 Helo, hi gwaith ymgyrch, dwi'n ddweud fyddai'n gweithio'r ddechrau, ac ydych chi'n gwneud i David. Yn ymlaen, Naomi, ac rwy'n beth o'r Grifthau Aelgrwyd meddwl. Rwy'n arred погwll gardau yma o fyrniadau ei hyn yn gweithio, a dyna sut rydyn ni'n anghyfyddoedd mewn ddamlu yng Nghymru. Gallodd yn ganferwyr yn ôl yw fynd i'w Llyfr Nadol, ac yn ddwych chi'n gweithio ond i'r rhaid, ond rydych chi'n gwybod hi'n gweithio ar fyntfforddi Llyfr Nadol. Felly mae gydigau'n gweithio'r Ddaeth Unedigol o'n fan hyn yn cael ei cas i'r newid i'w Llyfr Nadol, neu pob pwynt i'r holl Ddaeth Unedigol, ein llwyntmentau a'r cwestiynau gydig oedd yn rhoi gwneud hwnnw, a mae'n cael ei wneud o'r lleisiwyd o'r parlymyniad oherwydd. Felly, mae'n ddweud i'r cyfnod o'r ddau i gyd yn ymlaen i'ch byddwch gweithio ffeydd. Ond mae'n gweithio'r ffilm o'r llectur yn ychydig i'r website. Mae'n gweithio'r ffilm o'r lecwyr o'r website, a ddweud i'ch ni'n gwybodaeth i'r llectur, ac mae'n gweithio'r lecwyr o'r website. Mae'n gweithio'r lecwyr o'r website. Mae'n gweithio'r lecwyr o'r website. We've got Robert Rogers, who's chief executive of the House of Commons, giving an insider's guide to what goes on behind the scenes at the Commons. We've got the Lord Speaker, Baroness de Souza, talking about her role in international relations. We have Andrew Kennan, who's the clerk of committees, talking about the role and reform of select committees, and that's just a few. Next month we have got one of the archivists in the parliamentary archives talking about Parliament and suffragettes, which will be on the anniversary of the death of Emily Wilden Davison. So, do check that out online, or if you're in London, come along on the 5th of June. So, that's a little plug from me. Without further ado then, I'd like to hand you over to David, who's going to give a lecture, and then we're going to turn the camera off, and you can ask him lots of questions, and he doesn't have to be bound by the fact he's being recorded. So, thank you very much. Thank you, Naomi. Well, can I start by also thanking the University of Hull for inviting me to give the latest in this open lecture series under the auspices of parliamentary outreach. It is a particular pleasure for me to be in Hull for the first time since I bicycled here from London 25 years ago to raise funds for anti-slavery international, and it is a special privilege for me as I'm a great-great-great-grandson of William Wilberforce to be in the Wilberforce building. So, I am genuinely thrilled. About 700 years ago, if I can take you back, in the 1320s, one of my distant predecessors wrote a little manual in Latin on how to hold a parliament called modus tenendi parliamentum, or the way of holding A, or possibly the parliament. Most of it is about who is to attend, how they get paid, where they sit, and so on. Only one of its 36 paragraphs deals with what a parliament is actually supposed to do. After discussion of a faze of state comes, and I quote in English, matters of common concern to the kingdom so that laws shall be enacted against the defects of customary law. So already that far away parliament was there for political discussion of the great matters of state, for the assent or withholding of taxes, for discussion and settling of grievances, but also increasingly from the 14th century to legislate. Now, its non-legislative functions are still crucial to parliament's daily life in holding the executive to account, fulfilled through debate and scrutiny and question. In recent years, these have taken centre stage and understandably so. They're relatively accessible and highly visible. Select committees, particularly in the last 30 years, the departmental select committees are the jewel in our crown. Question Time plays, Prime Minister's Question Time plays to an audience of millions. The regular urgent questions that the current speaker has introduced keep the commons abreast of breaking news. And debates, as a form of political discourse, debates on issues are a well understood form of political dialogue. By contrast, parliament's legislative function is complex, it's sometimes inaccessible, it's based on texts and to some eyes, infuriatingly slow. A bill can take all of 12 months or more to progress from introduction to royal assent, going through all its stages in both houses, and it gathers around it a panoply of papers and documentation. All beautifully set out, and this is a plug, are on the bills pages of the parliament website if you want to follow them. But it does show just how much paper there is, how much information there is gathering around a bill. The procedures we use to debate and decide on legislation are widely seen by academic and political observers as needing reform and refreshment. So in a limited time what I'm going to try to do is convey some of the fascination and of the significance of parliament's legislative role. Now I'm conscious it's a political subject. Bills are basically politics in action. Same-sex marriage, welfare reform, the European Union, banking, enough said, but it sure does make them interesting. I'm going to limit myself just to the commons and in order to be topical just to the session that just ended, that's session 2012-13, the second session of this coalition parliament. And I'm going to limit myself to primary legislation, that is to say bills that become acts of parliament that have the force of law rather than secondary legislation which are statutory instruments made under powers granted under an act, but powers granted to ministers. I may drop in a few modest suggestions for reform. So firstly what is legislation about and quite interesting what is it not about? Well for example it doesn't really cover public expenditure except for forms sake. Spending plans are not subjected to the discipline of legislative procedure nor are government borrowing or money supply. Foreign affairs and defence remain relatively unconstrained by legislation. There are now one or two EU bills each session. We had three in the last session including the accession of Croatia to the EU and there will be at least one in the forthcoming session. Every five years there is an armed forces bill which sets out the legal basis under which the forces operate. But by and large those subjects are not the subject of legislation. But in general terms just about everything else can be. In a sovereign parliament almost anything can be legislated for except the weather and of course the climate change act even tried to do that. And we are now legislating or discussing legislating on subjects that the first Queen Elizabeth, those of you who have done this, the first Queen Elizabeth would have been appalled by interfering with succession and even criticising the episcopate of the Church of England. For whom do we legislate? The answer is for the United Kingdom or for its constituent parts. Virtually all bills cover England, most of them cover Wales and some still cover Scotland and Northern Ireland in whole or in part. That is why on and off for the last 30 years people have been asking what's known as the West Lothian question. Named for the then constituency of Tandiel. Is it right that Westminster MPs from Scottish or indeed Northern Ireland constituencies can vote on legislation which has no effect on their constituents? And if not, is it possible to devise arrangements for English members to have some sort of special voting rights on England bills without undermining the validity of a government of the United Kingdom that relies on a majority in order to have its validity? Put crudly, why should Scottish MPs be able to vote on your university fees? Well England and Wales or England bills are in fact the exception and rather not the rule. Only two of the 15 major government bills last session, defamation and marriage same sex couples were England and Wales and that can change in their passage through Parliament. In fact the defamation bill there was a clause that protected peer reviewed statements in academic journals from Action for Defamation. That was extended to Scotland during its passage through the Commons. So something that started as an England bill became an England and Scotland bill. There has been a commission that recently reported on this chaired by a former distinguished clerk of the house but I think it's fair to say that immediate results are not expected. This session there was a Scottish bill which I will mention because it has some unusual characteristic. It was called the Partnerships Prosecution Scotland Bill Laws which originated in a report from the Scottish Law Commission. Its tragic but interesting origins lie in a fire in January 2004 at the Rosebank Care Home in Udingston in South Lanarkshire in Scotland in which 14 residents died and where the owners were found to have infringed health and safety rules. They were in a partnership which they soon after dissolved and in 2008 the High Court of Justice in Scotland decided the dissolved partnership could not effectively be prosecuted and fined because, you can read the judgement if you're an enthusiast, it didn't exist anymore and therefore nor could the individual partners be fined. As you can imagine for the relatives of the 14 who died at the Rosebank fire this was intolerable. So the bill makes it now possible basically to find a partnership even if it doesn't exist although not of course retrospectively. I don't suppose most members even enthusiastic observers of legislation will have noticed the passage of this particular bill but it does meet in a small way that 1320s definition of some bills are there to improve the law. A lot of them of course are not. Where do bills come from? Well a number of the larger government bills come down the traditional route of policy formation, debate and development, party manifesto, sometimes media excitement, white hall, digestion, green paper, consultation, white paper, possibly pre-legislative scrutiny then through the sieve of the parliamentary business and legislation committee of the cabinet to arrive on the floor of the house. Some have been years in preparation, last session's defamation bill began in 2010 with Lord Lester of Hearnhill's private members bill on the subject. Others have their origins because of events, events dear boy events as the man said, things that happen. The partnerships bill I've just mentioned, another one we have the police complaints and conduct bill, a rose out of the Hillsborough independent panel report into the 1989 Hillsborough disaster so that the independent police complaints commission could reopen that case and also oblige serving police officers to be interviewed as witnesses. So those were cases where stuff happens, not always connected with tragedies but sometimes. Now if I can move to a slightly less somber example, I don't know if there are any checks here. No, fine. The European Union approvals bill covered three separate, quite small issues which required primary legislation. And one was to establish that the electronic version of the European Union's official journal could be taken as the authorative one. It arose out of a case brought by the Czech customs authorities, this is ghastly credible, the Czech customs authorities against a wine importer in Olomuz who in 2002 or 2004 had wrongly categorised as a fortified dessert wine, an imported alcoholic drink he brought in called Cagor. Cagor interestingly enough is the Russian term for Cahor, those of you who know the black wine of Cahor from south west in France. Peter the Great brought it into Russia because he had a stomach disorder and then on ever since for 300 years the Russians have been drinking something called Cagor which is a fortified sweet wine and it's used as communion wine in the Russian Orthodox Church. I digress a bit. In Prague, analysis found that in fact it was as well as some great juice, there was a lot of sugar beet alcohol and corn spirit. The importer got off prosecution for wrongly labelling it because he said that the new EU customs regulations are only electronically available in Czech and therefore he couldn't be expected to have read them. As a result of which, years later this strange piece of legislation arrives in the House of Commons and we have to spend some time on it. So we are special thanks to, they're called skoma-lux of Olomuz if you want to buy, used to be known as Olomuz where a number of my Slavic ancestors used to do business selling the wines of western Slovakia which I assure you are not, have no corn spirit in them. Right, let's get back to bills. What are the main characteristics of bills? Well the first thing you see is they're written in a language which is not simple which has to stand up in court under hostile scrutiny and it has to have precise meaning. That means legal language however unused or friendly that may be. Sometimes it means real intellectual complexity, sometimes it means length. Few bills are complete unto themselves. Few of them are an island of statute unrelated to other statute. So they have to refer back to and often amend existing masses of statute law which has itself been amended. I learnt last week that every year, and this is a good fact for an essay, every year around 10,000 to 15,000 changes to existing statute law are made by the new statutes. I'd imagined about 100 to 150. There are thousands of little changes going through all the time. That makes it challenging to keep up with what the current law actually is, never mind how it's being changed. And it does suggest that the bills changing existing law should as a matter of routine be accompanied one way or another i.e. hard copy or electronically with a text showing how the relevant bit of the existing law would look if it were amended as he's being proposed. The main characteristics of legislative procedure. Well I'm sure there are those here who could give you a better and a more precise definition than I can but I'll give you a few characteristics. First it is gradual and staged. It's not sudden. It's not a resolution. It takes time. A single bite is not enough. The material in bills is chewed over and it's very time consuming. Secondly, at Westminster, although obviously not in some other parliaments, it's bicameral, which sometimes means that the same meal is made of it in both houses. So it goes through two very similar processes. And it's a nuisance to change law once you've passed it for those reasons. It takes as much time and trouble to change it as it did to agree it in the first place. And I think most importantly it is textual and substantive. It's not intended to be contextual or symbolic or illustrative. It's not a work of literature, which is where I got those words from. And it can't be criticised as a work of literature. It is not for the faint hearted. It is sometimes said on the basis of no evidence that Bismarck, who can't have known very much about the legislative process I always think, and who once said that a Bavarian was halfway between an Austrian and a human being. But that Bismarck said, and forgive my German, je vénige di leute da rübe wysn, viwst in gesetze gemarctverden dystobesa schlefenzi nacht, which basically means the less that people know how sausages and laws are made, the better they'll sleep at night. So I hope you'll still be sleeping at night at the end of this lecture, but not before. So let's go to the Queen's Speech a year ago, almost exactly a year ago, which gave notice of 15 main government bills. All but one, and that's House of Lords reform, have now become acts or are likely to do so fairly soon. The Queen's Speech gives a list, but it's not an exclusive list. She says memorably, other measures will be laid before you, and they are. Some are too minor to be worth mentioning. Some may still have not got the agreement of others. Noticeably last session, the succession to the Crown Bill, which awaited the agreement of all the Commonwealth realms to the end of male primogeniture in succession to the Crown. Others were in effect emergency legislation, a different sort of events that then produces the need for law. The Police Complaints and Conduct Bill, which I mentioned. We had a Mental Health Approval Functions Bill, which went through in a day when it was discovered that in some regions, the power to approve specified doctors to detain patients under the Mental Health Acts had been improperly delegated. And perhaps of more political interest, the Job Seekers Back to Work Schemes Bill in March, which dealt with the consequences of the so-called Poundland case, if you remember the young woman who was sent off for two weeks to work at Poundland. Others reflect ongoing policy development within government. Government policies don't have to be set in stone each year in May, put into the Queen's Speech, and then they sit back and do nothing. Politicians have ideas throughout the year. The Infrastructure Financial Assistance Bill and the Growth and Infrastructure Bill introduced in the autumn gave effect to ministerial proposals which had only crystallised, best way to put it, in the autumn of 2012, as did the Welfare Benefits Uprating Bill. And the Marriage Same Sex Couples Bill, which was introduced in January of this year, did indeed represent the outcome of a consultation that had begun in March 2012, but whose outcome was by no means certain at the time of the Queen's Speech in May 2012. Now, who can bring in legislation? The answer is any member. And that includes, although I'm not talking about the Lords, any peer, whether or not supported by another member. You don't need a seconder, and you certainly don't need six people or ten people. A single member can simply present a bill, and once it's presented, it gets an automatic first reading, even if there is no text. All you need is a long title and a short title, and a day is then named for second reading. So presentation is a mere formality. There are some survivals of earlier procedures, and I'll mention one which is of political significance, which is called a 10-minute rule bill, which is a motion you seek the agreement of the House for leave to bring in a bill. Now that is in fact the skeleton of a procedure which covered all bills until relatively recently, like 200 years ago, because this is an old parliament. So twice a week on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, after oral questions and statements, a member has the chance to make a little speech seeking the leave of the House to bring in a bill. Convention since the Speaker's ruling of 1931 is that the quote, brief explanatory statement permitted is to last for no more than 10 minutes, which to some people may seem quite a long explanatory statement, and therefore it's known as a 10-minute rule bill. And then another member can make a similarly long speech in opposition, and then there can be a vote. There aren't many. There are about 45 bills a year. We had three votes in the last year. So it's a chance for a speech, but it is a remainder of some old tradition that the House didn't just let people present bills. They wanted to see if they would have leave, first of all. And indeed, on a side note, the abolition of the slave trade bill, the first time in the first great debate, was on a motion from Wilberforce for leave to bring in the bill, as you will remember. Getting a bill presented is one thing which anyone can do. For a backbencher getting it debated, let alone decided or passed into law, is very different. For backbenchers there's a ballot. You draw, well actually I draw 20 numbers out of a hat at the start of each session. So next Thursday morning I'll be drawing the numbers and the deputy speaker will be reading out the names. For the first time, and this is breaking news, for the first time we'll be doing it in reverse order, because it used to be we picked out number one, and by the end of the ballot people didn't mind who came 18th or 19th. So this time the first name out is number 20, and the excitement will grow unbearably to see who is then number one. So these members then get priority on the 13 Fridays set aside from private members' bills each session. Now the overall system is that only really non-controversial bills enjoying preferably active government support, absence of opposition opposition, and sometimes drafted by government lawyers are likely to reach the statute book. And of the ten that reached the statute book last year, nine were exactly that, what some people call handouts, meaning bills from government departments for which there was no time in the government's legislative programme, usually short and usually relatively non-controversial. The procedure committee is about to produce a great report on this, not in time for your exams, is about to produce a great report on this, which will no doubt suggest quite radical changes in procedure. In parenthesis there's a quite separate category of bill called a private bill, which in very simple terms is a piece of local legislation. And as I'm here I must mention the Humbra Bridge Bill, which was introduced in January and which has almost completed its common stages. Among many other amending provisions about the Humbra Bridge it sets the new statutory maxima in effect for tolls. I was glad to see that pedal cycles will continue to be free as they were 25 years ago. It'll also deal with speeding on the bridge. I'll just mention that in case any of you drive. From now on I'll just be dealing there with the most in a sense important category, which is government bills, bills presented by ministers. The principles of bills are discussed on a debate on the question we read a second time. Now that debate is usually scheduled to last for a day, meaning about six hours. And the question is a simple one, yes or no. And it's many years since a government bill, many, many years was defeated on second reading. So you may say, why bother to debate it? What's the debate for if you know that the bill is going to get a second reading anyway? Well, there are three groups of people who may benefit. One is ministers. It gives them a chance to set out in public, televised what the bill is for and in some detail what its provisions will do and to put it in a political context. Secondly, the opposition have a chance to explain their view on the bill, which may well be a little complicated. They may well welcome some bits of it and dislike other bits of it, particularly bills about crime, because no opposition wants to be seen to be against measures that are there to put down crime. And back benches have an opportunity to make speeches, setting out their own views, but perhaps most crucially to intervene on a minister speaking and put a question to him or her and get an answer on one specific issue in the bill that maybe causes them concern. In a large legislature, in the House of Commons with 650 members with a constrained timetable, individual backbench members are otherwise largely divorced from any detailed engagement with the process of legislation. And it's not strictly true to say it's a yes-no question, because in the Commons you can table what's called a second reading amendment, which has to be framed so that if it were passed it would be fatal to the bill, where you can express in no more than 250 words why you dislike the bill. If it's selected by the speaker it's put to the House for Decision, and if passed it's fatal. And of course the government will win if it's a straightforward opposition reasoned amendment, but it gives the opposition a chance to explain why they may be dislike one bit of the bill, but not another bit. And they don't want to be on the record as having voted against second reading and be told, oh, but you voted against this wonderful provision. An example in December there was a reasoned amendment on the energy bill from the opposition, which affirmed support for what they're doing on the electricity market, but objected to the absence of a decarbonisation target. So they voted on their amendment, but they then didn't vote against second reading of the bill. Once a government bill has been given a second reading, it's the subject of a programme order. The system of programming, which means timetabling legislation, as opposed to just allowing unlimited time, started in 1997, modestly, and in 2004 became the rule. By now every government, virtually every government bill is programmed. It sets a date by which it has to come out of committee. It limits the time to be devoted to the bill when it comes back to the floor of the House for consideration third reading. And if made at the same sitting as that in which the bill was read, it is put without debate and without the possibility of moving any amendment. That is a bit ruthless. And I think there is a good case for allowing for some sort of amendments to be moved at least to programme motions, because those are the ones that constrain the amount of the time that can be spent on talking about it. Now, it was never foreseen by my predecessors who drafted the rules that a government bill would once be given a second reading, in this case by a very large majority, we had in July, but the government would then not move the motion for the programme order, which would leave the bill floating in mid-air. But this is actually what happened and always the unthinkable happens with the House of Lords Reform Bill. To remind you, in July, ministers suspected they would be defeated on the programme motion if they moved it, because the Labour opposition or their willing to vote, indeed enthusiastic to vote for second reading, was going to vote against the programme motion because it didn't want any constraints on the length of time the bill would have to take going through the House. And they would be joined by a large number of conservative backbench rebels, who were maybe not some of whom will have voted against second reading of the bill, and others of whom showed their doubts about the bill by saying that they didn't want to have any limitation on a debate. I mean, no limitation on a debate of a bill of that nature, it would go on forever and ever and ever. So the ministers therefore decided not to move the motion, which left us in a difficulty, because nobody knew where the bill was. So we, or I think it's probably my fault, we explained that it was in limbo. I don't know very well what limbo is, but it's a theological term, and apparently it no longer exists in the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. What we should have said is a waiting committal, because it's been read a second time and it hasn't been committed, but I thought the phrase a waiting committal had a slightly unpleasant overtone. But most government bills, those that get through this stage, then go either to a public bill committee or to a committee of the whole house, or exceptionally to a select committee. The main bills that go to a select committee are what are called hybrid bills, which are basically private bills like the Humber of Bridge bill, but that have been presented under public bill procedure, partly because they are government sponsored. They're not sponsored by the Humber of Bridge commissioners or Humber of Bridge board, but they are sponsored by government. And this year we're going to have one. We didn't have one last year. There'll be one that's probably, you know, there's a railway being driven, called HS2, or maybe driven north from London, through the home counties and possibly gradually reaching Yorkshire. So that will be dealt with through a select committee procedure, and the regular armed forces bill, which hours ago I mentioned, you may remember, also goes to a select committee. They then examine it, meaning they try to sit in a bipartisan way, take evidence, but they can also then change the bill and report it back to the house. And consideration is being given to doing that more often, to committing more bills to select committees, where the spirit of select committee investigation and inquiry, rather than of partisan debate and scrutiny, can be imported. It is generally observed that bills of what are called first class constitutional importance, I've never seen a bill of which regular described as a second or visitor class, or what's the word, tourist class constitutional importance. They go to committee of the whole house, which means the whole of the 650 members become a committee, which means they can talk as much as they like to a single question and that the speaker's not in the chair. And all members can table amendments and take part in debate and decision. And so are urgent bills, because it's by its nature a swifter procedure than setting up a committee upstairs to send it to, short and relatively uncontroversial bills, and sometimes short but controversial bills this session. We had the welfare benefits uprating bill, which put the 1% cap on welfare benefits. The advantage of the government is there's no report stage. It's a one bang. They get it through committee of the whole house unamended. They move straight to third reading. But there are drawbacks in bills in committee of the whole house. Members, as you may imagine, can find it rather a daunting experience, probing amendments, exposing their possible personal uncertainties about what a bill is doing in detail in the grand surrounds of a very, very empty chamber. There's none of that shad sense of purpose you can get with a smaller number of members in a small room that are regularly meeting together. Voting is much more time consuming. It takes 15 minutes to vote in the House of Commons chamber compared to about a minute in a committee upstairs or less than that of 20 people. And of course, if it's taken downstairs in the whole house looking at it, no evidence can be taken. You can't have witnesses examined by 650 people. Now, we had the electoral registration and electoral administration and registration bill in the summer of last year went through committee of the whole house. And I think all the members involved felt they might have had a more constructive and helpful debate if it had been in a committee upstairs. So more thought is being given to dividing bills between maybe vital bits to be downstairs, but most other bits could go upstairs and you might conceivably allow all members to attend the upstairs bit, the committee upstairs, although not to move amendments or to vote, but at least if they want to attend and take part in these debates, they could. Public bill committees to which most bills are committed comprise typically around 20 members reflecting the party composition of the chamber. In 2009, the right committee on reform of the House of Commons concluded that it was about time that the means of selecting these members was looked at. And the Hansard Society, I don't know how many of you know the Hansard Society, is about to bring out a report very soon, which should be making radical proposals, so I'll leave it there. As to what public bill committees do, Louise Thompson of this university, I think, published a paper in parliamentary affairs on the impact of public bill committees over the first decade of this century, well, over the last 10 years, we could say. What it showed is, I think, slightly unexpectedly to some of us, that actually committees were spending longer scrutinising these bills and they were discussing more amendments than they did in what some of the old and bold say 30 or 40 years ago was a much richer environment, but that significantly fewer amendments to the bill were actually made in the committee. I think, Louise, you entitled your thesis, is it about viscosity? I didn't understand that. And an article on their operation a few years ago asked the reasonable question, rubber stamp or cockpit. I think that was, again, are these committees merely rubber stamps just agreeing the bills or is it a tremendous place of fighting? Well, a bit of both probably. One example which you can if you have the time and I do read is on the marriage same sex couples bill, which I did read partly because the substance is such an interesting subject anyway. They didn't make a single amendment. The bill went through completely unamended and I read an article about this that said what a waste of time. I don't think it was. There were fantastic debates. There was, in fact, one division on a, it was a tie at seven each. But the important thing is all the issues that people wanted to raise were raised, discussed. And there is now a much clearer idea amongst those people who will then in about 10 days time when the report stage comes up in the House of Commons, will at least have crystallised what is a real worry and what isn't, depending obviously from which of the many sides of the argument you come. So what can you expect from these committees? Well, we shouldn't expect forensic non parties and scrutiny and learning debate. They're not postgraduate seminars in some institute of legislative studies in the cloistered calm of a campus. They are a political debating forum on a series of detailed policy propositions which have been put forward by ministers. So the debates that take place in these public bill committees are by way of amendment and they are by the way of exploring the provisions of the bill to see if it stands up to hostile but hopefully not wholly destructive analysis. Much as in a court of law cross examination is designed not to expose lies but to discover some sort of truth. So the output is not to be measured by changes. The amendments discussed are often simply a peg or a way of framing a question or crux on which to argue rather than representing a form desire to change the bill in the way that the amendment suggests. So ministers are forced to defend or feel forced to defend the proposals that are in the bill. The advantage of that is they have to be satisfied with the advice that they are getting from their officials. So the terms of a bill are tried and tested in that crucible of debate. Secondly the opposition can use it of a means of exploring their own views in some detail which are unlikely to have been fully formed at the time of second reading. And thirdly and perhaps potentially most importantly the world outside Westminster, civil society should have if it's interested in detail in the provisions of a bill a clear idea of what the bill is intended to achieve and how it will operate. It has or it should have an educative or expository function. The procedures in these committees are I fear not necessarily designed to achieve these ends. They are perhaps excessively attuned to a dialectical process of textual amendment. And it does seem odd to me that members who wish to ask simple questions and get simple answers while a bill is going through, it's not easy for them to do that. It is assumed you should put down amendments. So there may be a space for a more directly and explicitly interrogatory procedure through a process of let us say oral and written question and answer rather than relying always on amendment. In the recent years public bill committees have started with several sessions of oral evidence. That's to say question and answer from a range of witnesses which is intended to help committee members identify the detailed issues and to give civil society the people who are deeply engaged in the bill a chance to make their representations and to answer questions. Again, I would urge you to be the same sex marriage, the same sex couples bill for a good example of really interesting and vigorous oral evidence as you can imagine from a range of people including a particularly argumentative bishop. In fact, in the earlier days before we had evidence of course civil society still made contact with members so that they are sitting in the room in the public bill committee would be the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Let us say who would have memoranda they would hand out to members perfectly properly and they would talk to them at the corridor outside or the Institute of Housing or the Association of Directors of Social Services or whatever the bill was about. So that was always going on to say this is an amendment we'd like you to think about next week or why don't you argue this. The advantage tonight is transparent. We all know what interest groups are saying to members and everybody can know because they're published on the website. One disadvantage is that bills that start in the Lords and about a third of major government bills start in the Lords rather than starting in the Commons because if they all started in the same house the Commons had nothing to do for the second half of the year and the Lords would have little to do for the first half of the year. Start in the Lords committees don't generally take evidence on them so they can take the public bill committees can take written evidence on Lords bills but not oral evidence and I suspect that that convention will soon be revisited because the Lords don't have committees on bills and are therefore not able to take evidence. I want to have a word about the public reading stage. The coalition agreement of 2010 committed to introducing something called a public reading stage. The idea is that members of the public would be able to comment on a bill in detail. We've had three of these so far. The most recent one on the Children and Families Bill and it remains uncertain whether and when there will be more but I suspect in the coming session there will be another one and it is in a sense merely an extension of what we're doing anyway by actually going out to the public and having an electronic forum and with the bill on it and you can look at it and you can say at Clause 32 you can post a comment and somebody will read it. I'm not going to say they're going to change the bill as a result but somebody will read it. Okay so that's the end of the committee stage. Report or technical consideration is when the House as a whole has a chance to look at and amend a bill. Now most members find this the most frustrating side of legislative procedure and the right reform committee in 2009 agreed. Ministers can use it to bring forward new material either in response to the debate in committee or elsewhere or because they didn't have full agreement to it before or because they haven't thought of it before. The official opposition gets a chance to get votes of the whole House on the three or four issues in the bill it feels most strongly about and often forgotten back benches because there are a lot of other members who are not clearly represented by the views of the two front benches get a chance to put their views. Now there never seems to be time. The chair does its best through the grouping lots of amendments together in big amorphous debates or maybe it's simply that time is ineffectively used or distributed for all matters to be voted upon. Now there are a range of remedies being looked at for this and this is in a sense the most crucial weakness in legislative procedure. The most recent example we have the crime and courts bill which was effectively report stage was hijacked at the last moment by the debate which all sides wanted on the new clauses relating to the implementation of leveson, press regulation. As a result of that other things that were rather more closely connected to crime and courts and you may say what's leveson got to do with crime and courts and the clue is in the word courts. Other things including for example a debate where there was a lot of controversy about extradition was simply not held because there was no time for it because it just fell off the bottom. And finally you'll be glad to hear except it's not quite fine. We come to third reading which is the last stage of a bill, the stamping. These are generally rather lackluster debates of half an hour or so where there's a mood of relief and self-congratulation and they are debatable. It does however give a chance and particularly the vote gives a chance for a last look at a bill and you might say well if you voted for it on second reading why wouldn't you vote for it on third reading? Well some members say and some mean it, I'm going to look at the bill, I'm willing to go ahead with it on second reading, I won't rebel here but I'll have to see it third reading if it meets my concerns that I expressed. And returning to marriage same sex couples bill and possibly the European Union bill sometimes and if the House of Lords bill had gone way through. There would have been people that said I'm not going to allow this bill through unless X happens to it on the way through. And we had an example last session, the Justice and Security bill which came from the Lords which was divided on third reading, the government won very easily 13 MPs voted against. Six Labour, four Liberal Democrat, three SNP, one Conservative, one Green. So that's from every party, a tiny group of members but they gave them a chance to put on the record their concerns about what are called closed material procedures, the introduction of so-called secret evidence in civil cases. So now it's gone from the common sigh of relief and it goes up to the Lords, is that the end? No it isn't. If a commons bill is returned, it comes back with or with amendments, the commons then consider those Lords amendments. And that can go on until the text is agreed, in theory the whole of the text is agreed by both houses. Now the back and forth for some reason you know what it's called, people call it ping pong or whiffwaf as I think Boris calls it. And we now even call it ping pong on our website, I'm embarrassed to admit because there's no other short phrase for it. The basic idea behind this is that where you've agreed on something you mustn't open up new areas of disagreement. So the only thing you're discussing when quite the bill comes back from the Lords is not the bill but the amendments. Those of you familiar with what you all are with aspects of family life know that when you're having an argument it's very important to concentrate on what you are having an argument about and so that it doesn't spill over into who takes out the dustbins or does the washing up or other things. Just concentrate on the point of disagreement not the many many other points in the context around. So the Commons can agree with the Lords amendment and it generally the Commons agrees with a vast mass of Lords amendments. Why? Is it because of the wisdom of the senatorial wisdom of the House of Lords? Perhaps it may have something to do with most of them were actually moved by ministers in the House of Lords in the first place and therefore the government which commands a majority in the Commons is likely to agree to them usually without opposition. It can amend a Lords amendment and then a seek agreement to that amendment usually but not always in a fairly friendly way. It can disagree to a Lords amendment and where it disagrees it assigns a reason the text of which is agreed by a little mini committee in a little mini room. If it disagreed to a Lords amendment it can propose an amendment in lieu that's to say an alternative but related proposition. Or if the original amendment, and this is where I'm losing you, if the original amendment sought to leave out some words you can amend the words restored to the bill. For example if the amendment from the Lord says leave out Clause 6 we don't like it the Commons can say no no we disagree to that amendment we want to maintain Clause 6 but to go a little bit of the way to meet your concerns we will amend Clause 6 and we'll send back some amendments to the words restored. And which is a nightmare it can propose consequential amendments to the bill in other words because of stuff the Commons is doing it has consequences. So you see why it's fun it's a sort of wonderful intellectual game except it's not game and it is easily understood if you concentrate on the fact it's about politics and policies and that makes to me the last week of every session the most enjoyable and sleepless and exciting. There is one issue about Lords amendments which before I come to an end which is to do with money. Because basically the Lords being an unelected house are not supposed to take the initiative on spending money or raising taxes. So when amendments come back from the Lords that seem to do either of those two things they are identified as infringing the Commons privileges and they get a little P put next to them. Most of them agreed anyway because they were moved by ministers in the Lords and it's simply to say we have noticed this involves money but we're very happy to agree to it. So for example in the last session we had a public service pensions bill that was 16 of the amendments that came back were designated as engaging privilege and 14 of them were just simply agreed to by the Commons not a problem but two were not which sought to basically improve the pension terms of the Defence Fire and Rescue Service and the Ministry of Defence Police. Now the reason the Commons disagreed with it isn't really because of the money it's the matter of the policy involved. Government felt strongly that we shouldn't be extending the same early retirement provisions to the Ministry of Defence Police as maybe enjoyed by the other police forces. But then we have to send back a reason if we disagree for money reasons saying we disagree with this because of money and there's a form of words that's used which then annoys their Lordships who feel that we're trying to hide behind money when actually we're just straight disagree with them. So why bother to have reasons? Well this is my last but the fact is nobody knows. Reasons are a survival I believe from distant days when neither house knew what the other was saying. There was no transcript so the Lords would suddenly get some message from the Commons saying we've disagreed to your amendment number 17 and the Lords say well why? And nobody would know. It was now of course every Hansard that is on the web within three hours of it being said and certainly within the next day it's in a bound volume so it's very easy to find out what the real reason is for disagreeing to an amendment. It also dates back to the days when the two houses would meet together and to point effectively managers the way the Congress still does to try to work out a compromise and so you sent the managers off with a reason so they remembered why it was that the house had disagreed with the thing in the first place. Will you be delighted to hear I've exhausted myself, I've probably exhausted you and we haven't even got to the Lords, let alone to Royal Assent and the use of Norman French. I just hope that what you've heard has inspired you a little if you didn't have it in an interest in the passage of legislation, a recognition which I'm sure you did have of its importance and its significance and of its close connection with politics which is why I've tried to give examples from bills on matters that are a substantial political interest. And a willingness to engage with the legislative process. Thank you very much.