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

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

Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy. And coming up this week,

Ruth Fox: Rachel Reeves survives her Budget ordeal. But what happens when the cheers of Labour MPs fade away?

Mark D'Arcy: It's a process, not an event, but is Parliament really across the government's attempt to reset relations with the EU?

Ruth Fox: And count them. 10 more days of debate are announced for the assisted dying bill.

Mark D'Arcy: But first Ruth. Budget Day. It's not just the biggest event of the week. It's one of the biggest events of the whole parliamentary calendar. The dramatic moment when the Chancellor [00:01:00] comes to Parliament and announces what they're gonna do with taxes, with spending, and usually an enormous swathe of policy announcements are kind of subsidiary to the main tax and spend announcements as well.

Gordon Brown was an absolute master of this. He would descend like Jove from his throne on Mount Olympus to the floor of the Commons to assert total command over the whole government. There would be little aside about my Right Honorable friend, the Secretary of State for Education, will be saying more about this later, making it clear just who the number one, at least on domestic policy, was in the Tony Blair years.

So Gordon Brown was awesome at it. George Osborne was quite an effective performer at it. Rachel Reeves, where would you put her in the kind of Richter scale of Chancellors?

Ruth Fox: Probably not at that level. But on the other hand, she had an experience that no other Chancellor has had in discovering that as she sat through PMQs waiting to deliver the Budget speech, and of course, we all had seen so much of what we thought was gonna be in the Budget announced to the media. But I suspect the [00:02:00] Chancellor did not expect as she was sitting in the House of Commons through PMQs waiting, no doubt, somewhat nervously to deliver the Budget speech that she was going to be essentially gazumped by the Office for Budget Responsibility and some poor soul at the OBR pressed publish on their website an hour and a half at least too early. And as a consequence, the OBR's report was released and you could see MPs across the House, I mean, they weren't focused on PMQs, they weren't even focused on her during the Budget speech that much. They were scrolling through their phones, picking up all the information, and it did have a quite dramatic impact on the dynamics in the chamber.

Mark D'Arcy: Yes, indeed. I mean, the whole point of the secrecy around a Budget is that it is such a big theatrical announcement and there's usually lots of meat in there. And there are two people who were discombobulated by this. One was Rachel Reeves who had to begin her speech with a, not exactly an apology 'cause she wasn't responsible for the leak, but with a remark that this was pretty unfortunate.

Ruth Fox: Making clear that it was the OBR, not her.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, absolutely pointing the [00:03:00] finger of blame at the OBR and actually subsequently in the subsequent debate, quite a number of MPs I think were casting angry eyes at the OBR, and one of them, Liam Byrne, the chair of the Business Committee, was suggesting that maybe Richard Hughes its chair should resign or at least consider his position, which is I think shorthand for you should really go.

The other person who was discombobulated, but probably in a good way, was Kemi Badenoch because normally the opposition leader has to get up and respond to a vast body of complicated information that's been hurled at them with no notice in the Budget announcement. And there's normally a very complicated exercise where there's a team in the Leader of the Opposition's room going through the small print of the Budget documents that have just been released, and little pointers and suggestions are passed to the Leader of the Opposition on postcard size bits of cardboard as they're trying to make their speech and they have to fly by the seat of their pants and add in these bits and take out those bits as the advice keeps arriving from their team. Kemi Badenoch had a head start this time. Her team got to see [00:04:00] the gory details of the Budget well before they normally would, and that I think made her response to the Budget speech a lot easier.

This is normally the single toughest gig in the average parliamentary year, is to do that Leader of the Opposition response to a Budget, and so her team could breathe a sigh of relief and she had a slightly easier time of it than she otherwise would.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, in some ways made it easier, but on the other hand, the bar is also raised in terms of expectations, precisely because she had that early access to it.

But also, you know, how challenging it must be to sit on that front bench, juggling your papers, doing PMQs, as well as trying to field all the noises off from your shadow Chancellor sitting next to you and trying to amend your remarks that you've already pre-prepared for the Budget speech, trying to fit things in around them almost in real time, whilst also listening to the Chancellor.

So it is a huge, huge challenge. And, you know, there's been an issue with her performances at Prime Minister's Questions since she took office, and I think most people think she's improved her performances in recent weeks. [00:05:00] And she certainly hurdled that barrier this week on the Budget speech.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, absolutely. I mean, given the succession of open goals she's been presented with by the government, it would be amazing if she hadn't had a much higher success rate in recent weeks. But she certainly now I think, found a more consistent style. My thought about her speech in response to the Budget was that there was an awful lot of personal attacks on Rachel Reeves in it. I think this is me pearl clutching, to be honest, it's something I don't like and I think she's just a little bit too keen on calling people nasty names. But at the same time, that probably won't percolate into the few clips that people will see of this on the evening news or online.

Ruth Fox: I think you perhaps got that perception 'cause you sat through all of it.

Mark D'Arcy: I sat through all of it and there was an awful lot and as a, the word of the week for the Budget seems to be smorgasbord. There was a smorgasbord of bits of abuse that could be picked up by the broadcasters and put into a suitably, pungent package.

Ruth Fox: No, I can understand what you're saying. I'm not sure I agree though. I mean, every Chancellor and Leader of the [00:06:00] Opposition, when they give the Budget and respond to it, they've got an audience. And insofar as Rachel Reeves' audience was the bond markets and Labour MPs, Kemi Badenoch's is Conservative MPs to shore up her position.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, the joke floating round after the two speeches had been made was that, given the attacks on Rachel Reeves, Kemi Badenoch had made the second most unhappy person with Kemi Badenoch's speech after Rachel Reeves was probably her leadership rival, Robert Jenrick, the Shadow Justice Secretary.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, precisely. It's always a delicate balance how personal you get, but the reality is they've got Rachel Reeves in their sights with a big target on her back. Her poll ratings are terrible. She's been under attack on the Labour benches, as well, suggestions that she might have to go after the Budget.

We ourselves said her position is precarious if this Budget doesn't land well, which we'll come onto in a minute. And I think she's also, Rachel Reeves has also left herself open to those kinds of personal attacks by dint of the kind of media coverage she's attracted and possibly even actively [00:07:00] pursued in recent weeks profiles of herself, which in some ways, were not flattering, shall we say.

Mark D'Arcy: That's certainly true. As you say, one of the key audiences for Kemi Badenoch's speech was Conservative MPs, and they loved it. Job done there. And one of the striking things in Rachel Reeves' Budget speech was who she took a swipe at. She also went on to have a bit of a mocking lash at Nigel Farage. There's a mention of freezing Russian assets and several MPs pointed in the direction of Nigel Farage and Rachel Reeves laughed happily at that. And then she went on to have an attack on Zack Polanski, the Green leader, who's of course not even in Parliament. And I think this must be a historic first. The first time a Budget speech has name checked, a leader of the Green Party. His famous previous career as a hypnotherapist, during which he boasted that he could cause women to have larger breasts through the power of hypnosis caused a bit of merriment anyway, but I think the Greens will be quietly pleased that they're now important enough to be attacked in the Budget speech.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, it's probably the first [00:08:00] time, hard to think of anyone else. This was one area where, going back to what you were saying earlier, where there was a sort of a Gordon Brown-y element to her delivery that she name checked certain constituencies, she name checked certain MPs, where money that was clearly gonna be delivered for particular programs or projects of interest to their constituency mattered. And she was making that clear. And the other one that took my eye was that, when she announced more money for Scotland, she was very explicit in saying, as requested by Anas Sarwar.

Mark D'Arcy: The Leader of the Scottish Labour Party.

So a bit of naked politics intruding into the economics there, but never happened before, obviously.

Ruth Fox: Clearly not.

Mark D'Arcy: Rachel Reeves had to please both the Labour MPs behind her and the bond markets who would be reacting to what she said. And if the price of government borrowing had suddenly leapt as a result of what she had said, that would've put the skids under her big time.

But those are two audiences with quite different agendas who want quite different things. She [00:09:00] managed to balance both of them. It wasn't a vintage Budget speech by any means, but it did the job. So she and by extension, Sir Keir Starmer, because they are umbilically connected as Chancellor and Prime Minister both live to fight another day because of this.

And this might have been a day when both of them were thinking, ooh, the game's up. It didn't come to pass.

Ruth Fox: But the group that you haven't mentioned in terms of audiences is the rest of us. We the voters. From my perspective, you said smorgasbord, there are a range of, you know, hundreds of different measures, which in their own right may be justified and have merit.

But what does it add up to in terms of the big picture for the voters? For the people paying the taxes or receiving the spending?

Mark D'Arcy: You don't get a sort of Gordon Brownian sense of a grand master plan in anything like the same way. And you've gotta see how it does play with the voters. Maybe they'll think, blimey, after all the buildup, this isn't quite so bad as we thought. So maybe there'll be a small sense of relief, but I don't think senses of relief win you votes. They haven't been quite as nasty to us as they might have been [00:10:00] isn't a great sort of selling point for a political party.

Ruth Fox: And a Budget in which the spending is upfront and the tax increases are taking most effect at the end of the Parliament. Frankly, it's not credible, I don't think to suggest that in 2028-29, 2029-30.

Mark D'Arcy: When we are on the slope down to an election, they're gonna be cutting spending big time.

Ruth Fox: And raising taxes. I just can't see it. So those proposals will be refined, but at the end of the day, that's what the Government presented to the OBR. So that's what they have to assess. But debt is still rising. There's gonna be questions about whether or not targets are gonna be met. Government went into the general election saying growth was its number one priority. Not clear how this Budget really addresses growth. Again, there's no narrative there to underpin the growth agenda.

OBR has downgraded the growth forecast, said it couldn't price in the cost benefit analysis of the Employment Relations Bill, for example.

Mark D'Arcy: There was quite an interesting interview that Peter Kyle, the Business Secretary, gave on the Today Program a [00:11:00] while back in which he was talking about kind of the soft law that will follow the Employment Bill, the codes of practice and the guidance about how things will work and perhaps, and that may be where they offer a few bones to employers.

But what happens now at any rate is that there is a Finance Bill that will be published and that will have to be enacted. There will be resolutions, 101 Ways and Means resolutions, for MPs to pass to get the Budget moving. So there is parliamentary action here to follow, but what I don't get a sense of is that there's some sort of rebellion flashpoint in there where Labour MPs might rise up and remove a central pillar of the government strategy in the way they did over benefits a while back.

So there is a sense, I think, that the government's gonna get away with this at least at a parliamentary level and get its legislation through and live to fight another day.

Ruth Fox: Well, of course, one reason it will do that is because the government tabled an Income Tax Charge motion rather than an Amendment of the Law motion for the [00:12:00] Budget, which we discussed at length on last week's episode.

And the consequence of that is it narrows the scope for tabling amendments on the Finance Bill when it gets into committee. So nil points for the government ministers on that score. So, we'll see whether any MPs raise it in the coming days in the debate.

So as we are talking, Mark, the MPs are engaged in the second day of the Budget debate. There'll then be two next week, Monday and Tuesday of next week, 1st and 2nd of December. And then at the end of Tuesday's debate, MPs will have to approve the Ways and Means resolutions and as you say, 101 of them.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, I tried to think of a good 101 dalmatians joke to insert in this, you know, casting Rachel Reeves as Cruella de Ville or whatever.

But I couldn't quite make it work and it's probably not fair, anyways.

Ruth Fox: And probably we would lose some of our listeners at some point who don't know who Cruella de Ville is, but yes, these 101 resolutions will be the founding resolutions for the Finance Bill. Only the first Ways and Means motion is being debated over these four days and can be amended.[00:13:00]

All the others are put forthwith, without debate. They'll be voted on. Some of them individually, some of them en bloc. There won't be a vote on every one of them. There'll be the vote on the most sort of contentious ones. So there'll be sort of agreement behind the scenes about which ones they want to divide on.

And then I assume at the end of close of play on Tuesday, the Government will present the Finance Bill at First Reading. That usually happens immediately after the Ways and Means resolutions are passed. The Whip will read out the short title of the bill, and then they'll be asked, what day for Second Reading?

Now you may hear them say, "tomorrow", but tomorrow doesn't really mean tomorrow.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, tomorrow never comes, at least in this context.

Ruth Fox: So what basically "tomorrow" is, is a procedural device to list the bill on future business of the House papers. So tomorrow is a holding, a placeholder, and they'll confirm the date at a later time. They might give the date, but more often than not it's tomorrow.

Mark D'Arcy: What they have to do is have the debate within 30 sitting days, which could allow them, [00:14:00] quite honestly, to kick this well past Christmas. So debated in January sometime. And there's also another little deadline that's worth talking about in the process here.

There's a thing called a Provisional Collection of Taxes motion, which allows HM Revenue and Customs to start collecting the taxes at the new rates set before the Finance Bill has gone through, and I think they have seven months to get the legislation through. And, I suppose the doomsday scenario is if for some reason they couldn't get the legislation through then HMRC would have to give all the money back.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, absolutely. So the Provisional Collection of Taxes motion is moved at the end of the Chancellor's statement. That's sort of approved by the House on the nod, that gives you the legislative cover for the changes, as you say, that need to be implemented immediately and the changes to duties, for example, traditionally. That provision remains in place for seven months to give the government the time to get through all the Finance Bill stages. I mean, that very rarely needs that long, it's usually quicker, but you have got that time. But it is [00:15:00] invalidated, so you don't get seven months, if you don't get the Second Reading bill through in 30 sitting days.

So that's the timetable we'll be working to. And I guess in practice it could happen the last week before Christmas recess. So we've had the business statement for the next couple of weeks, so it doesn't appear there. So one assumes it could be the last week before recess, or it could be early in the New Year.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. In the meantime though, I think the government's anticipating that we will just be able to get this safely enacted. Now there doesn't seem to be any great sort of tripping point. There's no pasty tax or something like that from George Osborne's Omnishambles Budget of blessed memory. There doesn't seem to be anything like that that's immediately attracting a great wadge of opposition on the government backbenches.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. I mean, it survived the first 24 hours intact. There are questions being asked about what's happening with the digital services tax. There's questions about how schools budgets and special needs educational provision is gonna be dealt with, 'cause there's some provisions in there about it. There's concerns obviously about implementation of some of the more complex tax changes [00:16:00] around, for example, taxing of electric vehicles and so on. So there may still be problems to come down the line, but it survived that first 24 hours. But equally, she didn't have the traditional Budget day surprise. There was no measure in there, no white rabbit. There was no measure that had not been expected, of course, because it had been leaked so extensively to the press. And the interesting question is, going to your point earlier about whether the OBR chair might be under pressure to resign, in some ways it didn't actually have that much impact. It had a lot of impact on the Chamber, in the theatre of the Chamber, didn't really have an awful lot of impact in terms of the wider economic situation in the markets. If there had been white rabbits, if it hadn't been as leaked as it had been, presumably it might have had more impact and therefore the OBR might be under more pressure.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, apart from anything else, the chair of the OBR, Richard Hughes, is one of the early witnesses in front of the Treasury Select Committee in the coming week, and I would imagine he will get a bit of a grilling on exactly that point. How on earth did this happen in the first [00:17:00] place? I don't know if some miserable communications official is going to find their head put on a spike.

Ruth Fox: There's an inquiry underway, but suggestions that possibly an OBR official who lives abroad may have hit publish and forgotten the time zone difference. So we will see when it'll all no doubt come out in the wash, but he will have to give an explanation.

Mark D'Arcy: And of course there'll also be the by now pretty traditional collection of experts and commentators before the Treasury Select Committee..

Someone from the Resolution Foundation, for example. It used to be Torsten Bell, but of course now he's a government minister doing the Budget and indeed, he was personally praised in the Budget. There were some movements around pension funds for miners, I think, that he was given direct credit for by Rachel Reeves. So there are certain rituals that the Treasury Committee enacts, talking to various witnesses about the shape of the Budget and how much attention it will attract, of course is another matter because so much as you say was expected that this is almost a Budget without startling news points in it.

Ruth Fox: And of course, every podcast going, every political and [00:18:00] economic podcast going, has already done their hot takes. So what more is there to find out? Well, that's the Treasury Committee next week, so if anything does come out of it, we can discuss it on next week's episode, Mark.

Mark D'Arcy: Absolutely. Under the chairmanship, of course, of Meg Hillier, the former New Labour minister and former chair of the Public Accounts Committee, so someone who knows their onions in terms of government spending, it'll be a quite an interesting set of sessions to watch, I imagine..

Ruth Fox: With that, shall we take a break?

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah.

Ruth Fox: And while we take a break, listeners, an opportunity for you to help the podcast, you can rate and review us while we take this break and also be really helpful if you could share it on social media so that your followers can also find it. Help us grow the reach of the podcast and ensure that others can learn more about Parliament and why it matters.

See you in a minute.

Mark D'Arcy: Bye.

And we are back. And one of the important processes that's going on, rather in the undergrowth of Parliament and various sort of international negotiating rooms is the UK's reset in its relationship with [00:19:00] the European Union. Something that was promised in Labour's manifesto where they said they would be ruthlessly pragmatic in trying to extract more advantage for Britain in the trade agreements that they've been striking with Brussels.

Now this is a process that's been unfolding almost unnoticed, but it is being carefully monitored by just one organ of Parliament, the Lords European Scrutiny Committee whose chairman, Lord Ricketts, Peter Ricketts, the former National Security Advisor, spoke to us about the state of the relationship now and how Parliament should keep tabs on it.

We began by asking him for a kind of account of the state of play between Britain and Brussels.

Lord Ricketts: Well, we are a year and a half into the Government. They set out a clear ambition to really improve the relationship across the board. Where we are now is that they've done the software end of it. They have improved the relationships, they've built confidence, they've established much more dialogue across the piece, and they had a [00:20:00] successful summit last May with the President of the Commission, Ursula von der Leyen.

But translating those ambitions and that goodwill into real workable agreements is going to be a long, slow process. And we are only at the start of that. So we won't see specific changes in our legal relationship with the EU of a kind that might have some impact on the British economy and the ease of doing business with Europe and travelling for some time yet because it's always slow and complex to negotiate detail with the EU.

Mark D'Arcy: And what sort of agreements will we be seeking?

Lord Ricketts: Well, the Government set out a couple of objectives in their manifesto. One was to do away with the animal and plant health checks at the border to make it easier to export British food and animals to the EU.

That's called a sanitary and phyto sanitary agreement. They also wanted to negotiate a deal on touring artists to allow them to move more freely around [00:21:00] Europe and on recognition of professional qualifications. And they have got to the point on the animal and plant health checks that they've now opened negotiations.

It took a while for the EU to organise itself, for the Commission to be able to negotiate. That has just started now. They haven't made much progress on the touring artists or the professional qualifications, but they have added a number of other objectives as they've gone along.

And one important one is to align the emissions trading systems. That's the system of carbon pricing across the Channel, because if they are different, then quite quickly we'll find that we're getting border levies if our carbon prices in the UK are lower than they are in the EU. So there's an ambition now to align those two systems, which is also quite complex, and also to work on making it easier to swap energy, electricity, trade electricity between the UK and the EU.

So those are the kind of things that are underway along with another important element which we can perhaps come to, which is a security and defence partnership, [00:22:00] which has been easier to get off the ground because it's more about relationships and agreements to work together. But there again, there is one very detailed piece of legal text that we need to get right, which we can talk about.

Ruth Fox: Let's talk about that now then. Lord Ricketts, in terms of the defence side, I mean, one of the things that comes right through your report is that Parliament, certainly the House of Commons, if not the House of Lords, is not particularly well placed at the moment in terms of being able to have the capacity to scrutinise these issues because it hasn't got the structures in place.

And really, apart from your Committee, there isn't a scrutiny model in place to be looking at all the range of these issues, defence, but also the domestic economic impacts of what may be about to change.

Lord Ricketts: You're quite right. We are the only Committee of Parliament that is focused on relations with the EU and European countries.

So in the Commons, the Foreign Affairs Committee can look at the foreign policy aspects. The Business Committee can look at the trade issues, but nobody can look at the piece as a whole. And that was the importance, [00:23:00] if I can say that, and the complexity of doing our report, because we have tried to take a snapshot of the entire relationship as it exists now, recognising it's a process that will evolve over time.

But yes, we wanted to look at all of these issues because in Brussels, when you negotiate agreements with them, they tend to look at the whole spectrum. And when the Prime Minister met Ursula von der Leyen in May, their announcements, their declarations covered the entire spectrum. So you do need to look at the whole while also focusing in on the individual detailed parts of it.

Mark D'Arcy: With all the rising security concerns that Europe has at the moment about the behavior of Russia in particular, is there an opportunity here for the Prime Minister to, as it were, leverage Britain's defence clout to get a better deal in other areas?

Lord Ricketts: I think we have to be a bit careful about seeming to try to leverage using our defence capacity. It's all about, you know, shared interests in defending Europe, and the action on military defence cooperation helping Ukraine is [00:24:00] happening outside the EU through a coalition of the willing, which is a group of European countries, plus Canada, which are coordinating that. In the EU, I mean, the agreements we've now got with the EU are lots of further joint working cooperation, exchanging ideas. But the hard point is that the EU is setting up a programme of defence loans, which are secured against the EU Budgets. So the interest on the loans for defence companies is lower than in the market. They call it the Safe program, 150 billion Euros, and the UK is negotiating to have access to that as a third country, we have to have a specific agreement. And I've been pretty thunderstruck actually, that the EU proposals have been that we should pay billions of pounds as an entry fee for British companies to be able to access these competitively priced loans.

If it's billions of pounds, there's no way that that's going to be good value for British defence companies. I think the negotiations are still going on. The programme is supposed to start very [00:25:00] soon, so there's a deadline there. But this shows a little bit the problem we have that the big picture is that all our European countries are together in solidarity facing the existential threat of a hostile Russia and what is happening in Ukraine. And yet in another part of the undergrowth, we have the EU member states and the Commission trying to charge the UK an eye wateringly high price for British defence companies to join, participate with equivalents in European countries using the loan facility they've set up. That is a disconnect, which I hope can be sorted out, but which may not be.

Ruth Fox: Isn't that one of the issues here that, you know, you said about not using our defence clout, I think as Mark referred to it, to help our negotiations in other areas, is it that we are perhaps being a little bit too high minded in our approach and they're rather being less constructive in terms of economic arrangements?

I mean, defence from our perspective costs a lot of money and we are defending parts of Europe, or could be defending parts of Europe that are not actually paying [00:26:00] nearly as much as we are in defence and intelligence and security and so on. So isn't there just this disconnect that has been a running sore all the way through?

Lord Ricketts: Well, I don't really agree because I think we're cooperating with our European partners on defence because we have an existential threat to our security in the face of Russia and all the kind of disruption and sabotage and subversion that they're operating. Not to say the all out war in Ukraine. And of course in NATO, the UK is a absolutely central player.

I think if we were to go to the Europeans and say, we will only work with you on defence, to the extent that you are going to cut deals with us on the economic side, isn't going to work, and I don't think actually it would be in British interest. So I think we've got to look at this issue by issue. It's in our interest to get the animal and plant health checks amended. It's in our interest to align the emissions trading schemes. It is in the European Union's as well.

I think within the package of negotiations about legal texts, there's also something that the Europeans want a lot, which is a youth mobility now called a youth experience scheme, to [00:27:00] allow young people to come from Europe to here, from UK into EU countries.

And the British government here, the Labour government started out not being at all keen on that. I think they feared that it sounded like free movement by the back door. They've become convinced that it doesn't have to be that at all. Numbers can be capped, can be subject to visas and other conditions. And it is in the interest of young people on both sides of the channel to be able to come and study work live in the other country for a limited period.

So now there are negotiations going on about that and also about the UK joining the new Erasmus program for youth mobility in the education field. All of that will require money, of course, and a lot of the negotiation will come down to the money. But there is a series of issues there where there's a balance of interest between the two sides.

I would honestly keep security and defence in a different basket because that's about the fundamental national security interest of our country.

Ruth Fox: This is a really substantial report. Your Committee has undertaken this inquiry over a period of 12 months punctuated in the middle [00:28:00] by the UK-EU Summit in May, in which quite a lot obviously that you've mentioned changed.

So, I mean, what are the challenges, because it's one of the things that's really difficult to pin down, we don't know what the volume of regulatory change might be, we don't know when it will come into practice, but also we don't know much in terms of the forward plan of the Government and the EU in terms of when will the next summit be, for example.

Lord Ricketts: I mean, you are quite right. We did find it hard to get our hands around this subject. Partly 'cause it's a large, complex set of issues, partly because the Government never published a White Paper at the outset to say precisely what their objectives were. So that makes it hard to hold them to account. And then we were aiming at a moving target because as the year of the inquiry developed, new issues came onto the agenda and we had to scramble to take evidence on those.

So this is very much a snapshot of a process that is underway and we are not yet clear when the next summit might be, when the next real forcing event is, to try to get some of [00:29:00] these agreements over the line and done and dusted so that you can see an impact in the British economy. We do say in the report that the overall impact if all of this was done is only going to be marginal, though positive, to the overall growth forecast for the country.

But even that is clearly worth having. So, understanding how the process moves forward to reach conclusions in some of these areas is one of the unknowns.

Mark D'Arcy: I mean, there are people now saying Britain should rejoin the single market, or Britain should rejoin the customs union. And that seems to be light years away from anything the Government wants or possibly even that the EU wants.

Lord Ricketts: When you look at how difficult the negotiations are going to be on some very specific areas of renewing our relationship with the EU, I mean, yeah, that's a different war game completely. We have to also remember that the EU has a certain number of priorities that probably come above that, one of which is Ukraine.

You know, how on Earth are they going to deal with the prospect of Ukraine drawing closer to the EU. So that is for a longer period, it's probably for another [00:30:00] Parliament. We've got enough on our plate to do the relatively specific, quite modest changes to the relationship that are underway in this reset.

Mark D'Arcy: Now there's an awful lot here for Parliament to keep track of and one of the buzzwords that crops up repeatedly in your report is dynamic alignment. So can you give us an idea of what that means. Dynamic alignment is, as I understand it, British law tracking European law where it's to our convenience to do so.

Lord Ricketts: Yes, it's Brussel's jargon, but it's essentially means that if we want to remove burdensome border checks on British food, British plants, or the energy that we're supplying you, then obviously we will need to stay aligned with European regulations as they change. We always have the sovereign right to decide not to.

But then the EU would have a sovereign right to say, well, then we're going to resurrect border controls on the products involved. But this whole area is a new one for Parliament because it's going to involve a constantly changing regulatory [00:31:00] framework. For example, the issue of pesticides. If the EU decides to change their regulation on pesticides, which is a sensitive issue here, or we decide to change on genome editing on this side of the Channel, then there will be difficult political decisions to make, and Parliament needs to scrutinise those decisions. Have ministers made the right decision? Is it in the interests of British producers, British consumers? What does the text say? And I don't think we yet have any idea as to what the volume will be. How many of these changes are gonna happen every year? Is it going to be every week or one or two a year? We have no idea.

And so the rather stately system of parliamentary scrutiny of the government on policy issues needs to speed up a lot. And there are resource issues. The simple capacity to stay abreast of what is happening if we start to get dynamic alignment in a number of different areas.

Mark D'Arcy: It seems to me there are two categories of things here.

One is the policy decisions to follow or not to follow EU regulations in particular places. The other is the [00:32:00] scrutiny of the actual regulations, probably secondary legislation that would enact that. And as you say, Parliament does not seem to be tooled up to do that. Your committee is one potential organ for that.

But it'd be an awful lot of work to land on just one committee. There is no dedicated European Scrutiny Committee in the Commons. Should they perhaps start the process of building a mechanism to look after these things by setting up such a committee, do you think?

Lord Ricketts: Well, I wouldn't dare give advice to the other House down the corridor, but our report invites the government to start a debate with us, and by implication of the whole of Parliament on how we're going to do this.

Because as you say, it could be an awful lot of work. It could involve sensitive issues that will be of interest, importance to farmers, to consumers, to the food and agriculture industry here. And we need to find a way of making sure that they are transparent, that people know what's going on, that we can take account of people's views and hold the government to account.

I mean, the policy decisions will be between ministers and the Commission and [00:33:00] the EU members, but the scrutiny of that will be for Parliament. So yeah, I think we need some new structure, certainly at the other end of the corridor. And here we need to understand from the Government how they're going to do this to make sure that we are not landed with fait accompli and are only able to make comments after something's been done and dusted.

Ruth Fox: Do you have any thoughts on what that might need to look like then in the Lords? Because there's a policy perspective that's got to be scrutinised, both sort of before the negotiations and after the decisions. And that might be scrutiny of ministers in terms of what their remit is and what their plans are.

You're critical in the report of the fact that there wasn't a White Paper, for example, in advance of the Summer for setting out what the government's objectives were. But there's also then a very technical form of scrutiny. Surely that's gonna need to be done in terms of documentary scrutiny. Not dissimilar to the kind of work that, for example, the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments does, or the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee.

And they are different types of scrutiny and different skill sets required and also different capacity [00:34:00] levels. So your committee can perhaps do the policy scrutiny, but is it something that you could imagine doing the documentary scrutiny or do you need a new mechanism?

Lord Ricketts: It's a very good question. I mean, we are already doing the policy scrutiny of the major agreements that the Government are proposing to have with the EU, like the overarching sanitary phyto sanitary system, like emissions trading system, like joining a youth experience scheme.

They will go through the normal process. Yes, of course, when there is an agreement, it will have to come to Parliament for formal consideration and we will have our role there. We just don't know, I think yet the volume of what will come at us through this dynamic alignment.

And part of the purpose of our report is to open that subject up and the next thing we're expecting is the Government will produce a reply to it. Then there'll be a debate in the chamber of the House of Lords. Well, I'm sure a lot of members will be interested in this. And they will expect answers from ministers on how are they going to organise this? What will the process be [00:35:00] to make sure that we see the proposed regulatory changes in time to comment on them and also consider the implications of them not following the changing EU regulatory landscape.

And maybe there will need to be further resources put into that. New committees or, you know, new structures. I think more at the Commons end than at ours, but it is a whole new ball game, and I think our Committee and our report is the first time it's really been ventilated for discussion.

Mark D'Arcy: In a way though, these issues have been floating around since the Brexit debate went live in 2016 in the sense that it was always clear that there were going to be a rush of new trade treaties, that agreements for trade with the European Union would need some kind of monitoring, and yet nothing has ever really happened about it.

It's slightly depressing that years on, having been outside the European Union now for five years, we are still in the position of not having even addressed these questions.

Lord Ricketts: Well, Parliament had to cope, of course, with the Withdrawal Agreement from the EU, with the [00:36:00] Trade and Cooperation Agreement, and then keep track of how those are being implemented.

There is a system of specialised committees between the Government and the Commission in Brussels that produce reports that we look at in our committee. There's also a UK-EU Parliamentary Partnership Assembly where British and European parliamentarians get together twice a year, which we featured last week, which you've covered on the podcast.

So there are a number of things that are underway, and we have regularly done scrutiny of the proposals the Government are bringing forward and also of EU documents because of course we see the documents that the Commission are sending around member states and we can scrutinise those. So it's slightly odd that we spend some of our time looking at the EU's negotiating mandate to their side, where the British government is often rather reticent about what their negotiating mandate is, saying we won't have a running commentary on negotiations. So yeah, we've done a good bit of that. It is time consuming. It is important work, but this, as we've been saying, risks being [00:37:00] a far greater load of a rather different kind, very detailed month by month regulatory shifting, and that is uncharted territory for us.

Mark D'Arcy: A nasty thought occurs to me that may be one of the reasons why there isn't a big all singing or dancing formal system in place for all this stuff is that maybe Governments prefer to have things going on in the undergrowth, virtually unnoticed, rather than revive the horrors of the Brexit debate.

Lord Ricketts: I mean, I think that's not quite fair and I think it's reasonable that the government should have the space to negotiate texts with the EU.

I mean, the negotiation that's going on now on this SAFE agreement going on day by day, they can't really report to Parliament on that day by day or week by week. They have to, you know, have the space to do that. But equally, we then have to have the opportunity to challenge what they're doing both upstream before they get into the final stages of negotiation. So hopefully we can influence Government thinking and then in particular, when the result comes out, I mean, that's tends to be how Parliament operates anyway, when the Government [00:38:00] negotiates a treaty or an international agreement. It doesn't consult Parliament. You know, in the negotiating phase, it presents the outcome to Parliament and then we have the choice of do we accept it or do we challenge the government on it?

And so it's not very different to that. I think you have to allow the government negotiating space. But we do have our role, and I'm not yet quite clear how we're gonna play it.

Ruth Fox: One of the things I do when I first open a Select Committee report is I go to the back and look at the Minutes and see what's happened in the discussions about the report.

At least if it's a report Mark, that I have not given evidence to. If I've given evidence, I do a find and search on the Hansard Society's name, but for those inquiries like this where I've not been involved, I go to the back, look at the minutes and see was there consensus about the final draft of the report.

And in this case, very unusually for the House of Lords, there wasn't, there was a vote. And Lord Frost, of course, who was the UK's negotiator during Brexit, he was a member of your Committee and he put [00:39:00] forward a proposal for a different summary, emphasising different issues. Can you talk us through, you know, sort of what the approach is to getting agreement on a report like this where there are clearly significant differences of view on the Committee, and how you resolve and decide upon the final draft?

Lord Ricketts: Certainly, and as you say, normally the House of Lords committees work through an issue. There are no doubt always differences between members, but the aim is to come out with a consensual report that provides a basis for the House to debate the underlying issues. In this case, perfectly legitimately, we had a committee where there were strongly held and very different views among members of the committee, and that was clear from the outset.

We didn't let that deter us from doing the report because I think it did fill a real gap, but we had to take account of that and having collected all the evidence and Lords reports are evidence led, and so most of this report is the evidence we received when we came to drawing the conclusions and recommendations from it there were very [00:40:00] different views among members. And at that point, I suppose had a choice between either fudging it so drastically that it didn't really say anything or mean anything very much, or accepting that there were differences and putting that on the face of the report.

As you say, we sought to get a consensus. In the end, we couldn't, and so Lord Frost provided a different summary at the front of the report, which has a different tone, more critical, more negative about the whole idea of a reset. And the Committee voted on that and the voting is set out of the back. So I don't see that there's anything to be ashamed of about that.

It's not unprecedented. I think there was an example where Lord Lilley did something rather similar in an Environment Committee report on climate change. It gives the House clarity that yes, there are differences here. No great surprise. There are still differences in the country. It sets them out in a summary form and it allows debate.

And so I think where we've got issues where members are deeply divided, seems to me that it's, you know, a perfectly legitimate way of approaching them. I would still hope that [00:41:00] normally the model is that we come out with a consensus agreement so the House can see, the public can see, that we've looked at all the issues.

We've argued hard and we've come out with some useful conclusions. But that won't always be possible. And that was the case in this report.

Ruth Fox: And do you think in the House of Lords, you mentioned Lord Lilley's objection to a report in relation to climate change, I mean, do you think in this sort of growing era of polarisation that's being reflected in the House of Lords as well, and is that gonna flow through to committees more?

You know, there isn't now the consensus on the economic direction, on climate change and Net Zero, on the EU, perhaps on some of the foreign policy issues. Are we getting likely to see perhaps more divisions on reports that we've had in the past, do you think?

Lord Ricketts: First of all, it's, of course, it's the norm in the Commons. The idea of voting on reports is completely normal there. It hasn't been here. I mean, my assumption is that's probably true. I mean, there are deep divisions within the country, you know, between people, sometimes in families, over a lot of the complex issues that we are [00:42:00] facing. And it's no surprise that those are reflected in the House of Lords.

As I say, there will be always a choice whether you try to bridge the differences and come out with a report, even if it acknowledges that on one or two points, perhaps some members thought differently, or if the differences are quite deep seated and cut across the whole report, then acknowledge that in the way that we did.

My suspicion is we probably will get more cases like this, but I wouldn't want to ease the pressure on members sitting around a committee table to come to an agreement if they possibly can, 'cause that's probably the best basis for debate. But if they can't do that, then at least set out the differences clearly.

Mark D'Arcy: Now your term as chair of this committee is coming to an end quite soon. What are you gonna do next? I mean, one thing that I spotted the other day was that the House of Lords Liaison Committee has come up with a new set of special select committees and there's going to be one on national resilience.

And I thought with your national security hat on, maybe that would attract you.

Lord Ricketts: Actually, ever since I joined the House of Lords, I've been on a committee, so it must be about eight or nine years and I think I perhaps stepped back for a year or so. But [00:43:00] there are always opportunities for committee work. I particularly find it satisfying for myself as a crossbencher, former public servant.

I'm used to committee work and indeed chairing committees. I find it a very satisfying way of contributing. So I will be back in the committee world quite soon I think. We are also doing quite a lot of these one year targeted select committees to look at a particular issue. And they are quite interesting as well.

But for somebody of my background, it's perhaps the most effective way I can contribute to debate in the Lords. And I hope wider public debate because these documents reflect a great deal of evidence. You know, there's a lot of research goes into them, they're a good read. And for anybody who wants to understand the complexity of what we're trying to do in resetting relations with the EU, I strongly recommend our report because it'll give you an insight into where we are now in this process, which actually I think is going to be continuous. I don't think there'll ever come a time when the UK's relationship with the EU is reset. It's going to be the new [00:44:00] normal that we will face. And so this report is a good way into that.

Mark D'Arcy: As they used to say about devolution: a process not an event.

Lord Ricketts: Yeah, I thought that was original. So you've really disappointed me there.

But yeah, I think it's as good a way of explaining it as any.

Ruth Fox: Thanks Lord Ricketts for joining us on the podcast.

Lord Ricketts: It's been a great pleasure. Thank you.

Mark D'Arcy: So Ruth, lots to chew on in that? What's your thoughts?

Ruth Fox: Well, immediate reaction, something we've talked about on the podcast before is that the Commons really needs to get its act together in terms of how it is going to scrutinise European issues.

I mean, the Government, one of its early decisions procedurally, was to abolish the Commons European Scrutiny Committee. And it has not replaced it with anything. And EU, European, issues are being essentially siloed into select committees, looking at different aspects. So Foreign Affairs Committee, Business and Trade Committee, Science Committee, and so on.

What it needs is a committee that enables cross departmental, cross policy area, cross cutting policy area scrutiny, [00:45:00] and dare I say it, my favorite subject, Mark, delegated legislation.

Mark D'Arcy: Absolutely.

We're there again.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, we're there again. It comes back time and again. There needs to be a scrutiny model that will enable MPs to keep track of and express views on and vote on some of the changes that are gonna be coming down the line.

Now we are pretty clear from the interview. I was wondering what the volume and speed of these things might be next year. I was hoping Lord Ricketts might know more than me. It turns out, it's pretty unclear to everybody, but there are going to be things coming down the line and there needs to be some internal discussion in the Commons about how they're gonna handle that because once it hits, it's too late.

Mark D'Arcy: And I remain, I'm afraid, pretty cynical about this. I think that's the way the Government likes it. The Government doesn't necessarily want Parliament breathing down its neck on EU issues. I think one of the kind of psychological factors in all this is that the political class in general, and MPs in particular are still pretty traumatised by the legacy of the [00:46:00] Brexit debates and the huge tangle that Parliament got itself into after the referendum for quite a long time, and they just don't want to revisit that. Try and avoid saying the B word if you can.

It's perhaps just starting to unwind a bit. Now, Ed Davey got up in the Commons during the Budget speeches and said that the key thing that the government ought to do is essentially get a much closer trading relationship with Europe. I think he may have meant rejoin the customs union or the single market or something along those lines, but he certainly wanted a much closer trading relationship. So some people are beginning to suggest that kind of thing, but I think for most of our politicians, this is still a fairly taboo subject, a kind of third rail effect. Touch it and you die.

Ruth Fox: But you know, a lot of MPs in the House now were not present during Brexit. They're new and yes, I understand, for those that were there, it was a difficult time and you and I watched and commentated on a lot of it, we still bear the scars, but in a sense they've kind of got to get over that.

There are some really big policy and economic decisions that are gonna be made that are coming down the line. [00:47:00] This whole subject of dynamic alignment. What we will or won't align with. What role and say Parliament is gonna have. I mean, my fear since Brexit all along in terms of how it was structured, in terms of how they negotiated, in terms of how they treated Parliament, was that the whole theme of Brexit was to empower Britain again. Taking back control was the theme. But it was taking back control by ministers, not by Parliament. You know, there's an awful lot of talk about parliamentary sovereignty, but actually Parliament has not been empowered by this process.

Mark D'Arcy: Ministerial sovereignty is probably a slightly novel doctrine there, and it's worth remembering that the evolution of the UK-EU relationship will be enacted through possibly international treaties and possibly through secondary legislation.

And neither of these things are things that Parliament is any good at scrutinising. The procedures are extremely weak in both cases. So if the House of Commons wants to have any kind of traction over these agreements, it's gotta find a way. And that may involve mandating or at least trying to feed in views before a negotiating process, keeping [00:48:00] tabs on a negotiating process, and then having genuine scrutiny of the actual product in the form of treaties and whatever.

Ruth Fox: And the other side of this is quite a lot of the scrutiny is complicated, involves a lot of documents.

Mark D'Arcy: Very techie, legal documents, needs a lot of support.

Ruth Fox: So there'll be capacity issues about whether they've got the right sort of expert advisors in the Commons and indeed the Lords to do this.

That comes at a cost, it's at a time when we know that the House of Commons particularly, is under pressure to reduce its budget. There's, you know, talk of up to 10% spending savings.

Mark D'Arcy: And against that, you'd have to staff a very high powered select committee with a lot of very high powered advisors, which won't come cheap.

Ruth Fox: No, but it's a necessary price to ensure that the policy decisions that are being made in MPs' constituents names, are gonna affect the constituents potentially for years to come, are the right ones, and that the right voices are being heard on some of these issues and some of the complexities, rather than it just being left to ministers,. [00:49:00] And it goes back to this whole business, you know, why we think parliamentary scrutiny being improved through reforms is important, because the idea that a government that is properly scrutinised and held to account makes better decisions, stronger decisions, decisions that reflect the concerns of the electorate, that they've heard the stakeholders, that they've reflected all these issues in the policy determinations rather than it being made in sort of back rooms with just a few people in the room who haven't thought about the potential consequences and the downsides as well as the upsides. So we will have to see.

There is a proposal out there from two MPs, a curious duo, Stella Creasy, the Labour MP for Walthamstow, and Richard Tice, the Deputy Leader of Reform UK, one of course an avid pro-European in Stella, who I think is chair of Labour Movement for Europe, Richard Tice being an arch Brexiteer, but united in the view that the House of Commons needs something, a committee of some form, to scrutinise these issues. So they've come [00:50:00] together in common cause on that. We probably ought to try and get them on the podcast actually, Mark.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, sounds like a good idea. If you're listening Richard and Stella, please come on board.

And in the meantime we may get some kind of glimpse of what the Government proposes to do bracket, if anything, when they respond to Lord Rickett's report. And there will be a House of Lords debate on it, probably sometime in January when the government's ground out its response. So watch out for that. I mean, it may seem rather techy, but again, these scrutiny issues really do matter. And with that, Ruth, probably time for another break.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, take another break and come back and talk about the assisted dying bill.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. Interesting developments there. Join us in a moment.

Ruth Fox: And we're back and Mark that discussion we had before the break with Lord Ricketts. You mentioned the fact that the House of Lords has made a decision on four new select committee inquiries it's gonna hold in the New Year. So I thought for listeners, we'd perhaps ought to just flesh that out a little bit more. What are they?

Mark D'Arcy: Well, the one that really caught my eye was a select committee spending a year [00:51:00] looking at the issue of national resilience. In some senses, what used to be called civil defence, how resilient is the UK in the face of natural disasters or foreign sabotage? Imagine someone managed to make the whole internet go down for a week.

I mean, imagine the chaos, even half a day, imagine the chaos it would cause, and what I was suggesting to Lord Ricketts was, you know, with his hat as a former national security advisor on, that might be a select committee of some interest to him. Do we need to recreate some kind of civil defence core and have volunteers with all sorts of different training in every town and city and village ready to meet any disaster that might befall the nation? So that was quite an interesting one.

There's also going to be something I really thoroughly approve of, which is an exercise in post-legislative scrutiny, in this case of the 2021 Domestic Abuse Act. Now, this was an act that was passed when Priti Patel was Home Secretary to get a much better state response to the issue of domestic abuse.[00:52:00]

And I like the idea of Parliament taking a look at how laws that have been enacted are working out, and whether there's any tweaks needed, any reforms or changes that follow on from the practical experience of trying to make that law work. In this case, there's a lot of talk about how there needs to be perhaps more provision for things like refuges for the victims of domestic abuse and maybe more provision for the needs of children.

There may be all sorts of traumas and difficulties that the children have that need to be addressed and maybe the law needs a bit more focus on that.

Ruth Fox: And the other two, there's gonna be one on childhood vaccination rates in England. And other one that took my eye was numeracy. I mean, the inquiry is just listed as numeracy, to consider numeracy, but presumably to consider the lack of numeracy in certain quarters of the population.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, I always used to have this joke about wouldn't it be wonderful if we were good and quietly governed by people who can add up, which, you know, it has never seemed a imminent danger, but numeracy is clearly a growing national problem now, [00:53:00] and there are an awful lot of people who think that we just need to have a bit more understanding of numbers in general in society, that it's not taught well enough. Getting a grasp on that as an issue is a really interesting, and that could be because it's such a general subject, that the committee could go almost anywhere on that. It'd be very interesting to see what the focus is and who the members are.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And also one of the witnesses it occurred to me that could be called to that inquiry is the former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, because he's taken a big interest in this and I think with his wife has set up some kind of charitable body or trust to improve numeracy and understanding of things like maths and so on. So we will see. But the House of Lords had 41 proposals submitted by peers for the House of Lords Liaison Committee to consider. And they've whittled it down to these four new special inquiries. They'll have to report, this time next year, the deadline of the end of November next year.

But the House of Lords will have to actually formally approve this selection of the four committees. It's a recommendation at this stage only from the Liaison [00:54:00] Committee. Memberships will then be set up, I guess in December and early in the New Year. And they'll kick off in January, February of next year.

Mark D'Arcy: And staying with the House of Lords, another substantial piece of action around the procedures for the assisted dying bill. The Chief Whip, Roy Kennedy, got up and announced that there would be 10 sitting days, count them. That's an absolutely huge block of parliamentary time devoted to the scrutiny of a Private Member's Bill. And there've been calls for this because as we were discussing in last week's pod, the consideration of the bill and the vast number of amendments to it meant that the bill was just inching forward and therefore it was in danger of running out of time, running into the sands and not getting through.

Now the Government has more than put its fingers on the scale and tilted them slightly. It's given an enormous push to the bill by making sure that a very large block of time is now available.

Ruth Fox: I'm not sure it's given a push to the bill. I think it's enabling the House to properly consider the amendments.

I mean, I'm not sure it necessarily is stepping over that line of neutrality. In the House of Lords it's the Government that has to make the time [00:55:00] available, and that's what they've done in consultation with Lord Falconer.

Mark D'Arcy: They didn't have to make it available.

Ruth Fox: They didn't, but they

Mark D'Arcy: They could have said, we've given it plenty of time already.

If you can't come to a decision in the allotted time, that's it. They have, I think, done something to at least make it possible to pass the bill.

Ruth Fox: Yes, I think they've made it possible for the House to reach a decision and they've made it possible that the bill ought not now ,with that amount of time, to fail because of a lack of time. It ought to be possible now for them to carve out a way to consider all those groups of amendments. Now, if you're an opponent of the bill, this might still not be enough for you, and it will at least smoke out then the opponents that actually what they're about is filibustering it, rather than actually trying to reach a decision on those groups of amendments.

But listeners, what has actually been agreed is that there were three days already scheduled in the New Year, in January, February, March one each month for Private Members' Bills. Which is the norm in the House of Lords, one Friday a month. So [00:56:00] those three were already scheduled, and what the Government has done is added seven more days in the New Year through to the end of April, and one more for International Women's Day.

So, in effect, the House of Lords is gonna be sitting virtually every Friday through to Easter recess. And in fact, the Friday where the House was supposed to have risen for Easter recess, that is now gonna be a sitting day. So they're gonna have less time in recess than anticipated.

What's not clear at the moment is how that time is going to be divided. Looking at the future business paper, it appears those extra days are gonna cover Committee Stage and Report. Now, bear in mind, we've already had two days in Committee, so are we looking at 6, 7, 8 more days in committee and then the remainder given over to Report? We are assuming at this stage, and it's only an assumption on my part, that those days do not include Third Reading and ping-pong, but they might do.

Mark D'Arcy: And I don't think you could rely on Third Reading being a kind of rubber stamping formality for this bill because I think there may be attempts to stop it at third reading, [00:57:00] there'd be a big debate.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, it'd be a big debate. And you know, that's where this will all come to a head in terms of the divisions.

So my understanding is that, Lord Falconer is gonna meet with those members who've got amendments down for the bill and talk through and see if they can come up with a plan to ensure, you know, division of time that everybody thinks is fair and appropriate and see whether they can divide that time accordingly.

But again, I think the big question is, you know, the opponents of the bill said that they wanted more time, because there were so many amendments. Now they've been given more time. It's either not going to be enough or, taking your view perhaps, that they think that the Government's put their finger on the bill too much, on the tiller.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, I do find it very hard to sustain an argument that there are so many amendments, that they're vitally important, they must be debated, this bill must be properly considered and improved, and then complain that the time has been allocated to make that possible.

You can't have both.

Ruth Fox: You can't have it both ways.

Mark D'Arcy: No. And so the government has provided the time for the House of [00:58:00] Lords to come to its decision on all these things, and really the number of days that have been set aside now ought to be enough. It ought to be possible to reach a decision on this bill now to either get it through or reject it. What becomes a lot more difficult is to spin out the time to the extent that this bill still hasn't been decided on after all those days.

And Roy Kennedy, the Chief Whip, did make another sort of hint, I suppose he didn't quite explicitly say it, he said, so far I have suggested that the debates on Friday stop at the normal time, a convenient moment around three o'clock, kind of hinting that maybe things could go on a bit longer.

So if those Fridays start turning into sort of drone till you drop sessions, that really would suggest that filibustering is going on.

Ruth Fox: And then, the answer is just to sit longer and longer and later and later on Fridays and just carry on and see where you get to.

One thing that does come out of this though, Mark, is that because they've given the dates, it's very clear now that the Session is not going to end before the end of [00:59:00] April.

That's also been sort of one of the unknowns in this. It's a known unknown, in this process. And timing and scheduling is so important in Private Members' Bills in terms of how the procedures work out. But it's clear that they're expecting to be still sitting at the end of April.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. And there will clearly be a Session, a few weeks of Parliament, after the May local elections by the look of it, which would give enough time to get the bill through its Third Reading and then have ping-pong sessions to resolve differences over wording with the House of Commons afterwards.

So any changes made in Lords have to go back to the Commons. Giving enough time for that would suggest that maybe the prorogation at the end of this parliamentary Session comes in mid to late May.

Ruth Fox: At the earliest, possibly. Certainly if you remember a few podcasts ago, Mark, I speculated on this question that I didn't think, the government previously only just said the Spring, no specificity around that. And I speculated, at my most cynical, that possibly they might prorogue [01:00:00] fairly soon after the local elections in order to change the nature of the debate.

Mark D'Arcy: Change the subject, yeah.

Ruth Fox: Change the subject. But this timetable might suggest actually that that's too cautious and they'll actually go on longer so that you could be going into later May or early June, you'd have a king speech, then possibly a few weeks at most for the start of the Session.

And then you're into Summer recess. So the bulk of the sort of legislative agenda would then kick in, in the Autumn of next year.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, we're beginning to get a glimpse at least of the shape of parliamentary politics through the rest of the coming year. And 2026, as you say, is looking pretty interesting now because, on current poll showings, at least those local elections in May could be pretty cataclysmic for the government.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And Mark you mentioned earlier about the assisted dying bill that, you know, the House of Lords may in the end come to reject the bill. Interestingly, the last time the House of Lords rejected a bill outright was in 2007 on a bill to abolish jury trials in fraud cases. And, if you're looking for potentially [01:01:00] contentious issues in the next Session, the suggestions that have been in the media that the government is proposing to abolish all jury trials except cases of rape and murder, and

Mark D'Arcy: Anything with a less than five year sentence..

Ruth Fox: In order to tackle the backlog in the court system.

That would be highly contentious, wasn't in the manifesto, and you can imagine, you know, that that would be a hard fought issue in the next Session if indeed it does come to it.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, when you look at the manifesto that Labour put to the electorate in 2005, so just before this, removing juries for fraud..

Ruth Fox: You've been doing your homework!

Mark D'Arcy: I'm afraid, I'm shameless on this. Labour had a proposal to improve the process for fraud trials so that they were quicker and more effective.

Now, that didn't include the magic words, remove juries, and so there wasn't Salisbury Convention cover, that is, that this wasn't something Labour had laid before the electorate specifically, and therefore the House of Lords had to acquiesce to. So they felt able to reject this bill. And again, I [01:02:00] don't think in the last Labour manifesto there was anything about removing jury trials.

So this could be something that the House of Lords could again throw out. I suspect it'll have a rough ride in the Commons. Certainly there's been an awful lot of reaction against it from the opposition parties, and I think a few Labour backbenchers sound a bit queasy. I suppose the one thing you've gotta say though is could this be David Lammy's answer to Rachel Reeves' income tax increase?

They march up to the top of the hill saying you're going to do this, and when there's enough opposition and it reaches a crescendo, you march back down again. Or maybe circumstances change and oh look, suddenly we've discovered that our improvements to court procedure mean that we don't have to do this after all.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And Mark, while we were over in the House of Lords interviewing Lord Ricketts, there was an Urgent Question in the Commons on this very issue and the Justice Minister and Courts Minister, Sarah Sackman said that no final decisions have been made. So basically this is off the back of a, an independent review done by Sir Brian Leveson.

And this is essentially one of his suggestions [01:03:00] in that review. And she was very explicit in saying no final decisions have been made. It's a bit like the Budget. Things are sort of, you know, leaking out, but no final decisions have been made. And she said a crisis of this scale requires bold action to get the system moving and to deliver swifter justice for victims.

To which my question would be, I understand that rationale and wanting to improve the speed at which cases are moving through the system, but it doesn't seem to me that necessarily abolishing juries is... that's the problem. But, you know, availability of judges and availability of court times and the efficiencies of the courts in terms of the buildings and the IT and so on, all seem to be much bigger issues in the system than the availability of juries.

Mark D'Arcy: And it also takes out, as it were, a wild card in the legal system, juries can decide to do something, even if it's not exactly what the law would dictate. Juries can still acquit someone. I always remember, I mean, this shows my age here, the Clive Ponting trial. This is a guy who was leaking information [01:04:00] about the sinking of the Argentine warship, the General Belgrano during the Falklands war. He was absolutely clearly leaking information to Tam Dalyell, the Labour back bencher of blessed memory, and although it was absolutely clear he did it, the jury acquitted him. Much to the embarrassment of the then Defence Secretary Michael Heseltine, who had a slightly torrid encounter with the House of Commons shortly afterwards.

But juries can decide that they don't disapprove of something someone did even in the face of the law, if you like. And that's something that if you take out of our system and you just have judges automatically enacting the law, it takes a dimension away. And the joy of jury trials, if you'd like, and I think an awful lot of people might be very, very uncomfortable.

Ruth Fox: A point Sarah Sackman made during the Urgent Question today, which I wasn't aware of the actual number, is that about 90% of all criminal cases are dealt with by a magistrate, not with a jury. But I think one of the interesting points that will come up is that, Sir Brian Leveson's report argues that there is no constitutional right to trial by jury for [01:05:00] any citizen in this country. And that's something he's firmly believed and advocated for quite a long time. My understanding is that's not a view shared by all lawyers and judges and, I think if this proposal goes ahead, that'll be something, an interesting angle perhaps for us to explore on the podcast in future.

Mark D'Arcy: If it comes to the House of Lords, this could be a very, very, very interesting battle.

Yeah. And you could see the Parliament Act eventually being wheeled out to force it through if the Government sticks to it that long.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Well, Mark, it's not clear from Sarah Sackman's statement that this is going to come to pass. This is all speculation at this point. They clearly have got a problem they need to resolve, whether it will be the abolition of jury trials or some halfway house on that, we'll have to see. But I think, Mark, that's all we've got time for this week. So I will see you next week.

Mark D'Arcy: Join us then. Bye-Bye.

Ruth Fox: Bye.

Outro: 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 [01:06:00] @HansardSociety.

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