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Lord McNally: My Lords, it has become abundantly clear that this is a matter of individual opinion. I am
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pleased to hear about the freedom on the Labour Benches. It was not quite so clear at four o'clock on a Friday morning a short time ago, but there we go.
Lord McNally: You independent-minded lot! My Lords, we are looking for some independent minds today. As the noble Lord, Lord Rodgers, rightly said, this is not just a matter of moving business to another day. There are much wider issues to be thought about. Ever since I have been in this place, I have been naturally suspicious of arguments for tidiness and good order in relation to how Parliament works.
The family-friendly arguments do not carry much weight with me. I have looked at what has happened in another place and, like Nye Bevan, I ask why we should look into a crystal ball when we can read the open book. Many of the family-friendly reforms in the other place have taken away a lot of its life, vibrancy and effectiveness. I was told that MPs do not now like three-line Whips on Wednesdays because they ruin two weekends, but I am not sure that I would go as far as that. However, if one goes to the other place and looks at the empty rooms and the echoing Chamber then one must worry about the operation of—I shall be generous to the noble Baroness, Lady Lockwood—a three-day week. But that is what we are proposing.
Parliament should be a little bit messy and unpredictable. Ministers should not be able to rely on certainty. Too much certainty breeds complacency and puts too much power in the hands of an already powerful Executive. This House won great plaudits for its 36-hour Thursday.
If we put three days of Government business in sequence, it puts a strain on the resources of Opposition parties to marshal their teams and do business. The Wednesday breather is also an opportunity to regroup and scrutinise.
I know the attractiveness of the neatness of this arrangement for the out-of-towners, but we would be sacrificing effectiveness for convenience. We are an anachronism, but an anachronism that works. We work in both senses of the word. We work very hard—we are the most hard working advisory and revising Chamber in the world—and, as we have shown in recent weeks, we are, if not the only, certainly the most effective check and balance to the over-mighty Executive that apparently still exists in our constitution.
The noble Baroness, Lady Lockwood, offers the House neatness, good order and long weekends. The noble Lord, Lord Rodgers, offers a lifeline to the awkward squad on all Benches. I believe that this move would weaken the authority of the House and undermine our reputation. If the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Rodgers, is defeated, I would rather have the opportunity to consider the idea of the noble Lord, Lord Williamson, of a general debate on Monday. It has better merit than the idea put forward by the noble Baroness, Lady Lockwood.
Let me put something into the minds of the serried ranks opposite. John Major said, towards the end of the Conservatives' 17 years in power that, one day, a
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leader of the Conservative Party would have the duty of taking his party back into opposition. That applied to the Conservative Party; it will apply to the Labour Party. In making these decisions, noble Lords should make them on behalf of an effective Parliament, not for the convenience of the Whips. We shall see where they go.
I have accepted various changes in this House, such as referrals to Grand Committees, but if we want to come to this House to do the job of a parliamentarian, not merely that of a party supporter, we must guard extremely jealously the capacity to cause inconvenience. Our present structure does that. Reform as proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Lockwood, would be to the convenience of the Executive and to the weakening of this House.
Lord Lipsey: My Lords, I do not think any noble Lord on these Benches will be surprised that the main opposition to the proposal tabled by my noble friend Lady Lockwood comes from the Liberal Democrat Benches. They have put her suggestion down to its convenience to government, but they are not likely to have any experience of that and we would not expect that argument to weigh much with them. As a matter of fact, it does not weight much with me. I find it hard to see why the convenience of government is greatly increased. As my noble friend Lady Lockwood said, this House has, over time, become hugely more effective in scrutinising the Executive. It is extraordinary to believe for a moment that a switch from Wednesday to Thursday would affect that fundamental reality. It would not affect it in the least.
I am moved to rise by the remark of the noble Lord, Lord Rodgers, about long, long weekends. I am proud to say that the noble Lord has been a friend of mine for a very long time. But those of us who have the pleasure of having homes in London and who can go home to our family at night should be a little chary of prescribing a more bitter mechanism and a more bitter lifestyle to those who always have to go to some not very pleasant little hotel on a Wednesday night. That does not improve the role that they can play in this House and it is not something that we should dismiss lightly.
On the noble Lord's phrase, "the long, long weekend", there are Members of this House for whom that is true, particularly the older Members. I do not refer to my noble friend Lady Lockwood, who is a mere stripling in this place, as am older Member—
Baroness Lockwood: My Lords, I am probably one of the oldest Members of the House, but, unlike what my noble friend was suggesting, my weekends are very busy doing things in Yorkshire which enable me to contribute to this House.
Lord Lipsey: My Lords, I quite agree with my noble friend as what she said goes absolutely to my point. I thought that my noble friend could not be much above my age of 56, but it appears that I have misassessed that.
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Like most Members of this House, I have a large portfolio of jobs. Some of them are paid, because this House does not provide an income sufficient to support someone with a family who does not have any resources of his own, and some are unpaid. I do not have a long, long weekend. I devote parts of the weekend directly to the affairs of this House and parts to affairs outside this House that bear on my work here and to the contribution that I hope to make to its debates.
I shall give an example that might appeal to the noble Lord, Lord Rodgers, because he is a distinguished former chairman of the Advertising Standards Authority. It has a two-day "away day" each year. I cannot attend that because I do not have two successive days for an away day at the times when it is possible for that authority to meet. I cannot devote two days solely to important meetings outside the House. It is not a matter of my personal convenience but of discharging and balancing the extraordinarily difficult, conflicting pressures on time. I do not think that there is anything ignoble in taking those into account in making the decision today. I very much hope that the House will vote to make the change.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire: My Lords, we are voting on a personal not a party standing. I strongly support the amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Lockwood. I support it for two strong reasons: first, when I was recruited to the House, I was assured that it was a part-time House. It remains a part-time House, and I have continued to earn a salary and—thank goodness—a pension, to which I shall shortly be entitled—since I entered it. Secondly, it is very important that this place should be regionally diverse. To be regionally diverse, we have to ensure that it is possible for new Members—we will recruit new members in the next two or three years—to continue to work and live with their family outside London as well as contributing to the House.
I was extremely lucky when I was appointed to the House. Three months earlier, I had been offered a job at a university in London—10 minutes from the House. It has therefore been possible for 10 years to continue teaching my students, sometimes seeing them here and occasionally—I hope no one has noticed—marking essays on the Bench; and thus to combine the two. If I had still been at the University of Manchester, where I was first employed, or perhaps at the University of Hull, which has contributed a remarkably large number of people to the House, it would be much more difficult.
I realised as soon as I came here that some of the best Members of the House had been or remained members of county councils—in Lancashire, north Yorkshire, as well as in Suffolk and Sussex. It is important that we continue to attract such people, who bring a range of political experience that enriches what we do.
There is a danger of a romantic view about the Wednesday debates. I took part on the second debate on 16 March. Throughout that debate, there were two
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people on the Conservative Benches: a Front-Bench spokesman and a Whip. It was a Wednesday. Would there have been more if it had been a Thursday? There certainly could not have been fewer.
The current distribution of Members of the House is not as diverse as it might be. I have spent some time over the past two or three days trying to organise visits for Members to Yorkshire, the north-west and the north-east during what have been kindly described as the "county council elections" on 5 May. I have been struck by the number of times that I have had to ask people to travel up from the south-east to the north, rather than being able to draw on people who come from the area. That is not the people who live outside London. I was accused by a member of my own group in one of our early discussions of belonging to the Tuscan Yorkshire tendency. Many of us have families who work some distance away. We also like to spend a little time with them at weekends.
One Member who stayed until Friday evening during the great confrontation between the two Houses remarked to me in the course of rearranging her life that it took her seven and a half hours to travel back from the House to her home in Scotland and that the decision therefore to stay on from a Thursday afternoon to a Friday evening was not one that she wished to take lightly. Nevertheless, I want such people to remain active Members of the House and to be attracted to the House. For those reasons, I shall support the amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Lockwood.
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