Matrix Chambers

• Double Jeopardy - The Law and Politics Podcast presented by Lord Macdonald KC and Tim Owen KC

UK Parliament

• Courts and Tribunals Bill

• Inquiry - Legislative scrutiny: Courts and Tribunals Bill, Justice Select Committee

• Courts and Tribunals Bill, Second Reading (10 March 2026), House of Commons, Hansard

Cabinet Office

• Government response to Humble Address motion of 4 February 2026, laid in the House of Commons on Wednesday 11 March

Please note, this transcript is automatically generated. There may consequently be minor errors and the text is not formatted according to our style guide. If you wish to reference or cite the transcript copy below, please first check against the audio version above.

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. Coming up this week.

Ruth Fox: Did Magna Carta die for this? The Government faces trench warfare over its attempt to limit the right to trial by jury. We talked to the former Director of Public Prosecutions, no, not that one, it's Lord Macdonald, who joins us to talk about the prospects for the bill.

Mark D'Arcy: A cruel month of cold going ahead in the House of Lords as the tumbrils roll for the hereditary peers.

Ruth Fox: And the calm before a parliamentary storm. The first tranche of the Mandelson papers signal trouble ahead for Sir Keir Starmer.[00:01:00]

Mark D'Arcy: But first Ruth, we are bracing for a parliamentary battle royal over the Courts and Tribunals Bill, which will, amongst other things, restrict the right to jury trial for a certain category of offences. It's one of the biggest changes to the right to a trial by a jury of your peers for decades, and there's strong opposition on the Labour benches led by backbencher and barrister, Karl Turner, as well as from the opposition parties, and there may be even stronger opposition lying in wait in the House of Lords.

Ruth Fox: Well, I think everyone accepts Mark that the courts are overloaded, with victims and defendants and witnesses having to wait years before a trial is held. And there've been plenty of reports and proposals to deal with this issue, not least by the retired senior judge, Sir Brian Leveson and even the current Lord Chancellor David Lammy back when he was in opposition.

Now the Government's produced this package of proposals, but they go well beyond Leveson. So, uh, to look at the issues involved, we thought we'd turn to Lord Macdonald of River Glaven, who was Ken [00:02:00] Macdonald, was head of the Crown Prosecution Service between 2003 and 2008, when he was succeeded by a certain Keir Starmer. Whatever happened to him, Mark. Now Ken himself is a podcaster, he co-presents the law and politics podcast, Double Jeopardy, which I highly recommend. I'm a regular listener. Listen every week. So here's what he'd got to say.

Mark D'Arcy: Lord Macdonald, first of all, aren't we perhaps pearl clutching a little bit? People talk as if the right to jury trial has come down unchanged since the days of Bad King John and Magna Carta, and it really hasn't. And the frontier between the Crown Courts and the Magistrates Courts changes quite often.

Ken Macdonald: Yeah, I mean, some of the rhetoric is a bit silly. I'm not a great fan of invoking Magna Carta every five minutes, which was a pretty specific document for a specific time. I mean, I think David Lammy has been right to say, and Sarah Sackman has been right to say, that we don't have a constitutional right to trial by jury. The constitutional right is found in Article Six of the European Convention on Human Rights, and it's a right to a fair [00:03:00] trial and you can obviously get a fair trial in front of a judge alone. People will have trials in front of judges alone in the Magistrates' Court and in the Commercial Court and in the High Court all the time. So it's not a constitutional right, it's just something that we've become very attached to, and which people think of as being a particularly intrinsic part of our justice system. And it has a wider advantage than that. It brings the public into the system. So we have ordinary members of the public playing their role in the dispensation of justice, and I think that's hugely important for public confidence.

Mark D'Arcy: So is this in the end the objections to this? Are they just sentimentality?

Ken Macdonald: No, I don't think any of that is sentimental. I think the, I say British, but we are looking at England and Wales here, essentially the English and Welsh people are very attached to juries for good reason, because they trust their verdicts. Public surveys have repeatedly shown that most people who do jury service enjoy it and see it as an important part of their public responsibilities, civic responsibilities, as citizens. I think [00:04:00] it's more than sentimentality. I think it is valuable, not least because as David Lammy himself said in his 2017 report on discrimination in the justice system, jury verdicts are the one area in our justice system that seem to be pretty well free from bias and prejudice. In other words, the evidence around jury verdicts is that they are not biased or bigoted or racist. There are not disparate outcomes according to the colour, race, ethnicity, culture of the defendant. And I think that's a very valuable part of the system that is very well worth preserving and I'm surprised that Mr. Lammy is not paying more attention to it.

Ruth Fox: I think that's one of the interesting questions that came out in the Second Reading debate Lord Macdonald, that actually a number of MPs were making the point that David Lammy had defended jury trials to the hilt previously. Can we unpack exactly the detail of what on jury trials he's actually proposing in this bill? What is it that he proposes to do? And then we'll come onto the why.

Ken Macdonald: [00:05:00] It's important to explain that I think how we categorise cases at the moment, we have three categories of cases. The less serious ones are called summary only cases, and they're tried in a Magistrate's Court, either by a professional district judge or by two or three lay magistrates, members of the public who have been appointed magistrates.

We then have what are called either way offences, and at the moment an either way offence can be tried in the Magistrate's Court or the Crown Court and the defendant himself or herself gets to choose.

Finally, we have a category of cases which are called indictable only offences, and these are the most serious offences, murder, rape, GBH, and so on, grievous bodily harm, serious assaults. These can only be tried in the Crown Court in front of a jury.

What David Lammy is proposing to do is to change the situation so that first of all, it's no longer the defendant who decides whether an either way case is tried in the Magistrate's Court or the Crown Court, but it's the court itself which makes that decision.

And secondly, when that case gets to the Crown Court, if it's sent to the Crown [00:06:00] Court, a judge in the Crown Court will decide whether the case goes in front of a jury in the Crown Court or whether it goes in front of a new division of the Crown Court, the Crown Court bench division, which will be trial by judge alone, and the basic rule will be that if the judge making this allocation decision believes that the ultimate sentence will be under three years, the presumption will be that the case will go before a single judge in the Crown Court bench division rather than in front of a jury. And that's the nub of the dispute. Is it right to be withdrawing the right to select a jury trial from defendants in that category of cases.

Mark D'Arcy: And the calculus that defendants will make in this is, do I want a quicker trial before a magistrate's court rather than perhaps having to wait quite a long time to go before a jury of my peers in the Crown Court and is a jury of my peers more likely to find me innocent than a magistrate would?

Ken Macdonald: I think most people who elect Crown Court trial think that the process of trial by jury is going to be fairer. I mean, [00:07:00] I practised criminal law for longer than I care to mention, and I think that was the calculation that most of my clients were making. They felt that they would get a fairer trial, for which I suppose you might read a greater chance of acquittal in the Crown Court and less of a chance in the magistrate's court.

Ruth Fox: And clearly from what the government has said, the big driver of this is a desire to cut the backlog of cases in the Crown Court, which apparently something like 80,000. But it seems to me that one of the things, again that came through the second reading debate is almost as Peter and Paul question here that you cut the backlog in the Crown Court, but are you not then adding to the backlog in the magistrate's court?

And there just seems to be a real concern that this is quite a blunt instrument to deal with a backlog when there are a whole other set of non-legislative measures that could be taken to help with it.

Ken Macdonald: Well, there are two questions here. The first one is, what on earth is gonna happen to the magistrate's court, which is already deeply stressed. I mean, there was an article in The Times a few months ago, they sent a reporter, I think it was The Times, they sent a reporter down to a magistrate's court [00:08:00] somewhere in Southeast England to see what was going on. And the reporter was absolutely appalled by the dysfunction and state of chaos in that court.

What these proposals will do will be to pile even more work into the magistrate's court. The magistrate's court backlog is in excess of 370,000 cases. They're really struggling to recruit magistrates and magistrates get just three weeks training, and there will be more serious cases now for them to determine and bigger powers of sentencing, which means that the prison population will grow as it always does when you increase the magistrate's power of sentence. So that's a good question you raise, how on earth is the magistrate's court going to cope?

The second question, which is terribly important, is what impact is this enormous change in our present arrangements going to actually have. The Institute for Government in a very good piece of analysis, better than any produced yet by the government, I think assessed that the Crown Court Bench Division, the reallocation of some cases to that division will save only between [00:09:00] one and a half and two and a half percent of total Crown Court time.

And that's because most of these cases that go to the Crown Court bench division will be shorter cases. And a lot of the Crown Court's work isn't to do with contested cases at all. It's administrative hearings, the cases which it does hear and will continue to hear under these arrangements of the longer and more complicated ones.

The question has to be asked, and really MPs and peers have to ask themselves, do we really want to abolish something as fundamental and as much loved by the British people as jury trial to save a maximum of two and a half percent of time in the Crown Court if at the same time we're gonna be piling more and more work into the profoundly struggling magistrate's court.

So I think it's a question of pragmatism as much as one of principle. I don't think this is going to work. This sort of institutional upheaval is always very damaging in terms of efficiency. None of the participants want it. The judges in the Crown Court don't want it. The barristers don't want it. It's gonna cause an [00:10:00] enormous amount of upheaval, and the gains are going to be really quite small. In fact, I would say tiny.

Ruth Fox: The other thing that struck me is looking at the bill papers as we do on this podcast and at the Hansard Society, and you're a parliamentarian now of what 16 years standing, so you look at these issues, not just as a barrister, but also as a parliamentarian. I was very struck by the Impact Assessment, the document that is provided, that sets out the department's case, is supposed to set out the analysis of the pros and cons of the policy and the options that have been looked at. This impact assessment for this bill basically says that it's looked at two options. It's looked at, do nothing or do this, which seems to me pretty extraordinary when there are a whole set of other things that barristers, judges and so on have proposed that could be done. To not include any of that in the analysis.

Ken Macdonald: It's totally bizarre and not to include all of the suggestions that Sir Brian Leveson has made in the second part of his report around other efficiencies. I [00:11:00] think everyone who works in the system knows that there are dreadful inefficiencies that need to be resolved. A lot of them have been caused by the absolute starvation of funding for the justice system over the years. Prisoners not brought to court, not enough lawyers, 4% of Crown Court trials last year didn't start on the day they were supposed to start because there was no lawyer available, because legal aid is so low, no one wants to do criminal law anymore. We've had court rooms empty. Listing practises are archaic. There are all sorts of efficiencies that could be made to increase productivity as the Institute for Government has convincingly argued. I would say one other thing about the Impact Report, Ruth, which I found profoundly alarming, and that was the equalities aspect of it. I mean, I mentioned David Lammy's 2017 report and his faith in the ability of juries to do justice without bigotry. The Equalities report points out that the threshold for legal aid is lower in the Magistrate's Court than it is in the Crown Court. So [00:12:00] many of these defendants would've qualified for legal aid had they exercised their right to a Crown Court trial under the present system, but will not qualify for legal aid in the magistrate's court. So on top of all of the rest of the chaos, and I can tell you unrepresented defendants in courts are chaos, we're going to have a whole sway of unrepresented defendants in criminal cases in the magistrate's court with insufficient numbers of magistrates to train them. I mean, there is a real crisis in the recruitment of magistrates.

The reason the government has moved away from the Lammy proposal, which was that we should have a judge and two magistrates sitting in the Crown Court bench division, the reason plainly, although they haven't admitted it, is because they simply cannot find people to sit as magistrates in a division like that where they may sometimes be sitting in on trials that last several days or even a couple of weeks.

So this proposal is alarming on many levels, but I certainly agree they simply haven't looked closely enough at the blockages which exist and the [00:13:00] means which they have at their disposal to unblock those blockages to speed cases through the courts more efficiently.

Mark D'Arcy: One of the other proposals in the bill is to extend the sentencing powers of magistrates.

At the moment, a magistrate can send someone to jail for 18 months. It's going to go up to two years. Is that for you significant or just a blurring of the margins? What's the importance of that?

Ken Macdonald: Well, it's significant in one way. Certainly it means that the prison population will go up. And that's another crisis, all of its own. Last time we increased magistrate sentencing powers, I can't remember which year it was, it was in the early twenties, the prison population almost immediately increased by a significant proportion. So much so that several months later, the government came back, returned the magistrate sentencing power to what it was previously, and they did that openly on the basis that they had to get a grip on the rising prison population. So that's the first thing.

The second thing is that it means that more serious cases will be heard in the magistrate's court, and I question whether [00:14:00] three weeks training is enough for judges to be handling this sort of work. I question whether there are enough people with experience to be handling this kind of work.

And I seriously question whether the magistrate's court bench is sufficiently diverse to win public confidence in going through these sorts of cases. We've been struggling for years and with some success at last to diversify the Crown Court bench. There's still a very long way to go in, particularly in some parts of the country, with the magistrate's court bench.

So yes, I think that is significant and I think its impacts will be mostly deleterious.

Ruth Fox: Why is there such a problem in recruiting magistrates?

Ken Macdonald: I don't know. I've always thought it's quite an interesting job, an interesting thing to do.

Ruth Fox: Are they paid?

Ken Macdonald: I guess they get an allowance. I don't think it's particularly generous, and I think that's a problem in itself that the sort of people who become magistrates are the people who can afford to take time off work and aren't needed to be anywhere else. So they can be sitting in the magistrates court and that means you're talking broadly about a pretty self-selecting group [00:15:00] here in terms of finance, class, perhaps background, and perhaps even ethnic background. So there are lots of issues about the magistrate's court bench and the way it's formulated.

Mark D'Arcy: One of the other provisions, running through them one by one here, is restrictions on the right to appeal against both conviction and against sentence from a magistrate's court. That now goes up to this new Crown Bench Division as I understand it.

Ken Macdonald: Yeah. There is a slight anomaly here, which is that you have more rights as an appellant when you are tried in the magistrate's court than you do when you're in the Crown Court. You have an automatic right of appeal from a decision by magistrates, and the appeal takes the form of a complete retrial of the case in front of a Crown Court judge sitting with two magistrates. That's the present system, and it's slightly anomalous that a convicted person in the magistrates has more rights of appeal than someone who's convicted in the Crown Court, who could only appeal if there's been some error of law and I think that's probably a recognising that the magistrate's court is a place where rough justice can sometimes be applied, or at least [00:16:00] that was traditionally what was believed so that it was felt that defendants, people convicted in the magistrate's court, ought to have that greater power.

I think the government would have to persuade us that the system of justice in the magistrate's court has improved pretty dramatically to persuade us that people convicted in the magistrate's court no longer require that extra level of protection against miscarriage of justice. I mean, I must say, for my own part, this is not one of the reforms which troubles me the most. It's really the jury trial aspect of this approach that concerns me.

Mark D'Arcy: It did sound to me as if this was one of the areas that you wouldn't necessarily dine a ditch to stop. It's something where there's at least room of negotiation on this one.

Ken Macdonald: Yeah, and I think there's room for negotiation on other things as well.

And I think one of the interesting questions is what can the government do, if it can do anything, to bring the potential rebels on board? I mean, we know in the second, reading debate, there wasn't a huge amount of formal opposition in the sense of votes against the government, although some people abstain, but that doesn't mean [00:17:00] anything has been resolved yet.

I think it rather signals that the government is in a process or about to embark on a process of negotiation. In particular with Karl Turner, the backbench Labour MP, who, let's be clear, is a loyalist, he's not a rebel, he's a loyalist, but he's leading the opposition here, and I think that he would be looking for very significant concessions to deal with his opposition.

Mark D'Arcy: It doesn't sound as if the government's gonna get away with just a sort of spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down here, that there'd have to be some fairly fundamental changes, or alternatively, are they just going to tank it through the Commons and then it lands in the laps of their Lordships?

Ken Macdonald: They might try and do that, or they might lose. They might lose in the Commons. I mean we've heard figures of 60, 65 Labour MPs who are desperately unhappy about this and that only has to grow by another score or so. And we are in Government defeat territory because the Lib Dems and the Conservatives and I think Reform UK are gonna vote against.

Now I think they will have to offer concessions. I suspect the concession they might try and offer is to go back to the Leveson model and say, okay, we'll have two magistrates in the [00:18:00] Crown Court bench division. And that's a lay element, a public element, which is not quite a jury, but sort of a jury. And that clears up that problem.

But I think the real issue with that is gonna be the practical one. Can they find the magistrates? And I think they will really struggle, which is, as I say, is why I think they moved away from Leveson on that one. They just don't think they can do it. So they may in desperation propose that.

I would myself not support it. I don't think it's is a good solution. I don't think the case has been made for abolishing jury trial in this category of cases, and I don't think a one and a half to two and a half percent saving of court time in the Crown Court is anything like enough again to justify the disruption and distress that this reform is going to cause.

Ruth Fox: Can we just look ahead at what might happen in the House of Lords? I mean, it seems to me that the government might have to make concessions to get it through the Commons, or it might just have enough of the numbers to get it through, but who knows what those concessions might be, but it might not be enough for their Lordships.

This was not in the manifesto, [00:19:00] so it's not a bill that's bound by the Salisbury Convention. The last time the House of Lords rejected a bill at Second Reading was the Fraud (Trials Without A Jury) Bill, in 2006-07. You think about the government's legislative programme, if peers wanted to play legislative hardball, particularly on the opposition and cross benches, politically, this is one where, as a matter of principle, you could imagine peers digging their heels in. There's an awful lot of people with legal experience in your House.

Ken Macdonald: I think that certainly is a possibility, although it's worth pointing out that the lawyers in the House are not of one mind here. One or two of the senior former judges signalled their support for the Leveson approach. The bench is rather split on this.

I think some of the more senior judges are more favourable to these reforms. The Circuit Bench, the Crown Court Bench, is almost universally opposed to them. But if one or two of the more senior judges in the House of Lords on the cross benches signal support, that might water down opposition somewhat because they're very influential.

But I think there will be [00:20:00] an awful lot of peers who are deeply hostile to this, including some of the legal peers and I would predict, one never knows, but I would predict a pretty rocky road for the jury reform proposals in the House of Lords. And I think that there will be lots of amendments put down and I think that peers will be looking for some significant concessions from the Government if this is to get through. It's gonna be a struggle. It's gonna be a hard, hard, hard grind, I think.

Mark D'Arcy: The Government's been saying that it wants to get this legislation onto the statute book by the end of the year. That timetable would normally seem perfectly feasible. But if there starts to be the kind of resistance to this bill that we've seen, for example, over the assisted dying legislation, and it does strike me as an issue where peers might just dig in their heels, that timetable may suddenly look rather unattainable.

Ken Macdonald: Yeah, I mean, the assisted dying is not a perfect analogy because that's, if I may say so, a blatant filibuster. And everyone in the House

Mark D'Arcy: We've been having this argument a lot.

Ken Macdonald: Everyone knows there's a filibuster, including those engaging in it, although they hotly deny it. [00:21:00] I don't think we'll see that level of delay, but I think we could see delay, which makes the Government's programme look increasingly difficult to achieve.

This is a sort of issue that some peers will feel very very strongly about. I mean, one goes back to the control orders question, these sorts of civil liberties issues, it's rather an anomaly, isn't it? That the House of Lords, the ancient chamber, the aristocratic chamber, has become the great defender of civil liberties and has been really since the turn of the century, if not before, it's always in the House of Lords, that these things get very, very sticky for governments, these sorts of civil liberties questions. And I predict that this will be no different.

Mark D'Arcy: And if the bill is still in play into 2027, suddenly you are in the glide path to a general election and the political costs for the government go up exponentially the longer that they're forced to relive this agony.

Ken Macdonald: Yeah, I think such polling as has been done shows that people are strongly supportive of the right to jury trial. I certainly don't think this is an election winning issue for Labour. I mean, I understand they've done some internal polling, which shows that it's [00:22:00] not a great issue on the doorsteps, and I'm sure that's right. When people are asked whether they would like to retain the right to jury trial or not, the majorities in favour are very, very large. For reasons that are, I think are quite understandable.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. I suppose a lot will turn on the mood of their Lordships and as you said, it's the kind of issue where they have got cover to dig their heels in and see themselves as the defenders of ancient liberties. And so forth. But it is the mood of the House there for that yet, do you think?

Ken Macdonald: Well, it hasn't come to us yet, but I've had conversations with people across the House and I'm distressed to say that the words Magna Carta have been used quite a lot in those conversations. Look, there's a strong feeling here that this is an important part of British tradition, culture, history, heritage. What was it, John Mortimer said? That the Brits will be remembered for three things. Shakespeare, bacon and eggs for breakfast, and jury trial. And I quoted this to Brian Leveson recently, and he rolled his eyebrows. And I don't blame him, but it is an important part of how we see [00:23:00] ourselves as a country that we have trial by jury and I think people will feel strongly about it and I think some people will feel very, very strongly about it.

Mark D'Arcy: Ken Macdonald, Lord Macdonald, thanks very much indeed for joining Ruth and me on the pod today.

Ken Macdonald: Well, it's been a great pleasure and thank you very much for inviting me.

Ruth Fox: Thank you.

So, Mark, what happens next?

I mean, we've just heard hot off the press that Sir Brian Leveson will be appearing before the Justice Committee next week to discuss the bill. One of the big issues of course we haven't touched on in the discussion with Lord Macdonald is the impact of court delays on trials for rape cases. That's featured an awful lot in the the second reading debate.

Notably, because of the extraordinary speech by Charlotte Nichols, the Labour MP who waived her right to anonymity and said that she had been raped after attending an event in her capacity as an MP, and she'd had to wait over a thousand days, 1088 days precisely, to go to court, and she talked very powerfully in that debate about the agony of dealing with that on each and every one of those days, [00:24:00] and how it was exacerbated by the fact that, as an MP, the mental health consequences of her trauma played out in public, and she'd got some incredibly strong words for her front bench. I think it's worth, for listeners, just having a listen exactly to what she said.

Charlotte Nichols: In this debate, experiences like mine feel like they're being weaponized and are being used for rhetorical misdirection for what this bill actually is. The violence against women and girls sector haven't had the opportunity to come together to discuss it. And the government's framing and narrative has been to pit survivors and defendants against each other in a way I think is deeply damaging.

Ruth Fox: And then she went on to say.

There is so much that we can be doing for rape victims that isn't the Lord Chancellor using them as a cudgel to drive through reforms that aren't directly relevant to them.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, the next hurdle for the Government is the detailed debate that will now follow in the House of Commons. And one of the questions there is, will outright opponents of the bill be put on the bill committee?

There was almost a hint of that in the speech by Karl Turner, who's [00:25:00] the unofficial leader of the opposition on this inside the Labour ranks. At any rate, he said in his speech to the Commons that he'd been talking to David Lammy and he was now going to abstain rather than vote against the bill at Second Reading because he thought there was a chance that the terms of the bill could well be changed at various detailed stages of debate, committee and reports. So look out for government amendments that Karl Turner feels able to back or possibly not to back as the parliamentary process unfolds on that.

And there are a few other points to make about this bill as well. One is that it's going to carry over. The parliamentary session, as we've often discussed on this pod, has been scheduled to end in May, and this bill will kind of continue across the join. So the committee stage will go on. It's supposed to be ending by the 28th of April, but it's unlikely the report stage would then take place until the new session of Parliament, so after the next State Opening.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I think Mark, it's one of a number of bills now that have got a carry-over motion. You know, it's a sort of way of trying to spread the legislative workload over into the next session, which obviously we expect [00:26:00] will be considerably shorter. 12 months, not the current sort of 20, what are we looking at, 20, 21, 22 month. The session that we are looking at this time. So it's a way of spreading the legislative workload, getting some big bills through some of their early stages. And that obviously would then affect, you know, the timetable as we talked about with Lord Macdonald, trying to get it through before the end of the year ideally, because of course, the longer the bill takes, and this is the problem the Government's got, the longer the bill takes, the less time that they've got to start to bring about the changes on the ground in the court system to start to see a reduction in that backlog.

Mark D'Arcy: And of course, one of the clear aims for the government here is to have a visible improvement in the situation in the courts.

And so, as you say, the sooner they can actually get these provisions into action, the quicker they hope they'll get those changes. So, although of course it's disputed that these changes will be as effective as ministers seem to think they are. But anyway, that's there.

And so the Government's gotta get the bill through the Commons, then it hits the House of Lords.

And as Lord Macdonald was saying, the knives are being sharpened. They're [00:27:00] already, people are already having sort of preliminary discussions about what they can do when this bill comes before them on the red benches.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And talking of legislative battles in the House of Lords, perhaps we should take a break for a minute or two and gather our thoughts because the Hereditary Peers Bill, which we touched on last week, is finally through the House of Lords. It's staggered over the finishing line, but there were some important Government concessions that are worth talking about. So I think we should take a short break.

Listeners, while we do that, please do click subscribe in the your podcast app, if you haven't already done so, make sure you get future episodes and of course, my usual call on you to share the podcast with your family and friends. See you in a minute.

Mark D'Arcy: And we are back. And Ruth, we talked about it last week as the ermine end game, the bill to remove the last hereditary peers from the House of Lords has finally gone through.

There was a rather interesting little moment where some sort of government compromises to get it through were finally accepted by opponents. [00:28:00] And Lord True, the shadow leader of the House, former leader of the House under the Conservative government, of course, had a rather interesting thing to say. He said it was time to dial down on eternal ping-pong. Eternal battles between the House of Lords with bills flying back and forth between them for weeks on end. So he decided to accept a compromise with the Government and the form of that compromise seems to be that a number of hereditary peers will be converted into life peers. So they will get to stay in the House after the removal of the other hereditary peers, and that seems to have been a sufficient spoonful of sugar to allow this particular medicine to go down.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. There were essentially three outstanding issues at the start of the debate, and the Government has made quite significant concessions on two of them. One we talked about last week, the fact that they're gonna introduce the Ministerial Salaries (Amendment) Bill so that more ministers in the House of Lords will be paid, which seems not an unreasonable request, and that's gonna happen and they're gonna put that bill through fairly quickly, but then the important one, and the one that we don't have exact detail on, [00:29:00] but has clearly been a product of discussions in the usual channels, the business managers in the House of Lords, with the Official Opposition, the Conservatives and the cross benches, is that they are gonna be offered an agreed number of life peerages.

Now, I didn't see in the debate exactly how many, but I've seen in the press reports, 15. I dunno whether that's accurate or not. And the idea is that it seems that through these, what were described as constructive conversations, the Conservatives and the cross benches seemed to have made the point that quite a number of the hereditaries were critical on their benches because they had particular roles in the House and they played a particular role in terms of delivery of scrutiny and so on, and they wanted basically to retain these particular figures. So the idea is that they'll leave the House at the end of this session. So they'll have to leave end of April, beginning of May, whenever the prorogation happens, then at some point, shortly thereafter, they will be appointed as life peers. And they'll come back into the [00:30:00] House and the Conservatives will get X number of them, and the Crossbenchers will get a few as well. And then they will have seats in the House to be legislators for as long as they want until such time as they choose to retire or die in situ, I guess

Mark D'Arcy: Or Lords Reform takes place.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Or reform.

Mark D'Arcy: It's probably the least likely of the three, but yeah.

Ruth Fox: Quite. But the other aspect of this is to balance this out in terms of, you know, because we've talked on the podcast a number of times about the growing size of the House, that the Conservatives and the cross benches, particularly the Conservatives under some pressure to encourage members on their side of the House, life peers who were considering retirement to basically speed it up so that if they are serious about retirement, to basically do it now, rather than waiting perhaps another year or so, so that the numbers don't grow too much.

Mark D'Arcy: So rather like a butler ushering out a guest who's overstayed their welcome.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And we've already heard one announcement this morning, in fact, as we're recording on Thursday, Lord Bethel, [00:31:00] former health minister during the COVID Pandemic, very active in the House of Lords.

He's announced

Mark D'Arcy: Podcaster as well.

Ruth Fox: Of course. He's announced that he's going to retire from the House. We'll no doubt hear of a few others in the coming weeks. So that appears to be the deal. But it's an agreement that's been made in what was described as good faith for the proper functioning of the House and the Official Opposition.

That's the words of Baroness Smith of Basildon, the leader of the House of Lords.

Mark D'Arcy: So the deal is done, but Ruth, I'd like to take this opportunity to push back a bit against some of the total bosh that's been written about at hereditary peers. There's this characterisation that there's this whole class of wonderful, dedicated, above party, public servants who just happened to be descended from, you know, random mistresses of Charles II or drinking partners of various prime ministers.

I remember the late Lord Onslow used to have this wonderful line called, I'm only here because my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather used to get pissed with Pitt. I'm not quite sure whether it was the Younger or the Elder, but I'm not sure it matters particularly for the context of this argument.

But the [00:32:00] idea that all hereditary peers were absolutely wonderful public servants, and were rising above the constraints of petty party politics, and they're being replaced by ghastly members of the lanyard wearing classes, there's a lot of pearl clutching in some of the sillier sections of the press about all this, and I'm afraid it's pious romantic nonsense.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. I mean, look, amongst the hereditary peers, like the life peers, there are many, many good legislators, good scrutineers, dedicated public servants. There've also been some that frankly have been a waste of space.

Mark D'Arcy: Absolutely. You know, I really do think that people should get away from this idea that there are a whole load of people who are bred to public service, ought to be in our Parliament because it's so much better than those ghastly elected politicians or people nominated by those ghastly elected politicians. There's plenty to complain about the people who've been appointed to the House of Lords by successive prime ministers, and Keir Starmer was in terrible trouble with at least three of his current nominees, as far as I can see, so this is not a single party [00:33:00] point by any means, but for heaven's sake, let's lose the illusion that somehow or other coming from sort of eight generations of nobility somehow makes you a better legislator. It is not automatically true. While of course, I totally accept your point that there are a number of the hereditary peers who've done an absolutely marvellous job in the House of Lords as legislators, but that's not to say that all of them do.

Ruth Fox: No, quite. And I think it's kind of interesting also the response, particularly on social media, of a lot of Labour MPs and ministers, you know, touting this as a great achievement of Labour delivering on its manifesto, which it is, but whilst I completely support the idea that simply because of dint of birth, you and your ancestors should inherit a permanent seat in the legislature, equally, the government leaves us with a problem, which is that now we've effectively got monopoly appointments to the House by the Prime Minister, which it seems to me is

Mark D'Arcy: Undesirable.

Ruth Fox: Undesirable. I mean, I was gonna say equally unsatisfactory. I'm not quite sure, it is equally unsatisfactory, but it's very [00:34:00] unsatisfactory and there's still no real clarity about what's gonna happen in that regard and the ambitions that people had even for incremental change to that model in this bill, in hopes that it might have been amended, have fallen by the wayside, and the next step now is to wait until late summer, July, I think for whatever the recommendations of this retirement and participation committee are going to be, this committee that's been set up as a result of the negotiations around this bill to look at next stage reform in terms of whether there should be restrictions on peers so that if you are not participating enough, you're basically forced into retirement, you're sort of ejected from the House. Now I don't know what's gonna happen with that. And full transparency, my boss, Baroness Taylor of Bolton, has got the political hot potato of chairing that committee. Luckily enough, we don't discuss it, those are private discussions that are going on in the House of Lords that she and her, I should say, very high powered committee in terms of members on it, are gonna have [00:35:00] to grapple with. But I think the expectation is that that will publish something later in the summer, probably before summer recess, and then it'll be what happens with that.

Mark D'Arcy: But what we're seeing at the moment is a continuation of the final British tradition of constitutional reform by short term bodge. Which has been going on since at least the first Parliament Act way back in the years of H H Asquith.

So here we go again. Another short term fix. Deals with another current problem. Scores a few minor political points. But Lords reform on any kind of grand scale is just off the table.

Yes, the Government hasn't got the political energy to do something about the shape of the House of Lords. There's too much else going on. And there almost always is.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, well that's the problem, why it never happens. First of all, they can't agree on what the model should be. And then anything more than fairly small incremental changes just eats up too much political capital.

Mark D'Arcy: Yes, absolutely. If anybody doubts that, conjure up the ghost of Nick Clegg and watch what happened to his Lords reform bill.

Ruth Fox: Quite. Well, Mark, let's shift our gaze [00:36:00] to the House of Commons, because there's been a few strange things going on that the Speaker has been calling out.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. Mr. Speaker seems to have been in a particularly grumpy mood, maybe as some kind of internal threshold has been passed, where he's just sick of bad behaviour.

I mean, there was the usual rebukes to ministers. I think it was about immigration policy earlier in the week, where policy announcements were not being made in front of the House of Commons, which is something that now happens about twice a week, the Speaker gets up and rebukes someone for that and they say, yes, Mr. Speaker, we take that on board and then nothing happens. But then there was a member of the Commons was ejected from Prime Minister's question time, the MP for Bracknell.

Ruth Fox: Peter Swallow.

Mark D'Arcy: Peter Swallow, not previously particularly noticed him, I have to say, but he was getting too loud for the Speaker and was ordered out. So the whip was cracked a bit more definitely there.

And then we had a bizarre incident at the close of business or near to the close of business in the House of Commons on Wednesday evening where the Chief Whip and the [00:37:00] Deputy Chief Whip deliberately strung out a vote, a division, so MPs marching through the lobbies, apparently, in order to prevent, a further division on a Statutory Instrument that was due up immediately after that main division. So there was a bit of deliberate time-wasting there and we saw the Speaker Lindsay Hoyle getting very, very angry about that in the Commons the next day. There was a rebuke at the time from Caroline Noakes, who was the Deputy Speaker in the chair at the time, but a much louder one came from Sir Lindsay Hoyle the next morning when he quite directly told off the Chief Whip, Jonathan Reynolds and his deputy, for what he described as unacceptable time-wasting behaviour, which he said damaged the reputation of the House.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. He said Members should be ashamed of themselves. So it seems like half a dozen members, including as you say, the Chief and Deputy Chief Whips, were basically hanging about in the division lobby. The Deputy Speaker on the night sent out the Serjeant at Arms to investigate what was going on and to chivy them through the lobby. [00:38:00] What seems to have happened is that an MP was claiming to be ill and the Speaker subsequently said, you know, suddenly had discovered at 7:00 PM that they recovered.

Mark D'Arcy: Lazarus like they rose up and walked.

Ruth Fox: Which rather reminded me as, you know, I'm a football fan, it rather reminded me of football fans getting very frustrated at players going down to time waste, and then suddenly remarkable recovery and being able to get up and play immediately after. So what seems to have happened is they've basically strung out the vote.

Now, for listeners' benefit, there's a seven or eight minute time limit before the door closes to get into the division lobbies. And by the time they've done all the counting and sort of married things up, it roughly takes 12 to 15 minutes is what they aim for. They took 22 minutes for this division and it was described by the Speaker as "beyond the pale" and the Serjeant at Arms having been sent out to chivy them along in the division lobby, he seems to have been ignored. And this also has caught the ire understandably of the Speaker. Because he basically said the Serjeant lost his authority. [00:39:00] MPs said they were ill and then suddenly were not. And what this seems to be about is that as the vote was coming up to 7 PM, they wanted to get past the 7 PM barrier, the cutoff time, so that the Conservatives who wanted to oppose two of the three Statutory Instrument motions that were on the agenda next, having got through that 7:00 PM cutoff time, their objection couldn't be put to a division. It would be deferred to business next week, so it would be a deferred vote on paper next Wednesday. So basically they were time wasting in order to avoid another vote presumably because the Government whips had miscalculated and didn't have enough of their troops near the Chamber to win another vote before 7pm.

Mark D'Arcy: And the whole House knew what the game was, because audibly, just as the cutoff point was being reached, the moment of interruption, what you could hear in the chamber was a number of MPs counting down, so it was 10, 9, 8, you know, just like Thunderbirds

Ruth Fox: To [00:40:00] seven o'clock.

Mark D'Arcy: Except that Thunderbirds weren't go in this particular case. And, suddenly the division was off.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, it meant that the Conservatives couldn't get a vote on the Statutory Instrument. The Speaker said the morning after, if the Whips can't manage their business, they should go on a training exercise.

Mark D'Arcy: Meow.

Ruth Fox: Rather than breaching the rules of the House.

Mark D'Arcy: I think it was the sight actually of, because you could see all this on the TV feed of these events, it was the sight of the Chief Whip, Jonathan Reynolds, patting one of his whips on the back as the moment came and it was clear that they'd avoided having this division they were trying to avoid.

Ruth Fox: Whips on both sides play these games from time to time. But the Speaker was outraged. He talked about Westminster being the global leader amongst parliaments, and that this is not the kind of good behaviour you expect, and they should be ashamed of themselves.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, the general impression was he thought the mother of Parliaments was on the gin, and he was actually suggesting that he wanted letters of apology from all those involved, presumably from the Chief Whip down. I don't know quite what happens if he doesn't get them. Maybe people find themselves mysteriously not being called to speak when they want or [00:41:00] otherwise put through parliamentary contortions, but Speakers have their ways of getting revenge if they're dissed. So I think it would be very wise for those involved to pen a suitably grovelling letter as soon as possible.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And just to stop any letters coming into us from our listeners, just to point out, Westminster is not the mother of parliaments. We know it's England. With that, let's take a break and come back in a minute and talk about what's been going on in response to the humble address to get the Mandelson papers.

Mark D'Arcy: Very interesting subject indeed. Join us in a moment

Ruth Fox: And we're back, and Mark, we've spoken a number of times on the podcast in recent weeks about the humble address, calling for this huge trawl of papers related to the appointment of Peter Mandelson as our ambassador in Washington. We finally got the first publication this week, about 130 odd pages I think it was, in a searchable PDF on the government website. Go to the cabinet office website if you want to have a look at it. We'll put a link [00:42:00] in our show, as well. What did you make of it?

Well, there were several interesting documents that emerged from this sort of document dump. There was a bit of discussion about the severance payment that Peter Mandelson was given. 75 grand when he ceased to be the British ambassador. A lot less than he was initially asking for.

He was asking for half a million, wasn't it? Full payment of his contract.

Mark D'Arcy: A middle class chap of modest taste could probably manage on that for a little while. That was one thing.

I think that's almost a side issue compared to the most important document, which was the assessment of the potential reputational risks. And the assessment of what the Government knew about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted paedophile at the centre of this vast influence trading ring, and I think that that's the document that hurts most because it is absolutely clear that there were considerable concerns and a lot was known. And the initial defence of, we didn't know the full extent of the relationship, we didn't know how long it continued, rather disintegrates in the face of that particular document. So there's a lot there that is [00:43:00] quite corrosive for Sir Keir Starmer and there's more to come.

Now, the briefing at the moment is that the more to come may to some extent exonerate him. Well, I take that with a little bit of salt to be honest. But this is a problem for him now because we wait till after the May local elections. And if Labour does, as a lot of people expect, very badly in those, then his leadership will be in question again.

And this will be a kind of contributory factor to that slow motion leadership crisis that he seems to be permanently mired in.

Ruth Fox: Just to go back to what he said in February, he said Mandelson had portrayed Jeffrey Epstein as someone he barely knew. And when that became clear and it was not true, I sacked him.

The problem Keir Starmer's got is this due diligence document that was prepared for him references on a number of occasions that actually the relationship was quite close. It wasn't somebody he barely knew. This due diligence document talks about and references a report in 2019 commissioned by the bank, JP Morgan, that was looking at doing a [00:44:00] deal of some kind, possibly an appointment with Peter Mandelson, and it records the fact that Epstein had maintained a particularly close relationship with Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, and Lord Peter Mandelson, a senior member of the British government. So this is fundamental to the problem, as you say, about Starmer's judgement. Because it was referenced in the debate. Keir Starmer wasn't there. It was, keep forgetting what he's called,

Mark D'Arcy: Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, Darren Jones.

Ruth Fox: That's it. Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister. This new role that's been invented. Darren Jones is gonna have to face these questions time and time again. I do feel sorry for him, but he was basically faced with a question, well, if the Prime Minister thought it was a shallow relationship with a paedophile, why did you think that was acceptable?

So regardless, in a sense that the key question is that as a matter of judgement , Keir Starmer had access to the information, they knew that there was a relationship, they maybe didn't know about the fact that business documents, government documents were being forwarded on, that's all come out subsequently. [00:45:00] But the key issue is they knew that they had a close relationship with the paedophile and he still went ahead and appointed him and appointed him at a time when, after the US election, they'd known and were getting advice from the American Embassy in Washington, it's clear from the papers that this whole question about Epstein and the release of the Epstein files in America was a big election issue.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. The election of President Trump kind of guaranteed that this would continue to go on for quite a long time in the American media. I dunno if they expected the email dump of the Epstein papers to compromise Peter Mandelson as much as it did, but it was certainly a distinct possibility that that would happen.

So this continues to run and run. And now at the moment you might say, this is a good moment to bury bad news with the world aflame and a live war in the Gulf and the price of petrol heading through the stratosphere, but all the same, at some point Parliament is going to come back to this. And a couple of pods ago we were talking to Tom Tugendhat about his idea that there should be a special select committee dedicated to investigating this whole issue and the [00:46:00] wider levels of kind of corruption and favour exchanging that went on in Jeffrey Epstein's circle, which included people from lots and lots of countries. I keep going on about the idea that maybe people are so fixated on Peter Mandelson, they're missing the wider picture here. And maybe that committee would get to grips with that, but at some point or other Parliament is going to have to reach a verdict on it. And at the moment, the omens don't look good for Sir Keir.

And you've gotta say, this is a very un-Starmerlike decision to take such a risk in appointing Peter Mandelson the way he did. And it's maybe an odd decision that he's going to pay quite a price for.

Ruth Fox: The other thing that comes through the papers is who was providing the advice. I mean, it seems slightly odd that yes, of course you'd take advice from your chief of staff then Morgan McSweeney, but you know, your national security advisor, Jonathan Powell, who's worked with Peter Mandelson in the past, knows obviously him quite well.

Mark D'Arcy: Tony Blair's chief of staff. And someone who had long Mandelson experience, you might say. Had gone through two sackings of Peter Mandelson with him.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And he appears not to have really been involved in the discussion or [00:47:00] engaged in the discussion. And only subsequently in last September when all this came out and Downing Street were clearly investigating what had happened, when he was asked about the process of the appointment, he talked about in a phone conversation, it had been a quote, weirdly rushed appointment. But he seems to have been not involved in it, which itself seems odd. Certainly in recent months it's been briefed that Jonathan Powell was pushing for his appointment and David Lammy was not, at the Foreign Office when he was Foreign Secretary.

And in fact, the paper suggests that the reverse is true. So again, there's some sort of odd political shenanigans going on behind the scenes. And one thing that struck me in the papers, and I don't think it's really been commented on by the press yet, certainly at the point in which we are recording now, it might in subsequent days, is there's a letter to the King's Private Secretary, Sir Clive Alderton, from the Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office, which then was Philip Barton, he's now retired, it's now Olly Robbins, but back in December 2024, when this appointment was being made, it was Sir Philip Barton and he opens [00:48:00] the letter to Sir Clive, the Prime Minister has indicated his intention to recommend during this Parliament a small number of political appointments to serve as His Majesty's Ambassadors overseas, which suggests that there are a small coterie of possible political appointments. Now, I rather suspect he may be rethinking that strategy. There's no information about who they may be, which appointments, which individuals they were thinking about, or whether it was just a sort of a theoretical, well, yes, I might make some political appointments, and move people on that way, but I just thought that was interesting and it hasn't yet come out in the discussion.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. Well as I said there, there may be plenty of things further down in the small print of these various documents that attract a lot of attention on more detailed study.

Because of course, as we are speaking, people have had less than 24 hours to go through them and the fine tooth combes are doubtless out. I'd love the idea of these documents being released in a searchable PDF. For convenience of investigators.

Ruth Fox: I think [00:49:00] possibly all PDFs are searchable these days.

Mark D'Arcy: But the other point I'd make about this is that there were quite a number of Labour MPs who weighed in the reaction to the publication of the Epstein Papers. And I think that what they demonstrated was that a lot of Keir Starmer critics on his own benches see this as something that they're gonna sink their teeth into. People like Clive Lewis.

Ruth Fox: Clive Lewis sinks his teeth into quite a few of these issues.

Mark D'Arcy: Bit of a usual suspect in terms of attacking Sir Keir Starmer, but nonetheless, when you've got a group of people on your own side adding their voices to the chorus, it's never a comfortable experience for a Prime Minister.

Ruth Fox: No. One of the other interesting aspects from the perspective of the House of Commons was that if you remember this humble address, the government basically added an amendment to the Conservatives initial motion so that any redactions relating to international security matters and so on would be first channelled through Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee so that they could look at that information and determine whether they [00:50:00] accepted the government's rationale that this information should be redacted.

Now, out of this bundle of about 30 or 31 documents in this 130 page package, only one of them has gone to the ISC for redactions because the committee put out a press release to confirm that they'd looked at it on the 5th of March, I think it was, and had agreed that the redactions were appropriate. There were a whole host of other redactions of personal sort of information data, things like email addresses and names of junior staff in the foreign office and so on, all of which understandable. But the other thing that came through in the statement is that not only is there an agreement with the Intelligence and Security Committee, but they've also struck an agreement with the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, PACAC as it's known, and its chair Simon Hoare MP.

And actually quite a lot of those documents did go to PACAC to have a look at. When you think about potentially the scale of this over many, many months, and we know that some of the documents have not been released because the police [00:51:00] explicitly have asked the government not to and in there are apparently the questions that were asked of Peter Mandelson about his relationship with Epstein.

Apparently three questions were asked. Those questions and those answers, which may or may not give Sir Keir Starmer some comfort, those have not been published, but there are also all these WhatsApp messages and emails about the broader appointment, which have not yet appeared. We don't know when they'll appear, but potentially it's a huge volume of work for these two committees.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, there's an awful lot there. And the full majesty of parliamentary scrutiny needs to be brought to bear on this question because it goes to the judgement of a Prime Minister and a Prime Minister who's under siege at the moment. So watch this space and watch out for whether Tom Tugendhat's special committee ever gets set up, or whether the other existing select committees just decide that they're gonna sink their remaining teeth into it.

Ruth Fox: Yeah and Darren Jones in his statement has effectively announced that three other measures are, well, two other measures and an appointment are happening as a result of all of [00:52:00] this. So he said the government's gonna go further to strengthen standards in public life, including by looking at how ministers and senior officials declare and publish their financial interests. How transparency around lobbying is enforced and whether the rules on what are described as post-employment activity are fit for purpose to prevent unfair access to or influence within government. The government, or the Prime Minister specifically, has asked this new Ethics and Integrity Commission that the government has established, which effectively takes over the Committee on Standards in Public life and other bits and pieces of the standards landscape around government, they've been asked to conduct a review of the current arrangements on financial disclosures for ministers and senior officials, transparency around lobbying and business appointment rules.

And then they've appointed a new minister, Baroness Anderson of Stoke on Trent. Of course, Ruth Anderson, former MP for Stoke. They've appointed her to the Cabinet Office to support this work. It was described as [00:53:00] to deliver the government's agenda on ethical standards and constitutional affairs. So a lot going on in the weeds. Again, though, it's always the case that we suddenly get action on standards and transparency, the kinds of things that organisations like us and lots of others, Transparency International and so on, have been urging for a long time. You suddenly get a bit of action when there's a crisis. And it's all a bit too late

Mark D'Arcy: And they add a new layer and they possibly add a new regulator of some kind. And the whole landscape just becomes increasingly complicated.

And Ruth, quick change of subject here, because I just wanted to note another important development going on at the moment, which is that the Commons Treasury Select Committee under its chair, Meg Hillier, is going to be taking a look at the student loans issue.

And this has really come up to the boil quite quickly recently. The realisation that an awful lot of people in the process of paying for their university education under the student loan system are facing ever increasing debt. They're not even managing to pay down their debt. [00:54:00] And I'm intrigued by this from a number of points of view.

First of all, it's a huge policy problem for the government because you've got people who you'd hope would be starting families, starting businesses, embarking on careers, buying houses, completely bogged down by the weight of their student debt. And that is not a good thing for the economy and is certainly not a good thing for attracting votes for the governing party either.

At the same time, you've gotta find a way to try and reduce that debt that doesn't cost the government more money than it has available, and Meg Hillier is a very good person to have a look at that from her days as the chair of the Public Accounts Committee in the previous Parliament, her days now as the chair of the Treasury Select Committee, as a former minister, she's got a grasp of the realities of how government works and I'm wondering whether she's decided to do this off her own bat, whether maybe there's been a discreet ask that this is a good way to start pitch rolling for changes that the government could make and identify things that could command a consensus. So it's quite an interesting exercise because this is a policy area where the government is really gonna have to act.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, there's no doubt given [00:55:00] the degree of public attention that's now attached to it. I mean, this is another one of the economic hot potatoes the Government's got on its agenda, which could, you know, upend quite a lot of its plans.

Because the scale of what we're talking about is billions of pounds. So it'd be interesting to see how the Treasury Committee proceeds. I mean, as you say. I rather doubt because it's not in the way of ministers often to do this. I'd rather doubt that Rachel Reeves has whispered in Meg Hillier's ear and said It would be helpful if you could do an inquiry. I suspect Meg Hillier's looking ahead a bit further down the road. And so actually this is an ideal scenario in which the committee can helpfully propose some ideas for how you might resolve this and get a bit of cross party consensus around the select committee table. And then put that to the Government and encourage the Government to a bit of action. And it also helps put the pressure on the government to come up with a package, a plan, to deal with it.

Mark D'Arcy: At least spur ministers into bringing forward their own ideas. I suppose the question is whether the word helpful just now has large scare quotes around it, or whether it's just to be taken literally that it would actually help the government.[00:56:00]

Ruth Fox: It's one to watch Mark, so we'll no doubt keep an eye on it and I don't know, maybe even we'll get Meg Hiller in to talk about it in the near future. But I think that's probably all we've got time for this week. It's been a busy week, so I will see you next Thursday.

Mark D'Arcy: Well indeed, when hopefully we'll be able to deal with a few listeners questions. We've had a few piling up.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, apologies to listeners, we've had such a busy few weeks, we haven't managed to find a bit of time to deal with listeners questions, so we'll get through a bit of the backlog, but if you have got questions, get them into us, send them into us by social media or either use the link to the question form on our podcast show notes in your app, and we'll deal with them next week.

Mark D'Arcy: See you then. Bye-bye.

Ruth Fox: Bye-bye.

Outro: 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.