Parliamentary Standards Bill

My Lords, I thought she had. She will have an opportunity, as she gets a second chance to speak which is not available to the rest of us. Given what has been going on in the other place, albeit by a minority of Members, as the noble Lord, Lord MacGregor, has pointed out, the Government need to act and to introduce appropriate legislation as quickly as possible. I, for one, certainly support the Government in that. However, beyond that, if there had been deals in the other place between the Government and the Opposition so that the Bill passed there with a minimum of debate, that is their business. Of course, it becomes our business when it affects how we deal with the Bill. There is a paradox. Recently your Lordships’ Constitution Committee published a report on the fast-tracking of legislation, to which the Leader of your Lordships' House and the Deputy Leader of the other place gave excellent evidence. The paradox is that what they said then does not remotely match up to what is being done now and is in conflict with the Constitution Committee’s report on that subject. What is being proposed makes it impossible for your Lordships’ Constitution Committee to do the job assigned to it by your Lordships when the committee was set up. One can quote various paragraphs from the report but my favourite is the absolutely stark statement in paragraph 9: ""The way policy making has been rushed, the lack of public consultation and the limited opportunities given to Parliament to scrutinise the Bill all, in our view, fail to meet the minimum requirements of constitutional acceptability"." Nothing could be plainer than that and nothing can guide us more clearly to what is our duty. One would have thought that the Leader of the House would immediately have accepted the view of a major committee like the Constitution Committee, which has expressed its view in such a forthright way. We would have expected the usual channels—I emphasise "the usual channels"—to have assisted us but there has been complete silence from the usual channels, as far as I understand it, in accepting the peculiar set of accelerated arrangements that have come forward. Why are not the usual channels defending the way in which this House behaves? Your Lordships’ Constitution Committee published a second report this afternoon and I commend it to your Lordships because it contains very good detailed examples of precisely the areas in which the detailed scrutiny must take place—I use the word "must", not "might". The Constitution Committee and your Lordships’ House must be allowed to do the job of scrutiny properly. It is clear to me that we would do it in a way which makes it absolutely certain that the legislation will be passed. We do not seek to destroy the legislation but it seems to me—this is where I disagree with my noble friend the Leader of the House—that October is soon enough to get this Bill on the statute book. It would be better than "soon enough" as we would end up with a much better piece of legislation. My second worry is that the gossip around your Lordships' House is that the deal or the stitch-up—a better expression—between the main parties, or rather between the leaders of the main parties, is that the Opposition have been instructed to nod through the Bill. I have heard that from at least one very senior member of the Opposition Front Bench. That means that with all the time in the world the Opposition leadership would devote none of its efforts to scrutiny at all.