European Parliament (House of Lords Disqualification) Regulations 2008

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Trefgarne on bringing this important matter to your Lordships’ attention in his characteristic style. My noble friend rightly drew your Lordships’ attention to the 24th report of the Merits of Statutory Instruments Committee, HL Paper 136, dated 3 July 2008. It makes some extremely adverse observations on the regulations. It is the regulations that we are asked to focus on tonight, rather than the principle that lies behind them. I listened with interest to the exchange between my noble friend and the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, about the merits and demerits of a dual mandate. Much as I would like to get into that tonight, it is not germane to the issue that the House has to confront. I hope that my noble friend and the noble Lord will excuse me if I do not trespass into that disputatious territory. The judgment of the Merits of Statutory Instruments Committee is that the regulations are drawn to the special attention of the House on the ground that they may inappropriately implement European Union legislation; which is exactly what they do. One of the observations made by my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth concerned paragraph 4(2) of the regulations, which refers to Writs of Summons. It states: "““No writ of summons shall be issued to a life peer while disqualified under this regulation””." My noble friend colourfully and effectively explained that that is nonsense; because it is much more likely than not that a European election will not coincide with a new Parliament. Every Peer must be issued with a Writ of Summons before he or she can come to your Lordships’ House. Halfway through, there may well be an election to the European Parliament, in which a particular Peer translates from your Lordships’ House to the European Parliament; but the Writ of Summons will still have been issued. There is nothing that your Lordships’ House, another place, this Parliament or the European Parliament can do about it. It is not just sloppy drafting, but sloppy thinking by the Government. In fact, the Government could probably have avoided all this, had they taken the following advice from the Merits of Statutory Instruments Committee: "““We asked the Government whether they consulted the House authorities or any Committee of the House (Privileges or Procedure), before making this instrument and they confirmed that they did not. We consider that unfortunate. While the principle of the policy is non-negotiable, there is scope for implementing the disqualification in a variety of different ways and the House should have been consulted on the options””." The Writ of Summons is an absolute classic example of that. There were disputes in the 17th century between Charles I and the Committee for Privileges of your Lordships’ House precisely about the Writs of Summons. The last word was had by the Committee for Privileges. What are the Executive doing interfering in the issue of Writs of Summons? It is not the Executive’s business; it is the business of your Lordships’ House, through the Committee for Privileges. Here is another example of sloppy thinking by the Government. Given those last few words that I quoted about there being other ways of implementing the disqualification, we know that the Government are concerned about the possibility that if an hereditary Peer is disqualified it would reduce the number of hereditary Peers in your Lordships’ House by one for the duration of a European Parliament, and there might be clamour by the hereditary Peers. I am sure that there will not be; but it is the suspicion that, I suspect, lies in the Government’s mind that that could occur.