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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: You wait ages for a trade treaty, then three come along at once. Liam Byrne, chair of the Commons Business and Trade Committee, explains why Parliament still won't get much of a say on Britain's new deals with America, India, and the European Union.

Mark D'Arcy: Can you cut the cost of Parliament without harming democracy?

Ruth Fox: And farewell to the man who guided the Commons through two decades of crisis.

Mark D'Arcy: So Ruth, let's start by talking about those trade treaties. [00:01:00] It's been an unusual couple of weeks for Sir Keir Starmer because he's actually had quite a run of good news. Those successive new trade deals announced first with India, then with the United States. You remember those scenes in the Oval Office with Peter Mandelson, cackling away with Donald Trump, and then the biggest one of them all, the EU reset. Now, these agreements will have to be underpinned by formal treaties, but as we've often remarked on this podcast before, MPs and still less peers get very little traction on the terms of those deals. Because this is the Government exercising the royal prerogative, the executive's right to make international agreements with minimal oversight from Parliament itself.

Ruth Fox: Yes, I mean, Mark, these are the residual powers which used to historically be exercised by the Monarch, but which are now exercised by ministers either directly or on the advice provided to the Monarch and which may be used without the consent of Parliament. And there's the rub, because a lot of these deals, I mean, you're talking about, as you say, a reset [00:02:00] with European Union, a deal with India, America dealing with tariffs, not just the kinds of deals that pertain to foreign policy, and the realm of foreign policy and international relations, but they cut deep into domestic economic policy.

And therefore, keeping Parliament at one remove is a problem.

Mark D'Arcy: And at the moment, the system for dealing with treaties for historical reasons, as you say, is actually pretty weak. The system we've got is that treaties are laid before the House for 21 days and it's up to parliamentarians to decide whether to object.

It rather echoes the procedure that I know you loathe for dealing with delegated legislation. Indeed, it's not a positive engagement with the legislation. It's a, do you want to veto this kind of question that's put before MPs. Peers actually don't even have that much.

Ruth Fox: No, essentially what we've got for international agreements, of which trade deals are a subset, is that the arrangement is basically modeled on what we [00:03:00] had a hundred years ago.

Back then, a foreign office minister in the Ramsay MacDonald government decided that actually Parliament ought to at least know which agreements were being negotiated by the Government and agreed and came up with this idea, this model, which became known as the Ponsonby rule, that he was Sir Arthur Ponsonby.

This idea was that the agreement should be laid before Parliament 21 days before ratification, effectively before the government wants to bring it into effect. It's already signed it, negotiated it, the deal is effectively done but hasn't yet been brought into force. It will be laid before Parliament for 21 days, to see whether Parliament wanted to say anything about it. Essentially, as you say, it's a negative process. Parliament has to actively object rather than actively consent.

Mark D'Arcy: And if Parliament does object, the agreement doesn't then fall. The Government then has a period in which to respond with a ministerial statement, and if Parliament still doesn't like what's been said by the minister, it can object again and [00:04:00] keep the agreement in limbo, at least in terms of parliamentary ratification, for an indefinite period.

This could be a sort of rinse and repeat cycle.

Ruth Fox: Yes. So this is where we get into what's known as CRAG.

Mark D'Arcy: Ah, my old friend, the Constitutional Reform and Government Act 2010, which was passed in the dying days of Gordon Brown's government, just before an election, rushed through in what is known in the trade as the Washup.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. So essentially this enshrined in statute, in legislation, what the Ponsonby rule was all about, and it basically enshrined this negative scrutiny procedure. So there's no explicit requirement for parliamentary consent. The government lays the treaty, or the deal, the agreement, before Parliament, has to have an explanatory memorandum. Having done so, it's then got a wait to ratify for at least 21 sitting days.

So not calendar days, sitting days. So obviously that deals with the prospective of recess. If, at that point, the House of Commons, if MPs were to agree a motion saying, we don't [00:05:00] want you to ratify this treaty, nonetheless, the Government can come back, the minister can lay a statement before Parliament saying, no, we actually think we have to proceed with this ratification.

And then you'd trigger another 21 day scrutiny period during which the House of Commons would again have to decide, are they resolving against ratification or not? And as you say, you're then into this rinse and repeat. But the critical thing is how do you get a motion in the chamber for MPs to vote on, against ratification, because of course, remember, theme of this podcast, the government controls the parliamentary agenda, the order paper.

Mark D'Arcy: So the only way probably is an opposition motion on an opposition day. And then you are inviting the political majority, in Parliament. So for example, if it happened now, so say the Conservatives put down a motion against Sir Keir Starmer's EU deal, they would essentially be inviting the Labour MPs there to vote down their own Prime Minister, which doesn't strike me as a desperately likely contingency at the moment.

Ruth Fox: No. And it was very [00:06:00] controversial at the end of the last Parliament when there was no vote on the Government's trade deal with Australia and the then business and trade secretary kept saying that this will be subject to parliamentary time. And of course, no parliamentary time was made available. Now, the government was obviously in a difficult position in the last Parliament and was more fearful about the mechanics of voting numbers and how that might work out as well as difficulties with the rest of its legislative program and the use of parliamentary time.

But it's hard to see in this Parliament why Keir would fear losing a vote. I mean, he, you know, he might lose some Labour MPs not willing to vote for it or abstaining, but it's hard to see him not being able to win those votes. And therefore it seems unlikely that the Government won't grant votes on these deals.

But nonetheless, it's a negative process and nobody knows really what would happen if through this sort of rinse and repeat cycle, the MPs kept saying, no, we don't want you to ratify this treaty. And the [00:07:00] government kept saying, yes, we do, because you're into the realm of, this is an international deal, so your reputation internationally, the diplomacy involved would be really tricky, but then you've got to consider domestic politics.

Mark D'Arcy: That's part of the problem with all this, of course, is that the Government goes away and negotiates these deals, then takes them back to Parliament and repudiating them in Parliament would entail having to go back and renegotiate the deals, doubtless to the considerable irritation of the other parties involved.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, you'd think.

Mark D'Arcy: And because these agreements are so wide ranging and touch so many different areas of the economy these days, there's increasing concern up on the committee corridor about how they can be scrutinised. And Emily Thornberry, who's the chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and Liam Byrne, who's the chair of the Business and Trade Committee, put out a joint statement saying that Parliament really ought to have more traction, ought to be able to scrutinise these deals much more than it now does.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, the role of select committees is important here, because they can do the detailed analysis and [00:08:00] look at each of the deals and be able to compare and contrast and see the relationships between them and the trade-offs that are being made. Select committees have been trying to get more traction on this issue of scrutiny for quite some time, all the way through Brexit, for example, where it was, you know, it's a heightened issue when deals were being done with the EU.

Yet again, the House of Lords has led the way, as so often, in terms of trying to get more of a scrutiny handle on things that then chair of the, I think it was the International Agreements Committee at the time, Baroness Hayter. She did a effectively a deal through correspondence with the then Trade Minister Gerry Grimstone, which set out that Parliament and the select committees would get advanced access to papers. They'd have some confidential access to some aspects of what was going on in the negotiations. The idea being that they wouldn't be surprised when this big trade deal paperwork landed on their desk for scrutiny when they'd only have 21 days to look at it. So the idea was that they'd kind of be kept in the loop, but of course, that's only subject to correspondence.

It's [00:09:00] not formalised in any parliamentary procedures.

Mark D'Arcy: And it's still grace and favour of government saying, okay, well, we'll make this concession and we'll go and talk to you about it. Yeah, and Parliament thinking, well, that's very nice, but it's still a favour being done to them, rather than an accepted procedure.

Ruth Fox: Absolutely. And if you have institutional changes within government, if you have machinery of government changes and a department goes, and therefore a select committee goes, then what happens? So there are a whole range of questions, and the International Agreements Committee at the moment in the House of Lords has restarted another inquiry on treaty scrutiny.

And as you say, Liam Byrne and Emily Thornberry are really demanding more input from the Commons end as well. So, Mark, we went to Westminster to talk to Liam Byrne and ask him what that might look like.

Mark D'Arcy: Liam Byrne, welcome to the pod. Can you tell us why this new round of trade deals is so important?

Liam Byrne: Well, we're moving into a very different world now.

So strategically what's happening is that America is sort of leaving the multilateral system that it created [00:10:00] between 1944 and 1961, and that's not necessarily a disaster as long as you have a coalition of the willing that is prepared to step up and help run that system, that helps keep order and peace in the world.

But what the UK has the opportunity to do now is to take its place at the, what Churchill called, the point of junction of a number of new majestic circles. So back in 1945, Churchill talked about three majestic circles, the Commonwealth, Europe and the English speaking world. There's probably about five now.

So the big trade area in Asia Pacific. Many of those are members of C-P-T-P-P. You've obviously then got the new trade deal with India. You have then got our relationship with the states of the Gulf where we are negotiating with the Gulf Cooperation Council, you've then obviously got the trade bargains that are helping keep tariffs down with the United States.

And then the most important of all, the reset with the European Union. So there's [00:11:00] probably five big circles that we are now at the point of junction of. And if we get all those deals done in the right way, the UK's going to emerge as the hub of free trade. But these are big deals that could change the country in significant ways.

Mark D'Arcy: And they're often very deep and wide ranging deals as well.

I mean, the report that your committee's produced about a reset with Europe talks about everything from phytosanitary standards for agricultural products to energy policy and resets on defense, and a whole range of other subjects. So these are not simple things. They're multifaceted. They involve all sorts of different industries and sectors of the UK economy.

Liam Byrne: They do. And the reason that they're wide ranging is because the world is now fracturing and defense and security is fundamental. So we are not just about trade treaties anymore, we're about trusted trade treaties. In the UK, it's got a particular interest in this, because of [00:12:00] course, if you think about those trade areas that I just set out, we have defense alliances that underpin most of those.

So we're members of Five Eyes, AUKUS, we have a partnership with Japan, GCAP Tempest, Five Power Defense Alliance, longstanding relationship with the Gulf. We're members of NATO. So many of the trade bargains that we're striking will inevitably have a defense dimension and they will definitely have an economic security dimension.

So these are much bigger bargains than we used to do in the past. They're not just about trade anymore.

Ruth Fox: And that's why it's so important that Parliament has a role in this, because as you said, they're bargains. So we will gain things from them, but we also have to make concessions. So your committee is quite keen to be able to have a handle on these, to be able to scrutinise these deals.

You're concerned that at the moment the current arrangements are not good enough, but the Hansard Society society, other organizations as well, have been frankly banging our heads against a brick wall on this question. So what do you want to see changed?

Liam Byrne: I think that there are three basic changes that Parliament needs to get a handle of.

So [00:13:00] I think it would be good if Parliament was involved at the mandate setting exercise. Now, a lot of the trade talks that we've got underway at the moment have been quite longstanding. So the initiation moment was post Brexit, long standing arguments underway. But I think in an ideal world, you would get Parliament involved in having a debate about the mandate for the talks, and I think in a way that could help the UK negotiators, because when others are pressing the trade offs, it's then much easier to say, well, look, there's no way we'll get Parliament to sign off on that, I'm afraid.

So actually, sometimes fetters can be a helpful thing rather than a hindrance. Second is, both Emily and I have said in the past, we do think there's virtue in an up down vote on a treaty just because it forces Parliament to really zero in on the issues it's taking, as you say, the trade offs that have been involved.

And then the third area is then obviously scrutinizing whether the treaties are being used. So are companies actually using the [00:14:00] tariff concessions that have been used. We have very poor data on that at the moment. That's one of the things that we're trying to figure out, how we will set up scrutiny frameworks, for example, on our committee so that we can actually see actually if these deals actually made any difference.

Mark D'Arcy: And where do the select committees fit into this? Something, for example, if one were to look at the new trade deal, it's not a full all singing, all dancing deal, yet, the new deal with America, that could involve easily the Agriculture Committee, the Defense Committee, your committee, probably several others.

So how do they fit into that ecology?

Liam Byrne: We are literally having that debate this week. We're just about to write to the government to say, well, look, how do you foresee the process for this? Because although the CRAG process is that 21 day process in which the scrutiny is really intensified, there's quite a long run up to that.

So the Trade and Agriculture Commission has to opine on impacts for animal welfare, for example. I don't think the government actually has to provide a set period of time for [00:15:00] that. We like to be able to draw on that evidence before then writing a report to Parliament to help Parliament understand what is going on.

We are literally having to make preparations now for how we're going to scrutinise the India deal and the America deal, as well as the EU reset deal. We're just writing to government now to basically say, look, how do you foresee parliamentary scrutiny being involved here? And I think what our committee will do is to basically make sure that we go into a CRAG process with the issues already lit up and well understood.

So we will begin convening pre CRAG hearings and we will start taking evidence pre CRAG so that we are ready to go, as soon as the treaty is actually laid in Parliament and the CRAG process commences formally,

Ruth Fox: I mean, 21 days is barely long enough to look at the magnitude of these agreements.

You were asking the question, how does Government see that it's going to be scrutinised for its deals? Mm-hmm. Is there any sort of discussions going on [00:16:00] with bodies like the Modernization Committee, the Procedure Committee, about how the House of Commons should be telling Government what your expectations are?

Liam Byrne: Well, we are working within the existing process, so we are looking to try and coordinate our work with what happens in the House of Lords because I think in the House of Lords, they do have that latitude to go into a lot more technical detail and with a lot more time. What the House of Commons has got to do is to basically light up the key political issues that are at stake and the key trade offs that are being made.

Now when you've got moving texts, that's quite difficult, so I'll give you a silly example. In the US trade deal, there is an agreement around a quota for car exports. It's not clear what happens once you are one car over that quota. It's not clear what tariff kicks in and who pays that tariff. We are already having to get in touch with ministers now to say, well look, we can see this text, we can see it's a signal, but actually it doesn't make any sense to us. So we need to kind of understand it. But we think as a committee that putting out that call for evidence [00:17:00] now, well ahead of a CRAG process at least helps us pin down and prioritize the political issues that we as a committee want to zero in on.

Because what we then have to do is to figure out, right, who are we going to call together as witnesses? What's the analysis that we want to get commissioned? What's the kind of shape of report that we want to table to parliament? When do we want to land that? Can we land that in a way that we can trigger a debate in parliament?

Can we persuade the government to move a vote motion in government time? So we've got some kind of logistical questions that we have to figure out about how we land a report in Parliament, because ultimately what we're trying to do is to help ensure that Parliament has considered this in as well informed a way as possible and really has the information that it wants about the key issues at stake and the key trade offs that the government's made.

Mark D'Arcy: You are an experienced minister,

Liam Byrne: You mean old, of course.

Mark D'Arcy: When you were immigration minister for example, would you have liked to [00:18:00] have had Parliament breathing down your neck while you were off negotiating something with a another country? Because I suspect the reason why successive governments have never gone down this road of improving the process is frankly they'd rather just get on with it without random backbench MPs juggling their elbows.

Liam Byrne: Yeah, I'm sure that's right. But that doesn't necessarily make for the best treaty. And so I think as a Minister I could see how having Parliament involved upfront actually would've been terrifically useful. So a general debate in the House of Commons over the course of a day actually does a pretty effective job zeroing in on the key issues that people are worried about.

Actually, that is quite useful for a minister. Gives a minister something of a compass to help them navigate trade talks. Also gives them material to play with when they're perhaps resisting ambitions that others may be trying to press on us. I think then it's just what Parliament ought to do, which is to hold a minister to account for the trade treaty that has been [00:19:00] agreed and ultimately no trade treaty is forever.

New governments do have the right to come and revisit these things, and so just helping understand that what has actually been agreed is an important part of the process too. And there is nothing that focuses a minister's mind like an up down vote,

Mark D'Arcy: But the up down vote that Parliament has on these things, on the treaty itself, Parliament can indefinitely delay the ratification of a treaty. Parliament can perhaps have a bit of traction if there's implementing legislation that's needed for a treaty. But mostly it's a sort of nuclear power, either, you know, if you take offense to some detail, you don't necessarily have any other way of doing anything about it except stopping the whole treaty.

Liam Byrne: Well, unfortunately, it's a nuclear power for which the government holds the codes because ultimately because of its control of the parliamentary timetable, the Government has the power to resist scheduling any vote on delay. So during the [00:20:00] C-P-T-P-P treaty, for example, we were constantly pressing ministers to commit to the House that they were going to schedule, within government time, a debate and a vote that would give Parliament the wherewithal to delay treaty ratification.

And there were lots of warm words. And guess what? At the end of the day, they ran out of time.

Ruth Fox: Are you thinking about things like joint committee inquiries and so on to scrutinise these things? Because they're so complex and these issues are not siloed. They cross departmental boundaries. So is there a sort of case almost for a grand committee type model of select committees to look at these things?

Or do you think they're going to continue to be done sort of on a departmental basis.

Liam Byrne: So I think we are going to see over the next six months, so we think the America deal may be actually quite thin, quite slim, not thin in content. We don't think it's going to be thousands of pages. The India deal is going to be thousands of pages.

And so [00:21:00] I don't think we yet know quite how Parliament is going to approach this. So we've had one initial discussion on our committee and the conclusion was right, we better make sure we are ready when the firing gun is fired and the treaty is laid in Parliament. So we're going to need to do pre CRAG hearings and start readying a pre CRAG report that we then refine and lay as quickly as possible within the 21 day period.

But this is something that I think the Liaison Committee that brings together all the House of Commons chairs of committees is going to have to think about quite quickly. Now at this stage, we don't yet have a timetable for when these treaties are going to be late. We don't know when the America deal will be finished.

We don't know when the India deal is going to be scrubbed and laid. We'll know a bit more about that next week and we don't know the status of the other deals either. So, it's a tiny bit of a theoretical discussion for House of Commons chairs at the moment, but it's definitely a discussion that liaison committee's going to have to have.

Mark D'Arcy: Because governments have been pretty much getting on with these agreements without much input from Parliament.

If there was input from [00:22:00] Parliament at all on the process of starting an India deal, it was in the previous Parliament before the last election sometime, and there hasn't been much since. And I just don't detect any great enthusiasm for ministers to have Parliament mucking in on this very much. They'd rather present a fait accompli and say, look what a great achievement we've achieved.

Liam Byrne: Yeah, I'm sure that's right. But that's a minister's view. But that isn't necessarily what's in the best interest of Parliament or the country, and I think, the level of concern was a bit lower in the past because most of the deals that we were signing were rollover deals from the European Union. We kind of knew what the parameters of those bargains were.

Like the new packs that are coming are quite different and they're much bigger. So the India deal is going to involve real trade offs. It's got some real advantages. You know, they've got some real strengths of these deals too. Equally, the US deal, some real issues are at stake there. The EU deal, real issues at stake.

So I think we're just now moving into a phase where the trade offs and complications of deals [00:23:00] are much, much bigger, and therefore, Parliament is probably going to want to be more involved.

Mark D'Arcy: And certainly on the EU deal front, there's a possibility here of the, the Brexit arguments all reviving, leaping out of the grave and starting all over again.

Liam Byrne: Yeah, we look forward to that. I mean, that's partly why we got ahead of it by getting a report done on what we thought were the 20 different ways in which you could reset the relationship with Europe. And we did something a bit unusual here, which is something we might repeat. So we actually, as a committee, wrote a draft report, published a draft report as a committee, to the House, consulted on that and then produced a final report. And what that allowed us to do when we published it today was to show the House of Commons, here are the levels of support from the stakeholders we've gone out to for the different measures that we propose, and that's been quite useful because you can see there's really, really high levels of support for things like compatible regulation with the European Union.

There are slightly lower levels of support for the [00:24:00] kind of proposals that we had on fisheries. There was a majority for what we proposed, but the support levels were different. So I just think that that might be a kind of innovation that we use a bit more frequently. When we are putting stakeholder feedback to the Commons, I mean ultimately, you know, if you think about what we're trying to do as a business committee, we've obviously got to hold the Government to account, but we're also trying to act as a bridge to Parliament for business and trade unions and consumer groups too.

And so we have a role to play, which is making sure that the issues that are top of their minds are issues which are in front of the House too.

Ruth Fox: Well, the questions for select committees is, you know, some of these policy areas, very complex, very technical, very legal. We've got a huge range of matters to cover.

What kind of resources does your committee have to sort of deal with these trade agreements and deal with the engagement with the business community? You said you want Parliament to have a different relationship with business. What kind of resources have you got your disposal as chair to do all that [00:25:00] work?

Liam Byrne: Pretty limited. I mean, we've got a brilliant team and you know, we're able to draw on specialists. The House of Commons has been changing the way that it organizes its research service, so they're making much greater use of these hubs now that bring together teams for select committees and teams for, for example, the library.

So international affairs is a good example. We actually do quite a lot of work in the defense industrial policy space. We have a subcommittee on economic security. We draw really heavily on the specialist in the international hub for that kind of work. But you know, we can't disguise the fact that the resources that we have are quite limited when we go out to inquiry.

We are obviously then able to crowdsource evidence from as many people as would like to give us evidence. But we're now just beginning conversation with organizations like the ESRC because we're quite interested in how we can potentially draw down on research money that ESRC wants to focus on public policy impact.

Because I think strategically, [00:26:00] select committees have got to build stronger partnerships with the policy institutes. I mean, there's about 40 or 50 policy institutes at universities now. We connect with them through the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, but there's, I think, a potential for kind of call off contracts with policy institutes that select committees can help steward.

The challenge that we've got is that we often need high quality analysis on very, very short turnaround periods, which is not necessarily how academics love to work, but we would like to find a way of working between the two extremes of hope here. And then I think the debate that's coming in this Parliament is how we basically build a bigger engagement process.

We have actually quite a small engagement team at the House of Commons. And if you think about the way that other countries. I mean, the Scandinavians are brilliant at this. The Taiwanese are pretty good at this. They're developing methods of building social intelligence into public policy making much more effectively than the UK Parliament is social [00:27:00] intelligence.

So basically going out, working with civil society groups, academia, think tanks in a much more dynamic way. A good example was the work that this committee did on climate change with a couple of other committees, and we organized a kind of a citizen's assembly like process to help zero in our options and ideas for the path.

Net zero, that's quite a big and expensive exercise. The budgets that Parliament has and select committees have for doing work like that is almost non-existent.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, Liam Byrne, thanks very much indeed for joining Ruth and I on the pod today.

Liam Byrne: Brilliant. Thanks for having me on.

Ruth Fox: Well, Mark, what did you make of that?

I mean, poor Liam, he's going to be very busy over the coming months.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. Well, one of the things that immediately hits you when you listen to him talking about these issues is a clear consensus on the committee corridor that something has to be done better here.

Ruth Fox: Yeah.

Mark D'Arcy: And they've got to find a way to make it work.

And this can't easily neatly fall into the purview of one particular committee that does all the heavy lifting. You can foresee the Liaison Committee, which coordinates the [00:28:00] work of all the select committees, having to come up with some way in which they can work together to start doing reports on the India deal, the EU deal, the US deal as and when they come before Parliament.

Because the chances are that there will be a legislative side of this, as Liam was saying in that interview. A lot of these deals will require implementing legislation to change UK law to conform with these deals. So at that point, Parliament will need to have an opinion, and part of the job of select committees is to inform that opinion, is to provide them with analysis of what the deals will mean and what the consequences will be for this sector of the economy or that sector.

So getting that done in good time and effectively will both have a resource implication and will mean maybe that the committees have to kinda have a variable geometry where they combine their efforts to do particular deals.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, there's also, I think, going to have to be some sort of effort on part of the Government that actually the 21 day rule under the CRAG Act is too [00:29:00] short for some of this.

I mean, there's some good indications off the back of the recent deal that's been done with Ukraine where the government has extended that 21 day sitting period because the select committee was reporting right up against that 21 day deadline, and the committee said, can we have an extension? And the government agreed.

So good indicators there. And it's in the interest of the government in terms of comity with these select committees to be helpful in that respect. But nonetheless, as we've said so many times, you know, so much of this is in the hands and control of the government and is about the government, as you say, gracefully granting Parliament these opportunities rather than Parliament, having the powers and the rules to be able to demand it of Government and hold the Government properly to account.

Mark D'Arcy: Now, of course, these three agreements, in some senses, the work on them started under the previous government, and in the previous Parliament, and then the Labour government took over the negotiations and took them in its own way.

But what you're going to increasingly see pressure for, I expect, is for when the process starts, of we are going to go off and have a new deal with all the [00:30:00] countries in the Gulf, that there has to be a debate on what that might look like at the start of the process, the mandating process, if you like. Perhaps, not formally setting out these are the red lines that ministers mustn't cross, but certainly giving an indication of parliamentary opinion on the issues that a particular deal might raise in advance. And if you get in on the ground floor of these things, I think that's where Parliament can have the most effect. Once you get into the position of having to decide whether to accept a deal you don't particularly like or repudiate the government of which you are supposedly a supporter, then you really are between a rock and a hard place.

So get in on the ground floor.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean, if you're in the position of essentially saying, no, we don't want to ratify this treaty, you've failed. Politically, it's negotiating failure. And we saw through Brexit, Theresa May, all those votes we commentated on BBC Parliament, you know, essentially a negotiating failure because you didn't bring your political troops with you along the way.

Mark D'Arcy: Um, I'm not sure any power on Earth could have brought all her political troops with her at that point, but that's another story.

Ruth Fox: [00:31:00] Possibly not, no. But the House of Commons is an outlier in this, well, Parliament generally is an outlier in this. Because most Parliaments internationally do have more grip over oversight of what their government is proposing at, as you say, the negotiating stage, the setting of the mandate.

And what you hear from negotiators is that they can find it useful because

Mark D'Arcy: Well, Liam was saying that very point.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, it's in full public view that their legislators don't like X, Y, and Z.

And therefore they can use that as a tool, a red line in their negotiations.

Mark D'Arcy: Surely trade minister of a foreign country, your ambassador, who I know was sitting in the gallery when we debated this, saw that we weren't going to accept such and such.

Just not going to get through.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, absolutely.

Mark D'Arcy: But I think the first instance we may see of real turbulence around an international agreement is not on any of these trade treaties. It's on the deal over the Chagos Islands when there's an awful lot of political heat being generated.

Ruth Fox: As we're speaking Mark, this morning, it seems the High Court has stepped in, there was apparently going to be a [00:32:00] virtual signing of this deal with the Mauritian government over the Chagos Islands. That's apparently been halted by High Court action. We don't quite know the details of that.

Mark D'Arcy: I think the injunctions now been lifted.

Ruth Fox: Has it been lifted?

So they're going to go ahead, are they? In which case, you know, we'll have to see what happens. But again, going to that point about the royal prerogative and the ability of ministers to sort of act themselves without oversight by Parliament or without consent of Parliament. We don't know the details of this deal yet as we are speaking, but it is said that in effect it is giving up territory and it is going to cost a considerable sum of money.

And those are two things in which Parliament has an interest and which go to confidence in the government. And you can't really say that Parliament shouldn't have a role in those things, so it highlights the friction that exists now in relation to the kinds of international agreements that have been recently signed and are going to be no doubt signed in the future.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, indeed. And if the vision of buccaneering free trading Britain striking deals all [00:33:00] over the world is to actually crystallize into reality. And we're going to see more and more of these questions coming up,

Ruth Fox: Which is where I think the International Agreements Committee's latest inquiry, into which we've recently submitted evidence, is so important because decisions have got to be made about what international agreement scrutiny should look like in the future. We've submitted evidence saying essentially, Parliament should have not a negative vote, but an active consent vote. It should say, whether or not it consents to these, it should have a role in the mandate stage. It shouldn't be for the government to decide when and how it lets Parliament know what treaties it's engaged in and what negotiations are going on. Parliament should actively be able to know what those are and sift and decide itself, what it wants to look at and what it wants to scrutinise and how it wants to scrutinise them with some kind of a sifting committee, for example.

Mark D'Arcy: And doubtless, that's a row that's going to run and run. And with that, Ruth, shall we take a break?

Ruth Fox: See you in a minute.[00:34:00]

Mark we're back and I thought we should discuss the costs of the House of Commons. So your former colleague, Esther Webber, now with Politico, was reporting this week that the House of Commons has been told it needs to make 10% savings over three years, or something like a saving of 54 million pounds, which you can't exactly get down the back of the sofa.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah.

Ruth Fox: So there are some quite serious implications I think that are going to flow from this.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. Well, first of all, a shout out to Esther Webber who's one of the shrewdest observers of the parliamentary machine and how it operates. I used to know her in her days on BBC Parliament and she's someone who's got a very beady eye on developments in the Westminster village.

But yes, this whole question of, where you save money, everybody else in Government is being expected to find enormous savings. So there isn't any good reason why parliament should be exempt from that. But what are the consequences of saving money? Where can you find that money? Are you going to end up cutting the budgets for the [00:35:00] select committees, for example?

Ruth Fox: Let's not.

Mark D'Arcy: Are you going to end up cutting the budget for the House of Commons Library, which provides a lot of the intellectual ammunition that MPs use in debates. Always remembering that Parliament is an expensive institution to run by its very nature.

Ruth Fox: Yes, and I suppose this brings into play the whole question of the Restoration and Renewal of the building, which keeps being put off because of the sheer scale of the costs involved, billions of pounds, but it's not cost free year to year in terms of the regular budgets, because the maintenance costs involved hundreds of millions of pounds.

There's also health and safety issues that, you can't skimp on those. And because it's a heritage building, you can't just pop down to Homebase and sort of, you know, get your cheap wallpaper and slap it on the wall. So there are costs involved by the nature of the building and the nature of the institution.

But as you say, you don't want it either impinging on the critical work of the house, the select committee scrutiny or the debates and, and, and time in the chamber. So an [00:36:00] obvious thing that's happened, of course in recent months is the recall of Parliament. Yeah. I mean, that adds to the costs of the institution.

Because you've got to get staff back, you've got to get security back, that's another area that you can't really skimp and save on.

Mark D'Arcy: And of course, when Parliament is not sitting, there's often vital maintenance work going on. And while I'm sure it'll be written into the contract of the builders or engineers or whoever they are, that if Parliament has to be recalled, they just have to get out the way. Yeah. It's still an expensive business for that to happen and the work will still need to be done at some other point. Yeah. So all those things make Parliament more expensive. So are we going to say fewer recalls? Are we going to say fewer sitting days?

Are we going to say less backup for MPs in terms of research? Are we going to say less travel by select committees, less expenses for witnesses, what gets cut?

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean, I was quite concerned. One of the quotes that Esther had in her report was that the source said that Parliament had been lax and sleepy for far too long on the finances.

There's no doubt the money that Parliament has received or the House of Commons has [00:37:00] received has gone up quite considerably in recent years. But I mean, that is a product of Brexit. It's a product of Covid, it's a product of Restoration and Renewal. I mean, back in 2017, 2017, it got about, I think from their annual report, roughly their estimate was about 458 million. The latest estimate was about 633, I think. So a considerable increase split between capital investment and resources and non-capital cash requirements I think they call it. But as a product of this, you know, the select committees, the House of Commons Library have got more staff, there's more demands on them.

There's much greater need for real experts in sort of technical policy areas and legal areas. You don't wanna lose that. I mean, there may be some savings at the edges to be made, but fundamentally, things like the House of Commons Library, that gold standard of research for MPs, you don't want to lose that because who would be the beneficiary?

It would be the government, right.

Mark D'Arcy: The thing that should be absolutely untouchable here is the scrutiny function of [00:38:00] Parliament. If that gets paired back, and then as you say, it's government that goes un scrutinised, it's the politicians in power who benefit from that, and that is not a good thing. Mm-hmm.

That's almost the whole raison d'etre of the Hansard Society. Amongst other things, are you going to touch MPs' pay? Well, that's controlled by IPSA. Yeah. Separate the Independent Parliamentary Authority there. So, that's a difficult area to touch. Are you going to perhaps pair back or freeze the pay of parliamentary staff?

Ruth Fox: Yeah, of course. The other thing that plays into this is that Parliament, the House of Commons, is subject to the same cost of living pressures as everybody else. You know, so inflation costs on all the things that they have to spend money on, including salaries.

Mark D'Arcy: Are they going to end the subsidies to House of Commons catering, which have been paired back year on year for quite a while now.

Ruth Fox: I think that's probably one where we could probably find popular opinion. That's actually the other side of this is the flip side is rather than cuts, do you try to increase the amount of revenue that you generate? Certainly in recent years, professionalization of things like the [00:39:00] banqueting options and tours and so on, and they've raised more money than anticipated.

But there are limits to that because of the scope for opening up the venue, the rooms to external organizations to hire or, you know, to hold their events. There's only so much you can do without it impinging on parliamentary business.

Mark D'Arcy: And indeed on parliamentary security. Yeah, so there's that. I suppose there may be internal administrative savings that don't touch the key functions of Parliament, and they do say that pretty much any organization can find internal savings if it's prepared to look hard enough for them without touching its main functions in life.

So maybe there will be some kind of internal rejigging of the administrative side of Parliament, but at the moment, the key danger here is that a cost cutting drive of the kind that's hitting pretty much every other aspect of the state could end up reducing the key function of parliament, which is to scrutinise the executive.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. So we'll have to keep an eye on this Mark. I think most definitely want to want to keep an eye on [00:40:00] over the next few years.

Mark D'Arcy: But the great Esther Webber has also highlighted something else that's been going on in Parliament, which is proposals to the Modernization Committee to update the way that the Commons does business.

And in particular, she's reporting that there is a proposal out there that the Government looks kindly upon, for call lists in debates. In other words, MPs would know in advance when they were debating a given piece of legislation or a given subject in what order they would be called to speak so that you would know that you would be due in the Commons as an MP at half past four in the afternoon.

And you would then have four or five minutes to make your speech in. And that could have quite a profound effect on the shape and nature of debates in the Commons chamber.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, and one thing I really dislike Mark, is where commentators characterise this as a demand from lazy MPs because I don't think it's that. Quite the contrary.

It's actually the sheer number of work pressures and demands on [00:41:00] MPs that is driving some of them to say, it's not a good use of my time to spend four or five hours sitting in the chamber when I could be off meeting constituents or dealing with constituency correspondence or holding a meeting with ministers and so on

Mark D'Arcy: And taking a zoom call.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. So it's not laziness and I really dislike that, but it is about competing work priorities and how they fit alongside what to my mind is their primary responsibility, which is as legislators and as scrutineers of the government, in those days when they are in parliament. And I have to say, I'm not a fan.

I have a real worry that it's going to turn debate, to be honest it's pretty sterile already, and I have a fear it's going to make it worse. I mean, long gone seemingly are the days where you were attracted into the chamber to watch a particular MP give a speech.

Mark D'Arcy: Winston's up.

Ruth Fox: Yes, I mean, you don't get that.

And I think probably the televising of Parliament has possibly partly, some people say killed that, because [00:42:00] MPs don't spend the time in the chamber that they used to. They do tend to be in the office and sit and watch and listen to the debates on the monitors in their offices, and then go in later.

Mark D'Arcy: But what worries me about this is the shape it would then give to parliamentary debates. The way things work at the moment, suppose you've got a debate on a bill, it'll be opened by a minister or maybe even a secretary of state, then you'll get their shadow from the main opposition party. Then you'll get another Labour or Government side speech, then you'll get the third party speaker, possibly other minor parties will ring in at various different points during the debate.

Ruth Fox: Select committee chair probably.

Mark D'Arcy: The select committee chair, absolutely. And it'll sort of work gradually down the pecking order. And if you have a call list, all that will be set out and up to a point, that's fine, because that's what almost automatically happens. But once you get down past the top four or five speakers, you then know which MP was coming where, and there's then no incentive for anybody else to bother to be in the chamber, obviously you've got the ministers listening to the debate, maybe the whip's keeping an eye on who's saying what, but beyond [00:43:00] that, you can see everyone else thinking, well, I'm not due until half past five, so I'm going to go off and meet constituents and catch up on some paperwork. And suddenly you have a situation where you have, a very small number of people in the chamber and essentially what they're doing is reading speeches into the record, then possibly staying for a decent interval afterwards and then scuttling off.

And that is no longer a debate at that stage. That's just a succession of people reading out pre-prepared statements and not really interacting with one another.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean we can be a little bit prissy about this because I think we're partway there anyway.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, absolutely.

Ruth Fox: And I think this would be the nail in the coffin, as it were.

Yeah, the concern I think is also that what you will get is you will get not just pre-prepared speeches, but that you will get repetitive speeches. Because nobody will know what's been said earlier. So that, you know, there's no sense of engagement between,

Mark D'Arcy: and we'll be doing the same joke.

Ruth Fox: You experienced that to some degree in select committees where somebody arrives late to the committee meeting and sits down and asks you the question that you were asked, you know, three [00:44:00] questions ago and it can be quite frustrating. There is a counter argument. And we heard it, for example, a few weeks ago when we talked to the disabled mp, Marie Tidball, which is the MPs with, for example, health issues like diabetes who've perhaps got to go and get insulin at certain times or other medications or where their nature of their disability means sitting on those pretty damned uncomfortable benches in the House of Commons for long periods of time. Uh, very difficult. Having some sense of when they're likely to be called so that they don't have to sit there for several hours at a time would be helpful.

Mark D'Arcy: But I wonder if that could be handled by the speaker or the deputy speakers simply being aware of the situation and understanding it so that if, for example, someone with diabetes had to go out of the chamber and take their insulin, they wouldn't lose their place in the speaking order, yeah, that the chair would have in their own mind of who they're going to call.

Yeah. Because if you're chairing a Commons debate, you've got a pretty good idea of the order in which you're going to call people.

Ruth Fox: Yeah.

Mark D'Arcy: Uh, but it is dependent on, to some extent, on [00:45:00] behavior because if they're the person you're going to call, then wanders out of the chamber and doesn't come back for 40 minutes, you don't then necessarily call them when you were intending to.

Yeah. Or if they're behaving badly or if they're intervening badly and won't sit down and shut up, they can be dropped. Now all that becomes a little bit more difficult if you've got a cast iron pre announced calling order.

Ruth Fox: Well, I think that's interesting. You talk about behavior. How does this affect the Speaker?

Because the ability of the Speaker, he doesn't actually have many formal powers in the Chamber, but the ability of the Speaker to say, if somebody's been misbehaving, as speaker, I'm not going to call you or I'm going to drop you down the order and you're going to get a minute or two minutes rather than six minutes.

You know, those are things that the Speaker can do. And he refers to this almost like this sort of penalty that can be imposed if they're misbehaving.

Mark D'Arcy: We saw that in the assisted dying report stage debate last week, all the sort of chronic interveners should understand that they're not going to get called.

Ruth Fox: Yeah.

Mark D'Arcy: If they're constantly jumping up and down and trying to get in earlier, they're not going to get called later on. Yeah. Well, they already [00:46:00] have in the Speaker's Office, lots of MPs lobbying to get called in a particular debate, you know, dear Mr. Speaker, this bill particularly affects an industry that's based in my constituency, so I'd be very grateful for a chance to put the views of that industry in the forthcoming debate on the Widgets and Grommets Bill. You know, something like that is, is the stock in trade of the work at the Speaker's Office, but there'd be an awful lot more of it.

Ruth Fox: Yeah.

Mark D'Arcy: If there was going to be a call list.

Because with the best will in the world, all the MPs who want to speak on really controversial subjects can't expect to be called and wouldn't get a meaningful time if they, if they all were called.

Ruth Fox: And I think that's a critical thing that there needs to actually be a discussion about what is a reasonable expectation for MPs, particularly newer MPs, about their participation levels in the chamber.

Because there does seem to be an assumption in some quarters that if they want to speak, they should be able to speak. But the realities of limits of parliamentary time is not everybody can, I mean they can't possibly. And what is a reasonable amount of time, and we saw this again in the assisted dying [00:47:00] debate, MPs objecting or being concerned about indicative speech limits that were imposed.

I mean, they weren't formal speech limits, but the Speaker was sort of saying, got so many people, 80 or 90 people who want to speak, you know, you can only have a few minutes. What's a reasonable amount of time? If everybody was given 15 minutes, the assisted dying bill debate at second reading would've gone on for 22 hours.

Mark D'Arcy: They'd probably be going on now, I think.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. So what's a reasonable amount of time? And does everybody need to participate just because they want to, if they're actually saying exactly the same thing?

Mark D'Arcy: Well, it's the classic thing that you find towards the end of a Commons debate that everything has been said, but not everybody's yet said it.

One of the things I would do, if we were going to have this list of people being called and everybody knew who was going to get a speech, I would leave the last hour of a debate free. So the people who'd been in the chamber wanting to get in, perhaps raising points, bobbing up and down, it's hell on the knees apparently.

Yeah. I can imagine if they've been there and were making an effort, that the chair then had discretion over a period at the end of the debate to bring them in because otherwise [00:48:00] I think you have very little incentive for someone who's not on the list to be in the chamber at all. Unless they wanted to support something and shout Hear, Hear, and be on the television sitting next to someone who's saying something they agree with.

Ruth Fox: Well, this is why if it is going to be implemented, and I say it's a big if, whether the government's indicated its support so that, you know, tells you a direction of travel. I think it ought to be on a trial basis. Again, a counterargument from some MPs is, well, the House of Lords has it, they have speaker lists.

Mark D'Arcy: They've had it since 1992, apparently.

Ruth Fox: Something like that. But they're sort of rather different. I mean, the pressures on peers in terms of time spent in the chamber versus other commitments is less. Peers who are there in the House of Lords for the day haven't got these sort of demands on constituency work and so on.

And dare I say it, the expertise of peers in the debates that they engage in tends to be higher, greater than MPs. MPs are, not all but in the main, generalists.

Mark D'Arcy: Yes. And I think the other thing is that peers are much better at engaging with each other. Yeah. So they [00:49:00] will raise the point that the previous speaker had made.

And you can sometimes get debates where a succession of former foreign secretaries or a succession of former chiefs of the defense staff or something are all saying, and the noble lord who spoke before me said such and such, but I think this, and they will actually have something that looks a lot more like a debate and a lot less like a series of speeches generated by Chat GPT.

Ruth Fox: Oh goodness. Please, let's not, well Mark again, one to keep an eye on. The Modernization Committee's pretty busy looking at all these issues, so we'll have to see. We don't know when they will make a decision and report and in what form, but I don't think it'll be for this session, but it might, I presume, be something they might be looking to introduce in the next whenever that may be.

Mark D'Arcy: So watch out for amendments to standing orders or whatever in due course time. Now, I think Ruth, for another break.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, let's take a break. See you in a minute.

Mark D'Arcy: Bye.

Ruth Fox: And we are back. And Mark, we've seen a quite unusual tribute session in the House of Commons. It's relatively rare [00:50:00] for the House to devote time to pay tribute to one of its servants.

And this was Roy Stone, who was principal private secretary to the Chief Whip. So a civil servant, not a parliamentary clerk, who has died after a short illness. He had retired from service to the Chief Whip's office, but why were so many MPs so keen to crowd into the chamber to offer their tributes?

You know a little bit about him. You've written a profile of him previously.

Mark D'Arcy: Yes, indeed. Sir Roy Stone was the principal private secretary, as you said, to the chief whip. And that's an extraordinary office that's only been held by, I think four or five people since it was created. And I think essentially it was created to help the first Labour government cope with the intricacies of running parliament.

So in the 1920s and the time in office served by the very small number of incumbents in that office is quite extraordinary. These are people who've served the House for decades in a very much behind the scenes role. They're the Go-Betweens. They are the embodiment of the usual channels, the people who [00:51:00] conduct the rolling negotiations that keep Parliament going day in, day out, controlling things like the timing, how much space is going to be available in a Report Stage for opposition amendments, to go down the general management of business in the House of Commons through personal relationships between the parties.

And Roy had been in this particular office for 21 years when he finally left, and it had been an extraordinarily tough time, in the sense that he had served first under the Blair government, under the Chief Whips in the Blair government. Then he'd overseen the transition to Gordon Brown's government, which is not quite the same as a transition of government between parties, but wasn't all that far from it, it sometimes felt. Then you saw David Cameron's coalition coming in, then David Cameron having a narrow majority government. Then Theresa May taking over after the Brexit referendum. Then Boris Johnson taking over from Theresa May, and he was there through all these transitions, helping successive governments [00:52:00] manage their parliamentary business.

And the story I told in the profile I did of him was about what happened in the immediate aftermath of the 2017 general election. Remember what you had then was a very narrow Conservative majority government elected under David Cameron's leadership in 2015. And in 2017, Theresa May called an election and the initial poll suggested she win an absolutely vast majority and that would make getting Brexit through a great deal easier.

And then she lost that majority. Jeremy Corbyn did extraordinarily well as Labour leader and suddenly the Conservatives had no majority at all and it wasn't at all clear whether or not they would be able to continue in Government. And at this point, the then chief whip, the person Roy Stone served as principal private secretary to, came zooming down from his Staffordshire constituency back to London the morning after the election.

Small hours of the day. First person he goes and sees is Theresa May. Does she want to continue? The answer eventually is yes. Second person he goes and sees is Sir Roy Stone, who, [00:53:00] as is his way, at seven o'clock in the morning, is already at his desk in the Whips Office, in this rather sort of scuzzy little cubby hole in the middle of Westminster, decorated in kind of Commons institutional grunge.

And there he is and they have a long discussion about can they make this work. And the question that's put is, can we do a Walter Harrison? Now anybody who's seen that great play, This House, the James Graham play about the minority Callahan government and the extraordinary sort of whipping adventures that were necessary to keep it going will be familiar with this story of how they managed through extreme whipping to keep the show on the road.

Could Theresa May's government do that? And the next thing you know, Gavin Williamson's flying off to negotiate a kind of pact with the Democratic Unionist Party who have enough MPs to put them over the top and give them an actual Commons majority. And so he made that work and all sorts of little procedural changes followed, standing orders were changed so that the Government had a majority in bill committees.

So that it couldn't be defeated on [00:54:00] the detail of its legislation, despite not having completed the small formality of having an actual majority in the Commons chamber. So this was all the sort of thing that Sir Roy Stone would advise on, and he was someone everybody trusted, despite the fact that he went through so many different administrations under so many different parties. Everybody trusted him. Everybody thought he was straight.

Ruth Fox: And that's what struck me from the tributes, not just from, you know, people like Sir Gavin Williamson and others who'd occupied the Chief Whips office, but those that had occupied the whips offices for the smaller parties as well. So particularly the SNP and the Liberal Democrats having been the third party, because although the usual channels is primarily about the two main parties, the third parties come into play at certain points as well.

And you know, they were very effusive in their praise of him and that sense that he was trusted, he was liked and that they'd had confidence in him. And it did strike me when I was listening to the tributes that here is a man who saw so much behind the scenes. I mean, frankly, his memoirs would be gold [00:55:00] dust.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, I have this fantasy that somewhere on the Roy Stone estate is a large collection of sort of exercise books or something, which he recorded the day-to-day deal making and events that he had to deal with in the Commons and just the general running of the place. But it's almost impossible to imagine that he would've put stuff down on paper.

Ruth Fox: And yet you contrast that with the fact as just a few weeks ago we had a conversation with Simon Hart, the Conservative Chief Whip who's published his memoirs, you know, broken the code of omerta, published his memoirs from his perspective for very good reasons. But on the official side, that confidence that trust was maintained. Yeah. And he never spoke out. I mean, he retired a few years ago, never spoke, never accepted invitations, requests to speaking engagements. I think you tried to interview him, didn't for your profile?

Mark D'Arcy: Well, when I did that profile, I pushed out feelers to see whether he would talk to me and the answer came back that in some senses he'd love to, but absolutely not. He'd never done that. He's never going to do that. So I fear that we'll never know all the secrets that he was [00:56:00] privy to. And in some ways, from a historical point of view, that's a pity. But from the point of view of his successes, that's the last thing that they would want. To know that all the deal making that goes on could suddenly be exposed to the light of day.

Yeah. And these are people who've been doing it for ages. I mean, his predecessor Murdo McClean was in office for 22 years. So he was actually in that office under James Callaghan's government, the Labour government in the mid 1970s, for heaven's sake. So these are people who are there at the absolute center of Commons business for decades, everybody trusts them, and their conduct must maintain that trust. And I think it's one of those areas where if were you to sort of rip the veil from the Holy of Holies and expose what really went on, that trust would disappear for the current incumbent. So they're never, never, never going to do it.

But what Roy Stone did after he left Parliament was he went up to the University of Lincoln and he helped teach a parliamentary studies course there. And I know from [00:57:00] people who were involved in that course that it was an absolutely great course and that his students were fascinated and that he gave an awful lot of time.

But he quite consciously chose that he didn't want to go and teach somewhere grander. He wanted to go to a relatively ordinary university, not some sort of gilded PPE course in Oxford or Cambridge, and so he was quite careful in all his choices, even in retirement.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Well, if you want to know more about Roy Stone, the tributes are well worth the reads.

We'll put a link in the episode show notes, and you can have a look at them there.

Mark D'Arcy: And there's a lovely story from Alistair Carmichael, who was the Lib Dem chief whip about Roy Stone catching him changing a baby's nappy in his Whips office.

Ruth Fox: We'll leave that one for listeners to look up.

Mark D'Arcy: There's a metaphor. Struggling to get out of that somewhere.

Ruth Fox: Right. We've just got a few minutes left. Shall we turn to a couple of listeners questions that have come in? So, Catherine Coffey has got a questions about Abstentions for you. How do Abstentions affect votes? She's read that it would take [00:58:00] 83 Labour MPs voting against the welfare bill to defeat it. Could it be defeated if some MPs abstain?

Mark D'Arcy: Well, of course an abstention is only worth half as much as a vote against in the Commons total, so it would take an awful lot more MPs, I think pretty much every Labour MP wasn't in the government to abstain, for the Government to be defeated purely on Labour abstentions. There's a huge amount of difference between an abstention where you can argue, oh, sorry, unavoidable dental appointment that day or whatever, as opposed to actually voting against your own side in the division lobbies.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean, it's worth saying perhaps that formally in the House of Commons, there is no procedure for abstention or indeed for recording an abstention, unlike some other parliaments where it does exist.

So technically you could walk through both voting lobbies.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. That's the trick that you sometimes see when people cancel out their vote by voting in both directions.

Ruth Fox: Um, but what's more common is that they just don't turn up and register a vote at all. But of course that means then you don't know, were they abstaining deliberately because they objected to the [00:59:00] policy? Or were they away on a ministerial or dental visit? Or some, you know, were they ill or whatever it may be. So it's quite difficult to actually work out, particularly when journalists talk about abstentions. I often wonder how have they worked out these exact numbers that they come up with, because you can't get that from the parliamentary record.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, I mean, this is something that may be tested when we get to the vote on the social security cuts that the Government's contemplating on personal independence payments and other issues. And I mean, really, I always thought when Sir Keir Starmer won his vast majority, that his government would never lose a single vote if they've managed within the space of just over a year to get to the point where they can lose votes with the majority of that size.

Well, that would just be seismic.

Ruth Fox: So we had another question in from anonymous.

Mark D'Arcy: Again, he's always onto us, isn't he?

Ruth Fox: Or she?

Mark D'Arcy: Or she. Yes, absolutely..

Ruth Fox: And anonymous says, is committee stage in the House of Lords taking longer than in the past? So this is a Lord's watcher here. Debate on [01:00:00] the first amendment of 514 amendments, apparently to the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill, took two and a half hours last Tuesday.

Both Lord Young and Lord Story noted, the growing tendency to propose amendments, including purpose clauses, which then allow peers to make what are effectively second reading speeches.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, this is always a bad sign for government in the House of Lords when committee stage debates start to drag. Now, committee stage in the House of Lords is a bit different from committee stage in the House of Commons because first of all, the Lords doesn't normally relegate a bill to a public bill committee or any Lords analog of a public bill committee.

Committee stage debates are normally taken on the floor of the house. On less contentious bills, they're sometimes taken in their parallel chamber, the Moses Room, their Lord's equivalent of Westminster Hall, its name incidentally is taken from this gigantic mural of Moses bringing the tablets of the law down from Mount Sinai or other sort of naff Lady Bird book kind of illustration of him, but they don't have votes.

These are usually exploratory debates [01:01:00] where ministers are probed about the exact intention of a bill and give answers refining people's understanding of what such and such a clause means. And I can remember back in the early days of the Con Lib Coalition, 2010 and thereafter, that almost Labour's only ability to cause the government difficulty was in the House of Lords.

By dragging their feet and exactly the same thing happened then as is happening now, which is people just making very long speeches, just dragging things on very slowly.

Ruth Fox: Lots of amendments being tabled for that purpose. We saw it on the Football Governance Bill, for example.

There was a lot of suggestions that there was foot dragging on that one.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. And there are several explanations for this. I mean, first of all, the atmosphere in the House of Lords isn't desperately happy with the impending exclusion of the remaining hereditary peers, which has obviously upset those on the receiving end of it and some of their defenders.

But I think it's more than that. I think Labour's dominance elsewhere in parliament is so total, this is pretty much the only place where Conservative [01:02:00] parliamentarians can dig in their heels and make life a bit difficult for the government.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And you know, the Conservatives would say, well, look, you know, Labour did this in in opposition, when we were in government and orchestrated lengthier sittings and dragged things on and tabled lots of amendments on which they were often defeated.

Mark D'Arcy: And that's show business, that's perfectly legitimate tactics for them to do that.

Time is always a factor in parliamentary debates, but the Government is not without recourse here.

Because if the government decides that progress on a bill is too slow, it can start saying, okay, we'll sit till the small hours, you know, we can,

Ruth Fox: Which it has done this session.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, absolutely. We can have drone till you drop sittings of the House of Lords, which go on into the wee small hours.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And one thing they did a few weeks ago was they said, well, look, we had planned, I think it was like four or five days in the chamber for this particular bill. We've now run out of that time and we need to get on with the rest of the legislative business. So we are kicking further stages of this committee into the Moses room for committee stage there.

And you can't have votes there because there's no division lobbies. So [01:03:00] everything has to be done by consensus.

Mark D'Arcy: But there wouldn't normally have been votes in any event in a committee stage. They wouldn't, can occasionally happen sometimes.

Ruth Fox: Sometimes there can be, but the fact that it was done at the behest of the government and the opposition objected to it, so it was being done over the opposition's head.

Again, sort of soured relationships a little bit. So, we're definitely seeing some, some would say some delaying tactics, others would say no proper scrutiny.

Mark D'Arcy: It might make life fun in the Moses Room and it could start reverberating back into the main chamber as well, when the Lords get irritated about unwritten rules being flouted, then things can get a bit heated.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, we'll have to keep an eye on that as things unfold. But I think Mark, that's probably all we've got time for this week. Should say to listeners, Parliament is going to recess today in fact for the next week or so. So we will we. So we will be taking a break for a week.

So our next episode will be back in your feed on Friday 6th June. And, in the meantime, that gives you plenty of time, listeners, to complete our [01:04:00] listener survey. So this is the survey, you can find the link in your podcast app notes for this episode, you can also find them on the episode webpage on our Hansard Society website, hansardsociety.org.uk.

Please do complete that survey because it'll really help us in terms of getting a sense of, well, first of all, what you like about the podcast, what you don't, what areas you might like us to look at in, in future. But it's also a way of us finding out more about our audience, who are you that's listening and that will help us in terms of, to be blunt, promoting the podcast to potential sponsors so that we can keep the business of Parliament Matters going in the future.

And of course, don't forget to give us a five star rating in your podcast app because that is a way that we can get through these pesky algorithms and ensure that more people can find Parliament Matters and have a listen.

Mark D'Arcy: So, two productive ways to fill the void. We'll be leaving in your life next week.

Until then, from Ruth and I, goodbye.

Ruth Fox: Bye. [01:05:00]

Intro: Parliament Matters is produced by the Hansard Society and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. For more information, visit hansardsociety.org.uk/pm or find us on social media at Hansard Society.

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