The Senior Deputy Speaker (Lord Gardiner of Kimble)

My Lords, the genesis of the changes proposed in the report was a letter from the Leader of the House containing various suggestions to make business clearer and easier for Members to navigate. The changes fall into three broad areas—Questions for Short Debate, time limits and deadlines for speakers’ lists, and explanatory statements for amendments. The committee gave these proposals full and detailed consideration and recommends the following changes to your Lordships. The five proposals relating to Questions for Short Debate are intended to provide clarity and certainty for Members and to provide greater opportunities, particularly for Back-Bench Members, to ask QSDs. The first recommends increasing the flexibility for scheduling QSDs to allow them to be taken between other items of business and not just as lunch break, dinner break or last business. The second proposal is that for a trial period, balloted topical QSDs should no longer be scheduled on a Thursday and instead a QSD from the reserve list of QSDs which is drawn from a ballot every five weeks should be tabled. This reflects that the number of entries into the topical QSD ballot has generally been low and on more than a quarter of occasions there has been no valid entry. To ensure that topicality is not lost, the usual channels will be able to select a debate from the reserve list which is particularly topical. If agreed by the House, the impact of this change will be reviewed by the committee by the end of the next Session. The third proposal clarifies that only the final QSD on the Order Paper should be treated as last business, with the resulting hour and a half time limit. The fourth proposal aims to rebalance the allocation of time so that Back-Bench and Opposition Front-Bench speakers have a greater proportion of the time available. The final proposal on QSDs would add emphasis to the existing Companion guidance that QSDs should be limited in scope to ensure that the Member in whose name the QSD stands can articulate the issues clearly and comprehensively in the time permitted. The next set of proposals relate to debates. The committee proposes that when Select Committee reports are scheduled for Thursdays, they should automatically be time limited to a total of five hours in the same way as party and balloted debates, thus giving greater predictability to timings on Thursdays. These time limits will not apply to Select Committee reports debated on other days. The committee also proposes that speakers’ lists for debates should close at 5 pm rather than 6 pm from Monday to Thursday so that Peers participating are informed of the length of time for their contribution as early as possible. This has been happening on a trial basis since January and has received positive feedback. The final proposal for your Lordships’ consideration relates to explanatory statements for amendments, on which the committee recommends that the guidance in the Companion “should ‘strongly encourage’ explanatory statements for amendments” when they meet the criteria in the report. The committee believes that this will be helpful to the House where the meaning of amendments is less clear. Clerks in the Public Bill Office will continue to be able to offer assistance in drafting these statements. As with all changes, the committee will keep the operation of these latest proposals under review. Our intention, as always, is to assist the smooth running of the House. I will not speak to the section of the report on resignation and powers of attorney, because it has been superseded by the amendment to the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill which was moved by the Leader of the House at Third Reading. When the Bill receives Royal Assent, that amendment will provide an explicit statutory authority for notice of resignation to be given by a person acting on behalf of a Peer who lacks capacity. The committee will bring a Standing Order to the House to implement this provision once the Bill has passed. Until then, no change is proposed in this area. I commend the report to your Lordships. I beg to move.