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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.

Ruth Fox: Coming up in this week's episode, Parliament's human rights watchdog on when to growl, when to bark, and when to bite.

Mark D'Arcy: A new Black Rod takes charge in the Palace of Westminster,

Ruth Fox: And it's all quiet on the assisted dying front in Westminster, but not in the Scottish Parliament.

Mark D'Arcy: And first Ruth, let's talk about human rights. There's a regular drumbeat of criticism at the moment and human rights rulings, particularly to do with immigration cases, but on plenty of other subjects as well, attacks on [00:01:00] the whole concept of the UK being signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights, which remember, British lawyers were actually instrumental in drafting after the Second World War and also on judges and the rulings that they've been making.

And it's an issue that's beginning to go to the heart of all sorts of questions about the way the rule of law works in this country. So we thought it was a good moment to go and talk to Parliament's in-house human rights watchdog, the Chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which is a committee of both MPs and peers, a select committee, and it's chaired by a slightly surprising person, Lord Alton. Lord Alton was once David Alton, a Liberal MP who was elected in 1979, who eventually left the House of Commons and a bit later on became a non-aligned non-party peer and has carved out quite a role for himself on all sorts of human rights issues, and also looking at things like the influence of China.

When we talked to him in the Palace of Westminster amid the occasional clank of scaffolding and the odd helicopter going past and so forth, so apologies [00:02:00] for the noises off, we began by asking him about what he's perceived to be the Government's attitude to human rights law.

A lot of governments start to chafe at the effect of human rights decisions that cause them a bit of trouble. His committee's just spoken to the Lord Chancellor, Shabana Mahmood, and before that to the Attorney General Lord Hermer. So did he detect perhaps just the start of an irritation with human rights law from those very senior figures?

Lord Alton of Liverpool: I think that they are signed up to a values based approach to human rights. How you interpret that through legislation and whether or not it's still fit for purpose is another matter. I initiated a debate recently in the Lords commemorating the 75th anniversary of the European Convention on Human Rights, and pointed out, of course, that this was the inspiration of Winston Churchill, but it was British lawyers from both sides of the political divide.

People like Maxwell Fife and Hartley Shawcross who engineered the European approach to human rights, but this was also being mirrored in the Universal Declaration. [00:03:00] This was coming in the aftermath of the Holocaust, in the aftermath of the terrible atrocities of that period. Now, when you look at things like Article Eight and how that is then used to deal with issues around refugees, you can see why the government itself is having to think through whether it was meant to be used in that way.

And so I guess you could say, yes, they're values based, they are committed, but how you interpret it's another matter.

Mark D'Arcy: Article Eight, Right to Family Life.

Lord Alton of Liverpool: Right to family life. But it's beyond that. It's also where someone could be separated from their family who might have come here, for instance, illegally.

What the implications of that are. We've seen some headlines. We've asked the Lord Chancellor and the Attorney General specifically about some of the stories that appeared. And for instance, the so-called chicken nuggets story people blame the European Court for that has never gone to the European Court.

This was something that was before the lower tier. Or the immigration tribunal in the UK and which was overturned anyway by an upper [00:04:00] tier tribunal.

Mark D'Arcy: I mean, this was the story of someone being allowed leave to remain in Britain by the lower tier tribunal because their kid would miss chicken nuggets.

Lord Alton of Liverpool: Exactly. Now, you can't put that on a par with someone who has been driven out of a country like Sudan, for instance, where there are now millions of people displaced as a consequence of the violence there.

There are 120 million people displaced in the world today, and I do sometimes think we neglect to look for root causes. And what I would like to see more of from the government is an approach that says, what can we do to stop the flow of migrants? How do we get to the root causes? Do the sorts of other things that happened back in the 1940s, like the Marshall Aid program, where you rebuild communities, where you try and stop the violence, where you construct places in people's own homelands.

Most people don't want to leave their homelands. If you can combat the corruption, if you can combat the violence that we see disfiguring countries like Sudan.

Ruth Fox: That approach is obviously a huge challenge given the current international situation, and obviously we're seeing cuts to our [00:05:00] international aid program.

What role do you think the committee can play in advancing the arguments about the benefits of human rights? We hear a lot of the criticisms, these Chicken McNugget stories. Obviously the opposition parties using human rights as a stick to beat the government with,

Lord Alton of Liverpool: Well, I think you've put your finger on it about education.

I think we've neglected to explain to people from where our human rights derive. After all, this isn't just about the ECHR, this is about Magna Carta. This is about hard won rights and privileges, liberties and freedoms that we enjoy in the United Kingdom, and which didn't come around by accident. They came about because of extraordinary campaigns in this country at one level by people like the suffragettes, at another level by the people who gave their lives in the Second World War fighting Nazism.

So we have to take these privileges seriously, but we do have to balance rights with responsibilities, duties, obligations. So through citizenship education, for instance, I think we should be saying far more, and we should be combating the [00:06:00] negligent way in which individual cases can sometimes be used to try and undermine a genuine approach that elevates not just the rights, but the dignity of every human being.

Ruth Fox: Can we talk about a few of the inquiries that you are running at the moment? Because you've got inquiries running on both legislation, but also thematic policy questions. This week, one of the issues is the Great British Energy bill and this vexxed question of how you ensure that any investment by Great British Energy, this new body that the Government is setting up, is not going to be finding its way into paying for things like solar panels where there's a supply chain issue in relation to China in particular around modern slavery.

You had an amendment on this when the bill was in the Lords. How does the committee approach this when it's a legislative question?

Lord Alton of Liverpool: Well, you are right we do two things. We look at legislation. We're currently looking at the mental health bill, for instance, which is about to go to the House of Commons.

It's had its Lord stages and we organized, for instance, with 10 [00:07:00] representative organizations a roundtable discussion here in Parliament, where people came and told their personal stories. I sat with a woman, for instance, whose son had tried to take his own life only weeks before on the bridge over the River Wear and was talked down.

But I also talked to a man who had spent 20 years in detention having been sectioned and detained for mental health reasons and having been forgotten about within the system.

So yes, we can feed into legislative things like that, but we also do thematic inquiries, as you've said, we are doing three at the moment, one in two.

ISIS and the British citizens who were involved in the genocide against the Yazidis and others in northern Syria, Northern Iraq. One into transnational repression, which can affect British citizens in all sorts of ways through the long arm of dictatorships and authoritarian regimes doing things in this country.

And the other inquiry is into modern day slavery, and the supply chain transparency question. The very first of our witnesses was [00:08:00] Rahima Mahmut, who is a representative of the world Uyghur Congress. She talked to us about what the House of Commons has declared to be a genocide in Xinjiang. And the question then is, is it legitimate to do business as usual with a regime that commits genocide against its own people?

And that was the subject of the amendment that I then moved to the Energy Bill and I spoke to it at second reading, at committee stage, at report stage. There were 12 amendments, I think, in all, that people moved to that bill at report stage. The only one that succeeded was the all party amendment that I'd tabled.

It had a majority of 50 in the Lords. We sent it to the Commons, a significant number of Labour MPs in the Commons abstained because they wanted to show their displeasure at the government removing the Lords amendment. So it came back to the Lords and only yesterday, I'm very glad to say, an agreement was reached with the Department of Energy and with the Minister of State, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, Philip Hunt, who engaged [00:09:00] intelligently, but with deep conviction and commitment as well.

I have a very high regard for him and I'm glad to say that that was agreed with unanimity across all parts of the House only yesterday, and it does place a prohibition on any company, and we're talking vast sums of public money now which are going into Great British Energy, but it may not be used purchasing goods which have been made where there have been credible reports of use of slave labour.

Now the committee continues to investigate this. We've got one more oral session. We've had over 800 pages of written evidence, and we will be looking at issues like. The American model of rebuttable presumptions where you have to show that slave labour isn't being used. We've had discussions with Theresa May who introduced the 2015 Act, and she agrees that section 54, which is a sort of tick box where you say, oh yes, we don't approve of slave Labour, but go on using goods made by slave labour anyway, that has to be reformed. And also the use of the [00:10:00] 2002 Proceeds of Crime Act where you confiscate goods if you find that a company is using slave labour. And the appeal court recently upheld a case involving the World Uyghur Congress in their favor. So last week we had evidence from Border Force and the National Crime Agency, both of whom confirmed that the 2002 legislation could be used rather more extensively than it has been. So in addition to the amendment, there will be a report, there will be conclusions, there will be recommendations. And yes, we are calling for an overhaul of the 2015 Act.

Mark D'Arcy: China looms rather large in your committee's deliberations at the moment, doesn't it?

Because the inquiry you are doing on transnational repression is very much focused on how countries like China in particular are doing rather more than just keeping tabs on the activities of their nationals in this country. They're actively in some cases threatening them.

Lord Alton of Liverpool: Well, two members of the joint committee, myself and my colleague, Baroness [00:11:00] Kennedy, Helena Kennedy KC, we are the two members of House of Lords who've been sanctioned by China, who were added to the list last week.

I see Putin's Russia have sanctioned me along with Iran and North Korea as well. So I'm collecting them and they all have to get in the queue. Um, this is ridiculous. I mean, this is an attempt to silence us and stop us carrying out things like our inquiry into transnational repression. But anybody who sat and listened to the extraordinarily brave, just turned 20-year-old Chloe Chung, who came and told us about how a bounty has been placed on her head.

This is a young woman living in this country who came here with her family, had to escape from Hong Kong because of the destruction of democracy there. Chloe has a bounty of 1 million Hong Kong dollars on her head, along with nine other people living in the United Kingdom, one of whom Carmen Lao was a member of the Hong Kong legislature.

So, of course we're going to speak out about that, but it's not just China. We had before us an Iranian, who is a democracy activist, who opposes [00:12:00] the theocratic regime in Iran and has done all his life. He was left dying, filled with bullets by the Iranians. The journalist last year in London left dying after he was attacked by a gang of three agents of the Iranian regime with knives, bleeding potentially to death.

He just about survived. We had evidence from the BBC about the Persian service. We've had evidence from other journalists. We've had evidence about other regimes as well, including Eritrea. We've had over 1,400 pages of evidence on this inquiry. This is going to be a mega report. This is a cutting edge issue and I'm glad to say that the chair of the Liaison Committee in the Commons, the excellent Meg Hillier, who kindly raised this question With the Prime Minister when he appeared before the committee a couple of weeks ago.

And Sir Keir Starmer has now written to our committee as well, saying that he very strongly agrees with the inquiry that we are doing, the importance of the issue. And I know that the Home Office are also been [00:13:00] told to look carefully at this. So our work is feeding into public policy issues, but it's also giving a platform to people like Chloe Chung so that their voices can be heard.

Mark D'Arcy: This was a case where you can't sit on the Liaison Committee as a peer. If the chair of the human rights committee had been an MP in the Commons, they would've been able to be there in person to ask. But you have to kind of get it, these questions asked in a delegated sort of way. Is there going to have to be a change in the law or is this a matter of enforcement of existing laws that there needs to be some sort of clamp down on foreign governments who are chasing their nationals in this country in illegal ways?

Lord Alton of Liverpool: There does need to be a change in the law. And also we have to think about issues like universal jurisdiction, which is a question that will be addressed in a report that is literally being circulated in draft as we speak to members of our committee where we do look at questions about what you do about governments or regimes that clearly have inspired acts against people living in the United Kingdom, but also United Kingdom citizens who may become agents of regimes or [00:14:00] terrorist organizations like ISIS.

Ruth Fox: I don't think we've ever had anybody on the podcast, David, who's been sanctioned by a foreign regime. Does it have any practical effects on your day-to-day life at all, other than you're not going to travel to China and Iran and Russia, but are there any practical effects?

Lord Alton of Liverpool: It's supposed to have a chilling effect. That's the idea. I presume that's why they do it, but for some of us, it has a exactly the opposite effect because it makes us even more determined. But look, it is trivial by comparison with the things that people experience in the countries that we've just been describing. I followed events in China, for instance, now over a very long time.

My friend Jimmy Lai's on trial there. He's in prison. I gave him and his wife tea in the House of Lords several years ago. That was even dragged out in the trial of this media mogul, that someone who's uh, passionate about free speech, how can that possibly be an offense? And yet this man, along with 2000 political activists, are imprisoned in Hong Kong.

So [00:15:00] anything that they do to us by comparison, what they do to intimidate Taiwan on an almost daily basis, the Uyghurs who have suffered from this genocide in Xinjiang, what's happened in Tibet, you just look at the list and by comparison telling some parliamentarians, they can no longer travel to China or wherever it may be.

I'm sorry about that. The reach also I suppose extends to your family and that can be difficult. And we have examples of some who have been sanctioned, who have been refused access to countries, and in one case, a former member of the House of Commons who was put on a plane and returned to the UK. So there are some practical implications, but when I look here, the personal stories of those who have suffered at the hands of these regimes, I just wanna keep it in perspective.

Mark D'Arcy: Continuing our very rapid whistle stop tour of your committee's activities. You mentioned earlier that you'd done a lot of work on the mental health bill that's about to hit the House of Commons. You've scrutinised that in some detail. And when MPs come to look at the [00:16:00] bill, what are your asks?

You're going to be publishing a report. What sort of things do you want them to change?

Lord Alton of Liverpool: Well, I don't want to prejudge what's going to be in that report. Obviously, the committee hasn't considered what exactly it will say to members of the House of Commons. But yes, we have taken a lot of evidence. I don't think I'm betraying any great confidences in saying, for instance, the treatment of people with autism is one of the issues that we have wrestled with and are concerned about.

But generally speaking, we think that the Government are moving in the right direction in what they're trying to achieve. So we're not just there to be destructive. This is not about yah-boo politics. This is about looking for things that might be scrutinised in a way that leads to further improvement in legislation.

So we take that duty seriously, but the six members of the House of Commons who serve on the committee will have their opportunities, now, if they wish to raise some of the things that they've heard during our deliberations, they can do that at second reading and committee stage amendments and that's where we've acted in the past quite successfully in getting change.

And the Energy Bill is a good example of that because that didn't come about just as a [00:17:00] result of my amendment. It came about partly as a result of the evidence that we were taking in the Joint committee. It came about because there were people in the House of Commons, everyone from Sarah Champion, who's the chair of the development committee, to my colleague Alex Sobel, who serves on the JCHR, who championed the spirit of the amendment that I was moving.

And people like Sir Iain Duncan Smith on the Conservative benches. And here in, in the Lords, we had both opposition parties, the Lib Dems and the Conservatives from their front benches, in support of the amendment. The Bishop's bench was in support. There were colleagues of mine from the cross benches and my colleague, Baroness Kennedy, had seconded the amendment from the Labour benches. So building up the sense that it's the issue that matters rather than is it the opposition or the government? Is someone trying to score a political point or whatever. I mean, there are lots of other issues around the energy bill that one could discuss, but in the end, can it be right to trade on the broken backs of slave Labour?

And it's not just about China, because in the supply [00:18:00] chain, you look at countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo and children being sent down the mines. Well, we have obligations under the convention on the rights of a child. That too is a sort of issue that the committee looks at. I recently met, for instance, with the Children's Commissioner Dame Rachel De Souza to discuss what more we can do to ensure that UK resources are not being used in order to lead to the exploitation of children in a place like the DRC. So that's something else that can be reflected in our report.

Building up relationships with agencies and charities and NGOs. This week I went down to the east end of London to meet with Crisis, and right back in the day when I was a very raw young MP, I was a trustee of Crisis.

It was then called Crisis at Christmas. Why do they want to talk to me? Because there will be a Police and Crime Bill coming up, and the Vagrancy Act, which is 19th century piece of legislation, which criminalises homelessness, it's something that should be challenged and changed. So I wanted to hear what they had [00:19:00] to say about that.

Later today I'm meeting with refugee women to discuss with them what more we can do at a practical level to support those who are legitimately in this country. You know, setting aside the chicken nugget type stories, just bear in mind the position of people who've had to flee often with nothing at all, desperate for their lives, and the way we respond to them. Everything from the teaching of English so that people can properly integrate to the right to work as well while an asylum claim is being considered. These are genuine issues that should put politics to one side, be properly discussed, and to see if you can build up a, political consensus.

So I think my job as chair of the JCHR is not trying to impose all my views. I think my principal role is to listen to what colleagues are saying and to see where we can build consensus from all sides of the committee. I want reports that the committee can agree about rather than be divided over. When I was a young MP someone gave me a copy of the E. M. Forster's book Two Cheers for Democracy.

Forster said, of course only Love the Beloved Republic [00:20:00] deserved three cheers. But he said, sometimes the idiosyncratic, bloody minded MP who gets some minor injustice put right is the justification for our system, and I've never forgotten that good piece of advice.

Ruth Fox: Well, regular listeners to this podcast will know that one of the few things that exceeds my interest and passion for Parliament is football.

So one of the inquiries that the committee's doing that's taken my eye is the Hillsborough question. So for our international listeners, Hillsborough is the football tragedy in 1989, where 97 football fans from Liverpool died as a result of, essentially, a crushing incident, at the stadium that they were playing a an FA cup match at.

It was a terrible tragedy, but it was then compounded by a coverup by the authorities, essentially, and it has taken years for politicians and lawyers and so on to uncover the truth. The Government has committed to introduce what is described as the Hillsborough [00:21:00] Law, which is essentially to impose a duty of candour on public officials when tragedies like this happen, and also to provide additional legal support and so on for those who are affected.

The Government promised, I think at Labour party conference last year, the Prime Minister promised that this law would be introduced to Parliament by the time of the anniversary, which was last month, it hasn't yet appeared. Your committee has been working on this as well and reported on it. Do you think the Government's foot dragging, or do you think the arguments about needing a bit more time to finish the preparation is legitimate?

Lord Alton of Liverpool: In 1989, of course, I was a Liverpool Member of Parliament. And I think one of the saddest duties of my whole parliamentary life was visiting constituents who'd had loved ones who were either there and had been traumatized, or some who'd lost loved ones who'd died, including the parents of a young boy. And another constituent of mine was the very last person to die, some years later, a man called Andrew Divine, who went into persisted [00:22:00] vegetative state as a result of being crushed at that terrible match, and he partially recovered later being able to eat solid foods and so on, but ultimately, Andrew also became a 97th person to die at Hillsborough.

So this had been part of my life throughout. I'd actually written to the then Sports Minister before the football match, questioning whether or not Hillsborough was a suitable ground for that game to be played at. As a matter of record, it's in Hansard that I tabled a question, wanting to get it on the record so that no one could say afterwards that nobody had raised this.

It had been raised with me by constituents who knew the ground. I also then challenged the outrageous way in which Liverpool fans were caricatured as though this was all their fault. And we know the notorious stories that appeared, obviously in the Sun newspaper at the time, and the police took part in a coverup as well. That I had no doubt, and I raised it again and again.

That supported the independent inquiry that was [00:23:00] established by my friend Bishop James Jones, who chaired that brilliantly. And I was very pleased when people like Andy Burnham came and started speaking out and saying that we've got to do not just something about the injustice that's occurred to those who were at Hillsborough, but more generally around what we do in the aftermath of such terrible catastrophes.

And as a consequence of the conversation I had with, he was then a new Liverpool Labour MP, Ian Byrne, Member for Liverpool, West Derby. I had just gone on the Joint Committee of Human Rights and I suggested he wrote to us and asked if we would carry out an inquiry into the delays in introducing something like the Hillsborough Law, and I was delighted when the committee agreed to do that.

We held an inquiry. We submitted, recommendations that we should enact the Hillsborough law. Three parts of it. You are right. One is the duty of candour, one is also about the creation of an independent advocate, who we said should be appointed within literally a couple of days of any tragedy occurring, able to [00:24:00] collect evidence, able to be there, able to ask all the right questions, and to make sure that disinformation doesn't be the order of the day.

And the third is equality of arms. So that victims should have the same kind of legal representation as a police force or a great national institution that's got vast amounts of money at its disposal and celebrated lawyers. So the three elements of the Hillsborough Bill I strongly support. I was delighted when I saw the Labour Party put it into the election manifesto.

I was surprised that they said that they would introduce it by a particular date, the anniversary date that has just fallen. And I asked the Attorney General about this and yesterday I asked the Lord Chancellor about it as well, whether or not they will now at pace ensure that the bill that they promised would reach the statute books will be brought forward.

I don't think they had thought through sufficiently well what the cost will be with the legal aid. I think it's that element of the bill that has now caused a problem [00:25:00] for government officials. But they should have thought about that. I mean, there's some pretty senior lawyers at the top of this particular government, and they surely would've realised this.

And you mustn't make promises you can't keep in politics. So I,

Mark D'Arcy: So, you don't entirely buy into this argument that, for example, Shabana Mahmood was making, that it's actually all a matter of getting the definitions very precise and the exact threshold of where a failure, to be completely candid, becomes a criminal offense for thousands of officials across the land.

Lord Alton of Liverpool: I think there is an element in that, but they should have again thought about that seriously. I mean, you'd have to decide, are we going to go in that direction or not? And they said, yes we are. And I agree with them. I think you have to take that head on. But you do have to listen to people, for instance, like Baroness Manningham Buller, who used to run our intelligence agencies, and she said on the record recently, there will be implications here for people within our security services. Fair point. So I think there have to be some exemptions, there have to be some sensitivities around questions like that. But that should all be in the legislation and that still needs to be not just properly thought through, but brought forward so [00:26:00] that we can then scrutinise a bill. And then that's what I hope the government as a result of the pressure that we continue to exert. And it's not just me, I mean I've been raising it, but my colleague, Shami Chakrabati, had an oral question about this last week, which I chipped in on. So did people from other sides of the chamber, and the Home Office minister who responded, who'd himself had someone from his family who'd been involved at Hillsborough or a friend, I'm not quite sure which.

But he had a personal involvement and he said to me subsequently as well, I get it, we're going to do something about it. So I don't think it's bad faith, but I think maybe they should have been a little bit more careful about the promise they made, that there would be something on the statute books by a specific date in April of 2025.

I don't think that was deliverable.

Ruth Fox: Wouldn't be the first time the government's done that, sadly.

Mark D'Arcy: Just a final thought then. You are in a very unusual position. As a non-party peer chairing a Select Committee of Parliament, it's very unusual for someone, even from the smaller [00:27:00] parties to be in the chair of a select committee.

It's extraordinary for someone who's basically an independent to be chairing a cross parliamentary committee. So how did this happen?

Lord Alton of Liverpool: Well, I am an independent cross-bench peer. I left party politics back in 1997, but I mean, people know that I was nearly 20 years in the House of Commons. Before that I was in local government, of course, and had been deputy leader of Liverpool City Council back in the day, was a chief whip of a political party that helped to manage the Liberal SDP Alliance in that period.

So I think they know I also get it in terms of the pressures that are on Members of the House of Commons, what considerations they have to take into account, how real politics works, if you will. But maybe there is a value in being an independent that you are not aligned with particular party interests.

I don't feel the need to get up and lambast for government simply because they're the government or sign up for the opposition, merely because they're the opposition. I was surprised that I was elected as chair of the committee. I didn't go to the committee meeting that day anticipating that, and [00:28:00] I walked out and thought to myself, I must perhaps need my head examined because it's a huge amount of work.

But I felt very honored that people from all the three political parties, the big parties that are represented on the joint committee, had voted for me and have entrusted this work in my hands. It would be for a three year term. Members of House of Lords don't serve on select committees, any select committee for longer than three years, so they at least know it's time expired as well.

And in the meantime, you know, I'm just blessed that we've, we've got an amazing team, the staff are so committed to the work the committee is doing. I think sometimes they're overlooked in the discussions one has about select committees and the work they do. But our clerks, the people who head up the individual inquiries, our legal officers, the comms team, I mean, all of them play a wonderful part. And actually all 12 members. We come from different backgrounds. We have different views and traditions. We all have the same [00:29:00] common purpose in mind, which is the upholding of the human rights of British people.

Mark D'Arcy: I think it's a very good place to stop. David Alton, thanks very much indeed for joining us on the pod today.

Lord Alton of Liverpool: A pleasure.

Ruth Fox: So Mark, what did you make of that? I could have sat listening to that with David for quite some time. It was a really enjoyable interview to do. I was very struck, always comes across with David, his passion for the subject.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, there are a couple of points that hit me immediately. First of all, he's an extremely experienced parliamentarian.

Yeah. He'd been around in the House of Commons for a very long time before becoming a member of the House of Lords. He'd been there quite a while now as well. And secondly, just the sheer breadth of the agenda. This committee has transnational repression of nationals of foreign countries who are living in Britain, whose home governments don't much like what they're up to in their political activities or the human rights advocacy or whatever it is.

The supply chain concerns about places where essentially slave labour is used to make products that then show up for sale in the United Kingdom. All those kind of issues. And so there is a vast swat of policy [00:30:00] and lawmaking in which his committee could potentially be involved. And I wonder if one of the constraints on him really is that they just don't have the bandwidth to do it all.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, and one issue we didn't get to actually in the interview because David had to head off into the Lords. He was taking part in debate so we couldn't keep him any longer. But the committee also looks at an area of legislation in my favorite area, delegated legislation, they look at a discreet aspect called remedial orders.

They're quite rare. And basically a remedial order is where if a court is concerned there's been a breach of human rights, the remedial order is used to correct it, to rectify it. And there's a case at the moment of a remedial order the committee's looking at, in relation to the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act.

And this is caught up in a quite a difficult and contentious court case in Northern Ireland involving Gerry Adams and his appeal against his 1975 conviction for attempting to escape from lawful custody and questions about whether or not he's going to be able to sue and get compensation for this perceived miscarriage of [00:31:00] justice, which the British Government says was not a miscarriage of justice. So the committee's looking at that. So as you say, the breadth and complexity of the issues is enormous.

Mark D'Arcy: Indeed. And we were discussing right at the end of that interview, the Hillsborough Law. If and when that finally appears in Parliament, I suspect that the Human Rights Committee is going to be a very active participant in nailing down absolutely the right details to get a system where when future disasters happen, there is an advocate in place and the victims have rights, and there is a genuine duty of candour placed on all the officials and civil servants and so forth who might be involved to tell the truth, because the horrible example of the Hillsborough case still looms very large over Westminster even now.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And I think it precisely because human rights is looming so large and has become such a contentious issue and a bit of a political pawn between the parties and is a brick back thrown in the media, the committees profile I think has become higher and higher in recent Parliaments. I mean, it's had some heavy hitting [00:32:00] chairs in recent parliaments. Harriet Harman chaired it initially in the last Parliament, stepped back from doing it when she took over the Privileges Committee.

Mark D'Arcy: Then it was Joanna Cherry, SNP MP.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And that, it was interesting when you introduced the start of the podcast, Mark, you talked about, David Alton being a slightly unusual character for Chair. Not really in terms of his issues and his commitment to the subject, his knowledge, unusual politically as we talked about, that he wouldn't expect. First as a peer, because a peer doesn't normally chair the joint committee. And secondly, as a non-aligned, you know, he is not a party aligned peer. You wouldn't expect to be chairing it. And interestingly, he went into the meeting seemingly with no expectation of doing so and suddenly walked out with the job.

Mark D'Arcy: It's quite interesting.

He was nominated, as I understand it, by the Conservative MP on the committee, Desmond Swayne and I suspect that a factor in all this was he's been working very closely with Iain Duncan Smith, the former Conservative leader, on issues pertaining to China. And maybe that's one of the reasons why people thought this is a good person to be in this chair.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. If you look at the MPs on the committee, who normally [00:33:00] would be providing the chair, half of them are 2024 intake. So they're completely new. And the Conservative, the lead sort of opposition party representative as you say, Sir Desmond Swayne, whilst he's an acerbic questioner, I'm not sure he would've been very keen necessarily to chair it or perhaps been the right character to chair it.

Mark D'Arcy: But certainly the days when this was a rather technical committee that looked at very narrow issues around the legal interpretation of human rights law in legislation are long gone. Yeah. And it started to take a much wider brief and has been, I think, rather the better for it.

Ruth Fox: And I think, you know, talking to David and he came across, particularly in the session that they had with the Attorney General Richard Hermer, Lord Hermer, he clearly sees a sort of public education role for the committee. So it'd be interesting to see how that plays out in the months ahead

Mark D'Arcy: With that Ruth, should we take a quick break?

Ruth Fox: Let's take a quick break and I think we should come back and talk about the assisted dying bill and where we are.

Mark D'Arcy: Absolutely.

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Mark D'Arcy: And we're back. And Ruth, we're in a bit of a pause at the moment with the assisted dying bill.

It's cleared it's committee stage. It's due to be back in front of the whole House of Commons on the 16th of May for its report stage. And you'll have heard listeners, I hope, our very in-depth discussion of the inner workings of report stage [00:35:00] proceedings with former Commons clerk and parliamentary procedure guru, Paul Evans, in an earlier episode of the pod.

But we are waiting for that and amendments are accumulating on the amendment paper, but it's all gone rather quiet at the moment, partly because the political focus is just elsewhere on all sorts of other subjects.

Ruth Fox: One thing to note at the moment, we are still waiting for the impact assessment for this bill, which the Government, as you remember Mark, promised that MPs would have before report stage.

We're now what, fortnight as we're recording 1st of May, we're sort of just two weeks away from it. It hasn't appeared yet.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, and you can't really imagine that it's all that difficult to compile.

Ruth Fox: Well, I don't know. I mean, presumably it's a bit more difficult than perhaps we imagine. I mean, I think this is probably one of the challenges is that there isn't the operational detail in the bill, so the Government is in effect having to fill out what it thinks the options are for how it could run the service. And the system. And it's then got to do all the impact provisions around that.

Mark D'Arcy: Maybe Ministers have got to sit down and work out how they think it ought to play out and there are still [00:36:00] questions to be answered before the civil servants can write that document and if that's still hanging in the air now.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And politically doing that when you got your two lead ministers in the department don't support the legislation, it could be politically tricky, but we are hearing it's imminent. So, you know, I've been hearing that for a while. It could be early next week after the bank holiday.

I mean, it's got to be next week surely.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, as a Southern Trains commuter, I reach for my revolver when I hear the word imminent.

Ruth Fox: Anyway, we've got 17 pages of amendments, so six new clauses, 37 amendments so far, two have already been withdrawn, sort of replaced by others, but you know, there's clearly building up, there's still times, a week or 10 days worth of time now for further amendments to be tabled.

So I expect that number will grow. And as we heard from Paul, one of the ways to make progress at report stage tricky is effectively to flood the amendment paper with lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of amendments. So they would have to get through. Another thing that we've noticed, in that podcast, that special discussion [00:37:00] with Paul Evans, we talked about the fact that in effect, the assisted dying bill is blocking the progress of other private members bills that made progress in the ballot so that other 19 of the 20 Private Members Bills the MPs are waiting to bring forward. And the next in line is the, as we discussed last time, the ferrets bill for shorthand. And that is waiting to go into public bill committee now

Mark D'Arcy: And hasn't yet. For reasons no one's quite sure of.

Ruth Fox: Well I assume it's because they're delaying things in order to keep the route clear for the assisted dying bill.

Mark D'Arcy: Because the last thing they want is for the ferrets bill to get out of its public bill committee and then be in a position where it would take priority over the assisted dying bill. Yeah. And then opponents of the assisted dying bill develop a sudden deep interest in the issue of ferret importation.

Yeah. String out the debate on the ferret's bill. Yeah. And the assisted dying bill gets five minutes at the end of the session and bat a bing it's out of contention.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. But the other thing that we've noticed is that on the future business paper now for that bill, there is a requirement for a money motion.

[00:38:00] So listeners to the podcast, you think back to the early episodes we had about the assisted dying bills, this was something we talked about then as well, that if there are provisions in a bill which have financial implications that you know need to be funded, then you need a money motion. The House normally would approve that immediately after second reading for a government bill.

It's done differently for a private member's bill. It's usually done separately. So there is indeed provisions that need funding in that ferret importation bill, and it's on the future business paper of the House of Commons that they are going to need that and that has not yet been scheduled for a particular day.

Now they can still put the bill into public bill committee. It just can't do anything. Once it's there, it can't get to discussing the detail of the bill's provisions. It'll be in suspended animation.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. So all these procedural intricacies potentially are clogging up, not just, the assisted dying bills consideration, but actually the consideration of all sorts of other bills.

[00:39:00] And it may be that the assisted dying bill becomes the only private member's bill in this session that gets a chance to be passed, and all the others have been waiting so long behind it that they never really see the light of day.

Ruth Fox: Well, the alternative is that they're all stuck behind the assisted dying bill.

And once the assisted dying bill gets unblocked and makes progress, it unblocks the rest as well. And you suddenly get this steady stream of these private members' bills flowing through the system and they get onto the statute book with very little, if any scrutiny.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. Well that's the thing, isn't it?

There'll be an enormous temptation to start waiving stuff through, because it's been waiting for so long, and it gets waived onto the statute book and then suddenly you discover, oh, there's a bit of a problem with this.

Ruth Fox: I mean, you should say these bills are small, quite technical changes, quite modest pieces of legislation compared to the assisted dying bill.

But if you've succeeded in the ballot, you're one of those 20 MPs and you're sort of thinking, actually the chances of my bill getting onto the statute book are

Mark D'Arcy: Having put a lot of work into it.

Ruth Fox: You know, it's reducing by the day the possibilities that you're going to get it onto the statute book. You might [00:40:00] be slightly frustrated, particularly, if you're also an opponent of assisted dying.

Mark D'Arcy: Meanwhile, a few hundred miles north of Westminster, there's an example of possibly how this sort of thing could be done an awful lot better.

Ruth Fox: Yes, Scotland, Edinburgh. There's been a report published this week by the Health and Social Care Committee in the Scottish Parliament. It has looked at the Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults Scotland Bill that's been brought forward by the Liberal Democrat MSP, Liam MacArthur, who represents the Orkney Islands.

He's brought this bill forward as a effectively a private member's bill in the Scottish Parliament. They call it members' bills as opposed to government bills. The interesting thing about this is that this bill has been in progress and preparation for several years, and the committee has reported because it is the first formal stage of the legislative process.

So Scottish Parliament, because it's a single chamber, it has a different approach to its legislative procedures, and once a bill is [00:41:00] published, it goes effectively the equivalent of second reading. It goes to a committee, because their committees equivalent to our select committees, look at both policy and departmental financial spending, but also look at legislation.

Whereas in Westminster committees are separated, you have committees to look at policy and committees to look at legislation. They combine that in the Scottish Parliament. So this committee is looking at what's called the stage one, the principles of the bill, and then it reports to the chamber, and then the chamber will debate and consider it and approve or not for it to move forward to the next stage.

Mark D'Arcy: I suppose one of the things about the Scottish legislation, though it's not the same, it is not the Kim Leadbeater bill translated into Scottish law in exactly the same way. There are actually some quite significant differences between what's being proposed in Scotland and what's being proposed for England and Wales.

Ruth Fox: Yes. Well, the key difference really is that it doesn't include the timescale for life expectancy that Kim Leadbeater's bill does.

Mark D'Arcy: The six months left to live rule that Kim Leadbeater has in her [00:42:00] bill isn't there in the Scottish legislation.

Ruth Fox: No. So I mean, the committee says that it therefore widens the eligibility to the prospect of people who've got progressive or untreatable conditions.

You don't know whether you've got six months left or not, and that they're terminal in the sense they're not going to get any better, but they're not terminal in that death is imminent within a certain number of months, which would be difficult to predict anyway. So in effect, the eligibility criteria in the bill are going to be left to medical judgment to much greater degree.

Mark D'Arcy: Um, the thing that got me raising my eyebrows was that the minimum age for applying for an assisted death is 16.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, and the committee reflects on that and remarks on that. There's also a residence criteria. They're clearly concerned about the prospect of, should we call it, assisted dying shopping or doctor shopping.

If you're denied in, for example, England or Wales, an assisted death, could you go to Scotland to get one under different criteria.

Mark D'Arcy: Less happy version of English people going across to Gretna Green to get married under Scottish law?

Ruth Fox: Yeah, it's a little bit awkward, [00:43:00] but they're clearly concerned about that.

And the bill does have a residence criteria. So in order to be eligible for consideration, one, you'd have to have lived in Scotland for at least 12 months. So that's another change. The committees suggests a number of oversight mechanisms and safeguards in the bill. Not dissimilar to the kind of arguments we've heard in the public bill committee here at Westminster.

So assigning responsibility to an oversight body or to the chief medical officer to monitor implementation to make sure that there's compliance with human rights. Should there be conscientious objection for healthcare providers. If you remember a few weeks ago we talked to, Professor Colin Gavaghan, Professor in Bristol University, who told us about the case in New Zealand, and what came out of their review of their assisted dying system was the need for more psychological support for healthcare professionals.

That's reflected in the Scottish bill 14 day period for reflection and the intention of the MSP who's bringing forward the bill, Liam MacArthur, as I [00:44:00] understand it, is that he wants this system to be delivered through integration with existing health services. He doesn't want it to be a sort of standalone service, which the committee says they acknowledge the reasons for that, but then it says, well, that's going to have to be carefully monitored because what's going to be the knock on effects and impacts of that on existing health services.

And then finally, some aspects of the legislation in Scotland. There are questions about whether or not actually the Scottish Parliament has got competence, devolved powers to do what the bill requires, and therefore it's the committee says that there's going to have to be some work with the United Kingdom, the Westminster government, about how that would work, and whether in fact there needs to be some adjustments made to enable them to take the bill through.

But this bill was first brought forward by Liam MacArthur back in 2021. So three and a half years, just over.

Mark D'Arcy: So its gestation process is both a lot more elaborate and a lot more thorough. And when you were reading this out to me as we were discussing how we would talk about [00:45:00] this, my main thought was that frankly, this puts Westminster to shame.

Ruth Fox: Yes, I mean it is a much more on the face of it, particularly for complex policy issues and, and issues of conscience like this, it seems a much more sensible approach. Both in terms of the time the effort taken, the support that the MSP has in developing his bill. So just to run through it, I mean, he published the bill, lodged it in draft with the Parliament in September 2021. There was then a consultation period for three months through to December, and they had 14,000 responses. That is a lot by any standards. About nine months later, October 2022, he was then given permission to introduce the bill to the Parliament. Meanwhile, he'd invited a group of people to form what he called a medical advisory group to help inform him on the bill, which was chaired by an MSP, who is also a doctor, and there was about sort of 10 other professional health experts, academic experts, and so on.

They [00:46:00] published a report in December 2022, so several months later, which was then used to inform the drafting process for the bill and the Scottish Parliament has what they call a non-government bills unit to support members in preparing their bills, drafting the accompanying documents and so on. So it's kind of like the, there are clerks, obviously at Westminster who help members draft their private members bills or, but it's a bit more ad hoc.

It's a bit more ad hoc. It's not necessarily able to draw on some of the expertise that an MP might need.

Mark D'Arcy: You've got to say, if you were sitting down with a blank sheet of parchment to drop up a legislative process, you would come up with something like this. You wouldn't come up in a thousand years with the frankly bizarre system for private members bills that has evolved in the House of Commons over the centuries. And it just looks like a far more sensible, deliberative, detailed, engaged way of drawing up legislation on a very sensitive subject than the process [00:47:00] that Kim Leadbeater has been forced to use.

I mean, she didn't even know until the ballot was drawn that she'd have a chance to do this. So it was all done from a standing start. And here we are now rushing stuff through against all kinds of artificial deadlines because it all has to be done within the course of one parliamentary session, one parliamentary year.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, and where you're limited to the number of days that can be set aside to cover these bills unless the government decides otherwise and grants more time, MPs get very little in terms of resource and support to do this. It's quite difficult I think, for MPs normally bringing forward a private member's bill, but this is enormous as an issue.

You know, Scottish Parliament had 14,000 responses. There was a huge response to the consultation by the public bill committee at Westminster on this. Kim Leadbeater has effectively had to perform the role of a government minister dealing with the press, dealing with the amendments, dealing with the drafting, dealing with the sort of policy and political engagement, [00:48:00] and all with her normal administrative and political research support that she has in her office. She may have secured some support and resources from some of the campaign groups elsewhere. As Danny Kruger acknowledged, he'd been able to do a little bit on the other side of the debate, but it means, he explained in the special episode we had with him a few weeks ago, it's been an enormous amount of work. And there isn't that resourcing really to support the members to do this on this scale.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, I mean it does make me think that one of the things that perhaps the Procedure Committee could do, perhaps the Modernisation Committee could do is take an urgent look at the way the Private Members Bill process works and see if it can come up with something that frankly is a bit more rational.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean, one of the things clearly is that if you go into a ballot, which takes place at the start of a session and then just a few weeks later, you've got to bring forward the name and title of your bill, and then if you're high in the ballot just a few weeks later, you've actually got to present your bill for second reading.

You can go into that ballot with [00:49:00] no requirement to set out what bill it is that you intend to bring forward. Now, you know, Kim Leadbeater had indicated that she was minded to pick up the assisted dying issue, and if she hadn't, one of the other MPs in the ballot had indicated they would. But right from the start, the pressure is on in terms of the timescales to get on with it.

And I do think if you are going to have time in the chamber for legislation, it is an incredibly important resource. You're engaged in something that's extremely important that's going to affect citizens across the country, should you really be able to do it without having given at least an indication of what it is you want to use that time for before you enter the ballot.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. It is quite, as we often remarked in our various special podcasts about this, a quite bizarre way of doing business and one that really does look right for reform. So with that, Ruth, should we take another break?

Ruth Fox: Yeah, well I think the Modernisation Committee will indeed, probably have to look at it.

Because I think that we get the sense quite a number of MPs are concerned about it. So yes, let's take a break Mark and then, uh, we come back and I think you want to [00:50:00] discuss the new Black Rod.

Mark D'Arcy: I do indeed.

Ruth Fox: See you in a minute. So welcome back and, Mark, the House of Lords has announced that there is to be a new Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod.

The current occupant is actually Lady Usher of the Black Rod, Sarah Clark, but she's stepping down this summer and will be replaced by Ed Davis. It's been announced who's had a 35 year career in the Royal Marines, former governor of Gibraltar, and he's going to be taking over. This historic role has a range of administrative and ceremonial duties, formally appointed actually by the Crown.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, this is because actually Black Rod is a royal official. This reflects the fact that the Palace of Westminster is, as the name suggests, a royal palace. And Black Rod is formally responsible for a lot of the things that go on in the House of Lords. He'll be there when they introduce a new peer, for example, not necessarily a new bishop, but a new peer.

In fact, he'd be in charge of [00:51:00] arresting any peer who was accused of a breach of privilege, for example. And most famously, of course, Black Rod is the person who can be seen at the State Opening of Parliament marching from the House of Lords into the House of Commons to summon MPs to hear King's or the Queen's Speech. You know, they do that famous ritual where they wrap on the door with their Ebony staff of office from which the title Black Rod comes, the King desires this honorable House, bows in the direction of each side of the House, to attend him forthwith in the House of Peers and then off they all march.

Ruth Fox: So they slam the door in his face initially, don't they? Symbol of Commons independence.

Mark D'Arcy: This is all dating back to Charles I trying to get into the House of Commons to arrest the five members. So there's an awful lot around this, but, Black Rod is also a key figure in organising the security of the Palace of Westminster.

Yeah. They tend to be, Black Rods over the years, fairly senior former military officers, Air Vice Marshal, this General, that [00:52:00] Lieutenant General such and such, Admiral so and so, over the years. Actually Sarah Clark was quite unusual in the sense that she hadn't been a military officer, so her prime career activity before that was organizing the Wimbledon Tennis tournament.

She was the first woman to organize a grand slam tennis tournament, I gather

Ruth Fox: And then the first lady Black Rod.

So that's quite a career.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. And she had quite a test because of course she was the one who had to orchestrate the Westminster end of the various ceremonials around the death of the late Queen.

Yeah. So she would've been the person in charge of the arrangements for the lying in state in Westminster Hall, for example. It's an extremely significant role.

Ruth Fox: Wasn't she also in place when the Prorogation of Parliament took place in 2019 when she came into the chamber and it was, well you and and I were commentating that, it

Mark D'Arcy: A somewhat frosty reception.

Ruth Fox: Yes, yes. You and I were commentating BBC Parliament, weren't we? And we weren't entirely sure what John Bercow's response was going to be. And she looked slightly nonplus at certain points. I felt terribly sorry for her. Incredibly important role, [00:53:00] administrative, ceremonial.

Mark D'Arcy: Mm-hmm, it's actually one of those weird eruptions of the old feudal constitution into parliamentary business today. I was looking at the list of this earlier on. There are actually several rods. Not only is there black rod who is the gentleman usher who works to the order of the garter. There's also green rod who is the usher for the order of the thistle. There is scarlet rod who's the usher for the order of the bath.

There is purple rod who's usher for the order of the British Empire. So all these other figures involved in the system. The post of black rod was first noted in the records in 1350 when it was held by the impressively named Walter Whitehorse. And it has gone on in almost unbroken line. I think there was a bit of a break during the civil war republican period.

It's gone on unbroken pretty much since then.

Ruth Fox: Well, you know, my thoughts on flummery.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, there are plenty of these things there. His deputy, incidentally, is the yeoman usher. [00:54:00] So the gentleman usher should not be confused with the yeoman usher. And of course, at the Commons end there is the Sergeant at Arms, who's some way down the pecking order. It's slightly simpler understanding of the world of Western officials.

Ruth Fox: And of course black rod also has to wear well, depending upon your point of view, a fetching uniform or a complete nonsense. Black shoes, buckles, breaches, coat, silk stockings. Not my cup of tea, I have to say.

Mark D'Arcy: And they've got, and they've got to be prepared to be occasionally in the political firing line. Yeah. As Sarah Clark was, as you described, over the reversed prorogation of Parliament during the Brexit years. But if you look back a little further, the death of the Queen Mother, which is 20 plus years ago, there was an enormous controversy about whether Tony Blair as Prime Minister had tried to big up his role, in the ceremonial, around the death of late Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, and had quite a clash with the then Black Rod over whether or not he had tried to get procedures [00:55:00] changed so that he could take a more prominent position in the proceedings and the enormous stories in the Spectator.

The journalist Peter Oborne was writing these thunderous pieces about how it was ridiculous that Blair was trying to big himself up in this way and Downing Street actually complained about the newspaper coverage and eventually withdrew the complaint before it went off to the newspaper regulator.

But, it all got very, very frosty and very, very nasty. And the then Black rod was at the center of all that. So this can be a position where you have to be able to sort of handle yourself in the political hurley burley, as well as being something that's purely ceremonial.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Well, good luck to Ed Davis when he starts this summer and we'll see how he does.

Yeah, perhaps try and get him on the pod when he's been in post a few months.

Mark D'Arcy: Also give him marks for artistic impression and technical merit.

Ruth Fox: Next State opening. You never know. We might well be in place for the next State Opening King's Speech. Well Mark, shall we turn to listeners questions? We've had a few.

This is going to be quite short though, because you can say they're quite techie procedural questions. Let's put it this way. I don't think Alistair and Rory on the Rest is [00:56:00] Politics get questions like these. So thank you to Gabriel who sent a question in about, we were talking last week on the podcast about, um, Lindsay Hoyle's role as Speaker and some questions being asked about his partiality or not towards Sir Keir Starmer at PMQs. And we were talking about the process for electing and choosing the next Speaker. And Gabriel has come back and said, you know, if you look at the Standing Orders, it says that at least one man and one woman should be elected across the four posts of speaker and deputy speakers.

And given that there's three women in post as the deputies at the moment, does that mean there can only be a choice of a male candidate? Which is an interesting procedural question, which we're trying to get our heads around. So, Gabriel don't think we can provide you with an answer immediately on this.

We are consulting our procedural gurus as to whether or not it would apply in the situation of the election of the next speaker.

Mark D'Arcy: I suspect if the ruling was that it did, they'd quickly changed the Notwithstanding standing order whatever it is we'll [00:57:00] do this differently.

Yeah. So we'll get whizzed through.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. So we are looking at the complexities around this particular standing order, but it clearly, that would not have been the intention at the time that they drafted the standing order, but in practical terms, on a plain reading, it might be problematic. So we are looking into that Gabriel, and we will come back with a more fulsome response in due course.

Mark D'Arcy: And in the meantime, how nice it is to get a question from a practicing archangel.

Ruth Fox: Oh, and then we've had another question in from, well they're anonymous, so I dunno whether they're an angel or, or the devil. I don't know. This is about something that's happened this week in the House in relation to the Royal Albert Hall Bill. So this is a private legislation, again, we've talked about it a little bit on the podcast before the Royal Albert Hall is bringing forward this legislation to change its governance arrangements and it's hit some problems in the House of Lords when it went through in that House initially, because there was a very rare amendment against the wishes of the Royal Albert Hall at Third Reading to deal with some governance [00:58:00] issues. And now it's hit a bit of turbulence in the Commons because on Tuesday this week, Sir Christopher Chope objected to the second reading of the bill and our questioner asked, when was the last time an MP opposed a private bill?

And how likely is it to derail the Bill's passage? Well, this is going to take a little bit of explanation through private bill procedure, which is different to that for government bills. And we're also looking into how often private bills have been opposed. There's some quite technical arrangements in play. So we're trying to find out what will happen with the bill now and again, we'll come back, uh, once we've got a bit more information on that and report back to listeners. As I say very techy questions this way.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, I'm one of these people who actually defends the Christopher Chope on some of these things, in the sense that he takes the view that you shouldn't just constantly be passing legislation on the nod and there really ought to be debates, especially where there is an element of controversy and that doesn't seem to be an unreasonable position for a parliamentarian to take.

Ruth Fox: No, and you know, as you say, he takes this view very much of private members [00:59:00] bills that he will be objecting to them, so standby when, uh, the assisted dying bill starts to make progress and suddenly all these other private members bills are trying to make some progress because they may well find Christopher Chope objecting to them.

Not on questions about the content of the bill, but just the fact that they're not going to get the kind of scrutiny that he quite rightly thinks that they should have. And at the moment, there's a motion now on the business papers of the house that he's moving, that the bill be read a second time in six months for the Royal Albert Hall Bill.

So trying to delay it. But that's a sort of normal motion that you get for private bills, which we're digging into. So he's clearly decided, yes, that this bill needs a bit more scrutiny as well.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, we'll report back when we've, uh, figured out more of the intricacies of both of those questions in due course.

But, uh, wouldn't like your listeners to think that we were ignoring questions that have been put down? Yeah. Sometimes it's just that they do take a bit of research to find workable answers.

Ruth Fox: Yes, they do sometimes. So yeah, listeners, if you've got other questions, you know, send them in. The link is in our show notes, [01:00:00] which you can find on your podcast app for this episode.

Or you can find the link through the podcast page on our website, hansardsociety.org.uk or just send them in via social media at HansardSociety on X and we're also on Blue Sky, so send those in and we'll look into the answers for you.

Mark D'Arcy: And I think that's probably about all for this episode, Ruth.

So for now, goodbye. We'll be back next week with much more exciting parliamentary action.

Ruth Fox: We will. But just a quick reminder to listeners before we go, please do fill in that listener survey that's also in the show notes. It really helps for us to find out what you like about the podcast, what you don't, and it, will help us develop and grow the podcast audience in the future.

So if you could do that, we would be incredibly grateful. See you next week.

Mark D'Arcy: Bye-bye.

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 [01:01:00] Society.

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