of Commons, you know.

[00:25:08] Mark D'Arcy: There are quite a few ex Conservative MPs out there whose eviction from the House of Commons was A, unexpected and B, very painful, but that's show business. Yeah.

[00:25:17] Ruth Fox: So we'll have to see what happens, um, once it goes into committee and we'll see what sort of amendments emerge, you know, probing the government about any scope for concessions.

[00:25:26] Mark D'Arcy: I think that's a subject we'll have to return to actually because I think, first of all, there is the question of whether the government will do some slight softening of the bill to ease its way through, but there's also the question of whether the opponents of the bill really are going to play hardball and use every possible parliamentary tactic to slow things right down.

[00:25:43] We've already seen some very slow movement as we were talking about last week on the football governance bill. It's not unheard of for foot dragging tactics to be employed on a very wide scale when an opposition is very unhappy. It's one of the few levers they have.

[00:25:57] Ruth Fox: Yeah, I think, I think two things emerged from the debate that particularly took my eye.

[00:26:01] One is this idea that the Peers will be removed at the end of the Session when this Act is given Royal Assent. So, the argument being we don't know when the end of the Session will be, but within the next year or so. And some suggesting that actually it should be at the end of the Parliament rather than the end of the Session.

[00:26:17] So there might be a little bit of give there.

[00:26:19] Mark D'Arcy: There's a bit of wiggle room.

[00:26:20] Ruth Fox: But the other one is that there was quite a lot of pressure being applied to Baroness Smith to say whether or not the government would grant life peerages to some of the hereditary peers that would be losing their seats. Now there has clearly been discussions going on about this and hints, more than hints, I think behind the scenes that they they would and there were some suggestions of that in the Commons debate.

[00:26:42] Mark D'Arcy: You do, is that even legal? I mean you're basically offering people a peerage if they vote a certain way. In fact they've already got one but are about to lose it.

[00:26:49] Ruth Fox: And I think that's the challenge because quite clearly the government couldn't explicitly offer a live peerage in exchange for passing the bill, but if they are going, as we know that is likely to happen in the not too distant future, there are going to be announcements of new appointments.

[00:27:05] The question is how many the Conservatives and the crossbenchers would be offered from among the hereditary peerage to keep them on, like Earl Kinnoull, for example, although I think he, already has a life peerage, so I think he may be staying, but, but there are others that they point to and say that they're stalwarts of the House, strong workers, they do a lot of the good scrutiny, we need to keep them in, will they be offered a life peerage?

[00:27:27] And there are some who are saying, well, look, we need clarity on this before the bill goes through and some saying, no, you don't, that comes afterwards. But then how long do you wait afterwards before the hereditaries would be offered those life peerages? And would there be a gap in service as it were? So there are some, you know, difficult constitutional questions and political questions to be worked out.

[00:27:47] Mark D'Arcy: One of the things I should add, to stir into this discussion, is that there is increasing talk that the current parliamentary Session may be a bit longer than usual and there might not be a prorogation of Parliament and a new King's Speech until maybe the spring of 2026.

[00:28:02] Ruth Fox: Yeah, so we had the King's Speech in, in late July, didn't we? So if it ran for roughly a year, which, It generally has been the norm, you'd expect it late summer, but we've had two, three Sessions in the last 15 years that have run more than a year, sometimes as long as two.

[00:28:16] Mark D'Arcy: There's two years at the start of the coalition years, 2010 to 2012.

[00:28:20] Ruth Fox: And I think 2017 to 19 I think ran, ran long as well.

[00:28:24] Mark D'Arcy: I have the post traumatic memories of that one.

[00:28:26] Ruth Fox: So, yeah, given the scale of the government's legislative programme and the sort of progress that's been made, and as you say, some of these bills start dragging their feet in the Lords, it could well require more time than the government would like.

[00:28:36] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. Well, Ruth, shall we take a break at this point? When we come back, we've got plenty more to talk about. It's back. The Intelligence and Security Committee is being reformed at last. The committee by which Parliament keeps an eye on the activities of Britain's spooks should be reconvening soon.

[00:28:52] Ruth Fox: See you in a minute.

[00:28:56] Mark, we're back. And, uh, one of the missing pieces in the scrutiny jigsaw has now been put in place this week. So we've got the appointments to the Intelligence and Security Committee, which we've talked about on the podcast a little bit before. We were waiting for those names. Five months after the general election, we've now got them.

[00:29:14] And, uh, an interesting list.

[00:29:17] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, the Intelligence and Security Committee is not a select committee like all the other select committees. It's not like, for example, the Education Committee or the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee. It is appointed effectively by the Prime Minister. He puts nominations through to Parliament and they are formerly voted on.

[00:29:34] But it was a bit of a rubber stamp. There was even a short debate on the appointments, a very, very short debate on the appointments. But it is a committee that is chosen effectively by the various party machines. The Prime Minister has to approve the nominations, and that's because of the delicacy of the job.

[00:29:50] The intelligence services have to trust the people on this committee in order to be candid with them. And there was a period when Jeremy Corbyn was running the Labour Party where, frankly, they were a bit nervous about who might be appointed. In the end, the appointments to that committee were quite conventional figures who didn't frighten the intelligence horses.

[00:30:06] But the membership here has to be people who the intelligence services feel they can talk to with reasonable candour in order for the whole setup to work.

[00:30:15] Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean, the committee oversees essentially, like a departmental select committee, it oversees the policies, the expenditure, the operations of the agencies that make up our intelligence community.

[00:30:27] So the obvious ones people will be aware of MI5 and MI6. I mean, Mark, if you look outside the window from Hansard Towers here, you can, you can see both buildings. So MI5 and MI6. GCHQ. But actually, when you look at the list, it's quite a long one. It's Defense Intelligence, the National Cyber Force, the Joint Intelligence Organisation, the National Security Secretariat and so on.

[00:30:48] So it's some of the lesser known organs of the intelligence state come under its remit. And as you say, you know, they're dealing with very sensitive information. So six MPs and three Peers have been chosen this time.

[00:31:01] Mark D'Arcy: Licensed to scrutinise, as you said in the headlines.

[00:31:03] Ruth Fox: Yes, yes. And you know, they have to be trusted.

[00:31:06] They have to be approved by the Prime Minister, as you say. I think they have to sign the Official Secrets Act. They don't meet in Parliament. There's a special room, I think, in the Cabinet Office somewhere. A secure facility where they can meet and hold their discussions. Most of their sessions are not held in public, they're held in private. Very rarely they might hold a public session, but it's very much parliamentary scrutiny of the security state.

[00:31:31] Mark D'Arcy: And it's scrutiny leading, hopefully, to reassurance. Because the point of this is not so much that all the information is out there, but they're a group of people who know what's going on and can reassure their colleagues that it's okay, or indeed not.

[00:31:45] Ruth Fox: Yes, yeah. So sort of things that their remit covers, terrorism. So Islamist terrorism has been a big part of their work in recent years, but extreme right wing political, extreme left wing political terrorism. Situation in Northern Ireland in relation to terrorists has come under their remit, historically.

[00:32:02] Mark D'Arcy: The integrity of the political system as well. I think there have been concerns about foreign money seeping into British politics.

[00:32:09] Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean the threats to the state from state actors like China, Russia, Iran, I mean, I understand there's a report pending in relation to Iran that was done in the last Parliament. It's not yet published, I think. Cyber attacks come under their remit, the threat from both state and non-state actors operating to attack our cyber security.

[00:32:29] Mark D'Arcy: So this is all pretty existential stuff. That's very, very important indeed. And the committee has in the past taken evidence from Prime Ministers, but I think Theresa May was the last Prime Minister to give evidence. Obviously we've had a set of rather short lived Prime Ministers since then.

[00:32:44] So maybe there hasn't been a chance, but it's very important too, that the committee has the level of access that allows it to ask the right people the right questions.

[00:32:53] Ruth Fox: Yeah, so it's got access to expertise, it has its own secretariat, it can call in for evidence, both ministers, it can call in experts, academics, for example, who work on particular issues, whether it's cyber security or geopolitical issues, it can call in officials from the security agencies, right up to the top, to director level. And interestingly one of the issues that comes up is this question of what can they then publish? So if you remember at the beginning of the last Parliament there was quite a lot of controversy about the Russia report and whether this was going to be published.

[00:33:28] Mark D'Arcy: This is the report into whether or not the Russians had influenced basically the Brexit referendum

[00:33:32] Ruth Fox: Yeah, that was part of it and sort of wider questions about what is the Russian state doing in relation to Britain? And how is it trying to influence things? Both election processes and, and, and other things, and there was a lot of controversy about the length of time it took for that report to be published and the extent to which it was or was not redacted. And that's the other thing. So the committee will prepare its reports. It will submit them to the agencies for factual checks. They have a process whereby the agencies can ask for redactions of information if they think that it's going to undermine their security operations or, you know, their intelligence sources and so on. And then there's an internal process of back and forth if the committee thinks actually they haven't got a good case and they do want to publish the information.

[00:34:14] That can then mean that the head of the agencies of MI5 or MI6, for example, get called in to the committee to make their case. And ultimately the Prime Minister is the arbiter of this if there is a dispute. Eventually it has to be all cleared. The reports are not just published by Parliament, because the committee wants them to, they have to go through a clearance process through Number 10.

[00:34:36] And then once the report is published, the government will provide a response at some point. But there's been some concerns in the past about how slow sometimes the government's response can be.

[00:34:45] Mark D'Arcy: But it is still a relatively new mechanism. This was set up, I think, in the John Major years. And before that, of course, you were in an era when the government didn't even acknowledge the existence of the security services.

[00:34:58] If you go back to the Chris Mullin diaries when he took over the Home Affairs Select Committee while they were still in opposition in the, I think it was the early 90s, there is a hysterically funny account of him indicating that the Home Affairs Committee wanted to speak to the head of MI5 and eventually after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing and shouting and making noise about this issue, the committee was taken by car on a route where they clearly made a great effort to shake off any pursuers into a cellar, up a lift and ushered into the presence. And I think perhaps both sides were then surprised by how well they managed to communicate with each other and it wasn't nearly the adversarial encounter that I think perhaps both had expected

[00:35:42] Ruth Fox: Yeah, and you know the heads of MI5 and MI6 didn't used to appear in public, but now they do. They give speeches, do interviews. So the argument that how accountable and how publicly accountable can they be to Parliament, I think is a live one that will need further discussion. But I think what's interesting about the committee this time is, I had a quick look at the past membership of the committee and it's not that experienced in comparison to some. I mean, on previous committees, you've had former Attorneys General, former Secretaries of State for Defence.

[00:36:14] Mark D'Arcy: Former Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind chaired it for a while, as I recall.

[00:36:16] Ruth Fox: Yeah, it doesn't quite have that. So Peter Dowd, longstanding Labour MP, served as a shadow whip, a shadow treasury minister.

[00:36:26] But hasn't got, as far as I can tell, a deep background in national security, defence, intelligence issues. Jessica Morden, again, long standing Labour MP, senior, she's now chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party, but again, not with a background in the foreign and defence and intelligence issues. One who has is Derek Twigg. Labour MP who served in the Blair years as a junior defence minister, veterans minister.

[00:36:48] Mark D'Arcy: Veterans, veterans minister for two years ending in 2008 I think. Actually the conservative side of the committee is a bit beefier. Yeah. In those terms when you've got John Hayes in there, Sir John Hayes who, who was security minister for a couple of years under David Cameron who had a whole series of mid ranking posts in subsequent Conservative governments. He was a bit of a utility midfielder. You might say you've got Jeremy Wright, who's a former Culture Secretary. Before that was Attorney General. So you've got a little bit more ministerial level, heavy metal on the Conservative side and the weightier figures almost seem to be in the House of Lords, Admiral West, Lord West of Spithead, who was a security minister as well, a Labour one.

[00:37:26] Ruth Fox: And he's been on the committee before.

[00:37:27] Mark D'Arcy: Who's a stalwart of the committee for quite a long time is there, for example. But the assumption is that this, this is a committee that because it basically exists to reassure the House of Commons, has to be chaired by someone from the House of Commons. And you look at that list, we don't know who the chair is as we're recording this.

[00:37:41] Ruth Fox: No, so they will choose amongst their number, is my understanding. If you remember in the previous Parliament there was a bit of a kerfuffle, yeah, because the government tried to fix it, I think for Chris Grayling.

[00:37:51] Mark D'Arcy: They tried to put Chris Grayling in, the former Transport Secretary, former Lord Chancellor, etc. And the committee in the end voted for the Conservative backbencher, Julian Lewis, who was, as a result, temporarily suspended from the Conservative whip, if you remember, so a bit of game playing went on there. They elect from themselves, but looking at that list, I'd guess Derek Twigg as the ex minister is the one?

[00:38:12] Ruth Fox: I would have thought so, on the assumption that it will go to a Labour member, but we'll have to see. I mean, interestingly, there's six MPs and three peers. Historically it's tended to be seven and two and only two from the Lords. I thought one of the appointments on the Lord's side is interesting.

[00:38:27] Baroness Brown of Cambridge, who is the chair of the Science and Technology Committee in the Lords, and then making up the number, well not making up the numbers, but the final member of the committee is Richard Foord the Liberal Dem MP. So, the SNP previously have had a seat on it because they were the third party in the Commons, but it's, uh, it's now gone to the Lib Dems.

[00:38:45] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, Richard Foord, former army officer, one of the Lib Dem MPs in the previous parliament, and of course there weren't all that many of them in the previous parliament, so you're getting a bit of a reward for seniority there. It's a committee that will have to demonstrate that it has the ability. to reassure the House of Commons that everything is as it should be in the necessarily shadowy world of the security services. And it's not as heavyweight as previous incarnations of that committee have been. I think it's as much as we can say on it.

[00:39:12] Ruth Fox: No, and thing to look out for is what are they going to be prioritising for their inquiries? So I said that there is this outstanding report apparently on, on Iran. There's a report that hasn't yet been published, I think, on cloud technologies, which goes to the cyber security brief.

[00:39:25] But given the state of play in the world, given the geo political situation, um

[00:39:29] Mark D'Arcy: It's a target rich environment for inquiries by this committee.

[00:39:32] Ruth Fox: It is, so, uh

[00:39:34] Mark D'Arcy: I'll be aiming to provide a quantum of solace.

[00:39:36] Ruth Fox: Oh dear, Mark.

[00:39:39] Mark D'Arcy: Well, another organ of Parliament that is swinging back into action is the Liaison Committee.

[00:39:44] And this used to be a very prosaic, little seen, little mentioned bit of parliamentary admin. This is the super committee as it's now referred to frequently of all the select committee chairs in the House of Commons. And once upon a time it did things like allocate travel money for select committees who wanted to go on trips and things like that, sort of internal housekeeping tasks like that.

[00:40:05] But then it became the committee that got to question the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister never wanted to get into the business of appearing before every departmental select committee. And so, um, previously, Prime Ministers were always questioned only on the floor of the House of Commons, and then Tony Blair conceded the idea that he could go in front of the Liaison Committee and be questioned by these very senior MPs who chair the select committees, and that's where it suddenly acquired a profile, and lo and behold, Sir Keir Starmer will be appearing before the Liaison Committee in the coming week.

[00:40:36] Ruth Fox: Yeah, so we're expecting next Thursday. So actually the day we will be recording the podcast, Mark. And we haven't got the time yet, so I don't know whether we're going to be able to see it, listen to it before we record. So we're waiting for that. But the other news is that Meg Hillier, the Labour MP, also Chair of the Treasury Committee, is going to be the Chair.

[00:40:54] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, Dame Meg is a very, very senior operator in the select committee world. She was Chair of the Public Accounts Committee in the previous Parliament. She's made a lateral move to the Treasury Select Committee this time around. The Public Accounts Committee has to be chaired by an opposition member.

[00:41:09] And now she's got this role as well, so she will be chairing the questioning of Sir Keir Starmer when he appears. One of the things that's always a bit of a bone of contention about this is it's, it's all well and good that the Prime Minister should submit themselves to expert questioning, but is the questioning any good? The scale by which my colleagues in the parliamentary journalism sector tend to judge these things is whether an encounter leaves blood on the carpet, and so far it never really has.

[00:41:35] Ruth Fox: No, and one of the problems with that I think is the structure. So the Prime Minister generally appears three times a year. And there's always negotiations back and forth when that will be. It's often the last day before a recess.

[00:41:47] Mark D'Arcy: So some people are mentally halfway out the door.

[00:41:52] Ruth Fox: Part of the problem is the numbers.

[00:41:53] I mean, there's 36 select committee chairs that form the Liaison Committee. There isn't a table big enough to seat them all round it.

[00:42:00] Mark D'Arcy: So they did at one point try to have them all in there.

[00:42:03] Ruth Fox: I mean, it's a nonsense. So they have to, choose their themes for each session and then they have the relevant chairs have to be there to ask the questions and they each get, you know, I don't know, two or three. And part of the problem is inevitably that you can't follow up in sufficient detail afterwards if the Prime Minister bats away, much as you can do on a normal select committee, if you bat away the first couple of questions, the chances are you're going to survive. The interesting thing is going to be what are they going to pick for this session? What are the themes? I mean, you've got to think, given the international situation, that that will feature.

[00:42:37] So we might see the Foreign Affairs Committee, the Defense Committee, for example. but what other issues might they pick up, you know, civil service reform?

[00:42:45] Mark D'Arcy: It might be, but I'm putting my money on something to do with farmers and in particular the inheritance tax that's now going to be levied on farmers estates.

[00:42:55] That's an interesting one because the person who would presumably be leading that set of questioning is the chair of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee, the Liberal Democrat Alastair Carmichael, very senior figure in the Lib Dems. He was a cabinet minister during the coalition and so forth, and he's in the happy position of being able to attack Labour on imposing this new inheritance tax, while at the same time not having to defend the Conservative trade deals with Australia and New Zealand that farmers say were very bad for them, so he's kind of got a bit of a license to have a go from any direction he chooses.

[00:43:30] Ruth Fox: And of course the financial situation is so central to everything that the government can or can't do. And of course Meg Hillier is herself Chair of the Treasury Committee, so she's got a dual hatted role and will be appearing at all the committee sessions, so you can expect some questions on the finances.

[00:43:45] But I mentioned the civil service. Just going back to that, will there be questions, for example, from the Public Administration Committee about government's, you know, missions, the way it's trying to restructure the central state? Will there be questions about the Prime Minister's recent comments about the civil service and the bureaucracy and enjoying tepid baths?

[00:44:06] Mark D'Arcy: And also, will there be questions about the demise of the Prime Minister's short lived Chief of Staff, Sue Gray? Because Simon Hoare, the Conservative MP, is the Chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, so this is very much his area. So, given half a chance, I'm sure he will be very much interested in asking a few questions about that rather embarrassing little interlude in the early history of the current government.

[00:44:29] Ruth Fox: Yeah, and the other one, I suppose, will there be questions on immigration? Um, from the Home Affairs Committee.

[00:44:34] Mark D'Arcy: They can only do so many, and typically they have about three sort of segments of questioning on different subjects, and the people in the room to make sure they can ask those questions. So they can't do everything.

[00:44:46] Will it be chosen to give the Prime Minister a relatively easy ride in his first outing, or will the Opposition be insisting on getting in there with the really tough areas? I know what I'd expect them to do.

[00:44:55] Ruth Fox: Well, one of the things we've asked is, to what extent will the new chairs of select committees on the Labour side, for example, of which there are so many and so many Labour members on those committees, to what extent are they really going to scrutinise their own government?

[00:45:06] And it was interesting to see this week, the chair of the Justice Committee, Andy Slaughter, long standing, MP for the Labour Party making a point of order, basically complaining to the Deputy Speaker that the Secretary of State for Justice had not come to the House to make a statement about prison reforms.

[00:45:23] Complaining that the Minister was out there on the, in the press, there was a written statement I think, but that she hadn't actually come to the House of Commons chamber to be questioned and he was basically asking what can be done. So it was an interesting sort of example where a senior backbencher, chair of a select committee on the government's own side, was actually, not very chuffed about the fact that the Minister hadn't made themselves accountable in the house.

[00:45:46] Mark D'Arcy: And if these sessions are to be any good, they really have to be made good by the Labour members, because there really aren't that many Conservative select committee chairs, still fewer Lib Dems.

[00:45:56] So it's got to come from MPs on the government side, if there is going to be genuinely tough questioning of the Prime Minister, and sustained tough questioning. You know, they've got to, almost tag-team it, someone's got to pick up the lines of questioning when another of their colleagues has run out of time.

[00:46:12] Ruth Fox: Yeah, and I think going to your earlier point about is the quality of questioning good enough, you know, the media being very critical of it, one of the issues is, if the Prime Minister is under some pressure, are the select committee chairs willing to let that play out and give whoever the committee member is that's putting them under a bit of pressure time to develop the line of questioning?

[00:46:32] Or are they determined to get their moment in the sun and pursue their own particular committee report or inquiry or recommendations? And that's one of the problems.

[00:46:42] Mark D'Arcy: I'm haunted by one of the very early Liaison Committee meetings where Tony Blair was in front of the committee. And just as things were getting interesting on some area of difficulty for the government at the time, I can't even remember what it was, time was up for the particular questioner.

[00:46:57] And the next questioner was a guy called David Tredinnick, who was chair of, I think, the catering committee or something, who was a very low key member on the Conservative benches who was principally known for his interest in homeopathic medicine. And so there they were fighting out some great political question of the day.

[00:47:14] And then it was David Tredinnick's turn and he asked Tony Blair about homeopathy and Tony Blair literally rolled his eyes.

[00:47:21] Ruth Fox: Yes. Well, hopefully it will go better next week.

[00:47:24] Mark D'Arcy: Those days have gone noticeably mercifully.

[00:47:25] Ruth Fox: Yes, I think it will be tougher scrutiny than that, but it is a challenge for the committee.

[00:47:30] And also an interesting challenge for Keir Starmer, because he won't have faced, you know, he's been in front of select committees as shadow minister and so on, but he won't have faced the chairs of the select committees in quite this way, and, you know, there's quite a bit of experience around that table with some of the select committee chairs. So it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.

[00:47:48] Mark D'Arcy: And how much friendly fire there is. And with that, Ruth, I think time to leave it. We'll be back with the final edition of the podcast for 2024 next week. But in the meantime, keep an eye out for a special edition.

[00:47:59] We've been talking to Sam Freedman, the former policy advisor to Michael Gove in the Department for Education, who's written a book called Failed State, which is a devastating account of the way Britain is governed and the part that Parliament plays or perhaps doesn't play in the government of the country.

[00:48:14] Sam Freedman: When I was in education, we used to do these kind of practices for select committees where we'd all, me and the other advisors and officials would sit around the table and sort of bombard Michael Gove with all the difficult questions we could think of. I think what was frustrating about it was we were always much more effective at doing it than the select committee.

[00:48:31] Ruth Fox: So that'll be out later in the week. Look out for it in your podcast feed. And otherwise, Mark, I will see you next week.

[00:48:39] Mark D'Arcy: See you then. Bye bye.

[00:48:40] Ruth Fox: Bye.

[00:48:47] 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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[00:49:05] Ruth Fox: Mark, tell us more about the algorithm.

[00:49:07] Mark D'Arcy: 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.

[00:49:13] Ruth Fox: 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.

[00:49:23] Mark D'Arcy: We'll be discussing them in future episodes, including our special Urgent Questions editions dedicated to what you want to know about Parliament.

[00:49:30] Ruth Fox: 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.

[00:49:38] Intro: 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 at Hansard Society.