My journey from the Commons to the Lords

4 min read01 July

The walk from one end of the Palace to the other has been full of surprises, reports Lord Cryer

Let’s start with the unexpected: the Lords and the Commons work in completely different ways. Almost nothing is the same. And MPs, strangely, have little to do with the Lords. Every former MP I have spoken to, both Labour and Conservative, says the same thing: you arrive in the Lords assuming that it will be broadly the same as the Commons and that just goes to show how wrong you can be.

The really big difference is that in the Commons almost all legislation is timetabled. That really started in 1994 under John Major’s premiership with guillotines – a form of timetabling. Then the Tony Blair government moved to formal timetabling.

In the Lords, the combination of almost no timetabling plus limitless amendments means no government really has control of the Chamber – which, by the way, is the only self-regulating assembly anywhere in the world. There is, of course, the Lord Speaker whose Chamber role is to move the next business and does not control proceedings in the way that the Commons Speaker does.

I am reliably informed that the Commons had much the same system until the 1880s when the system of whipping which is around today started to emerge. As a result, consensus fell apart.

Of course, the Lords has nowhere near the authority which it carried beyond living memory. The last prime minister to sit in the Lords was Lord Salisbury who left office in 1902. It became widely accepted during the succeeding years that prime ministers should sit in the Commons. Widely, but not universally: when Lord Curzon was summoned to Buckingham Palace in the early 1920s, he believed that George V was about to make him prime minister. Curzon had gone so far as to write out the names and posts of what he had thought would be the new cabinet. When he got there, the king told him in stark terms that he had better get the thought out of his mind pretty quickly.

Most departments have one Lords minister, which means that minister has to cover all the relevant policy areas – often a formidable range. Lords ministers are usually parliamentary under-secretaries or ministers of state. Lords Carrington and Cameron are exceptions to that rule in that they both served as foreign secretary from the red benches.

Government whips in the Lords also have a pretty heavy workload. I was in the whips’ office for the first six months of my time in the Lords. It was then that I discovered, quite unexpectedly, that government whips have a duty to wake up sleeping peers. I once woke up one elderly peer who I thought briefly was about to expire. Happily he is still with us.

Confrontation does not really happen on the red benches, whereas it is the lifeblood of the Commons. This is partly a function of self regulation, but also because no party ever commands an overall majority in the Lords. There is a huge number of crossbenchers and a pretty big group of Liberal Democrats. There are also peers from the Northern Ireland parties, Plaid, the Greens and the non-affiliated group. Why the non-affiliated peers do not sit as crossbenchers remains, as far as this Lord is concerned, obscure.

There is a widespread belief that debates in the Lords are better informed than those in the Commons. This is only partially true. There are a large number of specialist peers, those with, for example, long and distinguished careers as surgeons or lawyers and quite a few who have served in the armed forces. The Labour peer and former minister Alan West has an unrivalled knowledge of shipbuilding and the roles of warships, as you might expect. This means that some debates are of a very high order, but that is not always the case. And I have witnessed some dreadful debates in the Commons and some brilliant ones like the final debate on the Iraq war in 2003, just before British troops were dispatched to the Middle East. The atmosphere was electric, and it was packed with outstanding speeches.

Finally, on a slightly trivial note: the corridors in the Lords always seem to be narrower than in the Commons. Either that or I’ve been putting on weight.