(14 years, 5 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Strathclyde
That this House takes note of the case for reform of the House of Lords.
The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (Lord Strathclyde)
My Lords, I for one am delighted to have been able to find this very early opportunity in the lifetime of this Parliament to discuss your Lordships’ House. I can say to noble Lords who have an interest—and many do—that this is the first of such opportunities that we will have to discuss the future of this House.
Lord Strathclyde
The noble Lord who asked a question a moment ago is now leaving the Chamber.
Lord Strathclyde
So I shall not bother telling him the good news about how often we hope to hear him speak in these quality debates over the next year.
Before the election, we knew that if Labour had won we would now be faced with a Bill based on Jack Straw’s committee paper, seeking to legislate on an elected senate in Labour’s historic fourth term—but that was not to be. Equally, we believed that, with a Conservative victory, reform would not be such an urgent priority and we could continue to seek a consensus for a long-term reform. Under the coalition Government, the three main parties all share similar objectives and the issue has now been given greater priority. Today’s debate is an opportunity for the Government to lay out the structure of their plan and an opportunity to listen to the views from your Lordships’ House.
There were more speakers who had put their names down on the speakers list but decided not to go ahead. Some have written to me with their views, but, as I said a moment ago, this, I think, will be the first of such opportunities to discuss the future of this House.
We seem to have been living with propositions for reform of your Lordships’ House for years, indeed decades. It is neither the most important question facing the country nor the least important; this is one House in a sovereign Parliament. It is a House that has often been proved right in recent years, but its voice needs to be better heard. Your Lordships’ House does an outstanding job, but it has not been able to avoid this country having a near disastrous experience from a surfeit of spending, legislation and regulation. We have done what we can well, but it has not always been enough to achieve all that we wanted, whether that was in the fields of ancient liberties, choice or plain old common sense. If the first job of your Lordships is to call the Executive to account and to challenge the other place to do its job, we have not lately excelled. It is at least legitimate to ask if one of the constraints on our ability to act lies in how we are constituted.
There have been years of debate since the 1999 Act changed this House for ever by ending the right to sit by virtue of hereditary peerage alone. We have seen umpteen schemes and watched them drift down umpteen backwaters, often with many here cheering loudly as they ran aground in the mud. We have seen umpteen propositions for change within the House, with my noble friend Lord Steel of Aikwood perhaps the most persistent in his bid to create the wholly appointed House that both Houses rejected in 1999. Many have hoped that it would all go away, but it has not. Indeed, all three major national parties promised a largely elected House in their manifestos only a few weeks ago, while the SNP pledged our abolition outright. A reformed House could play a great part in pulling together the voices of the devolved nations. No wonder those who would divide our kingdom see no place for any upper House, representative or not. That is a view that I totally reject. I have no doubt that this country needs a second Chamber with authority in all parts of the kingdom—one with confidence, powers and the willingness to use them in the public interest, even as the House that we now have acted to protect jury trial, defend habeas corpus and rejected the tyranny of electronic surveillance by compulsory ID cards. Can we create a Chamber better able to do all those things? That is the question before us. I believe that we can. Others believe that nothing under the sun could be better than this. As Leader of the House, I want to ensure that the voice of this House is heard from the outset in this debate, as sadly it was not always—indeed, some argue ever—heard in the past decade.
The coalition Government’s declared intention is to bring forward a draft Bill on reform of the House, which will provide a proper focus for debate and decision. It is something that I and many other noble Lords called for many times over recent years. My noble friend Lord McNally and I will set out the government agenda, but we are also, just as importantly, here to listen to your Lordships’ views. I can promise you this will not be the last opportunity. I know that many of your Lordships will have greeted this element of the coalition’s programme for government with a degree of apprehension, although the work of the cross-party group led by the former Lord Chancellor, Mr Straw, set it at the heart of the programme of the party opposite, too.
I hope that we will be able to reassure the House today that your Lordships, indeed both Houses, will have a full opportunity to take part before ever any legislation is introduced. In our programme for government, we said we would establish a committee to bring forward proposals for a wholly or mainly elected upper Chamber on the basis of proportional representation. We have done that. My right honourable friend the Deputy Prime Minister is chairing that committee, which is composed of members from all three major political parties as well as from both Houses. My noble friend Lord McNally, the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, and I all serve on it. The committee is charged with producing a draft Bill by the end of the year.
Lord Barnett
Whatever is in manifestos, the plain fact is that at the moment the Front Benches of this House are on this committee and, as the noble Lord and all sides of this House know very well, in advance of a debate the Back Benches do not agree with the Front Benches. Why is there not a single Back-Bencher on that committee?
Lord Strathclyde
Because, my Lords, this committee is charged to create a Bill in draft. There will be a full role for Back-Benchers in both Houses, on all sides and with different views, when we set up a Joint Committee of both Houses which will then give it the scrutiny it deserves before it is introduced to each House.
Lord Grocott
Could the Leader of the House, in the spirit of the coalition document, referring as it does to the importance of transparency, ensure that the agenda and minutes of this committee which is meeting at present are made available to the House and to the public?
Lord Strathclyde
I am very happy for the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, to discuss that with the Leader of the Opposition, who sits on the committee, but the Government will not be publishing either the agenda or any minutes because our objective is to come forward with a Bill in draft. That will be the result of the committee and we hope to do that before the end of the year. This will be the first time that legislation setting out how an elected second Chamber might be constituted will ever have been published by any Government.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick
Before we leave the matter of the composition of the committee, perhaps the noble Lord could explain why representatives of three of the main groups in this House are on that committee while the fourth group—the Cross-Benchers—is not represented? In order to save him from doing something which will irritate those around me quite a lot, will he please not say that it is because we have already made up our minds as to the shape of a future House?
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, I have no desire to irritate the noble Lord or, indeed, his noble friends, but the point is that the three main political parties each had a manifesto at the last general election which was broadly in agreement. The Deputy Prime Minister took the view that it was important to bring those political parties together in drafting the Bill. When we get to the creation of the Joint Committee of both Houses, the noble Lord and others of his views—not just on the Cross Benches, but elsewhere—will quite rightly be fully consulted and represented on that committee.
Lord Hughes of Woodside
Does the noble Lord agree that the path that he has now undertaken means that the House will be presented with the choice of the three political parties? It is a bit like Henry Ford: “You can have any choice you like, so long as it’s mine”.
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, in a way that is how it works in Parliament. Governments propose legislation and then Parliament disposes of it in whichever way it wants—and that will happen. I am sure that what the Government publish and what comes out of this committee at the end of the year is not where we will be at the end of the day. This is the start of the process. It will be up to the two Houses to set up the Joint Committee; it is not the job of government. My noble friend Lord McNally, the Deputy Leader, and I will make the case for the inclusion of all strands in this matter.
The Earl of Onslow
I am normally an enormous fan of my noble friend on the Front Bench, but surely his argument about not including Back-Benchers is slightly destroyed when it becomes a cartel of the three Front Benches. If it was solely my noble friends on the Liberal Front Bench and my noble friends on the Tory Front Bench, his argument would be absolutely solid. However, as it has included the Labour Front Bench, which as far as I have gathered is not part of the coalition—even though 1931 might come again—surely to exclude Back-Benchers is not a sensible idea.
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, the point I was trying to make is that Back-Benchers will play their full part in the process when we get to the creation of the Joint Committee of both Houses. The committee that the Deputy Prime Minister chairs, with all his might and authority, is designed to create the Bill that your Lordships and others can then comment on. I suggest that we are not going to agree on this issue this afternoon, but I hope that we can move on.
Lord Campbell of Alloway
Is my noble friend the Leader of the House aware that there is another point of view? On 5 July, the question of due process concerning the setting up of this committee and its functions is due for consideration. There are two views. One is that of my noble friend the Leader of the House and the other is certainly my own.
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, I am well aware that there is more than one view on this issue. Today we will hear from 68 speakers and we may well end up with more views than there are speakers. The point of the Deputy Prime Minister’s committee is to produce a Bill. Then a Joint Committee will examine it and that will have representatives from the Cross Benches and the Bishops’ Bench. I look forward to them playing their full part in it. We would not wish to exclude anybody from this process. That is likely to mean that it will be a substantial committee. It will have a substantial job to do, but that will be next year’s job, not this year’s.
Lord Richard
The noble Lord has been very good in giving way. Perhaps he could help me a little. I understand that this committee will produce a Bill. Will it produce a Bill in a legal form, properly drafted by parliamentary draftsmen? Will parliamentary draftsmen be attached to a committee of the three Front Benches to draft a Bill? Is that really the position, so that when the committee reports we get a Bill in draft—which can be introduced in the House—and carry on from there?
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, yes. I would hope that the noble Lord would not be so incredulous. One thing that has been missing from this great debate is precisely that—a Bill in properly drafted form. It will not be introduced to Parliament as part of a legislative process, but as part of a pre-legislative process for proper discussion. I am not going to give way too often.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton
My Lords, I hope I can save the noble Lord the Leader of the House a little time. Will the draft Bill that is being produced by the committee deal with transition? I think it might shorten the number of speeches today if the noble Lord could be more forthcoming on that.
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, yes, it will deal with transition, which is one of the most important issues. I do not suggest for one moment that the noble Baroness will agree with whatever we propose, although she might. I cannot tell her what it will be because we do not know either at this stage. It is still very early days. However, the Bill will cover that subject, as it must. Once the Joint Committee has completed its work, at the end of the process, it will be for the Government to decide whether to bring forward legislation. I hope that by the time we reach that point, this House will have had the opportunity for input—first into the work of the committee, and then that of the Joint Committee—before we get to a final decision.
Lord Rooker
I seek clarification on this point. Like other Members, I have read all three manifestos, which all talked about the House being mainly or wholly elected. Not one of them raised the issue of what this place is for. At what point will the House get the chance to debate what a Second Chamber is for, what it is to do and what its powers are? Surely, all we are talking about at the moment is its composition, which seems to be the wrong way round.
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, was a senior Minister in the former Government. They must have debated these issues many times in the build-up to the 2008 White Paper. Of course we have to decide what this House is for and what it will do. The view at the moment is that the House should continue to have the powers that it holds and do the work that it does. We are looking at its composition and how people get here, rather than what they do once they get here. I have hardly started in my speech. I will give way to the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, and then I will get on.
Lord Phillips of Sudbury
I am most grateful but, in the light of all the peculiar circumstances, it is important to know that, when the Bill is brought to the House, it will not be whipped so that there can be a genuinely free debate.
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, I have consistently taken the view over a long period—I am not saying that I will retain that consistency—that whipping a Bill on reform of the House of Lords is a particularly fatuous exercise as I suspect that Peers will make up their own minds, almost whatever the Whips tell them. However, we are a long way from having legislation on which we need to take a view on whether it will need to be whipped.
The coalition agreement, which noble Lords will have seen, envisaged a wholly or mainly elected House with elections on the basis of proportional representation. As the noble Baroness pointed out a moment ago, it also anticipated the transitional arrangement that a “grandfathering” system would be put in place for current Members of the House. I know that noble Lords will be anxious to know what both these things mean. They mean that we as a Government have yet to take a view—
Lord Strathclyde
We have yet to take a view on whether a reformed House should be fully or partly elected. Those words mean that we recognise the case for an orderly process of transition if the composition of the House is to change, just as in 1999 both Houses saw the wisdom of retaining a transitional element from the old House.
As I said at the outset, this House can be proud of so much that it does, but it lacks democratic authority. As a result, I believe that it does not carry the weight that the quality of its work merits. While we remain an overwhelmingly directly appointed House—something like 85 per cent appointed as against 50 per cent before 1999—our membership continues to grow. It is now fast approaching 800, with daily average attendance rising over 400. More new Members are due to be introduced over the coming weeks and months. I believe that it is time to examine what avenues could be created to make it possible for Members to leave the House permanently. To this end, I can announce that I will be setting up a Leaders’ Group, chaired by my noble friend Lord Hunt of Wirral, to investigate the options available. The group will include representation from all sides of the House and will be tasked with identifying the options that could be considered to allow Members to leave or to retire from the House.
Over the past 18 months, public confidence in politics, but more especially in Parliament, has been dramatically eroded. While many may reject the case for change, both Houses must surely consider it. Some in this House did not want change in Parliament in 1832, 1911, or, indeed, that much in 1999. Incredible though it may seem, the party opposite even voted against the creation of the life peerage in 1958. However, we came to accept all these great changes, just as in 1958 the then hereditary House accepted the case for change.
We cannot know precisely how this debate will unfold, but we know that it cannot be avoided. A great debate is beginning, or perhaps for some of us it is restarting. This House of all places cannot sit this one out. There is not a single Peer, whatever his or her views, who does not love this place, understand the need for a stronger Parliament and want the best for our House. This House, and its Members, must be at the heart of the debate ahead. I want to ensure this House a place in that process. That is the reason today’s debate was arranged. I look forward to all the contributions that will follow today and in the months ahead. I beg to move.
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, I am grateful to the Leader of the House for opening today’s debate with his characteristic élan and his evident relish for reform. We all marvel at the newfound determination of the Conservative element of the coalition Government to ensure that, very suddenly, a third-term issue should become an imperative. But whatever their reasons—and I for one am utterly convinced that the Conservative Benches opposite are as natural supporters of reform of your Lordships' House as they are the natural party of government—we can all heartily welcome the Conservative Party to the ranks of reformers.
The noble Lord the Leader of the House is the very model of the radical revolutionary, and from his speech on this subject to the House today, no one can see him in anything other than that role in the future. While the judgment of these Benches is that the constitutional change on which the coalition is so focused means rather less to people’s lives than the measures put forward in the coalition’s Conservative Budget, I look forward to today’s debate, and I thank the Government for providing the House with the opportunity of debating these issues once again.
This House is familiar with almost every aspect of the issues around the question of Lords reform. The department store John Lewis makes the claim that it is never knowingly undersold. On the question of reform of the House of Lords, I think that we in this House can claim that it is never knowingly underdebated.
However, we have seen in this long-running debate a new move, as mentioned by the Leader of the House: the decision by the coalition Government to form a cross-party committee, chaired by the Deputy Prime Minister, on further reform of the House, with the explicit aim of bringing forward a Bill on reform for consideration by both Houses. I am grateful to the Leader of the House for the information that he has provided about the committee’s work so far. I would have liked a more open and transparent way of working, but I am told that because the committee is a Cabinet committee, this is not possible. However, I would ask the Leader of the House for an undertaking that he will, as Leader not only of the whole House but of the Government in this House, continue to keep Members of the House informed about the work of the committee as it progresses.
We may not always have to hand a debate on the future of your Lordships' House to provide the means for him to do so, but I would urge the Leader to consider the best means by which all Members of this House can be kept up to date about the committee’s work. It is directly relevant to the future of this House and of the Members of this House. While many beyond this Chamber have a legitimate interest in this House and what will happen to it, I would argue that the Members of this House unquestionably have such an interest and it is right and proper for the Government to keep the Members informed.
Some—including, I acknowledge, some in my party—have questioned whether it is appropriate for Labour spokespeople, including me, to be members of this committee, taking part in its deliberations. I understand those concerns. However, I think that in this case it is right for me, as Leader of the Opposition in this House, and for two other members of the current shadow Cabinet to take part. As we showed in government when, at the instigation of my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer of Thoroton, we established the cross-party talks which led directly to our last White Paper on these matters, there is a genuine cross-party interest in such a major constitutional change as further reform of your Lordships' House. We also as a political party should be involved in these discussions inside the tent, if I may put it like that. Reform of your Lordships' House is of course a matter of party politics, but reform of your Lordships' House is also such an important matter for the constitution of our country that it is above party politics too.
I would have preferred—as clearly would have others—the Cross Benches to be represented on the committee. I think it is wrong that they are not. However, our being members of this committee does not bind us to it. We are the Opposition, not the Government. We have joined a committee, we have not joined the coalition. We will see what conclusions the committee comes up with. We have agreed nothing in advance. As the Deputy Prime Minister told us about the approach to these discussions, nothing is agreed until it is all agreed. There will be no accretion of agreement as we move through the process. In particular, we on this side of the House were committed in our manifesto to put the issue of further reform of your Lordships House to the people of this country. To us, that commitment is real and it is important.
This House plays a vital part in the politics and constitution of our country. Whatever the temporary impact on the balance of this House caused by the forming of the coalition Government, this House plays a vital role as a revising Chamber as well as having a central function as a unique means of national debate. It is the principal mechanism within the legislative process by which the Government of the day are held to account and can be asked to reflect and reconsider. That role is necessary whatever political party is in power. It is no less necessary with a coalition Government in power. Indeed, we on this side of the House would argue that it is even more necessary in such circumstances. I take this opportunity entirely to refute the suggestion that the views of this House were not heard by the Government over the past 13 years. They were constantly heard around the Cabinet table.
This House plays a key part in our constitutional arrangements. It is one of the main checks and balances in our constitution and it is right that it should remain so. Our manifesto commitment to a referendum reflects that. It shows that we believe that, because of the importance of the role of your Lordships’ House in both our politics and our constitution, it is right that any fundamental change to this House should be put to the people of this country for their decision.
According to the agreement of the coalition Government, the parties opposite are committed to a referendum on voting reform, specifically on the introduction of the alternative vote system for the election of Members of the House of Commons. However, because of the fundamental instability at the heart of the coalition Government, the two parties opposite are not committed to campaigning for the same goal in any such referendum. That and other deep fissures in the coalition, although significant, are matters for another day. What is important today is that, if the issue of voting reform is significant enough to merit the country’s consideration in a referendum, so, too, is further fundamental reform of your Lordships’ House. I made that point at the first meeting of the Cabinet committee chaired by the Deputy Prime Minister and I shall continue to hold to it as the process of the committee moves on.
Lord Maclennan of Rogart
I remind the noble Baroness that the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, which reformed the composition of this House by removing from its Benches the Law Lords, was not put to a referendum. Has she any precedent for what she suggests?
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, I acknowledge that there was no referendum on that occasion, but I respectfully suggest to the noble Lord that making this House an elected House would be a fundamental change in our constitution.
Lord Goodlad
If, as we consider legislation, the party opposite presses for a referendum on the future of the House, will the noble Baroness take into account the recommendations of the Electoral Commission on compulsory voting, which applies in many other countries, so that that is one of the considerations that come before us?
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, I could not at this juncture speak for my party on that issue, but personally I am a firm supporter of compulsory voting. However, that is my personal view.
On other occasions, my noble friend Lady Jay of Paddington, a distinguished former Leader of the House, has asked what the point is of the committee of which I am now a member. The noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway, will raise a pertinent issue in his Question on 5 July and, with typical shrewdness and incisiveness, my noble friend Lord Richard has made the point that, if the committee is to consider fully the outstanding issues of Lords reform, it is unlikely to be able to produce a Bill by the end of the year.
Lord Higgins
Will the noble Baroness clarify whether, in her understanding, this will be a government draft Bill, or will it be agreed to by the Opposition as well? More particularly, is it not rather strange to say that we will have a draft Bill before we have taken the decision on whether we want a partially or wholly elected House? Surely that would be a complete waste of time. The vote on the main point of principle ought to take place first, not during consideration of a draft Bill that has been stitched up by the Front Benches.
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, as I mentioned, this is a government committee on which the Government have invited members of the Opposition to sit. That does not mean to say that, at the conclusion of the committee’s work, the opposition party will fully sign up to it. The noble Lord makes a powerful case in relation to a referendum, but whenever the referendum takes place—
Lord Higgins
My point was not about a referendum; I was asking whether the cart is now being put before the horse—that is, should we not vote first on whether to have a wholly or partially elected House before debating the establishment of a committee which assumes that that is going to be the case?
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, with respect, the setting up of the committee and the process that is being followed on when or whether or not there should be various votes are matters for the Government. I am the Leader of the Opposition.
Lord Haskel
Would it be open to members of the committee to put in a minority report?
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
Indeed it would, should that be necessary. Obviously, these are still very early days. This committee has met once, and we just have to wait to see what happens within the process. However, I assure my noble friend and other noble friends that I will keep them as fully informed as possible.
I return to the question of what the committee is for. Many noble Lords around the House have suggested that it will not be possible for such a committee to produce a Bill by the end of the year. However, I believe that there is a huge impetus on the part of the coalition Government and that, for three reasons, it will be possible for the committee to produce a Bill by the end of the year. The first reason is political impetus. On behalf of the coalition, the Deputy Prime Minister is making it clear that he wants and intends to maintain the political momentum implied by the formation of the coalition, including on Lords reform, and of course he has every right to do so.
The second reason is political preparation. Perhaps against all the odds, the cross-party group steered through to conclusion by my right honourable friend the Member for Blackburn got further and made more progress than might have been imagined. Therefore, the new committee is meeting against a background of a high degree of political consensus and of a considerable amount of work done.
The third reason is Bill preparation. The length of the history of further reform of your Lordships’ House means that a number of pieces of draft legislation have, from time to time, been prepared by the Government of the day. I suggest that there is much stuff in the Cabinet Office’s cupboards, so taking a Bill off the shelf, as it were, and adjusting it is far from impossible.
Therefore, to answer the question posed by various noble Lords, I think that it is possible to produce a Bill by the end of this year, but the crucial issue is the pre-legislative scrutiny which the Bill must then receive.
It is clear from what the Leader of the House has said that Lords reform will not be part of what the Deputy Prime Minister has talked about in quite grandiose terms—a new great reforming Act to rival the Great Reform Act of 1832.
Lord Campbell of Alloway
I apologise for interrupting but exactly the same problem is raised by the intervention of my noble friend and the noble Baroness’s reply. We come again to the question of due process, which must be dealt with long before a Joint Committee is in place to scrutinise the Bill. At a very early stage, the due process of this committee is being challenged.
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, I well understand the concern being expressed around the Chamber about due process, but quite frankly, as Leader of the Opposition, I am not responsible for that due process. This is a matter for the Government and noble Lords should continue to put their questions to them.
Lord Anderson of Swansea
My noble friend appears to agree that the Government have made a crashing error of judgment in excluding the Cross-Bench Peers, who clearly have a legitimate interest in the outcome of the draft Bill. Will my noble friend therefore not adopt a grandmotherly attitude, listen to the Cross-Benchers herself and be prepared to put forward their view, as they are excluded from the committee?
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, it would give me great pleasure to listen to the Cross-Benchers and to put forward their views in the committee. I must rapidly move on and come to a conclusion.
From everything that has been said, it is clear that this is going to be a separate Bill and not part of a great reforming Bill. However, can the Leader of the House confirm that its separation will not mean that it will be considered in isolation from issues such as voting systems? Would it really be sensible for the people of Scotland, for example, to be subjected to as many as four different voting systems, perhaps on one day?
In relation to pre-legislative scrutiny, can the Leader of the House state that a Joint Committee, which I welcome, will be given enough time to consider, in depth and in detail, all the complex issues involved in further substantial reform of the House? For example, can the Leader confirm that such a Joint Committee will fully take into account the stipulation of the last cross-party Joint Committee of both Houses, chaired by my noble friend Lord Cunningham of Felling, on the conventions of this House, that if substantial proposals on the reform of your Lordships' House are brought forward, then the issues considered by the Joint Committee will need to be examined again?
The powers and functions of this House are significant and merit careful consideration, which I hope they will be given. Can the Leader of the House also set out the coalition Government's attitude to the Bill covering a range of reforms of this House brought forward again by the noble Lord, Lord Steel of Aikwood? I welcome the Leader’s announcement about a small group to look at people leaving the House.
I shall detain the House no longer, other than to say that, in this next period, we on these Benches will be holding the Government to account, both inside the Cabinet committee and outside it, on four key points—that the major issues of further reform of your Lordships' House, including the conventions of its relationship with the other place, are properly considered; that the process of pre-legislative scrutiny is full, thorough and sufficient for the nature of the issues involved; that due regard is given to and provided for any necessary transitional arrangements—I am glad that the grandfathering idea is mentioned in the coalition agreement; and that the issue of further substantial Lords reform is a matter for a referendum of the whole country.
We on this side of your Lordships' House, together with the Liberal Democrats on the Benches opposite, have long been in favour of reform. If, in becoming a member of the coalition, the Conservative Party, and not just its leadership, is now also in favour of reform, we in the reform group genuinely welcome that. History and experience might suggest otherwise, but we shall see. As the noble Lord himself suggested, we know that change is inevitable. As ever, however, the questions are: what kind of change is intended? What will be the rate of change? How will the change be managed? And, crucially, what is the change for? As my noble friend Lord Rooker said, “What will it achieve?”. Will it make our Parliament, our politics, our constitution and our country better? Those are real and important issues, and throughout this process we shall seek answers to these extremely important questions.
Baroness D'Souza
My Lords, as has been said, constitutional Acts affecting this House include the Life Peerages Act 1958, the House of Lords Act 1999 and the Constitutional Reform Act 2005. That legislation has had a profound effect on the work and composition of the House of Lords—very much for the better, as almost all would agree.
More recently, a stringent Code of Conduct has been agreed and implemented, a commissioner for standards has been appointed and we are about to have a new and transparent financial support scheme. We have on the table a raft of small but important further reforms, such as those in the so-called Steel Bill which, if enacted, would address retirement, sanctions, the House of Lords Appointments Commission and hereditary by-elections.
The Leader of the House has referred to a group on retirement and is setting up a group to consider further the recommendations put forward by the noble Lords, Lord Filkin and Lord Butler, and by the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, on strengthening Parliament. These would encompass greater pre- and post-legislative scrutiny of primary legislation; better legislative standards; public evidence hearings for government Bills; improving lines of accountability and transparency in all our work; and measures to make the planning and execution of business more efficient.
So reform is clearly taking place. The above measures are aimed at enabling this House to do better what it already does well. Why do we need an elected House to do what this House does well and for which it is widely respected? In other words, why fix what ain't broke? What would elections add to the process? How would elections strengthen the functions that this House undertakes? Those are genuine questions, and it is difficult to find answers.
Let us take the important question of democracy. This House, it is said, lacks legitimacy because it is undemocratic, and will continue to do so until it is fully elected. Let us consider how far elected representatives will be able to deliver the relatively impartial and independent scrutiny that this House specialises in. One of your Lordships said at a recent meeting that in order to do our job, Members must somehow manage to stay out of the pockets of Whips, but the proposed reforms would be precisely to deliver us into the hands of the Whips. Democracy, which I shall define for the moment as freedom to say no to the Government of the day, would surely be eroded—possibly in a short period.
Once again, the role and functions of this House are quite different from those in the other place. Certainly a fully elected House would in one sense be a strengthened House, in that it would have the same legitimacy as the other place. If this House is elected, it will inevitably behave like an elected Chamber. Is that what the Government want? Do they want to legislate for tension and possible stalemate between the two Chambers? What would then be the point of such a second Chamber?
Let me briefly say something about the proposed mechanisms for achieving reform, which have already been addressed in some detail. The Deputy Prime Minister courteously called me to tell me in advance about the announcement that he was about to make in the other place two weeks ago about the Cabinet drafting committee to be set up, for which I am extremely appreciative. However, I asked him why I, as representative of almost one-third of this House, was to be excluded. The answer, which I think is worth repeating verbatim, was “I want a clear and explicit political consensus which I would not get if you were on the committee”. I appreciate the frankness, but I wonder what consensus means or what kind of consensus is concerned with talking only to those who already agree with your plan. That is no way to rewrite fundamental parts of the constitution of this country.
There is an area of further contradiction and confusion. It concerns the seemingly endless march of new Peers into this House—all of them extremely worthy and welcome—when on all Benches we agree that a smaller House is not only desirable but imperative. That is coterminous with an almost deafening call for a fully elected House. Do the Government believe that such actions command public respect?
Your Lordships would expect me to express those views—being, for the moment, Convenor of the Cross-Bench Peers. It is, after all, an aspect of my task to extol the virtues of an independent element in this House, and I do so willingly, but the issue is so much wider. We are heading at dangerous speed towards a major constitutional change by relatively undemocratic procedures. Once done, it cannot be undone. We have before us a much needed programme of rolling, incremental reform. This House would be the better for many of those reforms but, as they show, we do not need an elected House to achieve them.
The Archbishop of York
My Lords, in my speech on House of Lords reform in 2007, I said that the key issue in reform of your Lordships' House as a legislative revising Chamber has to do with revising the law that will maintain freedom and justice for the nation and for every individual within it. This is the basis of our concept of democracy, which is central to our nation's understanding of itself. Throughout this country's history, it has been a symbol of British freedom. As John Betjeman said:
“Think of what our Nation stands for,
Books from Boots' and country lanes,
Free speech, free passes, class distinction,
Democracy and proper drains”.
Winston Churchill said:
“Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”.—[Official Report, Commons, 11/11/1947; cols. 206-07.]
It is now claimed by some that your Lordships' House, not being elected, is undemocratic. I believe that a wholly elected House may not serve the interests of freedom. Our 21st-century fashion for a particular form of democracy may, in the end, not give us freedom. Elections, freedom and justice are not necessarily coterminous. We all know of countries where elections were conducted but their Governments ended up being elected dictatorships.
How should we therefore, in our 21st century, understand democracy? The principal elements of democracy are power, accountability, transparency and representation. However, representation must not be the only important element. There are those who always overplay this element. The concept of democracy goes back to Greek classical thought. Democracy—demokratia—means government by the people, but Governments do not have a right to the unrestricted use of power. They exercise it only as trustees of the people. The role of your Lordships' House, I submit, is to ensure that this temptation to the abuse of power, by the use of statutes from the other place as a promissory note or a form of assurance, is kept in check, and to maintain a very clear commitment to the social values of justice and equity.
Secondly, democracy has to do with accountability; that is, people's ability to call to account those who exercise power. In these present days, accountability is key to the confidence people have in Her Majesty's Government. The question for us is: how best will your Lordships' House exercise the task of calling Her Majesty's Government to account to the people for their stewardship of the trust people have placed in them? I believe that a wholly elected House of Lords will not encourage the distance and independence needed to ensure proper accountability. They are far too close. The elections are coming next time round. Proper transparency is necessary.
Thirdly, there is representation. While there is a strong and historic imperative towards representation, we must remember that your Lordships’ House is not Her Majesty's Government, but a second Chamber that revises legislation in order to keep the statute common to all, especially to the gentleman on the Clapham omnibus. The issue of representation becomes skewed if we are trying to create a Chamber in which everything is like the House of Commons, but in name only. I believe your Lordships' House is at its best when it is not being whipped, but allows freedom of expression and revision of the legislation for the common good of the country, and not for any political advantage.
A truly democratic society will affirm and uphold the equality of all, both before the law and in the responsibility for the exercise of power. The key issue for us is: does your Lordships' House keep to this task? Would it perform the task better as an elected Chamber? The present operation of the House of Commons, with its Whips and guillotines, should give us no great confidence in this. Regulations are often placed with a bare minimum of revision. The Equality Bill was a good example. This House revised that legislation and tidied it up into a good Bill, and therefore a good Act, which I do not think they could have done down there.
The fundamental issue before us is to determine the true purpose of this Chamber and the best way of achieving it. If we set out the purpose, goals and objectives clearly, it will be possible to work out how people should get here. If we do it the other way round, we are simply in a game where the football is already flat. I maintain that in order to ensure the just use of the power entrusted to Her Majesty's Government, in order to ensure true and impartial accountability, and in order truly to represent the breadth and diversity of our fellow citizens, we need a House that has the potential to draw on the diversity of persons, with all their different backgrounds and experience, who we see before us in your Lordships' House. The noble Lord, Lord Lester of Herne Hill, played a major role during the passage of the Equality Bill, as did the Leader of the Opposition and many other noble Lords. I am not sure whether they would like to stand, but I have not asked them.
It may be that the time has come to say to the other place: “Thus far, and no farther. You concentrate on your first task of ensuring that Her Majesty's Government are called to account, are transparent, truly represent the whole nation and do not abuse the power entrusted to them by the Crown and the people of this country”. The other place must make the main thing the main thing—calling the Government to account—and we revise the legislation. This House, your Lordships' House, will diligently revise the legislation and seek answers to questions. That will make Her Majesty's Government more accountable and transparent. That is our job, and I am uncertain whether a wholly elected House that looks very much like the House of Commons will do its job.
Lord Howe of Aberavon
My Lords, it is a great privilege to follow the most reverend Primate in a debate of this importance, particularly because each of the three noble Lords who have spoken before me have taken us one step further towards clarifying the issues. The noble Baroness, Lady Royall, gave a clear insight into the fundamental importance of the central issue, which, put simply, is: is this House likely to improve if a substantial elected element is introduced to it? That is the great fundamental question and I have some sympathy with her proposal of a referendum on the consideration of that. The noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, reminded us that a number of transitional changes are featured in the Steel Bill, which, whatever happens, will need to be considered. As we have argued many times, they have and could have been considered already. That is the quality of the questions we are considering.
The first and fundamental question is whether there should be elected Members here. One of the problems is that we will not gain much from arguing about the procedure for resolving that; from arguing about the appropriateness of a draft Bill now, next week or next year; or from arguing about what committee should be designed to consider the problem and disentangle the difficulties so as to make it easy to go on with the next step. The difficulty is that every political organisation addressing this question is divided within itself. All the parties are divided. Both Houses of Parliament are divided, which causes gaps between the leadership, as well as between the sometimes slightly misleading term of the organisation. For example, we understood that this would be something for a third term of a Conservative Government, but somehow impatience has carried it in a different direction.
We want this caucus of Front-Bench representatives from the three parties to seek a way forward, and I can understand why. It then has to be commended to both Houses of Parliament. Both Houses have to address this fundamental question of elected Members and be persuaded in their judgment that it is a positive improvement for this legislative structure. Because that question concerns this House alone in the direct sense, it is very disagreeable to find any suggestion to the effect that the views of this House can be pushed to one side and that, above all, we do not require a clear majority persuaded in favour of this change in this House.
Therefore, where the evidence is on which the case for change is to be based becomes the important question.
Lord Howe of Aberavon
Before the noble Lord speaks, I should say that it is not customary to give way in a speech of this kind. I fell into the habit on the Front Bench in the other House of yielding too often to interrogative bodies. I would like to have freedom from that on this occasion in this House.
I draw attention to the total lack of evidence that can justify a change of this kind on this scale. It is interesting to look at the speech made by the Deputy Prime Minister on 19 May in which he said that his second objective was to,
“reform to reduce the power of political elites and to drag Westminster into the 21st century, starting with the House of Lords”.
That is the proposition he advanced and it is the proposition which it is necessary to establish if this case is to get anywhere at all.
What will be the effect on the composition, style, quality and expertise of this House? It is that which is of crucial value and we need considered debate about it, as we have had frequently. The first quality is one that we hardly need to be reminded of: it is the sheer expertise of this House. Its difference and its quality are wholly distinct from that of the other place, and therefore it makes a very distinct contribution. Only in the past few weeks we witnessed a debate led by the noble Lord, Lord Patel, on genomic medicine. That is not a topic I even begin to understand anything about, but the House was privileged to have taking part in that debate not just the noble Lord himself, a profoundly authoritative expert on the subject, but four members of two royal societies, including the president the Royal Society of Edinburgh and two Fellows of the Royal Society, the president of the British Academy and chairman of the Nuffield Foundation, two Ministers, one a Minister of Health, and several other well qualified medical people, including the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff, and above all, the noble Lord, Lord Winston. That is the kind of quality that to a large extent would be impaired and destroyed if we were to accept the concept of a wholly elected House.
I take your Lordships’ minds back to the debate four days after 9/11, on the Friday when we debated what would happen in Iraq and when, sadly enough, our views did not prevail so as to prevent that disaster. The people who took part in that debate included three former Chiefs of the Defence Staff, three former Foreign Secretaries who had played a role in that part of the world, two former Home Secretaries, two former ambassadors, two former Defence Secretaries and many others with service experience. The House has its character because of the accepted presence of a substantial number which makes up the quality that it is necessary to preserve. That is only one thing which would be damaged if we were to accept a substantial elected element here. Grave damage would be done to the quality, diversity and expertise of this place.
Secondly, I turn to the argument about legitimacy, about which we have heard mention already. It is a strange argument that is inconclusive in its impact because an apparent consequence of legitimising us by making us elected would be to provoke much more savage and regular conflicts between the two Houses. There is no doubt that if we were to feel as extravagantly self-important on the issues of this kind as the other place sometimes does, conflict would be repetitive. Nothing would be gained by sharing legitimacy in that way.
Another consequence would be the change in cost if this House were to represent people who had been elected with access to the same level of privileges, facilities and services as exist in the other place. I make no complaint about that, but where is there any evidence to suggest that elected Members here would effect an improvement in the quality of our performance? It is a question that I have asked many times. Curiously, we find that Parliament’s shortcoming is most frequently attributed to shortcomings in the other place. I have quoted previously the fifth report, HC 494-I, of the so-called Wright committee, published in 2002, much to the credit of that Member of the other place. The committee addressed the question of what effect legitimacy would have and said,
“the principal cause of today’s ‘widespread public disillusionment with our political system’ is the ‘virtually untrammelled control … by the Executive’ of the elected House”.
It is the fact that the other place is effectively dominated, commanded and controlled by the Executive, which now even chooses candidates for selection at constituency level and so on. That is the cause of the disillusionment with our political system. The Wright committee went on to reach two conclusions. It emphasised,
“the need ‘to ensure that the dominance of Parliament by the Executive, including the political Party machines, is reduced and not increased’”.
How would that dominance be reduced and not increased if we were to have elected Members here? Who would select those Members but the parliamentary Executive? Who would finance their campaigns? The parliamentary Executive.
For those reasons, the Wright committee reached the other conclusion that the Second Chamber—that is us—must be,
“neither rival nor replica, but genuinely complementary to the Commons”,
and, therefore, “as different as possible”. That would hardly be fulfilled if we were to now set about introducing elected Members to this House. That is the central question.
Interestingly, I started by quoting the Deputy Prime Minister as wanting to start the reform by making fundamental change here, bringing us into the 21st century. This week I came across an article in the Parliamentary Brief paper for June/July—the latest one—in which there is an article by the new Leader of the House of Commons, Sir George Young, someone for whom I have great respect. I have half a minute left and I dedicate it to Sir George Young. Under the heading, “The House rules, OK”, he starts with this paragraph:
“For years, the real scandal in British politics has been the impotence of the House of Commons. The terms of the trade between government and parliament have shifted too far in the executive’s favour. Over recent decades, it has simply become too easy for the government to sideline parliament; to push Bills through without adequate scrutiny; and to see the House more as a rubber-stamp than a proper check on executive authority”.
If that is the real scandal in British politics today, where, in heaven’s name, is there any sense in introducing and extending the role of the political Executive into this House with disastrous consequences?
Lord Richard
My Lords, there is a strong sense of déjà vu about this debate. We go round and round and round again; it is not a magic roundabout, it is an eternal roundabout. I have heard nothing today which I have not heard in the past 10 years and I do not expect during the whole course of this debate to hear anything new said about this issue.
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, has been persistent and consistent in his views: he does not like the thought of an elected Chamber and has passionately advocated the status quo. For my part—I do not think anyone in this House would doubt it—I have persistently advocated precisely the opposite. As he has asked the question, I shall try to answer it. It is a fair question. The debates in this House are of extreme quality—no doubt about it. The people who take part in those debates are of extreme quality—no doubt about it. We deliberate, come to a conclusion—and nothing happens. The fact of the matter is that no one is listening to us. Why are they not listening to the House of Lords? They are not listening to the House of Lords for one very simple reason—we are capable of being ignored.
When I was in the House of Commons, as any other Member here who was in the House of Commons will know, the last thing we ever did was consider what was going on in the second Chamber. Why did we not consider what was going on in the second Chamber important? Because it did not represent anything. It was a group of people, some of whom are extraordinarily distinguished, I do not deny that, but—
Lord Richard
Perhaps I may finish the sentence. But we are not a debating Chamber. This is a legislative Chamber; a part of Parliament. It is not here for us to have good debates and to produce good reports, which people do not thereafter read. The noble Lord wants to enjoin me.
Lord King of Bridgwater
I wondered if the noble Lord recalled the fact that if it had not been for the intervention of this House, we would probably now have 90 days’ detention without trial.
Lord Richard
If he wishes, the noble Lord can take the view that that is a massive justification for a non-elected legislative Chamber; I am bound to say that I do not. I have a simple view on this, and I have persisted in it for many years now: if you are a legislator, you should be elected by the people who are going to be affected by your legislation. It is a simple proposition.
I am pleased that the Government, with the extraordinary coalition that they now have, seem to have come to the conclusion that a mainly elected second Chamber is desirable. I share that. What we need in our constitution is a predominantly but not exclusively elected second Chamber. I am fortified in that, because that is almost the wording that John Smith used to describe what Labour Party policy was supposed to be when he was leader of the party, and that is going back a very long time. The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, is now in exactly the same position on this issue as he was in 1997 and 1998. His position has not moved on, but it has to.
I support the idea that there needs to be legislation, but I have one or two reservations. The first concerns the powers of this Joint Committee. For the life of me, I do not see how it is going to produce a Bill. I do not see how you could conceivably instruct parliamentary draftsmen when there may be opposition on that committee. If we get a piece of paper in our hands that says, “This is the Bill”, I shall be extraordinarily surprised.
I shall make just two further points, because I am anxious to sit down within my seven minutes. It is easy to see the ends that one wants. Very often we get to this stage of the negotiations: you agree what you want to achieve, but how on earth do you get there? We had this the other day on the Barnett formula—everyone on the committee agreed that it ought to be reformed and what we ought to see, but how on earth did we move from were we were now to where we wanted to be?
I emphasise that the transition provisions will be crucial to this enterprise. I follow the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, on that. Many of the people in this House are life Peers who came here on the basis that they were here for life. Maybe they will not be—I do not know—but it was a legitimate aspiration on their part, given the way that they were approached and introduced. Personally, I had a fond notion that I would be staggering into the House on my Zimmer frame at the age of 85, and I sincerely hope that that will still be the position. I do not know how the grandfather concept is going to work, but I look forward with great interest to hearing about it. The transition is very important.
The second thing that is important is the system by which Members will be elected to the House. I am sure that this will shock the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, and many other Members of this House, but I am totally heretical about this: it should be an election on the basis of constituencies, rather like the present European constituencies, and it should be done by PR. Elections to this House should be fixed and they should not be coterminous with elections down the other end.
In terms of the health of British democracy, the situation in which this House can provide a better check upon the Executive because of the way in which it has been elected, and because of the composition of this House compared with the composition of the other House, is a greater check on the power of the Executive than the glorious speeches that we make in this Chamber and the glorious debates that we have. If you want to check the Executive you have to have power, and in order to have power you have to earn it—it has to come from an election. It has to have a legitimacy that arises from the people.
I hope that this venture moves, although perhaps not too quickly, towards fruition. I will give it my support. I hope that at the end of the day this House will be more efficient and effective, it will be heard more and it will be more democratic and more justified.
Lord Maclennan of Rogart
My Lords, I have been involved in several attempts to move the House of Lords towards a 21st-century institution of our democracy. I do not agree with those who say that nothing has happened. The outcome of the discussions between the Labour Party and Liberal Democrats that were led by Robin Cook and me was that measures for the reform of this House were introduced. That there was a compromise as a result of the clever negotiation between Lord Cranborne—now the noble Marquis, Lord Salisbury—and Tony Blair about the hereditary Peers certainly stalled the process of reform. However, that was not the end of the story, because in 2005 we had a significant Bill, which, as I mentioned in an earlier intervention, removed the Law Lords from this place. That followed the wise advice of the then senior Law Lord, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Bingham, who took the view that those who made the law should not sit in judgment on their own laws. We were moving. The previous Government produced a White Paper that indicated further moves.
The noble Lord, Lord Richard, exaggerates when he says that no one listens to the work that is done by this House. The actuality is that, during the past five years, some 40 per cent of the amendments passed by it, against the advice of the Government at the time, have been accepted without cavil. That may not have captured the headlines in the broadsheets; it may not have been reported more widely than in “Yesterday in Parliament” en route; but we have made a big impact on legislation and have stepped in very often when the Commons was not ready to make a move because it was very largely in the hands of the Executive.
In considering today the case for the reform of the House of Lords, what should be up front is not the process, which seems to have dominated the debate to some extent, but what the objective is and where we will see an improvement in our system of governance. For that, I agree that it would be sensible to look at this House’s transition to a modern elected House, because most of us have some direct interest in the House as it is structured. However, let us also consider where we should end up.
The weakness of our parliamentary democracy is not its bicameralism; it is the fact that its principal House—there have been references to retaining its primacy in every debate that we have had—is very largely the creature of the Executive if they enjoy a substantial majority. That does not help to improve the quality of governance, which is why this House, reformed, should have a major role. There is certainly a case for considering how that could be more effectively discharged; for example, I cannot really see that we need to circumscribe the Prime Minister’s choice of Ministers by saying that they have to be either drawn from the Commons or appointed to the Lords. That gives the second Chamber a heavier bent towards the Executive than it would have if it were empowered to draw in to answer its questions all those who were responsible for Acts of government. I hope that the second Chamber, as reformed, will not contain Ministers of the Crown, but that Ministers of the Crown will be required to attend when it has a Bill for which they are responsible or to answer questions when they are departmentally responsible.
I am glad that nobody in this debate or in any other debate that I can recall has seriously suggested that we could do without a second Chamber. Reform, not abolition, is under discussion. However, the discussion also ought to take into account as a goal, and as part of the case for reform, the fact that the Commons is grossly overloaded. It has to be said, taking that consideration into account, that it is somewhat odd to be looking for a substantial reduction in the number of Members. Does this not point to a sensible delimitation of functions between the two reformed Houses? Would it not make sense to have some second-guessing, which allows opportunities for reconsideration?
Also, as we give the other place priority over money Bills and exclude this House from their consideration, should we not give the reformed upper House priority over considering the country’s international obligations such as the treaty-making process and perhaps European Union oversight? That is a growing weight of responsibility for Parliament as a whole, and if we are all second-guessing each other all the time we are diminishing the amount of time available for the vast global responsibilities in which we wish to play some part.
This House has 137 Members at the last count engaged in its subject committees, which one might regard as a very active part of its membership. That sort of number might be a target for the size of the reformed second House. It is certainly clear that we need to have a committed House in which Members are prepared to work their socks off. Many do, and that is what has allowed this House to survive as long as it has in its present form.
I put it to the House, not as a postscript but as a central proposition, that we have such expertise, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, said, that we do not wish to see it lost entirely to the governance of this country. That should not be included in a reformed, elected House—
Lord Maclennan of Rogart
My time is almost up. That should not be included in this House directly, but it might be incorporated in a separate institution such as a council of state, which would not have the power to block the Government or reform legislation but would have the power to make amendments and draw in evidence from outside as well as informing the proceedings of both Houses of Parliament. With the complexity of government that we have today, that expertise should not be abandoned to our processes.
Lord Wright of Richmond
My Lords, I shall make four very brief points. First, in response to the Prime Minister’s invitation to everyone, including parliamentarians, to suggest ways in which to cut the deficit, I have pointed out that in my opinion it is sheer folly, in what the Leader of the House referred to only yesterday as the present economic climate, to aim to legislate for an all or substantially elected House of Lords, which on any calculation is bound to cost the nation at least three times as much as the existing appointed House.
Secondly, I find it extraordinary, given the strength of feeling expressed in today’s debate and on many previous occasions, that there is no representation of Cross Benchers, let alone Back Benchers, on the Deputy Prime Minister’s committee. Unless the Government are prepared to change their mind on this, I hope that the Leader of the House, or the noble Lord, Lord McNally, when he comes to close the debate—and the Leader has already told us that he is here to listen—will assure us that he will personally accept the responsibility of conveying our views to his noble and right honourable colleagues and, in particular, to the Deputy Prime Minister.
Thirdly, I strongly support the Motion proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Steel of Aikwood, which seems in no way to pre-empt whatever wider legislation the Government decide to propose at a later date for an all-elected House. Finally, a lot has been made today of our lack of democratic authority or legitimacy because we are not elected. Perhaps the Government could tell us what they propose to do about the Supreme Court.
Lord Denham
My Lords, having been a Member of your Lordships’ House for an inordinate length of time, I have often had it said to me that I must have seen a lot of changes in the House over the years. I always give the same reply, that what amazes me is not how much the House has changed, but how much it has remained the same.
It has survived the advent of the life Peers. It has survived eight Labour Governments, each bent on its destruction. It has survived Select Committees, Joint Select Committees and Royal Commissions, all hoping to improve it. It has even survived the culling of 90 per cent of the hereditary Peers, carried out though it was by the Administration of that time in an unnecessarily callous way. And the House still retains the quiet and unassuming sense of purpose with which it carries out its duties that I first found here 60 years ago. But I must tell your Lordships that I have the gravest of doubts if it will survive being turned into a wholly, or even a predominantly elected House.
One of the principal virtues that your Lordships’ House has retained is the fact that if you win the argument, more often than not, you will win the vote—which is invaluable in a reforming Chamber, frowned on though it would undoubtedly be in another place.
When the animal lobby and the whole Green movement first came to the fore in the 1980s, I discovered that there had not been a vet—veterinary surgeon—sitting in either House of Parliament in the whole of that or the previous century. And I was able to send an urgent message down the Corridor to my right honourable friend the patronage secretary, seeking to remedy this omission. That is how and why we have had the advantage of advice on such matters as these from my noble friend Lord Soulsby of Swaffham Prior to this day.
There is a small but select number of what I would call key Peers who are generally acknowledged, irrespective of party, to be experts in their own particular subjects and who, when that subject comes up, are immensely useful, to their own side, certainly, but beyond that to the House as a whole. Each of your Lordships would be able to draw up your own such list. I do not want to embarrass them, but my list would certainly include my noble friend Lord Plumb on agriculture, the noble Lords, Lord Bragg and Lord Puttnam, on the arts, and, more recently, the noble Lord, Lord Sugar, on business know-how.
Beyond that again, each of the parties has provided themselves on their Back Benches with their own experts on such diverse subjects as the law, defence, economics, employment, foreign affairs, the Commonwealth, crime, health, sport and the machinery of politics itself. The right reverend Prelates bring with them an extraordinary knowledge of the individual characteristics and needs of every parish in England. And the contribution of Cross-Bench Peers to all of this speaks for itself.
We would indeed be lucky if any conceivable form of election were able to throw up a tenth of the combined skills and experience that are present in your Lordships’ House today.
I would like to end with a story that I have told your Lordships on two similar occasions, both of them a long time ago. It is the story of Sir Isaac Newton’s mathematical bridge at Cambridge. The story is probably apocryphal but, as Sir Winston Churchill once wrote about another legend, “If it isn’t true it ought to be”. Newton, so the fable goes, designed a wooden bridge over the River Cam with such ingenuity and mathematical precision that its component pieces of wood, once they had been laid in place, held together without the aid of nails, bolts or any other form of fastening. This confounded all the greatest brains in the Cambridge of the day. They could think of no good reason why a bridge constructed in this way should work. They could think of a number of very good reasons why a bridge constructed in this way should not work. But the one thing that was abundantly clear for everyone to see was that the bridge did work and carried out admirably the purpose for which it was intended.
Such was Newton’s prestige in the Cambridge of the day that, while he lived, no one dared to tamper with his bridge; but as soon as the old man died, their curiosity got the better of them and his contemporaries could resist it no longer. They took the bridge to pieces to find out how it worked. From this piece of vandalism they learnt only two things. The first was that by taking the bridge to pieces, they could get no further forward in discovering how and why it had worked; and the second was that, having taken the bridge to pieces, they could not put it together again.
Lord Filkin
My Lords, follow that. When the Leader of the House spoke to us before multiple interruptions, he set out several points. He said that public confidence in Parliament had been damaged over recent years, and that the task of holding the Executive to account by this Chamber, while often done well, could have been done better. I agree with him. The point I wish to make in this short intervention is that addressing the composition of the House may make some contribution to those points but, by itself, will not rectify them. We need, within the terms of reference of the reform of the House of Lords, to consider how well we do our role, as well as who is doing that role. Over the past 15 years, we have given excessive attention to composition and insufficient attention to how we fulfil a role around which there is a broad consensus.
The noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, acknowledged that there had been many ideas for improvement of how the House functions. She had the kindness to refer to three recent contributions to that debate from the reports of the cross-party working groups led by the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, the noble Lord, Lord Butler, and me. We would say no more than that these are stimuli to a wider debate, rather than seeking to set out a rigid template for change. Nevertheless, some of those ideas—and others on the same theme of how we improve how this House works—require debate. The process of changing the composition could well take 10 or 15 years. We must not neglect the importance of addressing our processes, procedures, systems and standards.
I will briefly touch on three or four points in those reports, which are no more than a taster. On legislation, perhaps the central recommendation was that there should be a process whereby this House tests whether legislation is fit and ready for introduction to Parliament. That is basically a technical function; it would do for primary legislation on a slightly bigger scale what is already done for secondary legislation by the Merits Committee. It would ensure that legislation had been thought through; it was clear what it sought to do; it had been properly consulted on; and there was a clear explanation of what it was for and how it would achieve its policy objectives.
Next, we recommended that there should be a public evidence process as part of any Lords starter. I am delighted that we need to say no more on that; it is already the coalition Government’s policy, as set out in their manifesto. Amen to that. Finally, because we thought it made sense, we said that the use of Grand Committee should become the default rather than the exception. I am sure that ought also to cheer the heart of the government Chief Whip. We also said that there ought to be more post-legislative scrutiny and we should get on with doing it. There is no threat to the Government of the day in any of those proposals. They ought to ensure that government legislation is better prepared by officials and goes through with more understanding of what it is for, rather than wasting time trying to unpack what it is for, which is often what we do.
On procedures, I will say nothing more because the noble Lord, Lord Butler, may wish to speak on those. However, we made a range of recommendations about Statements, Oral Questions, the topicality of debates and sitting times—the micro-issues, which are very important in making sure that the House operates efficiently.
In the report on governance, we argued that there is a need for a debate about the governance of this House. Some believe that governance is self-evidently good and sound. Others find it opaque and do not understand it. Irrespective of who is right on that, it is important that any self-governing institution is particularly careful to review periodically its governance and standards so that it can command public confidence that it has good governance, and that how it has good governance is transparent. We ought to be particularly mindful of that. The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, when we discussed these issues with him, had the grace—as one would expect—to recognise that perhaps every 10 years or so, a body such as ours ought to review how we work in these respects.
We were pleased to have the opportunity to discuss these issues with the noble Lords, Lord Strathclyde and Lord McNally, as Leader and Deputy Leader. We were cordially received—I would expect no less from the Leader of the House—and had a good discussion. He agreed—I hope that he will correct me if I am wrong—that it would be desirable to have a debate on these and other issues before too long. I got the sense—I hope that I am not taking it too far—that he was minded to establish a Leaders’ Group after proper consultations. He has made a similar remark in other places. We told him that we see the benefit in such a process having wide terms of reference, being set up early rather than later—before the Summer Recess—getting on with it, and therefore reporting before the Christmas Recess, all of which we thought was perfectly possible without going at it too pell-mell. Therefore, when he responds, will the Deputy Leader say whether he agrees that we should make progress in these ways and when such a debate and such a process might start? I will say no more. I thank both the Leader and the Deputy Leader for the way they received our comments. I think that the House would generally welcome a process to look at these other issues in parallel with the debate on composition. There is more to life than composition.
Lord Low of Dalston
My Lords, I would certainly support the Motion standing in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Steel of Aikwood. A final solution to the question of Lords reform has been dangled tantalisingly before us, arguably, for the past 100 years. The pace may have quickened in recent years but the outlook is still quite uncertain. In the mean time, certain specific reforms are needed to remedy some obvious weaknesses in the constitution of your Lordships' House. These could be introduced without in any way prejudicing the case for more radical reform, if that was thought desirable. The noble Lord has given us the opportunity to make these changes on a number of occasions over the past three years, but we have consistently allowed the uncertain prospect of more fundamental reform to stand in the way of necessary but more limited reform. I do not think that we should do this any longer.
To take just the most obvious case, everybody agrees that the need to reduce the size of the House is now pressing. The adoption of a scheme to enable Members of the House to retire would potentially open the way to a reduction in the size of the House. We fluffed the opportunity to salvage even this most uncontentious provision from the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill in the wash-up at the end of the previous Parliament. In the mean time, the House just gets larger and larger. I do not think that we should fluff this any longer.
On the question of more fundamental reform, I was not long in this place before it was obvious to me that it is rather well constituted for carrying out its principal role as a revising Chamber. The qualification for this is expertise and experience rather than the more nebulous quality of representativeness. These are things that can probably be better secured by appointment than election; it is more like choosing someone for a job than electing them to represent you. The bases of legitimacy are not better or worse, just different. In any case, if it is democratic legitimacy you are after, it is not clear that this place is conspicuously inferior to the other. Again, it is just different. The Members of this House may not be democratically elected, but in the way that we operate, with the writ of the Whips being much less irresistible and predictable here than it is at the other end of the building, I would argue that the point of view of civil society gets a much fuller airing and receives a much better hearing here than it does in the other place. Subject to the changes about which the noble Lord, Lord Steel, is talking, I would be relatively content for the method of recruitment to this House to remain broadly as it is. By common consent the House has never worked better. The case for election may be superficially attractive, but it remains essentially superficial. Where is the added value in a pale imitation of the House of Commons composed of people who could not get into the House of Commons?
The arguments for election versus appointment will no doubt be canvassed back and forth as the day goes on—indeed, that process has already begun. We will hear about election changing the balance of power between the two Houses and the need to tear up the conventions, or the confusion caused by two sets of elected representatives roaming around each others’ constituencies. However, like the noble Lord, Lord Richard, who spoke earlier, I do not suppose that anyone’s mind will be changed. We will just argue ourselves to a standstill.
Instead, I might suggest that we try to find a way through which gives something to each of the rival points of view. If we are to have an elected House—as I said, I am by no means persuaded that this is the right way to go—I would submit that we need a better system, and one better calculated to preserve the House’s USP of expertise than one based on geographical constituencies such as is used for electing the other House. A system could be developed based on constituencies of expertise, mirroring the different walks of civil society—the law, medicine, the arts, sport, education, the Armed Forces, business, trade unions, the voluntary sector and so on. By departing from the geographical constituencies used for elections to the other place, this would bring something distinctive and provide the necessary added value. It would retain the necessary basis in expertise which those who favour appointment seek to preserve, and which is the essential hallmark of this place, but would at the same time concede something to those who favour election.
It may not be easy to devise a system which achieves universal suffrage. I would favour a system based on electoral colleges representing the different branches of civil society. It is not possible to get into the detail today, but I hope that it will be possible to submit more detailed proposals to the committee we have heard about this afternoon which is going to come up with a draft Bill by Christmas. I and others have made proposals along these lines before, but they have typically been given rather short shrift. The Wakeham commission was initially attracted, but—if I may be forgiven for saying so—its approach ended up by being one that seemed more inclined to find a difficulty for every solution. It cannot be beyond the wit of man to find a solution for at least some of the difficulties.
For instance, the House of Lords Library has a classification of existing Peers in 19 categories. We could do worse than take that as a starting point for determining the constituencies of expertise. At all events, I hope that the coalition may be willing to give these ideas more of a hearing than its predecessors, and see them as a potential solution for many of the difficulties. For it seems to me that only by means such as these will it be possible to break the deadlock in a way which stands any chance of building anything like a consensus.
The Lord Bishop of Leicester
My Lords, I know that brevity and clarity are at a premium in a debate of this length. I therefore ask your Lordships’ indulgence if I take this opportunity to remind you of the consistent position of this Bench and of the Church of England in the matter of Lords reform and to reiterate the principal points made both to the Wakeham commission in 1999 and more recently in response to the 2008 White Paper.
We have, along with others, consistently raised the question about the purpose of a second Chamber. In the Church of England’s submission to the Wakeham commission we expressed the point in this way:
“In a number of senses”,
the second Chamber’s role,
“is to provide a different yet complementary system of representation to that provided by the House of Commons. It should not seek to challenge that House's democratic primacy but it must not be a mere cipher. It should have powers to amend legislation, to require reconsideration and should play its part in the duty of Parliament to hold the executive effectively to account”.
The distinction of roles implied by the historic functions of your Lordships' House suggests that a second Chamber requires a different mix of skills in comparison to the other place and, crucially, a source of legitimacy which does not pit the second Chamber against the first in a potential stalemate. It is clear that our focus must therefore be on the role of a second Chamber in holding the Executive to account.
The party-political system has contributed a great deal to the functioning of our democracy, but where it needs augmentation from a non-partisan element is in enabling Parliament to maintain the necessary checks and balances that good governance requires. Elected Members in the other place sit on behalf of all their constituents, not just those who voted for their party, and the Executive legislate on behalf of all. A politician will, no doubt, believe with a passion that his or her party’s programme is the best hope for the common good, but understandable single-mindedness must always be moderated by the perspective of others, especially those who, because of expertise or experience, have reason to know the detail of how legislation impacts on people’s lives. Furthermore, a move to a fully elected House would come at a time when the greatest issues that we face, such as climate change, competition for scarce resources and reform of our financial systems, cannot all be fixed within the short-term time horizons of the electoral cycle.
My colleagues on this Bench and I question, as others have, the composition of the committee set up by the Deputy Prime Minister to take a first look at reforming the constitution. We would have expected such a committee to include representatives of all the stakeholders in the present arrangements. In replying to this debate, will the noble Lord, Lord McNally, at least acknowledge that, by setting up a committee entirely composed of members of the three main political parties, the Deputy Prime Minister runs the risk of appearing to foreclose the question about the role of non-party members in any future second Chamber?
At a time like this, your Lordships would expect me to raise the wider question of the place of religion and bishops in our national life and hence in our constitutional structures. The experience of the last decade or so has made one thing very clear. The theories of secularisation, with which most of us have been familiar for a long time, are no longer an accurate picture of how the world works. Contrary to expectations, increasing material prosperity, scientific advance and global mobility have not led to the death of religion or even to its relative eclipse. That may be a matter of celebration or dismay to some of your Lordships, but it remains true that the persistence of religion has to be accounted for and, since it will not go away, its ongoing place in society must be taken into account. It would be at the very least a shame if major constitutional reform, potentially the most significant for nearly 200 years and designed to last for perhaps several hundreds more, were grounded on a 20th-century theory of secularisation that has been fairly comprehensively discredited and no longer describes the world as it has turned out to be.
Of course I do not believe that Christians, let alone Anglicans, should be the only Members of a second Chamber who stand for and speak for their religious principles. Nevertheless, the established place of the Church of England is deeply woven into the constitution and unpicking it at any one point will have numerous consequences in other areas of our national life. Successive Governments, including the last, have asserted that they intend to do nothing to diminish the church’s established role and I hope that we can look to the new coalition publicly to continue that commitment. Embeddedness in the nation’s life and history should surely count for something. Of course, bishops of the Church of England claim absolutely no monopoly of those qualities among the religious communities of the land.
My case is this. I ask what a second Chamber is for and I remain convinced by the answer that it must be primarily a revising Chamber that does not seek to usurp the prerogatives of the other place. That in turn requires some distance from, or leavening of, the party system by independent Members chosen for a different set of virtues. Those virtues should include experience, expertise and wisdom gained in vocations to service outside these walls, and should be brought to the service of Parliament to serve the good of all. Some of these Members should represent the religious character of our country and the religious motivation that enhances citizenship for so many of our people.
Lord Waddington
My Lords, it is both a pleasure and a privilege to follow the right reverend Prelate. I am sure that he knows that I do not underestimate the important role played by the Bishops’ Bench in this House. However, this afternoon I will raise another matter of great importance that we are in danger of overlooking. It shows clearly that we cannot duck the question of what should be the powers of a reformed House by saying that it can be left as a marginal matter.
I remind your Lordships that our constitution has been rickety since 1949, when the Government of the day, rightly or wrongly, upset the quasi-settlement of 1911 and used the Parliament Act to drive through a reduction in the delaying powers of the Lords without the consent of this House. It is arguable that with that precedent a Government could further reduce our delaying power; indeed, could so reduce it as to make it virtually valueless and render this Chamber incapable of fulfilling its most important role as the ultimate guarantor of the rights and liberties of the subject. Therefore, what is required is not a second Chamber that is an ever more efficient part of the legislative sausage machine, and not a second Chamber that does no more than—to use the jargon—add value to the legislative process by amending bills that have not been properly considered in the Commons, and by scrutinising EU legislation. We need a second Chamber that can block legislation for a meaningful period and stop a Government using their temporary majority to drive through irreversible change before the country has had time to grasp and digest its true consequences. That was precisely what the settlement in 1911 was about. We need a second Chamber that can stop a Government using their temporary majority to extend their own life, which is another thing that the 1911 settlement was all about.
That is what the country needs but, the way we are going, it is very unlikely to get it. This House with its present powers is, as I have shown, a very frail barrier against arbitrary government, and it is absolutely clear that, because it lacks democratic legitimacy, it will never get additional powers. However, if we do not look out, an elected House will also be denied meaningful powers in the name of preserving the primacy of the Commons. My noble friend the Leader of the House said as much when he hinted that there was no chance of any increase in the powers of the second Chamber.
After all the inglorious constitutional meddling of recent years, it would be surprising if many people did not feel now that the best course is to leave well alone. If an elected House comes into existence, we do not know how the relationship between the two Houses would work, and how the inevitable tension between them would be resolved. So why, many say, take a leap into the unknown?
I am afraid that the answer to that is very plain: the transition to an elected House is, in my view, well nigh inevitable. Lords reform is not, just now, a burning issue in the Dog and Duck, but when measures are taken to cut the number of MPs, surely it will be almost impossible to argue that people should be required to support an unelected House growing ever bigger and costing ever more, for I have seen no evidence to suggest that if a proposal were brought forward to encourage noble Lords to retire, there would be a great rush of people to the door. I do not believe for one moment that that would happen.
Therefore, I think that our job is to see that by the method of election to the new House, by a limit on the period for which anyone can serve and by other devices we create a House far more independent of the Executive and therefore a better check on the Executive than the Commons has proved to be in recent years. Of course, we must see that the new House has meaningful powers and at the very least—this has not been mentioned yet today—the power to veto a Bill that seeks to further amend the Parliament Act.
I have not much doubt that a change to an elected House will cause much trouble and strife, with the new House using its democratic legitimacy to challenge the primacy of the Commons. However, there is perhaps some reason to hope that out of it all will come in time what is really needed: a new constitutional settlement with a written constitution granting the second Chamber specific powers different from those of the Commons—powers such as were mentioned very briefly by the noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, a few moments ago—and with it becoming something akin to the American Senate. That, indeed, would be a happy outcome.
Lord Grenfell
My Lords, I begin by thanking the noble Lord the Leader of the House for introducing this debate. I have to confess that I am somewhat irritated by the fact that we are invited to take note of the case for reform of the House of Lords, as though that were on the coalition’s agenda. It is not. What is on the agenda is the abolition of the House and its replacement with something entirely different. That is quite an innovation but, as Edmund Burke taught us, innovation is not reform.
Of course there is a case for introducing reforms, particularly those that would reduce the size of the House, improve its structures and procedures, and set in place a statutory appointments commission. We have been discussing such reforms for some time now, many of them in the context of the House of Lords Reform Bill, for which there was wide support, and it is on those that the Government should now be focusing.
However, we have got nowhere because the posture of the previous Government, and now, alas, of this Government, has been founded on what I would call a grand illusion. That illusion is that you can invest this House with the legitimacy that we are told it lacks with reforms that do not upset the balance of power between the two Houses. My Lords, you cannot. This Government and the previous Government are and were hell-bent on creating a wholly or predominantly elected Senate whose powers would be neither more nor less than those enjoyed by the House of Lords today. They may succeed in drafting a Bill with that as their objective but they know that in practice it will be shown to fly in the face of all logic. Alas, they seem to be ideologically blinded to reality.
The abolitionists speak airily of “transition” to an elected Chamber, as though it will involve little of more consequence than a rechoreographing of the State Opening and a rewriting of the Companion to the Standing Orders. However, in effect, they will be provoking a constitutional upheaval of colossal import. To paint it as otherwise is, to put it politely, disingenuous and, less politely, pitifully naïve.
What would this hugely costly new creation be asked to do? If it is asked to do what the existing House does, but better and more democratically— whatever that means—I cannot believe that it will succeed. It will fail because it will become, in the splendid description offered by Simon Jenkins in the Guardian,
“a wrinkled second division replica of the Commons”.
What room will that give for the application of expertise and independence of thought, which are the hallmarks of the work of this House? One has to ask: in exchange for giving up most, if not all, of our capacity to scrutinise, advise and propose revisions to legislation to the high standards that we attain here, what on earth will we get in return, all in the name of greater legitimacy?
Those who claim that only a fully elected or predominantly elected upper Chamber will have the legitimacy to do what we do, fail to appreciate, or wilfully ignore the fact, that our true legitimacy lies in what this House achieves. I voted happily for the 1999 Lords reform Bill and I remain convinced that the House has since demonstrated that it can and does play a fundamentally important constitutional role. How? In simplest terms, the House of Lords seeks to meet the electorate’s requirement that the legislation promised by the party that wins office is fashioned to the highest possible standard, consistent with the will of the elected House, whose primacy we unquestionably acknowledge. With few powers to exercise, and rightly so, we Members of the Lords participate in the legislative process by drawing on our experience and applying our expertise to help to ensure that Parliament delivers to the people what it has the right to expect: high quality, implementable Acts of Parliament.
It has yet to be proven to me that the fact that we are an appointed House disqualifies us from performing that crucial democratic function. I am yet to be persuaded—I am confident I never will be—that an elected Senate, riven by party political interests and divisions and locked in a permanent power struggle with the other House, will perform that service to the people better, if at all.
My final point is that we all know the broad outlines of what will emerge from this exclusive, closed drafting committee. That is pre-ordained. In the mean time, Cross-Benchers and Back-Benchers must satisfy themselves by writing letters to it, presumably enclosing a stamped addressed envelope. After today, we shall have to wait for the pre-legislative scrutiny stage before we outsiders can make any real impact. Believe me, those of us who do not share the abolitionist ambitions of the coalition Government and of those likeminded on other Benches, including my own, will, I trust, continue to make their case forcefully, but not just within the confines of Parliament. The people must be made fully aware of what is being proposed in their name.
Properly informed, I believe that they would recognise that their right to high-standard law-making would be put at risk by an ideology-driven move to create an elected Senate, no matter what the unintended consequences. Is this what the people want? The Government may claim that they already have the mandate to reform this House because it was in each party's manifesto, but do the people know what the full constitutional consequence of that is for the structure of Parliament and the balance of power between the two Houses? Of course they do not. It has not been explained to them, and it should be. Then let them tell us what they think about that in a referendum, but, of course, they are not likely to get one. One referendum on AV will, doubtless, be considered enough. Besides, the coalition Government could well lose a referendum on a proposal to restructure Parliament in a way that alters the balance of power between the two Houses and puts at risk the quality of legislation, and they would richly deserve to lose it.
Lord Steel of Aikwood
My Lords, I wish to express the hope that our colleagues on the Front Bench will convey copies of this debate in Hansard to members of the committee who are not present in this House so that they may read speeches such as the one we have just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell. I begin with a note of surprising agreement with the noble Lord, Lord Richard. I have some doubts about the timetable. In my Resolution, I very politely talked about the legislative timetable being unclear. That is not an insult, it is a statement of fact. So many things have to be decided before we get to a Bill that I think that the noble Lord, Lord Richard, is right.
Let me mention just three circles that have to be squared before we get to that point. The first is the question of the electoral system to be used. The noble Lord, Lord Richard, said that he is a heretic and believes in proportional representation. I join him in that heresy, but we must be aware that, at the moment, both the Conservative Party and the Labour Party are not so persuaded—or, if they are, they are minded to have the horrors of the party list system, which is a form of proportional representation that most of us would not want in an elected House.
That is the first circle that must be squared. The second is to decide on the phrase used so blithely, “wholly or mainly elected”, as though that is just some minor matter. It is not a minor matter. If the argument is that we have no legitimacy unless we are elected, what on earth is the point of having a percentage of illegitimate Peers in a future House? That does not make sense. In my view, only a wholly elected House stands up to any rational scrutiny. That issue is glossed over all the time in every document from both the previous Government and the present one. They say, “wholly or mainly”, as though that is a minor matter that can be decided in five minutes. It is not; it is a major issue.
The third circle has been referred to by several colleagues already. That is the question of the conventions between the two Houses, which, as the Cunningham committee reminded us, if we move to an elected upper House, will have to be completely rewritten. I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Richard, when he ended his interesting speech by talking about needing to have power and saying that we would have power only if we were elected. I do not think that this House is about having power. That is a mistake that some people make; it has a very different function.
I suggest that two other circles have to be squared before we have even a draft Bill. Our coalition is committed to reducing the size of the House of Commons. It therefore cannot make any sense at the same time to be increasing the size of the upper House, but the previous Government’s White Paper and everything we have heard so far from the coalition suggests that existing Peers will sit in an interim House alongside newly elected ones. Our size will increase, when we are already bigger than the House of Commons. That circle will have to be squared.
The fifth circle that will have to be squared is this. I read the speech by my right honourable friend the Deputy Prime Minister in the Commons in introducing these proposals. I admire his reforming zeal. He said that one of his objectives was to reduce the cost of Parliament. How can you reduce the cost of Parliament when, as we heard only yesterday from the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, we, existing on minor expenses, would be replaced by an upper Chamber which is salaried and which will need offices and secretaries? That will not reduce the cost of Parliament.
All of those issues lead me to agree with the noble Lord, Lord Richard, that this will take some time. I very much doubt if we will see an elected Chamber—or even proposals for an elected Chamber—passed through this Parliament before we reach the end of this five-year coalition. What are we going to do in the mean time? That is why I tabled my Resolution, as one cannot amend a take note Motion.
Members will have noticed that the four items I mentioned in the Resolution are the four items that have been twice discussed in the Private Member’s Bill which I introduced to the House. I have said repeatedly in previous debates that my objective was not to pass a Private Member’s Bill—it is not a suitable subject for that—but to bring pressure to bear on the Government to act on the issues. To some extent, I was successful, because, as Members will remember, Jack Straw had a deathbed conversion and, at the last minute, produced three of the four items in the Constitutional Renewal Bill, which was washed out in the wash-up. I am not surprised, because we could hardly be expected to do in 24 hours what we had failed to do for several years, but that is what happened.
In a sense, we have gone backwards, because whereas the previous Government had grasped three of the four items in my Bill, today the new coalition has taken only one. Let me say right away that I welcome the announcement of the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, that he agrees that we ought to have a system to enable Peers to retire and that he will set up a committee to deal with that. I welcome that very much; I just wonder why he does not go the whole hog and take the other three items which were in my Bill. Why is he so wedded to continuing the hereditary by-elections? Why do we not, as in the House of Commons, remove those who are convicted and receive a jail sentence of more than one year? That happens automatically in the other place and should happen here.
The one item that neither Government have accepted is the appointment of a statutory commission, even though the noble Lord, Lord Jay, as chairman of the present commission, has argued for a statutory commission. The argument was that we do not need one because we are going to have an elected House. Since then, we have had 57 new appointments, we are told that there are more coming and there are bound to be more in the next five years. If we end up with a mainly elected House, 20 per cent or so of Peers will be appointed, so there will be a need for an appointments commission. I cannot see why we cannot have that properly on a statutory basis.
We have before us the scandalous case of Lord Laidlaw, who said to the Appointments Commission that he would give up his tax exile status. It had no powers to make him do that and, in fact, he has done precisely the opposite. In the best Lloyd George tradition, he has effectively bought a title with no responsibilities whatever. It is publicly unacceptable that that goes on. That is the case for having the Appointments Commission on a statutory basis.
These four reforms that I keep pressing on successive Governments were approved by the Commons Administration Committee, so they have a lot of support at the other end of the building. The question is: what is going to be done about them? When the Straw Bill failed to carry, I sent an e-mail to my noble friend Lord McNally, the leader of my party. I said that it was a great tragedy and we must do something about it. He replied and encouraged me to retable my Bill in the new Session of Parliament, which I have done. [Laughter.] Wait for it! I then wrote to him in his new position and said, “Dear Minister, my leader recommended that I table the Bill. I have done so. What about government time?”, to which I got a reply saying, “Dear David, your leader is a very wise man”, which did not really address the question.
Frankly, my Bill is not going to go anywhere. I recognise that. Let us be realistic. That is why I tabled the Motion in the hope that the Government would enable Peers to vote separately on the merits of these issues and would introduce their own wording so that it would be government wording, not a private Member’s wording. I think that is a sensible suggestion. Whether I move the Motion later tonight—I certainly do not want to start a second debate after we finish this one—depends on the reaction of Members in the rest of this debate.
Lord Bilimoria
My Lords, at a time like this we need to be extremely careful as we move forward, because a step in the wrong direction will have far-reaching consequences not just for us but for future generations. As Winston Churchill once said,
“It would be a great reform in politics if wisdom could be made to spread as easily and rapidly as folly”.
What the coalition Government propose—to rush through wholesale reform of the House of Lords—is sheer folly. The upper House is the principal check and balance on the Government. This House is, in many ways, the guardian of the nation. Nothing should be done to modify this role of the House. An appointed House brings together, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, said so well, diversity, objectivity, experience and, as the noble Lord, Lord Denham, illustrated, world-class expertise and, perhaps most importantly, thinking that is independent of party politics.
Should we appoint our Members or should we elect them? That is what we are all talking about. I believe that this is where instead of being right, a lot of people unfortunately try to sound right. To be clear, I believe with every fibre that if we stand for anything, we stand for democracy. As the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York so clearly spelt out about democracy, the voice of the people is the moon and tides, the push and pull, of our great nation. However, I have no hesitation in saying that if its membership comes through elections alone, this House will miss out on the services of many of its best Members.
We have a House today that is functioning well, be it in attendance, the quality of the debates, the exceptional value for money—as the noble Lord, Lord Steel, mentioned, it costs one-fifth of the cost of the House of Commons—or the independent nature of the House, which ironically makes our unelected House the cornerstone of our democracy. What is needed is further evolution, not revolution. For example, the Appointments Commission, which is doing such a sterling job, could be made into a statutory appointments commission, as suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Steel.
We are not very good at communicating our strengths to the public. The general impression is that the public feel that for the House of Lords to be legitimate it needs to be elected. I believe that if there was wider understanding of the role and functioning of this House, the public would agree that to have an elected second Chamber would dilute the quality and qualifications of this House. Would we risk diluting the credentials and qualifications of any other cornerstone of our society via an elected system? Would we elect our Army chiefs, our top civil servants, our judges, our surgeons or our university vice-chancellors? Do we question their legitimacy on whether they are elected or not? No, we judge these professionals on the quality of their work, their service to the people and the content of their character.
When we talk about the general public not feeling a connection to this House, I find it astounding that there are those who suggest electing Peers through a system of proportional representation in the mould of the European Parliament elections. MEPs in this country have no connection whatever with their constituencies or their constituents. The vast majority of people cannot even name their MEPs. Do we really want to go down that route? But whatever happens we must maintain an appointed, independent Cross-Bench Peers section of this House, as electing this valuable subsection of the upper House would never work. However, if we are living under a coalition Government who promise freedom, fairness and responsibility, as the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, and so many others have stated, where is the fairness in having a committee on House of Lords reform with no Cross-Bench representation? This is absolutely appalling and completely unfair.
Let us for one moment imagine what it would look like to have an elected second Chamber. As the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, said, we could kiss goodbye to the balance of power between the two Houses as we know it. An elected House of Lords would ultimately challenge the primacy of the House of Commons, leading to conflicts, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, said, between the two Houses over rights, laws and constituencies. We would begin to resemble our American cousins, with an elected Senate and a congress vying for power, and an appointed Supreme Court with the power to strike down laws that it deems to be unconstitutional.
If we want to go all the way, let us just do it. Let us have a wholly elected membership and increase the level, power and authority of this House, like the American Senate. I do not believe that this country needs that or that the people of this country want that. This is not a case of turkeys not wanting to vote for Christmas. This House is very much at the beating heart of democracy in Britain. It has been for centuries and long may that continue.
In conclusion, as I have said before, let us not shake these great foundations. We need always to remember that when you try making changes to a house, you can change the layout, you can even move a few walls, but if you try to change the foundations, there is always the risk of bringing it down.
Baroness O'Cathain
My Lords, I must apologise for being absent for most of this debate. Unfortunately, I had to go to a meeting of the EU Select Committee, but at least I have truncated my speech. I hope that what I will say will not be too repetitious. The Motion on the Order Paper is:
“Lord Strathclyde to move that this House takes note of the case for reform of the House of Lords”,
and we seem to be going through all sorts of options of how we will reform. But we ought to decide whether this House needs to be reformed.
I believe that there are three options. The first is to leave this House as it is. The second is to make some changes to structural procedures, such as reform of an evolutionary nature. The noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, is right that we should go for an evolutionary process. Reform implies evolution in terms of reforming something which exists and making it better, and we hope not to make it worse. When you chuck out everything and change the whole basis of the constitution—what it does and its relationship with other things—that is revolution. It is not reform.
Looking at the three options, I refer first to the option for leaving the House as it is: that the tasks undertaken add value, not least because of the body of experience and expertise. Moreover, as others have probably said, we have more time to consider issues because Members of the other place have serious constituency duties which do not permit them to undertake the same level of scrutiny as we can. In the last Parliament, there was an appalling situation of a House of Commons Bill where in only three of its seven stages had it been scrutinised even marginally before it came to us. That is one of the things we do, but I am not about to back this option.
We are in danger of being seen to be wasting time considering all sorts of options when people in the world outside this place are horribly burdened with managing their finances and wondering if their jobs are going to disappear. The amount of time we have already spent on this issue and the amount we are going to spend on it will, I suspect, be far greater than the 700 hours we wasted on the Hunting Bill. Is that what the people out there really want, and is that what they are going to be told it is all about?
I turn to the second point, that of evolutionary reform. The burgeoning size of this House is clearly a cause for concern. Although we have recently lost some very distinguished Members, their number has been more than offset by the creation of more than 50 Peers, with talk of more and more coming through. There are practical resource implications, not least in terms of accommodation, and political implications in terms of how we are seen by those outside the Westminster village. We are caught between a rock and a hard place. If Peers do not attend, they cannot claim allowances, so there is no burden on the public purse, but none the less it conveys a poor impression if we operate on the basis of a certain proportion of our membership being able to come here or stay away willy-nilly whenever they want.
We now have a dedicated and transparent House of Lords Appointments Commission. I support my noble friend Lord Steel and I firmly believe that it should be put on a statutory basis. That would bring us into line with what electors expect in terms of the appointments process, and in effect would guarantee independence for the process. Perception is all, and as a matter of principle we need to enhance our powers to deal with Members who break the law, or indeed who break the spirit of the law. Our powers are far too limited. I also favour changes to some of our existing practices and procedures for the purpose of strengthening what it is that we do. We should make greater use of evidence-taking committees when a Bill originates in this House, we should play to our strengths in establishing a committee for post-legislative scrutiny, and we should press further for the greater use of pre-legislative scrutiny. In short, we could, should and must build on strength as an evolutionary process.
What I am totally opposed to is the third option, which constitutes the exact opposite of building on strength. The Government’s proposals for an elected House are a recipe for wiping out the strengths of this House. Why would elected Members of a second Chamber devote their time to detailed scrutiny that has little potential to attract the attention of the media and their constituents? I do not think that I have ever heard of a Member of this House issuing a press notice when he or she is about to make a particular point in a speech, or has done so. That is a feature of what happens in the other place.
Moreover, what would elected Members in this House bring to bear to enable them to engage in these tasks? They would be here primarily because of their political skills and not because they have a particular expertise that is likely to be of value to the House. Despite some of the claims of the previous Government, an elected House would not be a House of Lords in a different guise. The reality of who would stand for election to a second Chamber was conceded in the last Government’s White Paper. After serving a single fixed term, Members of the second Chamber would, for a period of five years, be debarred from seeking election to the House of Commons. In other words, the group established by Jack Straw conceded that people coming to the second Chamber would be those who would rather be in the other place. We would be their number two choice.
Who would vote for the Members of a Second Chamber? The Government appear to believe that an elected Chamber would not have any more powers than the current House. However, turnout in elections is likely to be low—one suspects it might be lower than that for elections to the European Parliament, which now has considerably more powers than this House. Again, the Government appear to concede this by wanting to hold such elections on the same day as those for the House of Commons. In short, the Government’s proposals effectively concede that the new House would lack popular legitimacy.
I fail to see that the case has been made for the third option. They need to go away and think about it, not rush ahead with ill considered legislation. In fact, they should not even consider it. If they really want to see reform, they should take what we have got and go part of the way I have suggested in an evolutionary process.
Viscount Eccles
My Lords, I suppose we are hoping that, whatever the outcome may be, we are going to be better governed. Perhaps to some extent we should go back to first principles because there is always a danger, when something has been going on for a long time, that we stop thinking strategically. There becomes a certain inevitability of outcome that may disregard the circumstances. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Richard, put very powerfully in his speech the argument for stopping the dialogue and just doing what to him and many others has seemed obvious for a long time. My noble friend the Leader of the House referred to “public confidence” and the matter of whether people’s expectations are fulfilled, whether they are good or not so good.
There is a deep lack of confidence among the public because people believe increasingly that Parliament is not in a good position to deliver, and worse than that, that it is unreasonable to expect it to do so. Why are the public coming to this conclusion, which certainly requires that we should go back to first principles? If you say that you have ways of ending boom and bust and it turns out that you do not, that is not a good start. The story, which started in 1911, has a much longer history and began with the erosion of confidence in politicians and in politics itself. The public know that much of what has happened—and much of it is extremely good—has been driven by science and technology. People know that such improvements are not driven by the political system and that developments in the global economy are not driven by the political system of a single nation state, so they are becoming increasingly aware of the fact that Parliament is not easily able to design or even to describe end results. It is increasingly less able to keep up with the unfolding details of events such as the BP experience or the challenge of climate change.
Political leadership now lies much more in establishing directions of travel than in a commitment to detailed end results through legislation, but if we are to pursue successful directions of travel, we need to deepen the dialogue both within the Houses of Parliament and with civil society: a theme developed by the noble Lord, Lord Low, in his speech. We need to know where to acquire the necessary knowledge and advice on which the best decisions can be made, and we need to improve our ability to decide what to legislate on and what not to legislate on, and how to legislate. These decisions are becoming more, not less, difficult year on year, but the one thing we should not do is try to simplify these complicated issues by going back to a tactical solution that started in what was indeed a very tactical way in 1911, because simply to continue the long history of attempts to complete the process that started in 1911 will not lead to better government. We need first principles in order to think through the challenges of our democracy as they are today and not as they used to be.
Lord Lea of Crondall
My Lords, the fundamental flaw in the approach in the Statement made by the Leader of the House yesterday is that we are playing at demotic politics without the demos. For years we have been carrying on as though there is an issue in the country but, wherever else there is an issue, it is not in the country. We have therefore had to invent a demos who want something, which we then have to give them. A moment’s thought suggests that that is an erroneous starting point. There can be many other starting points, but I wish to clear that one out of our subconscious first.
This leads directly to the second fallacy in the line of proceeding. Someone has said that we must have a committee with a limited remit—build a Trojan horse. If you want to build a Trojan horse there is not much more you can do other than build it. I cannot think of someone saying you should put down an amendment if you want to build a Trojan horse—you have got to get on and build it. My metaphors are often hard to keep running, but this one would result in a process whereby it would be hard to look at anything other than building the Trojan horse.
Can all the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Steel, and many of the points made by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester—who made an interesting contribution, as did the noble Lord, Lord Low of Dalston—be brought within the building of, or even inside, the Trojan horse? That will produce a difficulty for many of us; it is an impenetrable remit that will prevent us getting to the practical and philosophical points that lie behind it.
Therefore, to use the vernacular that has been used more than once, it would be nice if we could take literally, objectively and honestly the famous aphorism, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. However, what is it that is broke? Let us say, “Okay. This is not a perfect place. Something is perhaps a little bit broke. Let us look at it”. There is a gap in the range of people who come here. The noble Lord, Lord Jay of Ewelme, who is not in his place, said in his evidence to the Constitution Select Committee—this was drawn to my attention by the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth—that there is a danger that we are appointing too many people in our own image. There is something in that. It raises the practical question of what you do to avoid appointing too many people in your own image.
In the Labour Party there is certainly scope for getting the National Executive Committee and the conference to look at the appointments system. This is a reform measure and, as the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, said in an excellent speech, the Labour Peers’ Group is a practical reforming group. A majority of the group—indeed, it was a consensus—wrote to the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, in answer to his suggestion that we should put forward any ideas, and said that we wanted these four points considered. I am not saying that the noble Lord, Lord Steel, did not have an idea in his head until that moment in history, but he picked up on that principle and no one at any stage has ever said that there was anything other than genuine reform in it.
The only request I would make of my very good friend, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, is that he does not repeat the canard that we are only putting forward the Steel Bill in order to put off the revolution of election: that in the Steel Bill we want a body of six or seven people to make all political appointments and so on. Perhaps I may put on record for the nth time that that is specifically not what we want. In the last version of the Steel Bill before the election, it was spelt out specifically that that is not what we are proposing. We are proposing virtually the opposite: that the parties should put up criteria to be registered with the Appointments Commission.
Two aspects of democracy would then be met and the balance between the parties would not be too far out. The Liberal Democrats would say that there are not enough Liberal Democrats, but the balance between Labour and Conservative over the years has met the three elections’ average. This is not like the nonsense in the coalition document. The worst drafted sentence in the whole document is that they want a House of Lords that reflects the last general election. I do not know which innumerate person in the coalition talks late at night wrote that sentence, but it would be totally impossible unless there were 1,000 Members within a few years—we leapfrog you, you leapfrog us.
The way in which these ideas can be looked at side by side with building the Trojan horse may cause a difficulty. One way through may be to look at the way in which we relate to Members of Parliament. There is no feeling among most MPs that this demotic politics needs to find the demos, but there has been a bit of a reaction. As Jack Straw said late at night here in the wash-up—this was reported in the newspapers so it can only be accurate—coming up to the House of Lords is like going to another planet. If these two planets are to have Members who know each other, and there are no pointed heads on one side or the other, we ought to get to know our colleagues at the other end a lot more than we do. There are some very notable colleagues—my noble friend Lord Grocott springs to mind on our side—who have spent many distinguished years in the Commons. We know many people in the House of Commons who, as soon as you have the second pint with them—but not only because you buy them a second pint—start to see the sense of what you are saying.
We should find a way in which we can continue to look at the merits of the proposal by the noble Lord, Lord Steel, and parallel proposals, side by side with this mad idea of building a Trojan horse. George Woodcock, who was the very distinguished general secretary of the TUC when I joined, used to quote something that I never understood. He said, “Structure is a function of purpose”. After 50 years, I begin to see what he was talking about, and that is where we should begin the conversation.
Lord Cope of Berkeley
My Lords, I wish to express my views on the main issue of whether or not we should have an elected, largely elected or partly elected House. The House of Lords has evolved under Governments of all three parties during the past century and I support some further evolution such as that suggested in the Bill of my noble friend Lord Steel. However, as I said, I want to discuss the main question.
The basic argument in principle against the present set-up, which has already been set out, is that we are not elected. The argument is that it is wrong that unelected people should be involved in legislating in a democracy. I do not accept that. After all, even if we had a fully elected senate, many non-elected people would still be involved in legislating—the Civil Service to begin with. Given that almost all legislation of importance is government legislation, government collectively have a much larger and more detailed input than either House into what goes into legislation. That will not change.
In addition, Governments these days also consult widely from outside when preparing legislation, draft Bills and so on. That involves experts, interest groups and the public generally—and quite right, too. So the idea that only elected people should be involved in decisions on legislation is not sustainable.
However, this is also related to the question of power. As others have said, this House is high in expertise but low in power—and, for that matter, in cost. An elected House would dramatically lower the expertise involved in legislating, and it would inevitably increase the cost immediately. It would increase the power of the second House, at least over time, and it is the question of power that is the least understood. The House of Lords lacks power exactly because it is not elected. That does not mean that it does not have any power; it does, but in the end the elected House prevails.
Having been a Whip in both Houses, for some years in both cases, I have seen the ping-pong process from the inside. The process when the two Houses disagree is more subtle than is often realised. If each House insists on its version of the Bill—what is called “double insistence”—then the Bill falls altogether. By that time that is rarely wanted by either side, so the amendments exchanged between the Houses in the course of ping-pong in order to avoid double insistence progressively move nearer to one another until agreement is reached. I can tell your Lordships from experience that when ping-pong is in process or, for that matter, merely threatened, the time comes when noble Lords increasingly say, “Well, the elected House should have its way. We have expressed our opinion and they have expressed theirs”. When enough Peers say that to the opposition Chief Whip, the Lords give way. This is not a secret. After all, at both ends of the building, and, for that matter, in private, Ministers use the argument vigorously in such situations.
If there were an elected senate, however, then that argument would not apply. The senate would be elected by a different method or on a different timescale, or some combination of those. At times it would say, “We are more legitimate than you, the House of Commons. We were elected more recently”, or, “We were elected by what we think is a better method”—more proportional representation, or whatever the method was. I hope that Members of the House of Commons realise that if we were to go down this route, the Commons would lose their vital power ultimately to decide legislation. To ignore that entirely foreseeable consequence of an elected House of Parliament is to be as short-sighted as a Uruguayan referee. Better to have an appointed second House with world-level experience and expertise and the influence that that gives to this House, but with the low powers that follow from not being elected.
Fundamentally, I believe that whatever can be done to improve our system of governance will not be achieved by electing more legislators. We are not suffering from a shortage of politicians.
Baroness O'Loan
My Lords, the debate on reform of the House of Lords has been, as Members have stated, a very lengthy one. However, reform has been ongoing, most importantly since the Life Peerages Act 1958 when women were allowed for the first time to take seats in the House of Lords.
Now the coalition Government have stated in the programme for government that this committee will bring forward proposals for a wholly or mainly elected Chamber and that there will be a grandfathering system for the present Peers, which I understand means that we will be permitted to serve out our term. Why it is called a “grandfathering” system for those of us of my sex, I am not quite sure.
The proposal appears to deal only with the methods of appointment to this House. I accept that there are consequences with any model of appointment, but nevertheless I question why there is a focus on the method of appointment only.
I emphasise that, as has been said previously, the cross-party Joint Committee on House of Lords Reform does not include the Convenor of the Cross-Bench Peers. Given that Cross-Benchers represent some 25 per cent of the membership of the House and given that they make a significant contribution, it cannot be right for them to be totally excluded from this process. The holding of a debate such as this does not address the lacuna created by this deficit in proper process. Even now, it would be much more acceptable were the Convenor to be appointed to the committee. In an era in which the Government legislate and call repeatedly for equality, and in which statutory obligations are placed on so many organisations, it is important that there be equality of access in the way in which any process of reform in this House is conducted.
The possible outcome of the coalition Government proposals for a House elected using proportional representation cannot be definitively forecast. We know from the operation of PR in Northern Ireland that on occasion the results can be somewhat unexpected, and that people can use their vote tactically to achieve the end of keeping an individual out rather than electing anyone. Be that as it may, it is eminently possible that a PR vote for an elected House of Lords would result in a House that, rather than being reflective of the share of the political parties in the previous election, would be very different.
There are of course a variety of systems of PR. The outcome of the most recent election, had it been conducted under alternative voting, would not have produced the result that the coalition Government seek to achieve for the House of Lords because the result of that election was the result of the first-past-the-post system, not an alternative vote system.
It has been said publicly that the turnout for elections, particularly in European elections and elections for the Mayor of London, is very low. In the past three Mayor of London elections, the proportion electing was 34 per cent, 34 per cent and 45 per cent respectively, and that was a situation in which the mayoral elections attracted candidates, it has been said, with a high public profile and the functions of local authorities are clearer than the functions of the new House would be—we do not quite know what those functions are anticipated to be. It has also been suggested, and I think noble Lords have said this, that elections to the upper House would be likely to attract candidates who would really be seeking to go into the Commons, and therefore it would become a second Chamber in more ways than one.
Can it be appropriate to develop a new system for selecting individuals for membership of the House of Lords by simply seeking to replicate the outcome of a previous election using an uncertain voting system? There is, of course, an alternative.
It is necessary to consider the possible outcome in terms of the election of an alternative Government to this House, one that did not reflect the party results in the House of Commons but that would effectively create a powerful Opposition to that Government in this House. One also has to contemplate the fact that elected Peers would look to their electorate to ensure that they remained in the House. This would introduce another dynamic into this House’s deliberations that may not be conducive to proper scrutiny and the reform of proposed legislation.
In addition, one has to factor in the fact that the other place has become rather dysfunctional. On a number of occasions, Bills have come to this House that have not been properly scrutinised and debated there. The tenor of debate in this House is generally more reflective, considered and purposeful. Were we to move to a fully elected Chamber, the dynamics of the context of our debate would change. Is it possible that that would result in the kind of dysfunction to be seen on occasion in the other place?
It is right that Governments should not be motivated solely by cost or by cost savings. Nevertheless, it is the case that this House, with its 753 Members—many of whom never appear in the Chamber and 155 of whom are women—cost about £104 million in 2008-09. Were Parliament to legislate for an elected House, costs would increase dramatically. We currently do not receive the kind of salary and office costs attendant on membership of the other place. Elected Members would have to be paid just as elected Members of the other place are. Inevitably, this would be a substantial salary.
A reduction in the size of the House is clearly necessary. Without wishing to be indelicate, that may, in part, happen naturally, and if the appointment of new Peers were handled differently, the size of the House would diminish anyway.
I shall briefly address the issue of how we work. As a newcomer, I think it works well. There is recognition of the role of the other place and of the place of government in that House, but Bills often leave this House to return to the other place in a significantly different form from that in which they came here. I think we could fine-tune our working practices, but I do not understand that to be the purpose of this new committee on the reform of the House of Lords.
Is reform necessary? I think it is. The route that we should take is the one that I am proud to have been appointed through: the House of Lords Appointments Commission. The noble Lord, Lord Jay, gave us its figures for appointment. It has appointed 51 people since 2001. Forty-nine of them are active, two having died. It has appointed about 20 per cent of the total of 183 independent Cross-Benchers, which means that 70 per cent of even the Cross-Bench Peers have not gone via this route. Of the 51 appointments, 37 per cent are women, 22 per cent are from ethnic minorities and 8 per cent are disabled. This composition represents greater diversity than does the current composition of the House of Lords and reflects the remit of the commission, which is to ensure that the House is more broadly representative of Britain’s diversity—a remit which it takes seriously. I am therefore moved to support the conversion of the House of Lords Appointments Commission into a statutory appointments commission. I do not see why those who have given distinguished service in the field of politics should not apply, as I did, to that commission for appointment to this House. There is nothing which diminishes one when one applies. The process of open competition is something which the people whom we serve understand and are familiar with, and it would add credibility to the appointments process.
There are clear arguments for non-active Members to be able to retire, attractive as it may seem to some parties to be able to call on the votes of those who have ceased to play an active role here. It would be better for this place if there were to be a process whereby a person could honourably retire if they chose so to do. I am well aware, however, of the extreme clarity of the minds of some of my noble colleagues who are a little further advanced in years than I am and of the wisdom which they bring to debates. Age should not be a determining factor. I agree that we need to be able to remove from this House Peers convicted of serious offences.
In all this, then, I am minded to support the Motion of the noble Lord, Lord Steel. There is much for this House to consider in the context of reform of the House of Lords, but the consideration must be worthy of this place. It must be conducted in a proper manner by all the representatives of this House. The Houses of Parliament have a great history. Any change will have great significance for the future of our country.
Lord Higgins
My Lords, we are asked to take note of the case for reform of the House of Lords. In fact, we have had two related debates: on the one hand, the arguments about whether the present House of Lords should effectively be abolished and substituted by a wholly or mainly elected House and, on the other, the arguments for reforming the House of Lords by improving the present structure of the appointed House. To some extent, those in favour of moving to an elected House feel that progress on the second issue would undermine their case, because it would then be working even better than it does now. That is a mistake. It is becoming increasingly urgent that we should reform our proceedings, and I wholeheartedly support the proposal put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Steel, which, after all, was carried without any dissent in the last Parliament. We have had in addition the proposals of the three committees set up in the last Parliament—under the chairmanship of the noble Lords, Lord Filkin and Lord Butler, and the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy respectively—putting forward a number of important ways in which we could improve our procedures. Since it is unlikely that rapid progress will be made on the first issue, it would be a mistake not to treat as a matter of great urgency progress on the second; namely, the reform of our procedures within the context of the present House.
The Leader of the House said that the reform of the House of Lords is not the most important issue which we face at present. That is true if one takes into account the state of the economy or Afghanistan—there are many issues which might well be regarded as more important. However, while the question of reforming the House of Lords may be more or less important, it is fundamentally different, because it alters the way in which we deal with all the other issues. In addition, any change is likely to be irreversible. While fundamental reform may not be the most urgent or important issue, we must recognise none the less that it is different in kind from the other issues. Budgets come and Budgets go, and even wars come and wars go, but the way in which we reach decisions on these matters is quite different.
I turn to the Government’s pressing ahead with a so-called Bill and there being considerable objections rightly raised by the Cross-Benchers as to how they are going about it. It is very curious indeed that the Opposition have apparently agreed to be involved in what the Government are proposing. We are not then clear whether it is a government Bill and, inevitably to some extent, the Opposition will be committed to whatever eventually emerges. The difficulty as I see it is pressing ahead with that Bill—the Government are saying, “We must have a Bill; we haven’t had a Bill before”—before we have reached a decision on whether we want a Bill which introduces elected Members to this House. That was the point of my earlier intervention on the Leader of the Opposition. If we are to proceed in this way, we should have a debate on whether we should have a partly or wholly elected element before we decide to draft the Bill. It is of course rather a cunning approach to it: we will find the Opposition to some extent committed and we will find anyone who serves on any pre-legislative committee also implicitly agreeing with the basic proposition. So we should agree the principle first then come to drafting a Bill. We do not know how the House will decide.
It was absolutely clear in the last Parliament that the leaderships of both the main parties were totally at odds with their membership. In the other place, the official Labour Party policy was not supported by a majority of Labour Members, and the same went for that of the Conservative Party. In this House, both were vigorously rejected. There is therefore a gulf between the leadership and the Back Benches. Therefore, to set up a committee made up solely of the leadership of the three parties with no regard for the Cross-Benchers or the Back-Benchers is unlikely to be a fruitful or helpful way of proceeding.
We must confront the fundamental issue: we are told that if we have elected Members, the House will be more democratic. I simply do not believe that to be the case. Mr Clegg said the other day that the House of Lords was an affront to democracy. How does having an elected House make the country more democratic? We are already 100 per cent democratic in this country, and that democracy is vested in the House of Commons. Having this House elected will in no way increase the extent to which this country is democratic. It will undoubtedly result in a division of powers between the two Houses, with no ready means of resolving it. We are going along this road. Unless we hear a more convincing argument than that it will increase democracy, it is the wrong way to go. But there is no other argument. For some reason, the leaderships of the parties have decided that there is a huge public demand for election to the House of Lords. Anyone who went around on the doorstep during the last election will not have been overwhelmed by a view that “we must have an elected House of Lords”—certainly not in some of the south London constituencies where I was canvassing. That is one of the main arguments against a referendum.
We have a problem both in the House of Commons and among the public at large. There is the most appalling ignorance of how this House operates, certainly at the other end. We do not know, if we have a vote similar to the last one, how the House of Commons will vote. It is always a danger with a new House of Commons that the new Members will not want to revolt too readily against their leadership, whichever party they may be in. That is clearly a danger. However, we need to take stock. The proposals put forward by the Government with regard to the committee and so on are totally out of sync. We have to reach a decision on the principle first, and then we know where we are. But there is also the most appalling ignorance about this House of Lords in the public at large. That is why a referendum is certainly not the right way in which to go. People do not have the remotest idea about what they are really voting about or about the value of this place, which is the most cost-effective legislative Chamber in the world. To ask them to express a view on it would be completely wrong. However, we need to press ahead with the second group of reforms, as I have suggested, in which the noble Lord, Lord Steel, and the various committees have put forward constructive approaches that will enable us to get this House right, not least with regard to numbers, before we go to anything more fundamental.
Lord Rooker
My theme is very much along the lines of my intervention on the Leader of the House earlier. I agreed very much with the speeches of the noble Lords, Lord Cope and Lord Higgins. The Tory, Lib Dem and Labour manifestos and the coalition programme exclusively refer to the words “second Chamber” and deal only with the issue of composition. I do not seek to support the status quo. Giving my maiden speech at that Box some nine years ago, I reminded this House that in 1980 I moved a 10-minute rule Bill in the other place to abolish your Lordships' House. That enabled me to get away with a lot at that Dispatch Box over the years.
The manifesto lines of the parties are obsessed with composition. Not one asked what we are for, what we do and how we do it. The functions and powers of the second Chamber should be known before starting on the composition, if only on the basis that if we are expecting good, honest, professional citizens outside to want to get elected here, they will want to know what their powers and functions are beforehand, not afterwards. There is a real problem, as the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, has just said. After 27 years in the Commons, the last four as a Minister, I will admit that I was very ignorant about your Lordships' House. Not any more—but as a transferring Minister from one House to the other, fresh from the Commons, in my first seven years in this place, in my four departmental roles as a Minister, I genuinely felt under greater scrutiny than I ever was in the Commons. There is no question about that in my mind and I have thought about that a lot. The scrutiny level here is much greater—and my experience ranges across six departments.
On more than one occasion as a Minister, I found myself in Cabinet committees explaining, not defending, the way in which the Lords works, to be met by the accusation from the senior Cabinet Minister in the chair, “You’ve gone native!”. That was the level of debate. My noble friend Lord Grocott was with me on one occasion when that was said. I am entitled to ask whether the present Deputy Prime Minister is any less ignorant than his shadows in that position beforehand, because so far I have not seen any evidence that he is. Many of your Lordships have served in the other place, but there is only one Member of the other place who has served in this place. So the level of knowledge of this place is incredibly shallow in the other place. You can make a damn good cheap conference platform speech, however, at the expense of your Lordships' House. It will always get a cheer. So there is that shallowness in the debate.
My other point is this—I do not see how we can escape a review of the conventions. If I came in here elected, I would not be interested in conventions, because I would have been elected. Where is the book of powers for the Lords? People have talked about our having fewer powers, but we do not; we have very substantial powers, but we choose not to use them because we are not elected. That is what the conventions report was all about. The refusal to give a Second Reading, the time delay, how we treat secondary legislation and the challenge on financial privilege will all go by the board by elected Members of this House. Why should they obey the conventions? Therefore, if we do not legislate on the conventions on a statutory basis, which means by definition legislating to reduce the powers of the Lords by law, we will suffer the consequences of massive conflict between the two Houses as elected Members here test the powers. If the second Chamber is to get more power, that can come from the Commons alone. We have to appreciate that—there is only one central, finite power, and any more coming here means that some has come from there. So it is make your mind up time. We have to fix the role of the second Chamber, fix the powers and the numbers before we do that—and only then do we start to make a sensible arrangement that will stand the test of time about the composition of your Lordships' House. I do not believe that these aspects will go away when we get to the detail of Bills. It will be an absolute disgrace if the Long Title of any Bill rules out discussion of the powers and functions, if the Bill does not deal with them itself, and we will insist on them being dealt with.
To finish, I want to be a little bit more positive. I have some personal views about how a second Chamber should work, although I cannot go through them in detail here. We should concentrate on revision and scrutiny rather than repetition, which we do so much of. There is far too much repetition in this place and not enough revision and scrutiny. I do not think that Bills should start here and we should be half the size of a much smaller Commons than is planned, with no more than 500. I do not think that Ministers should be here, but we should be able to send for them to come and explain and then scrutinise what they are doing and revise the legislation in the light of what they say. That would be a much better role. We must not be a mirror of the Commons—and we do not want people queuing up to get in here because they could not get into the Commons. I guarantee that that is what will happen.
The upshot of all this—and it has been a theme of many speeches—is that to function on behalf of our fellow citizens, as a second Chamber of Parliament, the powers that we have are not dependent on how people arrive here. I could make a case for an all-elected House or an all-appointed House, but one case that I will never make is for a hybrid House of some elected and some appointed. That is completely and utterly unsustainable and, if any Bill comes forward with that, we will end up wasting months of time, because it will not get anywhere. It is better that those points are taken on board and we have a much wider debate before we are faced with a fait accompli.
Lord Wright of Richmond
I intervene very briefly to remind the House that I am the only surviving Cross-Bench member of the conventions committee. We came under strong pressure from the then Government to make it clear that the conventions as they existed at that time would continue. In response, we made it very clear that under an elected House—
Lord Wright of Richmond
But not another Cross-Bench Member. We made it very clear that an elected House would totally change the conventions.
Lord Mayhew of Twysden
My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, and rather a surprise to follow the noble Lord, Lord Wright. I admire both of them. I admired the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, in the House of Commons for many years and admire him in this House. The difference is that I generally agree with him in this House, and I have agreed with him to a very great extent today.
The noble Lord, Lord Filkin, said that there was more to reform than composition—and, of course, there is. But the debate about composition is the cornerstone of reform. I hope that I shall not be thought to be obsessive if I devote my seven minutes to trying to demolish that cornerstone.
In his book, The New British Constitution, Professor Vernon Bogdanor, Professor of Government at Oxford University, has a particular footnote which I shall read. It says,
“In 2007 I heard a Liberal Democrat MP at a meeting in the House of Commons on House of Lords reform solemnly apologise for the fact that the Liberals had not fulfilled their pledge to democratize the composition of the Lords. Perhaps his apology was unnecessary. For the pledge was never intended to have been taken seriously”.
In support of this, Bogdanor reminds us of the then Liberal Government’s heavy and radical reform of legislation. He said that they and their Back-Bench supporters,
“wanted simply a measure which, by removing the obstacle of the House of Lords, would allow”
their programme to be implemented. He continues,
“They saw the Parliament Act as a final solution to the problem”.
They did not see it as “an interim measure”, and, as he says, for the reason that,
“the Liberals were hardly likely to construct a second Chamber more legitimate”
than the then current hereditary system, because being more democratically based it,
“would be in a stronger position to wreck their legislation”.
He concludes:
“It is doubtful ... whether current attempts to reform the composition of the House of Lords designed to make it more legitimate, can fairly be characterised … as ‘Mr Asquith’s unfinished business’”.
These are not fanciful considerations; they were not even fanciful in those days, or considerations peculiar to the differing circumstances of 100 years ago. Neglected though they have been, they remain good today. In modern times, I guess that there was no shrewder judge of these matters than the late Viscount Whitelaw of such fond memory—a highly successful leader of your Lordships’ House and, before that, an MP for some 28 years. In his memoirs, published in 1989, he wrote declaring his opposition to any elected House of Lords, partial or otherwise, as follows:
“Surely, experience with all assemblies, of which the most recent is the European Parliament, shows that the moment the members are elected they demand more powers”.
We can add that subsequent devolution surely adds further examples of that phenomenon.
Let us look into the future. If further powers are demanded, probably—and I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, about this—through a rejection of some of the conventions that govern our relations with the other place, what will happen? It is highly unlikely that the Commons will concede them, so there will be ongoing conflict and instability, with the probability that the delaying powers of this House would be further curtailed in the end, and that the stability of the 1911 settlement—substantially amended as it has been, as we have been reminded—which has served us so well will be disrupted.
Even if the powers of the Lords remained the same, membership of this place would be unlikely to attract what one might perhaps describe as first XI or even second XI players. To quote once again from Bogdanor’s book:
“The more the powers of the Lords are restricted, the more difficult it would be”,
for,
“people of ability to stand for election. What person of merit would wish to stand for election to a toothless chamber”,
and attract to himself all the joys of serving a constituency?
Almost at a stroke, then, there will be undermined and diminished those House of Lords functions which attract the strongest approval from the public; first, our wide expertise, so graphically illustrated by my noble and learned friend Lord Howe this afternoon, brought to bear when scrutinising legislation and in holding Ministers to account; and, secondly, our independence—the latter, because, as Professor Bogdanor points out,
“in every modern elected upper house, elections are organised by political parties and run by professional politicians”.
Not much scope for independence there.
I contend that the right solution, although there is no time to develop it, is a House appointed by an independent statutory commission. That would give it legitimacy from having been imposed, set up and established by Parliament. I concede, of course, that the high-water mark of the case for an elected House of Lords is the fact that all three major political parties supported it in their manifestoes. That undoubtedly advances the case, but does not secure it. Objectively, it can be seen to constitute a shared mistake. The electorate may well forgive a mistake that is confessed, explained and corrected. It will not forgive a mistake that it is left to it, by bitter experience, to discover for itself.
Lord Howarth of Newport
My Lords, an elected second Chamber is the wrong answer to the wrong question. Even those who accept the Prime Minister’s melodramatic characterisation of our politics as broken cannot claim that dissatisfaction with the House of Lords so much as registers among the public’s concerns—notwithstanding the grubby efforts of the Mail on Sunday and the Sunday Times. Public dissatisfaction with our political culture arises mainly, I believe, from two other sources.
First, people think that power is excessively centralised in London. Too few decisions are taken locally. Too much political power resides in Downing Street. Associated with that is a widely held view that the House of Commons is excessively dominated by the Executive. There is good will towards the coalition, a hope that it may portend a fresh politics, but that sentiment has not dissipated the folklore that Members of Parliament are too biddable by their leaders and Whips and, as exposed by the expenses crisis, venal. Unfair though this is, the House of Commons has a lot more to do to vindicate itself to the people. We are entitled to retort to the eager proponents of Lords reform in the other place, “Physicians, heal thyselves”.
We can applaud the new localism professed by the coalition, but if and only if it means a revitalisation of democratic local government and not a marginalisation of it. Reform of the House of Commons and renewal of local government are the right priorities for constitutional reform. Reform of the House of Lords will, at best, do nothing to mitigate public disaffection from politics and, if it is to mean a second elected Chamber—costly, docile, weak and otiose—it will actually make it worse.
The second principal source of malaise is the malfunctioning of the media. Our politics suffers profoundly from the relentless cynicism, triviality and sloppiness of so much political journalism. There is no solution to this at the disposal of constitutional reformers. The best we can hope for is that we might, over time, have better educated citizens who will insist on better political journalism.
Why would people want to create an elected second Chamber? For some MPs, it is good enough that it looks progressive and deflects public indignation from the House of Commons. For Mr Cameron, embarking on it at this stage is a price worth paying to have Mr Clegg on board. For some Ministers, it will be attractive no longer to suffer the inconvenience of a second Chamber that does revise their legislation and from time to time blows the whistle on seriously misguided policy. Rather than those independent Cross-Benchers and former senior parliamentarians, how much easier to have a second Chamber of elected placemen, placed by patronage on the party list under PR, people more like Prufrock,
“an attendant Lord, one that will do
To swell a progress ...
an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous”.
If those explanations are too harsh or fanciful, it is difficult not to take the view that, in the present circumstances of our country and the world, for senior members of the Government to be channelling their energies into abolition of the House of Lords is displacement activity, a frivolity. In the scale of things, reform of the House of Lords is neither here nor there; that, I am quite sure, is the view of the public. People will stop worrying about political institutions if they become confident that the politicians they have elected are making wise judgments about the big issues, tackling them with determination, courage and effectiveness and offering inspiring political leadership; that is the proper path to democratic renewal.
None of this is to say that reforms of the House of Lords are not still needed, following the major reforms since 1999: the removal of most of the hereditary Peers and the establishment of a Supreme Court, separate from this House. We are proud of this institution, but we are not complacent.
My own agenda is fourfold, aligned with that set out in the latest Bill and the Motion tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Steel of Aikwood. We need to open the way to abolition of the hereditary principle for membership of the legislature. We need to place the Appointments Commission on a statutory basis and task it to improve further the representativeness—representativeness of civil society—of your Lordships’ House, a House which is already more diverse in terms of experience, gender, ethnicity and disability than the House of Commons. We need to disqualify from membership Peers guilty of serious criminal offences. And we should introduce a term for membership. I would go further than the noble Lord, Lord Steel, in not only making provision for retirement, but abolishing the right to sit in the legislature for life.
The reforms proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Steel, and backed by so many of us on both sides of the House, are reforms that the previous Government would not countenance and nor would the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde. He showed no sign today of becoming any more pragmatic in office than he was in Opposition. If he would only abandon his dogmatic attachment to an elected second Chamber, he could carry the House in support of a substantial set of reforms.
What most noble Lords seek is not abolition of the House of Lords, as advocated by the Leader of the House of Lords, but reform to consolidate and enhance the existing capacity of this House to do the job that the public want it to continue to do: to scrutinise legislation thoroughly and rigorously and offer amendments; to debate the issues before the country with expertise and relative impartiality; to advise; sometimes to propose restraint to overweening central government and a House of Commons that finds it hard to shake free of party conformism; to prompt second thoughts and a pause to get things right. This is the contribution that we make as a House of Parliament. The problem is not a lack of democracy at Westminster. So long as this is an unelected House, we will not defy or block the democratic House of Commons. Would it not be sensible to settle for this kind of complementarity?
What motivates so many of us, who value this House, to oppose its replacement by an elected Chamber is not self-interest but a deeply held belief that such a change would be damaging to Parliament and the quality of government. As I have said again and again, the onus should be on those who propose an elected House to explain how it would improve the performance of Parliament. None of them has yet been able to do so.
Lord Butler of Brockwell
My Lords, I take it that, notwithstanding the title of this debate, it provides an opportunity for your Lordships to put points to the cross-party committee which is preparing a draft Bill for a partly or wholly elected House. Like other noble Lords who have spoken, that is profoundly not what I want and I think it is a fundamental mistake. Nevertheless, although I do not agree with it, I accept it for the purpose of the remarks I am going to make. I want to put a case rather different from that which other Members of your Lordships’ House have made. I suggest—I hope not entirely frivolously—that the House could find itself going down this route, through the process of so-called reform, having an elected House, and finishing with something not very different from what your Lordships’ House is today. I will explain why.
As the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, said, the starting point is: what are the functions of the House? The Leader of the House answered that question this afternoon. He said that he envisaged that the functions of the House would continue to be as they are now, and its powers very much the same. What are those functions? I suggest that they fall under three headings. One is to provide an alternative forum of accountability for the Executive. The second is to provide the sort of detailed scrutiny of legislation which the other House fails to provide. I was struck by the statistics given by the noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, about the times when this House acts against the Government’s advice but its advice is accepted in the amendment of legislation; and by what the noble Lord, Lord Cope, said about that. The third—to which I think the public attach enormous importance—is to act as a partial counterweight to the dominance which the Executive have established in the other place and which, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, quoting from Tony Wright’s report, said, is the fundamental reason why the public have lost so much of their confidence in their Government.
I think your Lordships would agree that that power of the House of Lords—to act as a counterweight to the Executive—cannot be achieved if the Executive have an overall majority in this House. Since voting patterns for your Lordships’ House would be likely to follow closely those for the House of Commons, that can only be achieved if there is a significant independent membership of the House of Lords. I follow the noble Lords, Lord Steel and Lord Rooker, in feeling uncomfortable about having a hybrid House which is partly appointed and mostly elected. However, I do not see any other way of achieving an independent element. If there was a section of the House that was reserved for independent Peers, if I were not to be a grandfather I would stand for it, but I do not see any basis on which the electorate would be likely to know whether to vote for me. I find it difficult to see how an independent element can be produced without the method of appointment.
Then we come to the elected Members of the House. Of course the political parties will continue to exercise great influence. They will determine who will stand in their name. To say that this is people being elected at random is absurd. It will be a method of appointment which goes under the guise of election but will, in effect, be appointment by the political parties. Since the coalition manifesto makes clear that the people who will be appointed will be appointed for a long, single term, with a period of quarantine before they could stand for another place, it is unlikely that there would be people standing for election who have future political ambitions. Contrary to what the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, said, I give the political parties the credit of supposing that they will want to have sitting in their names in this Chamber people of experience, wisdom and weight, and people without further political ambition. That seems a very close specification for the type of Members that we have sitting for the political parties in this House now. I think the best outcome would be if those people were on the list and were elected.
So, what would we have after this period of reform? We would have a significant element—let us call it 20 per cent—of independent Members, who I think would have to be appointed. Eighty per cent would be elected on a party-political ticket and it is likely that they would be senior and experienced members of their parties, who have no further ambitions for the other place. If so, that would be a House very much like we have now. We would have gone through all the agony of reform. Certainly, the people sitting for the parties would have been nominally elected but in fact they would have been appointed. We would have gone through it all and we would wonder what the point of the agony had been.
Baroness Miller of Hendon
My Lords, let us face it—the subject of reform of the House of Lords is but a euphemism for introducing an elected second Chamber, where the protagonists of election in the last two Parliaments have conducted a bizarre Dutch auction between themselves as to the precise number of elected Members that there ought to be. The figures have ranged from 20 per cent to 80 per cent and 100 per cent, with those of us who dare to say 0 per cent being marginalised as undemocratic reactionaries.
Let us admit at the outset that the composition of your Lordships' Chamber is anything but democratic and that if we were creating a new Parliament today there would be no possibility of having a second Chamber such as the one we have now. Let us admit that, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, this House may be the worst form of a second Chamber, except for all the other forms that have been tried from time to time. However, we are where we are with a revising Chamber that, without exception, is described by commentators as the finest anywhere. We have a revising Chamber which, far from being undemocratic, invariably bows to the will of the elected Chamber, prodded without doubt by the Parliament Act 1911, but also by the outstanding act of self-denial, the Salisbury convention. We have a revising Chamber which, far from being undemocratic, exists to remedy the errors and omissions of the other place, where the legislative sausage machine operated by the Whips allows whole swathes of legislation to reach us without having had a single minute of debate or discussion, it being left to your Lordships to put these matters right.
On the subject of democracy, I say as forcefully as I can that our constitution does not belong to one Parliament, one party, or to one group of politicians who happen to have no more than a leasehold five-year term of office. How much less does it belong to a Parliament whose Members were held in such low esteem, given their unacceptable behaviour, that no party was able to secure the unequivocal mandate of a majority in the other place? Whatever the issues were in the recent election, I can tell your Lordships that, apart from the fine print buried in the massive verbiage of the three party manifestos, the so-called reform of your Lordships' House featured nowhere on the doorstep, as my noble friend Lord Higgins said. He may have been talking about south London, but the same applied in north-west London. Voters were interested in jobs, housing, immigration and above all the effect of the economy on their own lives.
Members of your Lordships' House who have been Members of the other place, party activists or have served their trade unions have already done more than their fair share of electioneering. I cannot see the leaders of industry, academics, Nobel laureates, distinguished commanders of our forces and others who are here honoris causa submitting themselves to door-to-door canvassing or to toadying up to the Whips in the hope of securing a higher place on the list if, as has been suggested, an election is held on the PR system.
The House of Lords has existed for more than 800 years. It is not open to a transient group of politicians to change it without the full knowledge and consent of the public and after a comprehensive, detailed debate. If this sounds like a call for referendum—I have never really approved of that—it is, but it is very low key. As we know, the outcome of a referendum can be manipulated in advance by the phrasing of the question. My choice would be exactly the same as that of the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, and of the noble Lord, Lord Lea, “Do you subscribe to the view that if it ain’t broke don’t fix it?”.
I assure your Lordships that I wish to discuss briefly the basic question posed by this debate. If the “reform” is not simply to alter the composition of your Lordships' House, what is to be reformed? The current President of the United States of America got himself elected by constantly repeating the mantra calling for change. Change from what to what was never specified. What reform do we need to enable us to perform our functions better without the other place ceding us additional powers, which, of course, it will not? In fact, the package of reforms proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Steel, in the Motion in his name on the Order Paper is indeed worthy of our support as it deals with difficulties that we have. The beauty of Britain's unwritten constitution is its flexibility and adaptability. Before we give a single day's consideration to the reform of the membership of your Lordships' House, it is essential to define what its functions should be. What is it supposed to do? What powers shall it have? What powers will be ceded by the other place? In short, what inducement will there be to persons of the same quality as those here now to put themselves up for the rigours of election?
Reform of the House is a distraction when compared with the vital and pressing subjects with which the country and the new Government should be concerning themselves first and foremost. The cosmetic issue of reform of the House, accompanied by the sound of the hoof-beats of hobby horses thundering through the corridors of the Palace of Westminster, is an irrelevant act of self-indulgence which the country is neither interested in nor has the time for at present. I only hope, but with not much optimism, that after today's debate the Government will accept that they have far more important issues on which to expend further valuable parliamentary time.
Lord Elder
My Lords, I intend to make just a few points. I have supported and opposed referendums in the past, and I look forward with interest to hearing what a low-key referendum might look like. I suspect that I may well support one of those as well. I am, and remain, a unicameralist, but I would like to put that in context, for I would not like to see a unicameral settlement in the UK with nothing else changed.
Under the previous Government, there were major constitutional changes: reform here, with most of the hereditaries going; devolution to Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and London; and a great deal more. It was hoped that the English regions would be part of that as well. It was a coherent package of constitutional reform. That has not normally been the case in the UK. The tradition—and it is an unhappy one—is much more piecemeal. I fear that the present proposals for the Lords are very much in that piecemeal tradition.
The issue of the cost of a reformed House has been raised. The noble Lord, Lord Wright of Richmond, made the point that any proposed reformed, elected Chamber would cost at least three times what the present House costs, and questioned wisely whether this was the right time for such a proposal. I would add a further point. We are in the middle of discussions about changes to the allowance system in this House. At a time when we are under more scrutiny than ever before, it appears that we are seriously considering a system whereby if you live close to the House and have fewer additional costs arising from attendance, it will be possible to claim higher allowances than before, whereas if you live away from London, as I do, and have genuinely additional costs, you will be able to claim less than before. I wonder whether this bright scheme will survive real scrutiny. It sends a terrible message to the rest of the country and will tend to mean that the representation of the country away from London will be diminished. I will not be alone in looking very closely at the costs involved in attending the House. The proposal for a sort of half-day payment, which has all the hallmarks of being put forward in a blind panic rather than with serious prior thought, is as unworkable as it appears ridiculous.
One of the great strengths of this House is that it has always given Governments time and space to get legislation right. Not just the Government but the Opposition, outside interest groups, lawyers, Cross-Benchers and other experts all have time to consider what legislation will achieve, and are able to make changes and discuss things. For a whole plethora of interest groups, that time and space gives them the opportunity to lobby Parliament and argue their case. An elected House will not, I fear, be as willing to fulfil that function and is more likely to be involved in a battle for power with the other place.
The question of electoral systems has been raised—a matter on which the coalition partners have strong albeit opposing views. Having a different system here will mean endless dispute about the relative legitimacy of the two Houses. That point was made forcefully by my noble friend Lord Rooker. Politics is a dynamic process. I wonder where we might be in a couple of years’ time. How will the future of regional government look then? I imagine that there will be increasing demands. In areas such as the north-east there will be a realisation that people need their own voice in their own area, to offer them protection and leadership. That is also true of areas such as the south-west. I know that they are very well—uniquely well—represented by the parties in the coalition. Does that mean that people in such areas will have no differences with Westminster? Or does it just mean that they will have no way of dealing with the differences that they certainly will have?
We have a very mixed system of government across the United Kingdom. We have a chance to make it better with a coherent package. I fear that what is being proposed will only make matters worse.
Lady Saltoun of Abernethy
My Lords, before you can decide on how to reform this House, you have to decide what you want it to do, and I do not think that we have done that yet.
But whatever the functions of the House are to be, I have grave doubts about the wisdom of making it an all or part-elected House. I just do not think that the Prime Minister and his advisers have thought this through. I do not know who his advisers are, although I read names in the newspapers from time to time. I believe he would be wise, if he has not done so, to consult the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, who has studied the subject with some care. Election for every conceivable post is now the politically correct procedure, regardless of whether it is sensible or not. It is supposed to be “democratic” and “modern” and to make the body to which people are elected more “legitimate”. These buzzwords are bandied about without any thought for what they really mean.
I am asking Her Majesty’s Government to give a little thought to what they are about to destroy, before wading in with the bulldozers—for bulldozers it will be. There is no way that the existing House can evolve into an elected Chamber as it has always evolved in the past. It means starting again from scratch.
There is in this House at present a large body of ability and expertise in a wide variety of subjects. Much of it is on the Cross Benches, but there is a lot on all sides of the House. Is it wise to disband that expertise? For no system of election will give us the quality we now enjoy in many Members of the House, which is a mainly appointed House. I am sorry, but I do not think that the kind of people who are in this House now will want to stand for election and go through all the hustings and the hassle of doing so, whatever anybody may suggest. What is less than satisfactory here is the method of appointment—party leaders filling the House with their cronies whom they want to pay off for past favours; or those cronies from whom they have hopes and expectations. Only the Cross-Benchers have an appointments commission.
The noble Lord, Lord Steel, has trotted out his House of Lords Bill for another outing. I entirely agree with him—I am sorry that he is not in his place at the moment, to hear me agree with him for once—in his wish to have an appointments commission for the whole House. What I do not agree with is his recipe for the commission. In the first place, I do not see why the Speaker of another place should have any input into the membership of the commission. Come to that, I do not see why the Lord Speaker of this House should have one either, although I mean no disrespect to the Lord Speaker in saying this.
At the same time, I think that the leaders of the parties should have an input, the Convenor of the Cross Benches especially. I think that they should each be able to nominate members of the commission. However, they should have to nominate them from those members of the Privy Council who are also Members of this House, because that way you might get people who understood what was needed. The leaders of the Government and the Opposition and the Convenor of the Cross-Bench Peers could each nominate three members and the leader of the Liberal Democrats could nominate two members. That would make a commission of 11 members. The chairman of the commission should be an independent Cross-Bencher.
I could go into a lot of detail as to how the commission would work—it would work in much the same way as the commission of the noble Lord, Lord Steel—but we have very little time, and I will not bore your Lordships with the details in this debate. Anyone who is interested, which is very unlikely, can ask me.
As for the rest of the noble Lord’s Bill, any of us can retire at any time by simply ceasing to attend. Or is he proposing that we should be paid to cease to attend? I doubt if that would go down very well in the present fiscal state of the country. I find the noble Lord’s proposed embargo on ex-convicts a little sad. They have paid their penalty and some may have much to contribute.
The hereditary Peers were—as the then Lord Chancellor, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg, said at the Dispatch Box—to remain until the second stage of the reform had taken place, as hostages to annoy the Government and prod them into producing the second stage. The appointment of an appointments commission for the whole House would constitute that second stage of reform, and the hereditary Peers would have fulfilled their remit and should then go.
I do not think that the people of this country want the House of Lords destroyed. It is the Government who want this House destroyed, when it does its duty in preventing them getting their own way without a second thought. That is why the Government are determined to do what they propose. They do not wish to destroy—for destroy it would be—this House because it does not work. They wish to destroy it because it does work—too well for their comfort.
Lord Campbell of Alloway
My Lords, I do not have a prepared speech, but I made a few jottings and shall try to deal with them in relation to what has been said. At this stage of the debate, it is just as well that I did not try to make a speech, because I could never have matched the quality of the speeches that were against setting up an elected second Chamber.
Perhaps I may say a word or two on due process. I am extremely grateful not only to my noble friend Lord Higgins but to the noble Baroness, Lady Royall of Blaisdon, who immediately got hold of the importance of the point. This is crucial, because if you are to start a process, you really ought to start at the beginning. No one yet has taken that point, which is crucial. We should debate whether we want a second Chamber. Once we have said yes—we probably will, or perhaps we will not; I do not know—the committee that has been appointed can get to work. If we say no, it cannot.
What is the committee doing now? I do not know of course, but I suspect that it is very little. I think that it has had one meeting, but it may be meeting in vain. At the moment the committee should not be doing anything. One has to consider not only its remit but its composition. Why is there no Back-Bencher from any of the three main parties of our House on the committee? I do not know. If I asked the Leader of the House, I would not get a direct answer, because even if he knew he could not tell me. This is a very important question because the whole process could collapse if a court were to hold that there had been no due process.
It is not only Back-Benchers from the three main parties. It is crucial to include the party in opposition, whatever it thinks, because we are supposed to be a sort of democracy. As the noble Lady, Lady Saltoun, said, we should also have someone who knows something about the House. Most of the people in the other place know nothing about the House. They do not want to know anything about the House. They do not like the House very much. They think that we are an awful nuisance. I do not blame them, but they are not ideal candidates for a committee to improve our work.
Those two aspects have to be dealt with. There is no prospect of a compromise. I hoped that there might be, but I made some inquiries and was informed by people who are more knowledgeable than I am that there is no prospect. Well, these questions will be dealt with at Question Time next Tuesday.
The noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, dealt with this next point in a remarkable fashion. What about the people? What do they think? Do they want a change in the House? Has anybody asked them? Does anybody know? The feeling is that the people are really rather satisfied with the way in which we deal with things in a moment of difficulty. I argued this point from the other side of the Chamber some time ago, when we debated the Eames report. The day after that debate, the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Eames, said to me outside, “You were right. What we wrote in the report could not have been the right reason”. However, there were other reasons. The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, who was not the Leader of the House then, said, “Well, times have changed and that is the reason”. However, there is no evidence that the people are dissatisfied.
Let us not forget that, as the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury said on 8 June, the “historic role” of our House is to represent “non-partisan civil society”. This is not only about elections; it is about the nation. Before we debate, we want to know what the people think. Some time ago, polls showed that the people supported our House. Perhaps the papers or someone else could arrange for us to have some evidence, of whatever quality, of what the people think before we have this essential debate.
Lord Morris of Aberavon
My Lords, since I first came to Parliament, I have listened to many debates on the reform of this House but I have never spoken in one. My fondest memory is of the debates on House of Lords reform in the other place in the late 1960s, when a coalition of Michael Foot and Enoch Powell, both eminent parliamentarians, held the Labour Government to ransom. As we did not have a sufficient majority to impose a closure, that Lords reform Bill was obviously dying on its feet. Its unenthusiastic author, Jim Callaghan, departed to the warmer climes of a Commonwealth conference, leaving the management of the Bill in the interminable, long nights to his young Parliamentary Secretaries, Lord Merlyn-Rees and the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan. In one of his late night interventions, Mr Foot reminded the House of a naval battle in the Mediterranean, when the admiral had been shot on the deck of his ship, leaving his young son standing alone on deck, whence all had fled. Michael said of the two young Parliamentary Secretaries that never had such responsibility rested on such young shoulders,
“since the boy stood on the burning deck”.—[Official Report, Commons, 14/4/69; col. 885.]
Soon afterwards, that attempt at reform was abandoned. I forecast a lot of trench warfare on this occasion, too.
There may be greater success if we keep at the forefront of our minds what I regard as some important facts. First, in our time, there have been massive changes in the entitlement to membership of this House. Secondly, it would be counterproductive to have piecemeal, individual reform of the two branches of the legislature. The Commons must be the primary House. Supply must be its concern and its concern alone. That is why I have looked with great disfavour when the head of a major spending department is in this House. Traditionally, my view used to be the attitude of the Labour Party, too. To achieve any worthwhile reform of this House and to ensure the stability of that reform, the powers of both Houses and the relationship of Westminster to the devolved legislatures should be considered first. We have had that reiterated time after time in this debate.
It is said from time to time that there is no intention of giving this House more powers. Powers are the key to the future. It is said that the powers of this House and of the other place would remain the same. That is nonsense. No self-respecting reformed House of Lords would be content with that. Elected Members of this House, with their staff and offices and with the enhanced credibility of having been elected, would demand their place in the sun. Unless a provision is built in to limit in some way their re-election—and there could be human rights problems with such a proposal—they will strive for more powers and the publicity from the exercise of those powers. Within our shores, we have seen in the last few years the demand from the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly for more powers. The same would happen with an elected House here.
Michael Foot also said, “Don’t ever think that you can make the House of Lords an India paper edition of the House of Commons without creating eternal conflict”. We are approaching a situation in which we have too many elections—to the Commons, Europe, the devolved legislatures and councils, as well as referenda, with more to come. Over the years, the percentage of those voting has gone down. It would be a brave person who would claim that, with different kinds of voting for different kinds of bodies, the percentage of those voting would go up. What sort of poll could we expect from another tier of elections for this House, unless we piggyback that election on another one?
Dare I say that there is a problem of identifying people who are prepared to stand the rigours of election to office? I surmise, with respect, that many if not most of our present membership would not dream of doing so. Given the resources that MPs now have to carry out their duties, can the totality of their number, which has been increasing over decades, be justified? When the Welsh Assembly was created, my postbag and my surgery workload as an MP were halved overnight. For all these reasons, I suggest a different approach. We now need an impartial study, probably by a royal commission—as we used to have, particularly on matters pertaining to the constitution. The most recent one in my time was the Kilbrandon Commission on devolution. The remit of the royal commission would be to examine the powers and constitution of both Houses; the number of Members; and Westminster's relationship with the devolved assemblies. Before we proceed any further, we should do that.
Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank
My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Morris, we are all allowed a personal reminiscence—perhaps an indulgence—on this occasion. My text for today arises from 20 October 1994, when I said in the House:
“I believe that it would be a mistake for any government to make the reform of the House of Lords the centrepiece of the first parliamentary Session”.—[Official Report, 20/10/94; col. 368.]
I suggested that there were more urgent problems, such as poverty, unemployment, health, education and homelessness. I went on to say that if, however, legislation were to be proposed, it should examine how life Peers were chosen, and by implication the ending of the hereditary principle. I also said that an appointed House should reflect the composition of the electorate as indicated at general elections.
That was my view 16 years ago. Consistency is not necessarily a virtue, but my views since have remained broadly the same. As for priorities, although my noble friends on the Front Bench may wince, I will remind them that there were only two and a half lines about reform of the Lords in the 108 pages of my party's manifesto—and one paragraph out of 300 in the document, The Coalition: Our Programme for Government. In the election campaign, I did not hear much about this in Glenrothes, Wigan or Llanelli. However, I recognise and fully accept the Government's wish to publish a Bill with a large measure of cross-party agreement. If the Bill is a big, bold proposal, it will absorb a great deal of parliamentary time. The alternative is an important, significant but relatively modest Bill, which may succeed.
One objection to the character of the House 16 years ago was the unfair and damaging political dominance of the Conservative Party. In the interim, without statutory change and owing to my noble friend Lord Wakeham's royal commission, there is now a convention by which there are at present more Labour Peers in the House than Tories, even if there are not enough Liberal Democrats. Another objection at the time was, as I said, to the hereditary principle. Although I thought that it should be abandoned completely and did not agree with the Weatherill amendment, at least under the 1999 Act the hereditaries have been reduced to fewer than 100. There has also been an Appointments Commission since 2000. This is better than nothing, although it is not statutory, it has arbitrary numbers and it does not cover all noble Lords who sit on the Cross Benches.
There have been other major constitutional developments, including the election of the Lord Speaker and the departure of the Law Lords to the new Supreme Court. The House has changed a great deal for the better over these years without becoming elected or partially elected. By common consent, the House is very effective in the scrutiny of legislation because it now has a greater range of experience and talent. At the same time, there has been no challenge to the primacy of the Commons. In the end, the existing elected House wins—and quite right, too.
In a debate almost three years ago, I said that my preference among the options for reform of the Lords was for no more White Papers, no more parliamentary Statements and no more working groups. I called for a moratorium of at least five years. It was, I think, the informal view of my noble friend Lord Strathclyde that he would perhaps prefer 10 to five. However, when I came to examine the first draft of my noble friend Lord Steel's Bill, I softened. There was a strong case for supporting it.
Almost every Member of your Lordships' House has a personal agenda. My own is for all Bills to go first to the Commons for Second Reading—to agree on the principle of the Bill and vote if necessary—and then to the Lords for all its stages, from Second Reading to Third and Do Now Pass. After that, it would return to the Commons, which would take the remaining usual proceedings up to Royal Assent. One advantage would be to end the tiresome exchange of ping-pong, another to emphasise that the House of Commons would have the last word. I am tempted to examine this further, but on this occasion I am content to back my noble friend Lord Steel's Bill as the core for new legislation to be promoted by my Government.
Lord Norton of Louth
My Lords, like others, I have no problem with taking note of the case for reform of the House of Lords. Indeed, I am happy to support reform. There are various changes that we could and should make in order to render the House more effective and efficient in fulfilling its tasks, not least those changes so clearly adumbrated by my noble friend Lord Steel of Aikwood. However, like others, I distinguish between reform and what the Government propose for this House, which is not reform but destruction. The Government's case for a largely or wholly elected House is built on stilts. In the time available, I wish to address each of these and demonstrate why they cannot bear the weight given to them.
First, we are told that having an elected second Chamber is the “settled view” of the House of Commons. This derives from the outcome of two Divisions in 2007. It is not clear why the votes of MPs in 2007 constitute a settled view but their votes in 2003 do not. How can something decided on only one occasion constitute a settled view? If there is a settled view, it is the consistently expressed view of this House, which apparently is to be dismissed.
Secondly, we have heard the argument a number of times that an elected second Chamber is the “democratic” option. This is usually advanced as if it is self-evidently true. We have a representative democracy, at the heart of which is the concept of accountability. Our system of asymmetrical bicameralism ensures that we maintain what has been termed “core accountability”: that is, there is one body—the party or parties in government—responsible for public policy and accountable through elections to the House of Commons for that policy. There is no divided accountability, as exists in presidential systems and/or where both Chambers are elected. The role of this House, by virtue of not being elected, is to complement the elected Chamber and not to conflict with it. Once one elects a second Chamber, the relationship will change and undermine the core accountability that I consider a particular strength of our current system.
Thirdly—this is related—we are told that an appointed Chamber lacks legitimacy. Legitimacy derives from a popular acceptance that certain people are the most appropriate for fulfilling particular tasks. The means by which they are selected to fulfil their task will vary according to the nature of the task. There is survey evidence that people want this House to fulfil its current tasks, not least that of detailed scrutiny of legislation. The legitimacy of the Commons derives from election. Our legitimacy derives from having a membership that is especially qualified, through experience and expertise, to engage in informed scrutiny. They are different forms of legitimacy but they constitute legitimacy none the less.
Fourthly, we are told that moving to an elected Chamber will not affect the relationship between the two Houses. My noble friend Lord McNally has said in answer to a Written Question from the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart of Swindon:
“The Government believe that the basic relationship between the two Houses, as set out in the Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949, should continue when the House of Lords is reformed”.—[Official Report, 24/6/10; col. WA 206.]
Perhaps, in replying to the debate, my noble friend can tell us why he thinks that the Parliament Act was put on the statute book. Election will change the relationship between the two Houses and indeed the relationship in the second Chamber between the parties. The partisanship that is a feature of the other place—a consequence of competitive election—will translate to this place. It will be difficult to see how demands for greater powers than those presently held by this Chamber can be resisted.
My noble friend’s Answer demonstrates the key failure of the Government’s approach. Our constitution comprises a number of bodies that have evolved over time, each interlocking with other parts of the system. No one institution is a wholly autonomous body capable of being removed or replaced without having implications—sometimes fundamental implications—for the other parts. We have to understand the complex nature of our constitution before we make substantial change to any one part. We have to have a clear understanding of what Parliament does—and what we expect of it—in relation to the body politic before we embark on replacing one of its Chambers.
Some claim that the subject of Lords reform has been debated ad nauseam. It has been debated at length, but most of the debate, like the White Papers on Lords reform, has focused on process. The Government appear to have achieved the remarkable feat of not having engaged with the principles and not having thought through the consequences. We need to engage in a proper, thorough debate. I look forward to my noble friend agreeing that any legislation must be a consequence of such debate and not a substitute for it.
Lord Desai
My Lords, it is a great privilege to follow the noble Lord, with whom I totally disagree, although I shall not explain why as I do not have the time.
I have been in this House for 19 years but I still fail to admire myself so much that I think of myself as indispensible to the British constitution. It is difficult not to be in love with oneself but I try. I am for a wholly elected House of Lords and always have been. I belong to a party which, I remind my noble friends on this side of the House, had to be dragged from being abolitionist to being in favour of a reformed House of Lords. If some of us have now moved to a no-change position, I shall not join them.
This, I believe, is the first time that we are in serious danger of being reformed. We at last have a Government who have the commitment to do that and, given what they are doing—I believe, rightly—to the economy, they need a political programme that will prove their radicalism. This Government have the majority in the House of Commons—and perhaps even in the House of Lords, although whipping is difficult—that will make it possible for them to pass a Bill on reforming the Lords to a wholly or partially elected House. That is quite a serious possibility. This is now the time to stop thinking that this issue will go away or that people will get into a discussion about powers and conventions and that somehow reform will never happen.
I take this matter very seriously. I believe that this Government should not only draft a Bill for whichever option they choose—as I said, I prefer the wholly elected option—but should also be prepared to use the 1949 Act. When Tony Blair came to visit the Labour Peers’ Group about five years ago just after he had made a hospital pass to Jack Straw about House of Lords reform, I remember asking him whether he was going to use the 1949 Act. He looked as though I had assaulted him. He said, “No, of course not. I am going to rely on consensus”. At that moment, I knew that reform would not happen.
Constitutional change does not happen by consensus; it happens by conflict, as British history shows, although I shall not go into that. If we are serious—and I am very serious about this—then we have to get this Bill through. We have already waited 100 years. The right honourable gentleman the Deputy Prime Minister may not quite get what he wants in 2011 but he may get it in 2012. I want reform because of the inadequacy of the House of Commons to be a check on the Executive and because our appointed position does not make us powerful enough to check the Executive, despite the evidence that the noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, gave of our amendments being accepted. When push comes to shove, we always have to say that the other place is right and that we are wrong.
I consider the primacy of the Commons to be an historical accident of the past 1,000 years or so. It is an historical accident because your Lordships’ House is unelected. No Commonwealth countries adopted this bicameral model when they left the Empire. They all took a bicameral model but none had an appointed or hereditary House.
Lord Pilkington of Oxenford
Can I correct the noble Lord? What about Canada?
Lord Desai
I stand corrected. I always think of larger countries such as India and Pakistan. I apologise for that. However, Canada did not make its second Chamber hereditary, because at that time it did not have that option. There was not even an appointed element in your Lordships’ House when Canada made that choice.
The point is that other countries manage to have bicameral legislations with elected representatives and they get into conflict. Conflict is the essence of politics and conflicts get resolved. There are established ways of reconciling conflicts between two Chambers of a Parliament wherever there are two Chambers. Why are we afraid of conflict? Solidly belonging to my party, I believe that good things, including progress, come out of conflict; progress does not come out of reconciliation.
If we want a really effective Parliament—one that will be a check on the Executive—perhaps we will have to abandon the wisdom and sagacity of your Lordships’ House and have a Chamber which is elected and legitimate and which will be able effectively to check the Executive. We will then have to consider on what grounds we elect that Chamber, and a number of suggestions have already been made. The noble Lord, Lord Low, in particular, made a very interesting suggestion about appealing to various constituencies such as the royal societies and so on. However, we have to move to an elected principle—perhaps not on territorial grounds like the House of Commons—with Members who cannot be re-elected so that they are independent. Fear not, my Lords. There are other people who are very capable; the fact that they are not here does not prove that they are not.
Viscount Tenby
My Lords, I confess it is something of a shock to learn that there is a Back Bencher in favour of an elected House. With the new stricter regulatory regime, I feel I ought to declare a family interest in these matters. I can assure noble Lords that my contribution will be brief in view of the hour and a long speakers’ list.
The arguments in favour of an all-appointed, or largely appointed, House, against an elected one, have been well aired in a series of remarkable and compelling speeches. I would say that they enjoy the support of the majority of noble Lords on all sides of this Chamber. One of the more entertaining features of life in this place in recent months has been to watch the faces of those noble Lords seated behind their Front Benches when official policy on the subject of so-called reform is being discussed. To describe such faces as being supportive would be to stand the English dictionary on its head. Practical considerations and common sense are, of course, nearly always overlooked at such times.
However, to put in hand, at a time of dire economic stress, reforms which will add very considerably to the cost of the Lords, while at the same time driving a coach and horses through its ability to make a meaningful contribution, as it undoubtedly does at present, to this country's legislative process, beggars belief. I am reminded of the question, repeatedly and cogently asked—and asked again today—by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, who is not in his place: in what way will any reform improve the quality of the work that the Lords is expected to carry out, and how will it improve its performance? Each time, until today, that question has been met with a deathly hush, but I am much obliged to the noble Lord, Lord Richard, who also is not in his place—this is a problem of speaking down the batting list, as they say—for supplying an answer during this debate. I cannot say that I am persuaded by it, but at least he has provided, as one would expect from the noble Lord, a lucid and passionate case for the forces of darkness.
Proponents of reform, as they like to call it—although in this specific context “destruction” rather than “reform” might be a more accurate word—take pleasure in using words like “anachronistic”, “indefensible” and “undemocratic” to describe this place, but, like many other noble Lords I suspect, I have rarely heard them used by ordinary people outside the hothouse atmosphere of Westminster and certain sections of the media. Rather, there would appear to be a modest appreciation of the work we do, although we must never ever be guilty of self-satisfaction.
I would like to make two observations, one general and one particular, about the spin-offs from this reform crusade. On the generality, there is much talk of the need for democratic accountability and that, of course, entails elections. Interestingly enough, however, figures show that the increased demand for elections—for Europe, for mayors, for the police, for Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all—runs in direct parallel with the drop in numbers of those taking part in the democratic process itself. In 1950, for example, the percentage turnout for the general election was 83.9 per cent and in May, it was 65.1 per cent. As a democrat, I have a strong feeling that we should be doing more, far more, to get the electorate to vote at the only election which really counts—the election of Members of the other place.
Let us fine tune the mechanism for general elections by making it possible for everyone to vote who wants to vote, without being turned away at the polling stations and without multiple voting fraud, by having sensible constituencies, and so on, before we start fiddling about with additional electoral creations where a 40 per cent turnout will be regarded as a triumph. That sort of thing brings democracy into disrepute. As to the particular, we learn, just as with certain aspects of the human rights legislation, that democracy can be selective. Let me remind the House, for the umpteenth time today—good tunes always bear repetition—about the committee established to produce a draft reform Bill by the end of the year. It contains no Member of the Cross Benches, and Cross-Benchers account for a quarter of the membership of this place, and it has no Back-Bencher on it. Presumably, one cannot risk the chance of dissenting voices. It might be too much to talk of the tyranny of democracy, but to describe it as the selectivity of democracy would seem an apt description.
Of course, I welcome sensible reform of the House, but reform and not destruction. There are more urgent issues than the debate between election and appointment. Let me refer to just two. At present, the House is far too large; its size should be reduced through the sympathetic and sensitive encouragement of retirement. Secondly, the Appointments Commission should be put on a statuary basis. I cannot understand why the excellent Bill proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Steel, should not be given a fair wind without delay. I look forward, with interest and sympathy, to the Motion of the noble Lord at the end of these proceedings today.
Recent experience has shown us the constitutional folly of piecemeal, or rushed, reform. Ill-thought-out changes, which after experience and evaluation can be seen not to have worked, can take a long and damaging time to put right. Any reform to this House must enhance its capabilities and be in harmony with the other place. Nothing else will do for the good governance of future generations.
The Earl of Onslow
My Lords, I am probably one of those people who will support an elected House, although, having listened to the noble Lord, Lord Cope, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, I thought that their cases were very strong indeed. When the noble and learned Lord was speaking, I looked at the three Cross Benches there and saw a collection of talent which was mind-blowing. Will we, because of election, lose those people? I was wavering. What made me stick to my guns is what the noble Lord, Lord Desai, said: I, too, want this House to be more powerful. Let us remember how the King’s Government goes on: the King’s Government can only continue because the Commons gives it money so to do. We have never had tax-raising powers; we only had “don’t raise tax” powers and when more people voted to tax other people and it was popular and necessary as a result of universal suffrage, it was natural for this House to say to the Commons, “No, you cannot take powers”. It lost all credibility and the consequence was 1911.
The powers that rest in this House are still, as the noble Lord, Lord Desai, and others have said, very considerable. I can think of several statutory instruments in the past year which we should have voted down. We should have voted down the one about all those northern boroughs and then the Government would not have got into a pickle. The fact that the first Division in this House this Session was lost by a Conservative Government in the House of Lords is one of those totally joyous facts which one will cherish, giggling, all the way to one’s grave. I am not sure the Whips feel like that.
The system of election is very difficult and it is important that the election should not be at the same time as that for the House of Commons. It is equally important that people should be elected for, say, a fixed term of 15 years with no re-election. When elected to this House, the Whip should lie like gossamer upon your shoulders. Admittedly, I am here because Pitt got drunk with my great-great-grandfather, but we have been paid our bribe and all that sort of stuff. For however long I have been here, the Whip has rested lightly upon my shoulders. I hope it has not stopped me being a great supporter of the Conservative Government when in office and someone who has tried on occasions to make the Labour Government’s life impossible. However, Governments are never perfect; they make mistakes; and, therefore, something has to be done about it.
If you have elections, you go back to what our Whig forebears found, which is a balance of power between the two. There was an amazing example of 18th century government which took place in Australia. Because the Australians had had dominion status, as it was then called, before 1911, their Senate had the power to throw out Budgets, exactly as the old House of Lords did. When the Senate under Gough Whitlam threw out the Budget, Sir John Kerr dissolved Parliament and said to the people, “The King’s Government have stopped. Now please, oh people, choose another King's Government”.
The Whig constitution of 1688 works perfectly. Before 1911, that is how this House functioned. It said that we will very rarely sling out Bills, but when we do, either you accept it or you call an election and let the people decide. If you rebalance the powers between the two Houses, you have a more balanced and, in my view, a more efficient Government.
The House of Commons now has a system of timetabling and guillotining. The Bills come from the House of Commons undigested and undiscussed. We seem to be able to go through most of them on the Floor of the House quite sensibly. I am not asking for a change of culture. I am just suggesting that we should use the powers that we have and have the legitimacy to use those powers more than we do.
The Archbishop of York
I am confused; perhaps the noble Earl can explain. He says that by electing this Chamber, those powers can be properly used. The House of Commons is all-elected. Does it do better in making the Government accountable? Does it use its time to revise the law properly? They are elected. What difference would that make to this House that does not happen in the House of Commons, which is fully elected? Can he enlighten me?
The Earl of Onslow
I am extremely sorry that the most reverend Primate is confused, and I will do my level best to try to deconfuse him. It is a question of legitimacy of power, is it not? In today’s world, it is difficult to say that power can arise other than through some element of popular choice. If we had an elected House, there would be no reason why the Prime Minister should not sit on that Front Bench, because if the party chose him as leader, he would have power. We would get a rebalance of the Whig constitution. That is very important.
Finally, if and when we have a change, please, please, please do not let us call this House a senate. I would love to be elected—it would be great fun to come in because of birth, because of an odd election and then because of a popular election, but I am much too old—but if I were I would not like to address my fellow Members in an upper Chamber as conscript fathers. Let us keep calling it the House of Lords. Let us not change it to a senate. Those are my views. I know that I am in a minority but there we are, that is what politics is all about.
Lord Hoyle
My Lords, we always get surprises in this House, and I did not imagine that I would agree so much with the noble Earl. Nor did I imagine for one moment that he was going to be in favour of an elected House. Indeed, when agreeing with the Leader of the House in the past, I said that there were only two of us in favour. Now it appears that there are one or two more than that.
On the other side, we have heard again—I agree with my noble friend Lord Richard when he says that the arguments are all the same—the reason for delay and why we cannot do it now. We have referred in passing to the fact that there have been party manifestos on this. The Conservative Party manifesto stated:
“We will work to build a consensus for a mainly-elected second chamber to replace the current House of Lords, recognising that an efficient and effective second chamber should play an important role in our democracy and requires both legitimacy and public confidence”.
In their manifesto, the Liberals were quite short on the subject. They simply said:
“Replace the House of Lords with a fully-elected second chamber with considerably fewer members than the current House”.
That is quite straightforward as well. The Labour Party manifesto stated:
“Further democratic reform to create a fully elected Second Chamber will then be achieved in stages. At the end of the next Parliament one third of the House of Lords will be elected; a further one third of members will be elected at the general election after that. Until the final stage, the representation of all groups should be maintained in equal proportions to now. We will consult widely on these proposals, and on an open-list proportional representation”—
I emphasise, an open-list proportional representation—
“electoral system for the Second Chamber, before putting them to the people in a referendum”,
with which I agree. It is no use this House continuing to resist change.
My noble friend Lord Desai is right; it is possible that that could go through, and it is time that the House recognised that that is legitimate and could happen. We have seen that the new Government are prepared to bring that about. There has been a lot of talk about the clash between the two Houses if it happened. On 24 June, the noble Lord, Lord McNally, stated:
“The Government believe that the basic relationship between the two Houses, as set out in the Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949, should continue when the House of Lords is reformed”.—(Official Report, 24/6/10; col. WA 206.)
That is right as well. There is no reason why there should always be a clash between the Commons and the Lords. What about the Lords and the Commons coming together to bring the Executive to account? I do not see why that could not be achieved. We have been looking at the negative; let us look at the positive for a moment.
We have been talking about the size of a new House. We ought to recognise that this House is run by about 400 people. There may be nearly 800 Members, but attending week by week or day by day there are about 400, give or take—sometimes there are less, sometimes more—so there is no reason why we should not look at a composition of a House of about 400. I welcome what the Leader of the House said: that he would look at proposals for what might happen to existing Peers—retirement, or how else they could go? There is no reason why we cannot change that.
I also agree with the noble Earl that anyone who is elected should be elected for one term—that term being, I suggest, about 15 years. It could be for three Parliaments; it could be for 15 years. Where I disagree is that if we are to get a real turnout and make a representative House, the election must be on the same day as the general election, when the Commons is elected, but in a different way. I believe that it should be elected by region; I believe that it should be by proportional representation; but I believe that it should be by an open list, so that Members are not responsible to the parties in the same way. We know what parties do with lists; they put those who they want at the top and those they do not want nearer the bottom. Why should not the electorate select for themselves who they want to sit in Parliament?
If you pass legislation, you should be democratically elected. I think it is possible—I go no further than that—to say that after 100 years, we may be nearing the time when there could be an elected House. I respect everyone in this Chamber. I really enjoy my time here and any debate I partake in, but instead of trying to delay and procrastinate, we have to recognise that this might happen and must play a role in bringing it about. We must be positive and look towards the future: a democratic House. We will end 100 years of procrastination when we achieve that aim.
Lord Pilkington of Oxenford
My Lords, as an old history master, I must give a little correction; Peers assessed themselves until, I think, 1663. That said, the noble Lord, Lord Desai, was right to say that you must consider the history of every country when you consider their constitutions. As the 38th speaker on the speakers list, I can only underline what other noble Lords have said. The fact is that the British Executive are one of the strongest in the world. As noble Lords know, in recent times Lord Hailsham described it as an elective dictatorship. Paradoxically—and we have got to face this fact—this House is the most independent element in the English constitution. The late Lord Peyton was a great friend of mine. Those of you who knew him here know that he was an awkward and independent man. The Whips once got hold of him and said that he ought to knuckle under and be more supportive of the Government. He replied, in a very pretty phase, “Look, you’ve got nothing to give me that I want, and there is nothing that I have that you can take away from me”. That is, in a way, the essence of this House. We are all independent. I am possibly more independent than many, which is why I am 38th on the list.
The basis for this executive power is the political party. There is a book to be written on the English political party. It is one of the strongest in western Europe and was created from Gladstone, Disraeli and Salisbury onwards. It is the basis of the power of the Executive. Many Members know more intimately that I do what happens when you rebel against a political party. Very few rebels last after one election. The party holds the power. Harold Wilson descried it by saying, “If you don’t wear my dog collar, you won’t get anywhere”. That is the historical background we are operating against. The political party will not alter its power and will remain, and that is why I oppose elections. You would not have men like the late Lord Peyton. The noble Lord, Lord Hoyle, who spoke eloquently in favour of democracy, is also an independent man, but would he be in an elected House with a career to prove?
A long tenure has been suggested. The English political party has refined and developed its methods and would deal with that tenure in no time at all. When the poor fellow passed his tenure, he would be told that he had no hope unless he committed himself to the party.
I am opposed to election. I think we are walking blindfold into an abyss. I agree with all that my noble friend Lord Norton said, but that does not mean that I am happy with the present method of appointment, although I was a beneficiary of it. It is not beyond the wit of man to devise a system of appointment that is fairer and more independent and that would produce a House that is better, possibly, than the one we have now. It is crucial that, with a strong Executive and iron political parties, there is an independent element somewhere within our legislature. The fact is that we are it. If we abandon this, we get over the abyss and hand total control of the legislature to the English political parties. I suggest that we would do that at our peril. History would not reward us for what we did. I ask noble Lords to think. The noble Lord, Lord Richard, spoke about democracy. It is a sort of magic word. We have forgotten who invented the referendum; it was Napoleon, and he never lost one. We also forget that the greatest beneficiary of the democratic system was the late Adolf. We should not plunge ourselves into that abyss.
Lord Cobbold
My Lords, I am one of those who strongly support the House remaining a fully appointed Chamber. I support the reforms proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Steel, and agree to the proposed ending of the election procedure for replacing the 92 hereditary Peers. Although I am a beneficiary, I do not think that heredity can any more be justified as an automatic qualification for membership of your Lordships' House. That does not, of course, mean that a hereditary Peer cannot be appointed to the House on the basis of personal merit.
My main concern is about the growing size of the Chamber. Noble Lords are living longer and the numbers of new entrants are large. The idea proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Steel—that there should be a voluntary retirement option—is a step in the right direction, but I do not believe that it would solve the problem. I believe that there should be a fixed retirement rule. It should be based on either a retirement age or a fixed period of service. I feel strongly that a fixed period of service is preferable. An age limit takes no account of the fact that individuals become Members at different ages and therefore would have different periods of service. A fixed period of service, on the other hand, is the same for everyone.
How long should the fixed period of service be? It could be 20 or 25 years; I would suggest 20. There should be a mechanism to grant an extension of, say, up to five years to a Peer who is making a significant contribution at the time of retirement. This step could be approved by the Lord Speaker after consultation, as appropriate. Given that a large proportion of the current membership of the House has considerably more than 20 years of service, it would be necessary to have an extended transition period of at least five years. I proposed such a system in an amendment to the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill in the previous Parliament, but it was lost in the wash-up and not debated. Basically, it would involve listing the present membership by length of service and dividing it into, say, five groups, with the longest serving group retiring in the first year and the others spread over the next four years. In summary, I believe that a fixed period of service will be necessary if this House is to survive as a fully appointed House, and I believe that it is of paramount importance for the future of this country that it should.
Lord Skelmersdale
My Lords, in discussing this subject, I believe that we should take a firm and objective view of ourselves and what we do or, rather, the results of what we do. When all is said and done, we are a House of Parliament with very few powers, fewer even than when WS Gilbert wrote that we,
“Did nothing in particular,
And did it very well”.
As my noble friend Lord Cope pointed out, we often do not use the powers that we have. We credit ourselves—and, to be fair, outsiders do too—on being an efficient and cheap revising Chamber, not only in discussing potential Acts of Parliament, but in general debates, Starred Questions and in looking at government policies or, sometimes, the lack of them. I must ask noble Lords to look beyond this and consider what happens then.
The noble Lord, Lord Richard, is right. The answer is precisely nothing, except in very rare cases until or unless the Government of the day accept our findings. That is why I believe that a better description of our activities is “advisory”. It follows then that we are not so very different from any other quango anywhere in the world, but with one notable exception. We are the biggest by far. I am sure that it is principally this that has, over the past few years, put the wind up the leaders of all the political parties. I am therefore delighted by the formation of the Leader’s Group to be chaired by my noble friend Lord Hunt of Wirral.
We are, of course, smaller than we were before the great emasculation, a phrase that does not gain universal approval. On 13 October 1999, we mustered 1,213— technically anyway, as 117 noble Lords had either no writs of summons or had taken leave of absence. That is around the size of the roll of Eton. At the beginning of the next Parliament, we had reduced to 674, with only four Peers on leave of absence. Today, including the three noble Lords we have just welcomed, we have 745. As my noble friend Lord Strathclyde said at the beginning of this debate, it would not surprise any of us if we did not number 800 by this time next year.
How can we possibly justify this? The answer is that we cannot. Indeed, could we do the same job so well and so inoffensively with less than the average daily attendance of 400? Do we even need 800 Peers to achieve attendance of 400? I doubt it very much. We must correct it. My solution is rather different from the announced policies of the main political parties, which got approval for them from a series of votes in another place in the last Parliament. This has resulted in a quick and dirty solution; that is, to have a substantially elected chamber. It is beyond peradventure that this will be the guts of the draft Bill that will be the product of the committee comprising the great and the good of the main political parties, all of whom are members of one or other Front Bench. My noble friend on the Front Bench will have noticed more than a little resentment here.
Before they do further work, I strongly suggest that the Government organise a free vote in another place to ascertain the views of a substantially different House. More than that, I would like to see a self-denying ordinance by my right honourable friend the Prime Minister of not recommending the creation of any more new Peers to Her Majesty once the parliamentary parties in this House are balanced. There should be no more mid-term lists except to correct the natural wastage of those that go to the great debating chamber in the sky, and there should certainly be no resignation honours unless we invent non-parliamentary life Peers. There should also be a statutory limit on the suggestions of the Appointments Commission.
Last, but not least, there should be no question of an elected House for all the reasons that have and will be given by other noble Lords. Another place will live to regret it if there is, unless we are to have what the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, might have called an elected poodle. That is what it seems the Government want.
Lord Anderson of Swansea
My Lords, we are invited to note,
“the case for reform of the House of Lords”.
In fact, the debate has noted the case for only limited reform or no reform at all. Clearly, House of Lords reform is very much a minority interest. As my noble and learned friend Lord Morris of Aberavon said, if there were to be a referendum just on this, one would anticipate a very small participation. The Conservative component of the Liberal-Conservative Government read public opinion better than its Liberal Democrat junior partners. For the Conservatives, at best before the election this was a third-term issue, which means that there would have been no conclusion during the lifetime of the first Parliament. They recognised that there are many issues much higher up the political agenda.
Thus, the question is: why now in government has this issue been accelerated against the political instincts of the Conservative Party? The answer is clear. For the Liberal Democrats, strictures on constitutional structures are very much part of their raison d’etre. There is a certain wide-eyed zeal, believing this to be, after 100 years or so, the unfinished business of Lloyd George. Just as Mr Clegg misread the significance of the Reform Act 1832, so I believe he has misread that of Lloyd George.
Lloyd George in my judgment would have shown himself to be a pragmatist at this time. One recalls the Limehouse speech:
“They toil not, neither do they spin”.
That is a world away from your Lordships’ House. Today’s House has a very different role and composition from his time. The truth is that the Liberal Democrats are so zealous that they were willing to pay a high price to obtain reform—not just voting reform, but including the reform of the second Chamber. But, the Minister, Miss Featherstone, as quoted in today’s Daily Telegraph, has said that she now recognises the sort of price that is being paid. It is the price of a free rein on constitutional reform for the Liberal Democrats so that the Conservative Party can have a free rein for a Tory Budget and massive welfare cuts, which will harm the poor particularly. It is sad to see the willingness to sacrifice the poor and the deprived in the country on the altar of constitutional reform. We have been here before. At an international parliamentary conference I recall a Florida Congressman saying that everything that can be said has been said, but not everyone has said it. So he proposed to make his own speech.
Let me try to expose some illusions. One illusion is that an 80 per cent or 100 per cent elected Chamber,
“answers the claims of democracy and accountability”.
That is absolute nonsense on stilts. If there were to be one election every 12 years with no possibility of facing the electorate again, how can such an individual be deemed to be accountable because they happened to pass an electoral test at one stage in the distant past? How can they in any way be accountable to an electorate?
The second illusion is that such a changed House would not rival the House of Commons. I think that it was Berkeley who said that no institution is static; all institutions are dynamic. Certainly, a House of Lords with democratic legitimacy would inevitably challenge the House of Commons more regularly and with greater ease.
Another illusion is that in a reformed House of Lords one can still expect the same expertise as we have now in this House. For me the argument is less strong, having seen some of the arguments in favour of a Welsh Assembly. We were in favour of an Assembly, but one of the arguments was that we would have a new sort of person coming from all corners of Wales and not from the traditional political structures. Alas and alack, although there are many very good people, the normal pathway to the Welsh Assembly is through being in the office of an existing Assembly person. One has to pass through the normal political structures if one values the expertise which one has from senior lawyers, senior medics and senior military people. Does one expect those lawyers, medics and generals to find a place on a party list? Of course they would not. If they were to expect to find a place on the list, the argument put to them would be: “What have you done? Have you laboured in the vineyard? What have you done for the party?”. It would be a different sort of House, which would be a pale reflection of the House of Commons and of those who, for various reasons, were not able to find their way here. They will not be the new people. Indeed, the old will prevail:
“New presbyter is but old priest writ large”.
Finally, the reality for all of us is that, ultimately, reform will come, as my noble friend Lord Hoyle has said. There will be a House wholly or mainly elected even if there is a Passchendaele of trench warfare in this House on the way. The other place seems not to understand that there is a real danger that much of value will be lost. Surely there is a case for analysing the strengths of the current House of Lords and for asking how one could mitigate the negative aspects of change.
That means not just altering the composition, but at present this House is less partisan than the other place, is more expert, has a stronger representation of women and minorities, is much stronger on human rights and is willing to be a curb on Government in this and other respects. So any change should ensure that no one party has a majority. At least 20 per cent of its composition should be appointed for their expertise and should be based on diversity. In the past, we have altered our constitution gradually, smoothly, moving from precedent to precedent. The Steel Bill, in my judgment, offered such a way out for the Government, but the zealots have rejected it, as the noble Lord, Lord Cobbold, said. I fear that much of value will be lost, and that we will indeed be a weaker reflection of the other place unless there is a clear analysis of the virtues of this place now and a serious attempt to preserve these so far as is possible.
Lord Goodhart
My Lords, it is now 99 years since the passing of the Parliament Act 1911. I think it would have considerably surprised the supporters of that Act that, a century on, the question of how people should become Members of your Lordships’ House is still undecided. To use for a moment the story that the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, raised about the man who said that everything that could be said once on a subject has been said but not everybody had said it, the situation here is more than that. Everything that could be said on this subject has been said and, what is more, everybody has said it. The trouble is that not everybody has said it more than 20 times. I shall therefore concentrate, perhaps slightly as a form of light relief, on other aspects of reform, just pausing to say that I support strongly the 80:20 per cent formula.
There have been many important changes since 1911 in the way in which your Lordships’ House operates. Notably, we have had the Life Peerages Act 1958 and the House of Lords Act 1999 which between them have fundamentally altered the nature and membership of the House. In 1911, Members of your Lordships’ House were mainly grandees, the hereditary aristocracy, the great landowners and the descendants of great landowners. That had been so ever since Parliament had first come into being 600 years earlier. But that is very far from the present membership. No new hereditary peerage, I believe, has been created since Harold Macmillan was created Earl of Stockton in 1984. It is several years now since any peerages have been included in the New Year’s or Birthday Honours.
Lord Goodhart
My Lords, I think Lord Tonypandy and Viscount Whitelaw were given peerages in 1983, a year earlier.
It is increasingly clear that new peerages created now are not awards of honours but are awarded as a method of appointment to a job. But there are many features of your Lordships’ House which are unsuitable to the House as it now exists and should be removed or altered. Let me start with a trivial matter. Why do we have to hire fancy dress from Ede and Ravenscroft if we want to attend the State Opening of Parliament? Scarlet robes are taken as a sign that we are still a group of hereditary aristos. Robes make us look out of date because the media always use photographs of us at the State Opening. I remember a photograph appeared in the newspapers of noble Lords dressed in robes and awaiting the gracious Speech in which I was the only identifiable face in the picture because I had turned around to talk to a Peer sitting behind me. Unfortunately the headline over the photograph was “Cash for peerages”. I must say that I thought I had good grounds for huge libel damages, but I avoided taking it any further.
More seriously, why do we have to have titles? Why do we have to be Lord X or Baroness Y? Why do many of us have to add place names on to our surnames? Titles, even if they are for life peerages only, seem to be another remnant of the hereditary aristocracy. Why not call ourselves—and here I disagree entirely with my noble friend Lord Onslow—senators in the same way as professors call themselves Professor or doctors call themselves Doctor without altering their names?
Let me move on to a more important matter. Why are we appointed for life? Again, that is a leftover from the time of hereditary peerages. I believe that all appointments to your Lordships’ House should have a time limit, and I agree, as most people have said, with 15 years. The Cross Benches add valuable expertise to your Lordships’ House which is particularly important when fewer and fewer Members of the House of Commons have experience of any work outside of politics. But most Cross-Benchers are only appointed on or close to retirement, and expertise has a sell-by date. After 15 years, expertise is usually not worth very much, and I believe that political appointments or elections should also be time-limited. In the case of elections that is inevitable, of course, because they will run only until the next appropriate election, but it should apply to those who in the future are appointed to sit in your Lordships’ House as party Members. I would extend this to those who have already been appointed, except that I do not want to be lynched by Members of the House, and indeed it would cause serious problems for my noble friends Lord Strathclyde and Lord McNally.
Quite plainly, our numbers are too large. Since your Lordships’ House is the best geriatric daycare centre in the country, we live for too long. I have been a Member for more than 13 years and I am conscious that my ability to contribute to the House is beginning to decline. When I will have completed my 15 years, my membership should come to an end.
The need to recognise and explain to other people that appointments to your Lordships’ House are for work and not for honour is completely different from the functions of Members of the House in 1911, and it is significantly different from the situation before the House of Lords Act 1999 came into force. But our retention of titles or life membership and other habits are out of date and mislead the public about the character of this place. It is time that we made it clear what we really are and stop pretending to be what our predecessors used to be.
Lord Jopling
My Lords, much has been said with which I strongly agree but, as Lord Peyton, whose name was mentioned a few moments ago, once said, “Nothing is spoilt by repetition”.
The House of Lords clearly needs reform, but the way not to reform it is to introduce the elected element. What will happen is that the bulk of the candidates—and here I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell—will see standing for election to come here as a second best choice to the House of Commons, as they do, to be frank, with the European Parliament now. The elections will be taken over by the parties whether we like it or not, and the elected Members will be taken over by the Whips. I say that with the authority of a former Government Chief Whip. The widespread expertise— which is the glory of this House—will be confined to the appointed Cross-Benchers, and that would be a tragedy.
However, the House needs reform and we have a good start with the Steel Bill. I like the phrase of the noble Viscount, Lord Tenby, who said, “Let us have sensible reform, not destruction”. Much has been said about the growing numbers. If we go on like this, it will be within the lifetimes of some of the younger Members of the House that we shall get to 1,000. We are already seeing the possibility of the Conservative shortfall in membership compared with the Labour Party likely to be corrected by the treadmill of top-up, as I call it. We need to move to a much smaller House—400, 500, it is arguable—which should be subject to a cap where the membership cannot go above that figure.
Over the weekend I was with American friends who have strong connections with the United States Senate. When I told them that I thought the membership of the House of Lords should be reduced from getting on for 800 down to 400, they were astonished and said that if the United States can manage with just over 100 in its upper House, why do we need 400?
However, the membership of the House should be flexible after each general election. I wish to ask a question of my noble friends on the Front Bench. I hope my noble friend Lord McNally might refer to this when he winds up because I have said it all before here and have never yet got any kind of an answer—partly because I do not think there is one. What would happen in this House if a party came from nowhere at a general election and became the Government, or a significant part of a coalition, with virtually no presence in this House? It happened not long ago in Turkey and Italy. I remember, and other Members, particularly the noble Lord, Lord Rodgers, will remember the surge of the SDP in the 1980s when it got to almost 30 per cent or maybe more—I forget, but around that figure—in the opinion polls. It was not sustained but it is not impossible that a surge of that kind could happen. It would be impossible here if there were a surge of that kind and a party came from nowhere and had no representation here. If we are to reform the House, let us take into account the chaos that would arise in that kind of eventuality. It is vital to deal with it now.
It would be important in the formula I suggest to adjust the House of Lords membership in the short time after a general election. The problem then is how you adjust the membership to reflect a change in government. I do not support an age limit; I do not support a set term of service. There are many around the House who will remember those who served for decades in this House; they lived to an old age in their 80s and 90s but contributed magnificently to the House. I would hate noble Lords to be thrown out just because of that.
The best way to adjust membership after each election is to leave it to the membership of the particular political party to decide which of the party members in the House will leave and which will stay. That was done very satisfactorily with the election of the 92 Peers who stayed on. Colleagues know their colleagues well, and they can be relied on to elect the most active and the most wise.
We need a formula that comes into effect after each election, so that within the cap of 400 or 500, as I say, you can allocate the membership totals to parties following the general election to reflect broadly the results in the House of Commons. Of course we would still need 20 per cent to 25 per cent of appointed Members on the Cross Benches, with all of their expertise, but whether you have an appointed or an elected House, in my view the two main parties should have more or less the same percentage. That percentage is currently around 30 per cent, and maybe each of the two parties would need rather more than that. You would leave the balance of the membership to the other parties.
I have made this speech before. I believe that it has become rather more relevant than it has been in the past, with our numbers approaching the absurd figure of 800.
Lord Inglewood
My Lords, having heard the noble Lord, Lord Jopling, I am sure that he will agree that it is better to hear a good speech twice than a bad speech once.
This is a good time to consider House of Lords reform, for two reasons. The first is that we have a coalition Government. Any party in government thinking about reform of this kind is almost inevitably going to see how it can obtain party advantage. The great thing about having a coalition of two parties is that, with a bit of luck, they may be able to keep each other reasonably honest.
The second reason is that this is part of a wider debate about parliamentary reform. As has already been said on a number of occasions, we cannot deal with the way that a second Chamber is composed or operated without reference to Parliament as a whole, because of the independent nature of its components. In that context, it is important to appreciate that we cannot prescribe by statute how a chamber of a parliament actually works. Since 1999, we have seen how this Chamber has gained considerable political self-confidence, and it has a kind of political impetus behind it that it did not have a decade ago.
I spent 10 years of my life in the European Parliament; indeed, I think I represented my noble friend Lord Jopling, who obviously felt that he might have had a better representative; I do not know. I remember the way that, regardless of what the precise constitutional position was, because we had been directly elected we slowly clawed more powers towards ourselves. This is the point that my noble and learned friend Lord Mayhew made when referring to my old friend, neighbour and mentor Viscount Whitelaw. In this context, I suspect that the more inferior any designation that is put to, and ascribed to, a Chamber of Parliament, the more uppity it will become as a result.
We cannot shackle the future, just as Parliament cannot bind its successors. If you look at the way that the European Union has evolved, you see that it was in a series of steps, each one of which was a settlement, but each settlement contained within it the mechanisms for change. If change takes place in accordance with the appropriate procedures, there is nothing that we can do about it. We can start by spelling out how the powers of a second Chamber may be exercised, but if a reformed second Chamber generates its own political impetus, there is nothing we will be able to do to stop it trying to acquire more. We should not be remotely concerned about that; we should cross those bridges if and when we reach them.
I turn to what I might call “soft points”. I will not necessarily offer any answers to the questions that I pose but they are important, albeit that they may not have been widely canvassed. First, I believe that Parliament as a whole is excessively metropolitan. Inevitably it is going to be London-focused because of where it is, but I happen to live and work outside London, and that makes it a great deal more difficult organisationally to play a part. I am particularly on my guard when I hear reference to “family-friendly policies” in Parliament. That normally means that you are going to have to spend all evening by yourself, and the temptations of the stews of Soho will no doubt be ever more in one’s mind as the evening goes on. They are not family-friendly at all; they may be attractive to those who live in London, but for those of us who do not come from London they are diametrically the opposite.
Secondly, the basis of the allowances that we receive appears to be that Members of this House are financially self-sufficient, through outside earnings, inheritance or pensions—I do not for a minute suggest that I am not. However, many people in this country are not in that fortunate position. While I would not go so far as to say that membership of your Lordships' House is means-tested, that proposition has an echo of truth in the background.
Perhaps I may use the “A” word: age. The truth of the matter, whether we like it or not, is that this is a pensioners Parliament. The average age here is just under 70. I think that I have been in the youngest decile here for the 20-odd years that I have been a Member. I have nothing against people being old—indeed, I very much want to be old myself one day, albeit subject to St Augustine’s strictures about chastity—but the second Chamber should no more be a gerontocracy than be a shrine to youth.
As someone who has to go out to work—I have not yet reached retirement age, which seems to be disappearing over the far horizon—I come here as a Back-Bencher and I play a part-time role. I suppose that, in a life where portfolio activities are becoming increasingly prevalent, that is not necessarily perceived as being dilettante or amateur, but we need to decide how Back-Bench Members of this House should organise their time and what commitments are expected of people.
We live in a country where evolutionary change is the technique as we go through time. We have a flexible constitution and we do not wait for the pressure cooker to build up so it explodes. We adjust to forces of change before that happens. Whatever the rationale for the processes under way for reform of the second Chamber, we must not forget that the composition of the House of Lords is not only a matter for us who are Members here or for Members of Parliament as a whole but is also a part of the constitution and belongs to every British citizen, who has a legitimate interest in what is going on. What matters most about the work which the committee that will look into these matters will conclude is not whether there is consensus in committee, not whether there is consensus in Parliament, but whether what is proposed is acceptable to the country as a whole. We can see from reading the newspapers that there is a wide range of disagreement about what should happen in the second Chamber—it seems to draw almost every crank in Britain into the letters pages, and you see some extraordinary as well as some extremely wise contributions.
Political legitimacy does not depend on systems of appointment or Acts of Parliament. It depends on acceptance by the wider body politic, which may or may not in turn form its view based on it. The ultimate test of legitimacy is whether, when a decision is taken with which you disagree or which personally hurts you, you accept it as being fair and reasonable. If you do, it is legitimate. To achieve this, hearts and minds have got to be engaged; you cannot simply do it as a top-down administrative process. Acts of Parliament do not engender hearts and minds. You have only to look at, for example, the Act of Union with Ireland, which collapsed because the Irish simply were not prepared to put up with it; the same, I fear, could happen again with Scotland. The European Union’s biggest problem is that it has not won the hearts and minds of the citizens of this country and a number of others.
If proposals for a reform of this Chamber come forward, it is important that they have general acceptance across the country. I have no objection to radical change, but my own preference should not necessarily determine the way in which I vote. There is not a right and a wrong answer—there is a whole series of ways of skinning this particular dead cat—but it is important that we know what the country wants for the second Chamber. For the time being, I am in the dark about that.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester
My Lords, I am sorry that the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, the Leader of the House, has temporarily left his place, because I was going to start by congratulating him on the way in which he opened the debate. It was, typically for him, a smooth and polished performance. I felt that if he were to visit a turkey farm in November he would have no difficulty in convincing the residents that Christmas was really a time for rejoicing and that all of them should be grateful for the humane way in which they were going to be dispatched. However, he is not here, so perhaps his Chief Whip will pass that comment on to him.
I had hoped that the new Government would have tried harder to achieve a consensus on Lords reform. When my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer of Thoroton was Lord Chancellor, he made it clear that Members of your Lordships' House were to be part of the consensus which would deliver change. That made particular sense in the aftermath of the votes in the other place in 2003, when no majority could be assembled for any of the options on offer.
That approach was shattered, which made me sad, following the votes in the House of Commons on 8 March 2007, and from then on the views of Back-Bench Peers were largely ignored in the discussions about our future. Quite why the 2007 votes mattered so much, and why the failure to agree on any option in 2003 was of so little consequence, has never been satisfactorily explained to me. The noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, referred to this matter in his speech. I have a strong suspicion that, had a Bill been published before the recent election, it would have contained provision for the eventual expulsion of all existing Members as we moved to an all-elected House. I do not know how many of your Lordships are familiar with the TV game show “The Weakest Link”. I suspect that the noble Lord, Lord Jopling, may be, because he seemed to suggest that noble Lords should vote other noble Lords out because they were not contributing enough—very much the theme of that programme, as noble Lords will know if they are familiar with it.
Let us be quite clear about one thing. Those of us who are opposed to an elected House are not against reform. This House has already demonstrated that there is very considerable support for the measures contained in the Private Member’s Bill introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Steel of Aikwood. It is very regrettable that its merits were not recognised until it was too late in the last Parliament to do anything about it. If the noble Lord, Lord Steel, wishes to press his Motion to a vote later, I shall certainly support him. His Bill goes a very long way towards modernising this House, as the previous Government recognised in their Constitutional Reform Bill. One of its immediate benefits would have been to reduce the total number of Members, to which a number of noble Lords have referred, as they took advantage of the provisions for retirement. Until now we have had to rely only on the Grim Reaper as a means of reducing our number. Unless something like the bubonic plague were to make a reappearance, the Grim Reaper would not be able to keep up with the lists of new appointments that seem to come through week after week at the moment. So I wish the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Wirral, well with his group, but I think that the provisions in the Private Member’s Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Steel, will be an essential part of any new arrangement for retirement.
I have a great deal of respect for the point of view that elections confer legitimacy, but I argue too that elections are not the only way in which legitimacy can be achieved. The role of this Chamber, which is primarily to scrutinise legislation and hold the Government to account, derives its legitimacy from the way in which we do that job and from the people who carry it out. It would not be enhanced if every Member, or nearly every Member of this House, were elected. It is necessary in doing the job that we involve substantial numbers of people who are not part of the normal party-political establishment. At present we can credibly say, during the passage of legislation and the final stages of ping-pong, “We know our place”. That is a point that the noble Lord, Lord Cope, made. When inadequately scrutinised legislation is presented to us, we are able to suggest improvements and revisions to it, but we know and accept that the final word lies with the elected Chamber. The moment when authority is conferred on an assembly through election, it would be necessary to rewrite the conventions between the two Houses. Where would you stop? On what basis would you deny an elected House the right to debate supply and agree the Budget, for example? That point was made with great force by my noble friend Lord Rooker.
I hope that honourable Members in the other place will read very carefully the words of the noble Earl, Lord Onslow. As we heard this afternoon, the noble Earl is a great enthusiast for elections. But the reason why he is such a great supporter of them is that he wants this House to be really powerful and to challenge the will of the Commons. I hope that the House of Commons will come to terms with the fact that many more Members will take the same view as the noble Earl. It seems to me that there is barely a glimmer of understanding of that in the other place. They seem to believe that opposition at this end of the building to an elected House is motivated purely by self-interest and will somehow melt away if we can be bought off by some vague offer of grandfather rights for existing Members, which I have to say I find pretty insulting. The great majority of us are opposed to a predominantly or entirely elected House because we believe that the effectiveness of the second Chamber will be irretrievably weakened if it is replaced by an elected body from which Cross-Bench Peers are absent and whose Members are chosen by the party machines.
It would be invidious to name individual members—mostly, but not entirely, they are on the Cross Benches—whom we would lose if they had to stand for election. Yet who can imagine how groups such as former university vice-chancellors, eminent scientists, distinguished medical practitioners, retired police chiefs and permanent secretaries, generals, air vice-marshals and admirals—with the possible exception of my noble friend Lord West of Spithead, who I can see on the hustings—would offer themselves as political party candidates in elections to this place? They would disappear and the character and effectiveness of the House would change totally.
I wish that when we discuss these matters we would use the English language accurately and truthfully. What is being proposed is not reform, it is abolition. It is the replacement of what we have now with something totally different. Anyone who questions that has only to read Mr Clegg’s rhetoric. I cannot believe that the overwhelming majority of noble Lords on the Conservative Benches, who voted by margins of almost 6 to 1 in favour of an appointed House in 2007, are going to allow their temporary coalition partner to destroy an institution in which they so strongly believe and to which they make such a powerful contribution.
Baroness Howe of Idlicote
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, for whom I have considerable respect. I also think that I agree with every single word that he has uttered. As someone who has lived through some 50 years of continuous, evolving reform of Parliament—admittedly, a great deal of it somewhat vicariously as the spouse of my noble kinsman when in the other place—I am certainly not opposed to necessary, continuing reform of your Lordships’ Chamber. Indeed, probably my only claim to speak on this subject is that I am a product of one of the more recent reforms of your Lordships’ House: Parliament’s decision to set up a House of Lords Appointments Commission to encourage a more widely drawn composition of the Cross-Benches, within what had already become a more representative and politically balanced House with the removal of most hereditary Peers.
As one of the first 15 so-called, rather arrogantly, people’s Peers selected, my baptism was immediate. Like all my colleagues in that first batch of appointees, we quickly became aware of the vast range of experience, expertise and, above all, independent-mindedness among those we had just joined. I do not need to go through all the characteristics because the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, has already kindly done it for me. That description certainly includes the remaining hereditaries, whose presence has also ensured the maintenance and quality of well-behaved self-regulation. Indeed, in our current Parliament we have what I would call a typical British accident—above all, an accident that works.
Necessary reform of your Lordships’ House probably has the backing of most of us, but that is not what our coalition Government have in mind. Again, I could not agree more with what so many of your Lordships have said: rather, it is the abolition of the Lords as we know it and its replacement by a completely—or almost completely—elected rather than appointed second Chamber. How much more sensible to proceed with something such as the Steel Bill, which would continue the evolving reform process by making the Appointments Commission statutory; ending the process of replacing hereditary Peers; enabling Members to retire; and taking whatever other sensible measures make sense at the time. When you consider the alternative—the upheaval and sheer cost at an economic time such as this—that a completely elected House would involve, it really does not begin to make sense.
There is no likelihood that elected Members will settle for the kind of minimal expenses and working conditions that today’s Lords receive. It is not just parity with the pay and expenses that the Commons receive that would be required, but the additional expenses and accommodation for their staff. Voting powers of equal strength, too, would certainly be demanded, unlike the benefits of the current system where the Lords can secure only strictly limited delay. What happens then when a clash between the two Houses occurs? How will that situation be resolved? Again, nobody has addressed these questions in the practical way that would be required. I return to the Lords’ proven track record of business experience and expertise in every field under the sun, particularly, as has been said, on the Cross Benches. This will become even more valuable in a Parliament where, to the great disadvantage of us all, the Prime Minister has made it clear that MPs will no longer be able to hold any kind of outside job.
However, there are certainly areas in your Lordships’ House where democratic reform could well and truly be introduced right now. I give one example. The usual channels may have their uses but they are hardly a democratic institution. In this respect, the other place has already begun to set us an example, with its change of rules to enable Members to vote for the chairmen of their committees, rather than Ministers being able to make these influential appointments. A similar change in your Lordships’ House would certainly inspire far more confidence.
We may be at the beginning of a real debate on this whole issue. I was particularly inspired to see that our marvellous House of Lords Library has today produced two wonderful examples of what it does to keep us all up to date. These draw the wider public’s attention to just how important the present role of the Lords is to the effective working of our basically democratic parliamentary processes. With that in the background, there is much more to look forward to in the debate, including the involvement of the wider public in the future. I hope the Government will find a less contemptuous and more democratic way of processing their plans, which involves membership of both sides of your Lordships’ House and not just a convenient section of it.
Lord Naseby
My Lords, I have a pretty cynical view of this debate, not least the word “reform”, which we all know is not what it is about. It is, as the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, has said, about abolition or—to put it in fairly crude parlance—butchery. It is not about democracy; it is, frankly, about expediency, power, short-termism and control. I am sorry to say this, but I have been in politics, in marginal seats, for long enough to know a stitch-up when I see one. This is a blatant piece of gerrymandering. Let the Back-Benchers talk among themselves for hours, probably beyond midnight. In the mean time, the Government have their own committee that will exclude the Cross-Benchers and Back-Benchers, and in the end they will force through a Bill.
I have news for the Government; first, they should listen to, and I hope study, the short, poignant speech of the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza. If they do not, that is a large block vote to put on the other side. They should listen to their own Back-Benchers who do not like gerrymandering. Many of us are very devoted democrats. I draw the attention of my noble friend on the Front Bench particularly to the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, which for many of us summarised what this is all about.
We do not believe that the voice of the House needs to be better heard. I had a look at the coverage of the Terrorism Bill. Your Lordships' House, or any parliament anywhere, could not have had better coverage than we received for what we did on that Bill. Therefore, I do not think there is any deficiency there or in the debates we had on trial by jury. There are other examples.
Those of us who have come from another place frankly do not want to see Members of Parliament challenged by senators, Members of the new House of Lords, or whatever they may be called. In addition, elected Members of Parliament do not like the list system one little bit. I think all of us recognise that some reforms are needed, but how cynical it is that the relevant figure has already increased by 56. The figures quoted in the press—I am not sure whether it can be believed or not—vary from another 100 on top of the 56 to as many as 150. Then our leaders say that there are now too many people coming to your Lordships' House. I view that as a rather cynical approach.
I have two major historical interests in democracy and your Lordships’ House. First, on your Lordships' House, I have a great interest in Cromwell. Even he had the sense to bring back the House of Lords. We should learn from history and not make the mistake that he made. Secondly, I had the privilege of working in India and know what it stands for. I looked up Mahatma Gandhi’s views on democracy. He said:
“Democracy, disciplined and enlightened, is the finest thing in the world”.
But, he added:
“The spirit of democracy cannot be imposed from without”.
This House, and particularly those who lead it, could well reflect on those words.
I am all for reform of this wonderful, passionate, unelected House, which respects its role and its relationship with the other place. However, I do not accept the need for an elected Chamber. If there is an attempt to impose it, I fervently believe that there should be a referendum of the people of the United Kingdom. No Government should try to change our precious constitution without the explicit will of the people in a referendum, for that is true modernisation.
Lord Birt
This is a powerful debate with more consensus than I anticipated. It is a privilege to follow so many distinguished contributions.
The steady, incremental and non-revolutionary development of the UK’s constitutional framework sets us apart from other countries. Unsurprisingly, therefore, our system lacks a neat and elegant design rooted in a clear set of principles. The US example offers a contrast, although not one I envy. Our system, for all its untidiness, has great strengths. For me, its critical virtue—although some of your Lordships plainly do not agree—is the ferocious intensity of a near-sovereign House of Commons. Governments will always make mistakes, but in our system they are cruelly exposed. National problems may receive insufficient attention, but eventually in our system they will surface and be addressed.
When, as now, and as in 1945 and 1979, we have to be bold and we can be decisive. I place great value on that. Inevitably, however, our system has had, and still has, many anomalies. We have only just separated our Supreme Court from our legislature. Uniquely among modern democracies, a religion nationalised by a tyrannical king nearly 500 years ago remains firmly embedded in our Parliament. While today’s hereditary Peers would justify a place on merit in any system, the birthright principle should have no place in a modern political system, as others have said.
There are constitution issues on which others have not touched thus far. As more and more power and responsibility are devolved to Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, it is increasingly anomalous that Members of the Westminster Parliament elected from those countries can have a decisive impact on policies that affect England alone, when the converse no longer holds. Moreover, while there continues to be a massive transfer of wealth from England to those nations—in effect, now taxation without representation—there will eventually be a clamour for a Parliament for England.
If the coalition Government are to redirect some of the awesome energy and political capital that they will need to reduce the deficit towards further constitutional reform, I hope that they will either take a truly fundamental look at the arrangements for the United Kingdom as a whole or confine themselves to more traditional incremental reform of the existing system, as most noble Lords have urged. Like others, I support the proposals of the noble Lord, Lord Steel. Whichever direction the Government take, they must address the simple question: what is the optimal role for a second Chamber? Then, and only in the light of that, should they ask what its composition should be.
At the moment, we sit in an essentially advisory Chamber with no significant powers. Provided that the process of appointment is democratically rooted, and provided that it is considered and sound, appointment is a perfectly reasonable means of ensuring that an advisory Chamber has an independent cast of mind and contains appropriate expertise and insight. Maintaining the advisory role but changing the composition whereby the upper House is wholly or largely elected is likely, as others have said, to have unintended consequences. An elected Chamber could never be happy for more than a moment with our limited role and powers, and would soon simply demand an increased role and greater power.
Moreover, a Chamber elected on a more proportional system may forever subvert the power of the Commons and of the Government of the day to act decisively. Such an outcome would be a momentous break with our history and would not be in our long-term national interest. We all appreciate and understand the immediate urge for a more raw form of democracy—just talk to the bright young political activists in all three major political parties—but let us please consider all the consequences with due wisdom before we risk fatally unbalancing our constitution.
Lord Jenkin of Roding
My Lords, I rise as number 50 on the list and I am conscious of the fact that there are still another 15 or 16 speakers to go before the wind-ups, so I shall be brief. I am sorry that my noble friend Lord Strathclyde is not in his place, as I would want him to hear this. He has listened to many hours of this debate and I cannot help but feel some sympathy for him as the Minister who will no doubt have to take through this House whatever emerges from the committee of which we have heard or from the Joint Committee that is to follow it.
It is perfectly clear from the speeches that we have heard that the position has not changed since the previous occasions when we have debated this issue. An overwhelming majority of this House is against the idea of an elected House and believes, as the noble Lord, Lord Birt, so cogently put it in the speech to which we have just listened, that an appointed House is a perfectly good way of finding the expertise that is necessary for us to perform our totally different function from that of the House of Commons. I listened to my noble friend Lord Onslow saying that the House of Lords needs more powers, including the power to tax. All I can say is, “Heaven forfend”. I hope that, as someone else said, the Members of another place may be persuaded to read his speech.
Earlier this afternoon, I listened to the speech of my noble and learned friend Lord Howe of Aberavon. We are very old friends; indeed, when we came down from Cambridge, we shared two rather grotty rooms while we started our practices at the Bar. Therefore, it is not altogether surprising that I should have intended to talk about two of the points that he made so cogently and to use the quotation that he gave from the Leader of another place, Sir George Young. However, as my noble and learned friend said it all perfectly well, I will not. To my mind, he made an extremely cogent argument as to why the Government’s position on this is wrong.
Like my noble and learned friend and others, I believe that the major problem in our constitution has been the Executive’s increasing dominance over the House of Commons and to some extent this House. It seems to me that that is what lies behind the public disquiet about politics and politicians. The Administration —one has to say this of whatever party or coalition of parties—seem to require the control of Parliament, which should be their watchdog. Parliament is there to scrutinise the Government as the first check and balance in the constitution.
One of the people who have been writing about our affairs over the years has been the admirable academic Meg Russell of the Constitution Unit at UCL, who has had many wise things to say about this House and its reform. The noble Baroness, Lady Howe, referred to the House of Lords Library’s excellent report—in fact, the other report was produced in March, not yesterday—from which I quote. Meg Russell wrote in her latest book:
“Although ministers try to present arguments as Lords versus Commons, the far more interesting dynamic is that of Parliament versus executive. The existence of the Lords as a serious longstop has given a greater confidence to MPs to extract concessions from ministers, and the greater rebelliousness of the Commons also acts to boost the power of peers. This … could represent a real shift of power within the British Westminster system”.
Yet what do we see? The Government propose an all or mainly elected House, which, as others have said, will come under the control of the political parties and in which we will lose most, if not all, the value of the Cross Benches and the independence of mind that they bring. It was certainly said that one of the motives of the last Government was to increase the Executive’s power over the House of Lords, which was the one organ of government over which they did not have control. So I align myself wholly with the majority of your Lordships in opposing what this Government are trying to put forward.
I am sorry that I did not hear the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, who expressed some doubt as to whether this reform could happen. I share that view. Given the great weight of opinion in this House, the Government will have a very severe task if they try to force their legislation through Parliament.
The noble Lord, Lord Steel of Aikwood, has a Motion on the Order Paper, and invited all of us in the House—a number of noble Lords have taken advantage of this—to express our views. I wholly support the four points that he has made in his Motion, and I particularly support the view that the commission should be statutory. I read the excellent evidence given by the noble Lord, Lord Jay of Ewelme, to the Constitution Committee of this House. It was a marvellous example of transparency that showed how the Appointments Commission works. If noble Lords have not read it, I strongly recommend that they do.
I will make one final point. The noble Lord, Lord Richard, said that nobody is listening to us. That simply is not true. I will cite my own experience: I chaired the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology’s inquiry into science and society 10 years ago. Ten years later, there is not a single professional scientific or engineering body in the country that does not have its science and society activities—and the Government have, too. I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Richard, is not in his place, but his idea that nobody is listening to us is complete rubbish. We work in a different way from the Commons, we can be equally influential and we should be allowed to go on doing this.
Lord Gilbert
My Lords, I start by declaring an interest as probably the most prehistoric of your Lordships to address the House tonight. I have no intention of standing for a seat in your Lordships' House for the simple reason that I know perfectly well that I would not get elected, and I am not interested in elections in which I do not intend to be successful. I think that I am the only person this evening to have made that declaration of interest.
Why do we find ourselves in this ridiculous situation? I am afraid that the engine driving it has been within my own party, very much led by a certain Mr Jack Straw. Within my recollection, not many months ago Mr Straw and Mr Blair were united in total opposition to anything other than a 100 per cent appointed membership of this House. Why did they change their minds? I am afraid that I have a nasty, cynical explanation: some grubby work at the crossroads, and peerages from the north-west of the country at the time causing them to change their minds and to decide that the situation could not be tolerated and that they had to find some way out in order to divert public attention from what was going on in the Labour Party.
I will make it clear that it is not only within the Labour Party that grubby things happen when it comes to appointments to this House. Many of the motives behind the movement at the other end of the corridor come from a combination of envy and incomprehension. The incomprehension reposes in the fact that Members in the other place have not the faintest idea what would happen to them if this House were to be elected. The first thing that would happen is that people would say, “Well, I’ve got just as good a mandate as you have”, because, however this House is elected, whether directly or indirectly, the elections must cover the entire territory of the United Kingdom. If we are to cover the entire territory of the United Kingdom in this House with only 300 or so Members and there are 650 at the other end, it does not take a mathematical genius to see that anyone elected to this House will be able to say to someone in the other House, “I’ve got twice the mandate that you have. What are you going to do about it?”. Unless the elections are always on the same day, as in other idiotic ideas put forward from time to time, the elected Members of this House will be able to say to the idiots at the other end, “What’s more, my mandate is more recent than yours. What have you got to say about that?”. Of course, there is no answer.
Leaving aside some other unpleasant consequences, if people were elected to this House without any cojones whatever, they would start to demand three things: a say in supply, a repeal of the Parliament Act and more Ministers. The noble Earl, Lord Onslow, will speak for himself but that lovely dream that he had of a Prime Minister addressing this House from that Dispatch Box is something of which I simply cannot conceive as plausible. Why on earth would the House of Commons voluntarily submit to an aggregation of extra powers to this House? Therefore, the stage would be set for permanent conflict between the two Houses as soon as this Chamber was elected.
Then we come to the question of who will be elected to come here. You would get the sort of oik—for Hansard’s benefit, oik is spelt OIK—that could not get into the Commons, Europe, the Scottish Parliament or the Welsh Assembly and probably not into a half-decent county council. That is the sort of oik you would have here, particularly when you told them that they would be here only for one election and for 15 years at the most. That is absolutely barmy. I do not see anything funny about it—at least, I was not intending to be funny but I am often misconstrued; that is one of the prices of old age.
I think that there will be some candidates from within your Lordships’ House. Looking around at my Benches and with great respect to everyone whom I can see, only my noble friend Lord Hunt of Kings Heath could get himself elected effortlessly to any Chamber to which he put himself forward. I have no idea whether it would be in his mind to stand and I hope he does not think that I am giving him ideas. On the other side, I can see only one half of “the two TomToms”. The TomToms have great charm, good looks, energy, youth and devotion to this place on their side, and unfortunately a very similar level of intelligence, but I shall not go into that. That was not supposed to be funny either. In fact, it is a moment of great tragedy when you think about it.
I have probably spoken for long enough. I simply add that I totally support what the noble Lord, Lord Steel, seeks to do. It is nonsense to say that people in this House do not want reform, as distinct from abolition. I think that these days it would be very hard to find anyone in this House who did not, like me, support in principle what the noble Lord, Lord Steel, wants to do.
Baroness Hooper
My Lords, it has always been my view that we should be looking at the whole of Parliament in determining the future of the House of Lords. In the light of the devolved Parliaments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland—and, indeed the existence of the European Parliament—the size and functions of the House of Commons also need to be looked at and changed if necessary, and I should prefer that to a piecemeal approach.
I opposed the 1999 reform Act partly because the mixed hereditary and appointed House worked very well, regularly defeated the then Conservative Government and asked the other place to think again, but mainly on the grounds that the final shape and role of the House of Lords had not been thought through. Here we are, still thinking about it 11 years on. Subsequently, we had two opportunities to vote on the best way forward in terms of a partially or fully elected House. In each case, I voted in favour of a fully elected second Chamber. Interestingly, my companions in the Lobby were mostly hereditary Peers and the Labour Party. Please note that I say “fully elected” and not “directly elected” and I shall return to that point. I voted that way because I recognised, with regret, that it was not possible to turn the clock back and that reforms justified on the grounds of making the House of Lords a more democratic and legitimate institution were hardly fulfilled by a fully appointed House.
Therefore, this debate gives us the opportunity for a completely fresh approach, so that we can design an appropriate system which promotes participation throughout the country in the selection of experts to assist and to complement the House of Commons, rather than to challenge its primacy. I favour the idea of indirect elections. It seems to me that a system based on electoral colleges, which would represent this country’s rich tapestry of interests—churches, lawyers, doctors, academics, trade unions, the voluntary sector, indeed hereditary Peers themselves—would give the House of Lords an element of continuity and recognise our history and tradition. The noble Lord, Lord Low of Dalston, made a similar suggestion, but from a rather different direction.
Indirect elections would offer flexibility and adaptability. Electoral colleges could be merged or altered as required, just as constituency boundaries are changed. Members would be elected for a term of years and would be accountable to their electors. Rather than a huge statutory appointments commission, as advocated by my noble friend Lord Waddington along the lines suggested in the Steel Bill, the responsibility for finding suitable candidates would be shared out and the interest and involvement would be spread across the country to all sectors of the community. I believe that would also fit in with the importance of the evolutionary nature of change, advocated by my noble friend Lady O’Cathain; would remove any feeling of direct competition with the House of Commons; and would avoid the danger, pointed out so brilliantly by the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, that people who fail to get elected to the other place would be queuing up to come here. I know others have also referred to that. Other countries have used that system for their second Chamber, notably the Republic of Ireland, so there would also be an opportunity to learn from other people’s experience. I believe that that would be a compromise and the best way of safeguarding the reputation of the House of Lords for wealth of expertise, independence, high ethical standards and hard work.
One final point is the name of our second Chamber. The creation of large batches of new Peers and asking the Queen to create more and more life Peers is a bit of a nonsense when the majority of hereditary Peers are not allowed to sit here any more. Whatever happens, therefore, I think that new Members, whether appointed, indirectly elected or directly elected, should simply become Members of the House of Lords without being given titles. I do not favour the idea of a senate. In any event, it would seem very odd to have a House of Commons without a House of Lords. I think this place should continue to be known as the House of Lords to preserve a lasting link with the history and tradition of our parliamentary heritage.
The Earl of Sandwich
My Lords, this debate goes on so long that I almost feel that I have been here for 350 years—in some senses, some of us have. I will focus today, however, on the present size of the House. There cannot be anyone here who does not want to reduce the number, which is growing every day. Our indulgent public would be quite hostile to us if they knew that we were funding a second Chamber of almost 800 Peers, half of whom do not attend regularly, so I hope that no one will tell them. Our numbers are absurdly high compared to other second Chambers.
That must be changed. There is only one way to change it quickly and soon: political parties will have to restrain themselves. They are the principal source of appointments, and hence the primary means of reducing our numbers over a reasonable time. There are dissolution honours, resignation honours and political lists of working Peers. The scene here nearly every day is still reminiscent of Trollope and WS Gilbert. Our website states that all Peers are vetted by an independent appointments commission. That is misleading. Rewards for favours and political patronage remain, only just out of sight of the public. The noble Lord, Lord Steel, has given a strong example. The do-nothing excuse on Lords reform—that in time we will have a partly or wholly elected Chamber—will not do. We heard that from the previous Government, but nothing happened, even at the last minute, when the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and his colleagues began to see the wisdom of the Steel proposals. The case for elections has been effectively demolished today and will be demolished again.
We are moving too slowly, and I propose that something is done about it now. One sensible way would be to bring the party and independent appointments together under a single committee of respected and still active retired civil servants. I rather like the phrase of the noble Lord, Lord Birt, “democratically rooted”. I have been at a loss to understand why both Front Benches have been against a statutory appointments commission. Perhaps the noble Lords who will be winding-up the debate can explain that. I am sure that it is not Downing Street or the Civil Service who are against that but the parties themselves, who wish to retain control over their appointments. Again, if the public knew all that, they would be horrified that the parties are still promising appointments as a reward for service.
There is now consideration for the balance of numbers and diversity of professions in the House, but not of the overall numbers. The noble Lord, Lord Lea, had a good phrase: leapfrogging is going on all the time. I very much hope to see the present Appointments Commission strengthened and, ultimately, made statutory. That is simply common sense, as many noble Lords have said.
What are the alternatives? The Leader of the House mentioned a Leader’s Group on retirement. I am glad that that subject is now being given fuller consideration. I supported an amendment to the constitutional reform Bill on that. One virtue of this House is old age; I increasingly recognise that. No other Assembly or organisation in this country reveres wise old heads as much as a loya jurga or a village shura in Afghanistan as does this House. The wise women and men here are precious to the nation, and long may they remain.
However, the proposed new national retirement age is lower than our average age in this House. We are not and should not be exempt from public discussion about the right age to retire. People grow old at a different pace, and there should be at least an opportunity for party leaders and our Convenor to speak to people from time to time to listen to their intentions. Length of service should be important but not a determining factor. Lord Russell and Lord Longford were examples of those who could never be allowed to retire—and they would not have agreed to it anyway. Fortunately, we are not all like that. In my view, it is time that we introduced that aspect of human resources, with a reasonable budget to help Peers in difficulty during their first year or two of retirement.
I repeat what I said at the outset. Those changes must be made now. They do not all need legislation or months of consultation. The virtue of the Steel Bill is that the House need not always be waiting for Godot or the Government. It can resolve to move now towards practical reforms, which most of us will see in our lifetime. Proposals that we have seen before are so far reaching and have so many constitutional implications—especially those regarding elections—that they would take many years to discuss and implement, and none of us would be left here to see them through.
Lord Selsdon
My Lords, for most of the day, I sat on the Steps of the Throne because I like to see my enemy and my friends face to face and also feel that I should be in an inferior position. Now, I feel like throwing a few spanners into the works, if I can, and I begin by pointing out that 20 per cent of the people who have spoken today are elected Peers. They may have been defined as those excepted under the 1990 Act and then elected, but according to my officials in Government, we are elected Peers, whatever the sense of the election. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, acknowledged that last time I spoke from the other side. I rather wanted to go and speak from behind him today because I have never liked this side of the House as you always have the sun in your eyes.
If you are elected, as my colleagues and I are, you should have a role to perform. I spent last summer sitting down writing papers for various government bodies, because if you have been brought up in a bureaucratic bank like Midland Bank, you write papers and you know that nobody will look at them. The noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, did me a great favour. He pointed out that the biggest single submission, which was bigger than almost all the submissions to him put together, was mine. I never thought that the Civil Service would take this up. Some of my questions were: Do I have a role? Do I have a role to perform? Do I have a job? Do I have a job to do? What do I have? I am happy to announce that the Civil Service at a very high level has confidentially advised me that the only people in your Lordships' House who have a job, a role or employment are certain Ministers and certain chairmen of committees who are remunerated. All others have no role and no job. They have nothing to perform. All they have is a dignity. Unfortunately, the definition of a dignity is beyond the Civil Service. It cannot define it. Therefore, it cannot define those of us who have it. We could define that all those who do not have a dignity and have employment are undignified. Today, I tried to find out who are remunerated and undignified. It was rather difficult. Even the Library could not find out.
I take my lead from the noble Lord, Lord Rooker. If you cannot define the role of a Member of the House of Lords, what is it that he or she can do? I am told that the dignity means that you are responsible to the Writ of Summons, which goes back to 1340. That Writ of Summons places certain obligations upon you, but it does not imply a duty. So one of my thoughts, very simply, was that if we are to try and define the future of the House of Lords, the first thing, following on from the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, is to define the role of the House of Lords and the role, responsibilities and duties of a Peer. That is not as simple as it seems. I promised my friends in the Civil Service who advised me that I would not sneak on them, but they find that when you look at Halsbury and some of the regulations, that is not true. You cannot have a place where the person concerned does not have a role.
Therefore, what are we? I thought I would go back into the mists of time and summon my classical Greek, which I was never good at. I came across aristokratia. It is effectively government by the best people. Aristocracy is not a class; it is a government. I have an enormous database on everybody. I use the frame “KEW”—knowledge, experience and wisdom—but after the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, I think I will change “wisdom” to “wit” as there is a sense of humour at the moment because nobody knows what we should do or who is going to do it. I am in favour of elections, and the first thing I would like to suggest is that all the members of the committee that will look at the future of the House should be elected, and I think that every Member who leads a political party should in this House be elected by his political colleagues and not be appointed by the Prime Minister. The previous two Prime Ministers appointed 428 people to your Lordships' House.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, I need to tell the noble Earl that on this side of the House, we have been elected.
Lord Selsdon
And I need to tell the noble Lord that I am not an Earl, but I much appreciate the compliment.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, in view of his tremendous work, he jolly well ought to be.
Lord Selsdon
I really believe that one of the things that we can do is provide more information on this House. If we do not have a role as an individual and we cannot define the role of the House, and if we believe in representative government—we are part of government—who do we represent? Last time around, I declared that I had agreed to represent everyone who did not vote at the last election and every person who was elected by another body, which was something like 106,000. It is fairly simple. Before we go any further, we need to define what people think the current and future role is of the House of Lords and of its Members.
Lord Graham of Edmonton
My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in this debate. I rise as the 55th speaker in a list of 65. In 1998, which was the last time we had a great debate of this kind, I was 182nd in a speakers list of 193. I rose at 2.30 am on the second night. So, if you think that we are being badly done by in this debate, you ain’t heard nothing yet. The interest in this debate is brought from a range of experiences. I do not envy for a moment the Leader and Deputy Leader of this House in having to attempt to make something out of the worth of this debate. One of the great things in sitting for a long time through a debate is to recognise, as I do, just how much one does not know about various aspects of the issue.
I have my prejudices and my roots. My mind will not be changed, but I always find great comfort and solace when I listen to people on both sides of the argument bringing their point of view to the debate. Invariably they bring it with passion and belief. It is not my job tonight or at any time on an issue of this kind to pontificate on what is right or wrong. All my political life I have been guided not by the destruction of the House of Lords but by the abolition of the House of Lords as it was painted during the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and into this century.
I will illustrate my point by giving my experience. While I was the opposition Chief Whip in the 1990s, I was convinced that election was much better than appointment. When Labour took office in 1997, there were 116 Labour Peers and 425 Conservative Peers, many of whom have spoken tonight. At that time, they saw nothing wrong with that disparity. There was no question of moving for change. They enjoyed the power that numbers brought and they did nothing about it. They might tell me now that they felt uncomfortable at the dominant numbers, but as I did my job I realised that the dominance of the hereditary principle was there.
The noble Lord, Lord Jopling, talks about the fear that some day we will reach 1,000 Members. In the 1990s, there were 1,200 Members of the House of Lords. Not a word was said about how the number could be reduced, but all of a sudden arguments about the composition and the powers are raised, and people forget what had been tolerated. I would say to the Deputy Leader, my good friend the noble Lord, Lord McNally—and, in his absence, the Leader—that I can recall at least two occasions when the Leader of the House, as Leader of the Opposition, came before us with a done deal between the two Houses and the two parties, which recommended that there should be a move towards an elected House. He was dignified and delivered what he had promised to do, but those on his Benches behind him did not follow him. People have told me that someone sitting behind Mr Churchill said to him, “Mr Churchill, I am in a very privileged position. Together we can look across the Chamber and see our enemies”. Mr Churchill is alleged to have said, “My boy, the people opposite us are the Official Opposition. Your enemies are behind you”.
Do not let the Deputy Leader of the House be under any illusion. If the committee that has the job of making progress is fed the feelings of the House, not just on that side of the Chamber but on this side too—I am in a minority on my side—when it comes to the real issue of abolition or change of a large nature, he knows before he sits down to put pen to paper that if the proposition as we know it now is brought before the House at the end of this year or next year, he will be soundly beaten.
Lord Graham of Edmonton
I almost forgot what I was going to say. The point is that in a few months’ time we will have a proposition along those lines, and I would simply say to the Deputy Leader that it will be a mess that they got themselves into because the imperative that is here tonight rides on the back of the Deputy Prime Minister. He spoke cogently but positively about a great reform that cannot wait; it has to be started now. Having started it now, they will then scratch their heads and ask, “What shall we do?”. If the committee examines all the propositions, it is going to be radically different.
I wish the coalition Government well in their attempt to change the composition and functions of this House, but I do not believe that they have got the House behind them. My best wishes go to my dear friend the Leader of the Opposition with these words: be very careful of being drawn into some kind of agreement that might appear to be generally well accepted, because in my view there has been no change on either side of the House on this issue since the last time we debated it.
Lord Phillips of Sudbury
My Lords, I am strongly in favour of reform of this House and I am strongly in favour of the Bill of my noble friend Lord Steel. I hope that, at the end of the proceedings, he will press his Motion because I think it deserves support. It will give an instant impetus to what I would call sensible and organic reform and will stand to the credit of this place. Having said that, I also agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, said at the beginning of the debate when she observed that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I do not think that this House is broke. It needs reform, certainly, but it is not broke. Sometimes I scratch my head and wonder how the other place manages constantly to point at us because if there is a broken House in our Parliament, it is, I fear, the other place.
Before I go on to say why, contrary to my instincts, I am against elections, I would say briefly that I am strongly in support of what the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, said in opening for the Opposition—that at some point we must have a referendum on the issue of election if it is pressed forward. I spoke to that effect in the debate on the Queen’s Speech and I do not propose to add to it more than to support what she said; she covered most of the key points.
To come back to elections, I was interested to hear the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, say that he thought that if 20 per cent of the House was retained on an appointed basis, he did not really see how the outcome would be very different from what we have now. I disagree with him radically for these reasons. The 80 per cent elected would, I fear, be beholden to the party members who put them on the list. Those high on the list would be particularly beholden and once in this House they would have, if you like, a powerful partisan obligation to be a great deal more observant of the Whips than Members currently feel they must be. Secondly, those personal party loyalties which are a natural—
Lord Goodhart
What does my noble friend think is the difference between that situation and the present situation in which appointments are made by the party leaders? Are they not equally under an obligation?
Lord Phillips of Sudbury
They are under an obligation, but a much more fuzzy and weaker one, and they are not constantly having to go back to their constituencies —as an elected Member would have to do—to justify themselves to their members. I have no doubt about that. As I was saying, the personal party loyalties, which are perfectly normal and good in our system, would not—contrary the hopes of the noble Lord, Lord Butler—allow many outsiders to appear high on the party list at elections.
In any event, the number of party members in this country is very low and still declining.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
Labour Party membership is growing considerably since the election.
Lord Phillips of Sudbury
The noble Lord’s party membership is going up—I am happy to hear it—by three in a month, probably. There are fewer members of all political parties than members of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.
I do not believe that the kind of people who inhabit this House now would want the rigours of an election. Certainly they would not want the constituency work that would follow from being elected for a regional constituency. The notion that Members could come to this place and devote all their energies to legislation and so on is cloud-cuckoo-land. They would have a massive constituency load and would be prevented from spending the overwhelming part of their energies and imagination on the legislative work for which this House is rightly renowned.
As to the 20 per cent appointed in the mixed, hybrid system—full-time, fully-paid appointed Members—I do not think that many sitting in this House now would contemplate that position. I do not think either that the tenor of this House, which is so important to the enjoyment of Members here, would be retained in a partisan House that was 80 per cent elected and which would swiftly become a shadow of the other place. The appointed Members would be second-class Members; they would not have elective legitimacy and they would be a much older cadre. The Commons might use the fact that 20 per cent of the House was appointed as an excuse for refusing to cede any further powers to this place.
The statement of the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, that the powers in an elected House would be unchanged from what they are now is surely a certain recipe for not only the constitutional inferiority that we now have, and readily accept, but for a qualitative inferiority. Let us be blunt: who but second-rate Members would want to be elected to this House, with its inferior powers, when they might seek to be elected to the other place?
I refute the assumption of the noble Lord, Lord Richard, and others that election would increase the power and influence of the House for the reasons I have attempted to summarise. The present wonderful complementarity of this House would be shattered in one fell swoop. It would lose both its storehouse of remarkable experience and expertise and its independent spirit by the act of election. In the last four Sessions of this House in the three and a half years up until last November, there were 349 whipped votes; the Government were defeated in 113 of them, or 32 per cent. Over the same period in the Commons, fewer than 1 per cent of the votes led to government defeats; indeed, in the first 10 years of the Blair Government, they lost a single vote.
I feel that we cannot abandon the historic, organic evolution of the powers of this place, and I hope very much that we will support my noble friend Lord Steel in his sensible reforms today.
The Earl of Caithness
My Lords, when I saw that I was going to follow the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, I was reminded of that lovely quotation in the book The Leopard:
“Things have to change in order to remain the same”.
It is a delight to see the noble Lord back in his place, and it is a great benefit to this House.
The noble Lord, Lord Richard, reminded us that we are on an eternal roundabout and not making much progress. Although we are not making much progress with reform, the House continually evolves as we adjust our procedures and conventions. To me, one of the conventions that has changed markedly and, I think, for the worse is the number of interruptions in our opening speeches. We are a great debating chamber, one of the finest in the world, but the number of interruptions in opening speeches, particularly today, reduces the value of those speeches, and that is to our detriment.
I was sad when I read the document that my Government put out on 20 May. It says:
“Lords appointments will be made with the objective of creating a second chamber that is reflective of the share of the vote secured by the political parties in the last general election”.
Why was I upset by that? Because the House is large enough as it is. It is increasingly difficult for us to do our job, given the space that we have. The noble Lord, Lord Graham, rightly reminded us that the House was much bigger when there were a number of hereditary Peers, but they did not attend. The average attendance in those days was under 300, if I remember rightly; now it is more like 400, and growing. If we are going to get a whole lot of new Peers, that will mean that attendance increases because they will be the regulars.
It is interesting that the Liberal manifesto said that they wanted to have a fully elected second Chamber with considerably fewer Members than the current House. How small a Chamber should we be? Going by the recent edition of Dod’s, if we wanted a House of 400 people, there would be no one here over the age of 70. That would move me suddenly from the lowest quartile in this House, where I have been for 40 years, into a much higher one. If we wanted a House of 350, the retirement age would have to be 67, so a number of us who have spoken today would be leaving and not returning. There is no doubt in my mind that the key driving force now for reform is the number of people in the House.
I join the many noble Lords who have asked in this debate, “What is our role? What is the point of a second Chamber? What role do the Government really want us to undertake?”. At the moment we consider in great detail, and spend hours debating, legislation that has not even been discussed in another place. We have long debates; we then have a vote, as the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, just said; the Government are defeated; and what happens? It goes down to the other end and most of it is not even discussed there. At the moment we are not asking the other place to think again—we are not even asking it to think. We are an advisory Chamber, not a revising one.
The second Chamber should be a revising Chamber, and that is why I firmly believe that we should be a wholly elected House. That is the only way that we can have some brake on the Executive. The other place is not holding the Executive to account at all, while we are doing a little bit. But we ought to have a much stronger voice and we ought to be much more challenging. We should be a totally elected Chamber, not a partially elected Chamber. I see huge complications in having some Peers appointed and some elected. It would be much cleaner, much better, to have a totally elected House. I have been of that opinion for some years.
The noble Baroness, Lady Royall, said that she felt that the Conservatives were naturally anti-reform. I would have to remind her of the 1958 Act. I would have to remind her also of the 1968 Bill, which was passed in the House of Lords by the hereditary Peers, who were ready to abolish themselves. It was Michael Foot and Enoch Powell in another place who destroyed that Bill. So I take issue with the noble Baroness on her view that we are the party against reform.
The noble Baroness also mentioned a referendum. I found that interesting. I found it hard to believe, too, considering how the Labour Party behaved with regard to a referendum on the Lisbon treaty. Could it be trusted on a referendum on this House? However, the point of a referendum is important. Having listened to a number of noble Lords who have spoken on it today, I believe that what we agree—if we manage to agree anything—should be put to a referendum.
The noble Lord, Lord Steel, has put down his Motion. He knows that I have fought him on his Private Member’s Bills in the past, but, since then, things have changed—we are both very lucky, we are both noble friends. Nevertheless, I shall still fight him on his Private Member’s Bill, most particularly because of its proposals in respect of by-elections for hereditary Peers. Those were an integral part of the 1999 agreement which secured that Bill into legislation and without them it would have been a very different story. It is a major principle for all of us hereditaries and it needs to be retained until there is a major reform of the House of Lords. When there is a major reform it will be a different story, but to do this incrementally and to remove the one plank that saw so many noble friends all around the House leave this Chamber after making such a huge contribution for most of their lives, would be a great mistake. I shall therefore fight my noble friend on his Motion and on his Bill.
Lord Walton of Detchant
My Lords, when I was a boy in a mining village in Durham County, and even when I entered the Newcastle medical school, it never crossed my mind that one day I might become a Member of your Lordships' House. I suppose that it was my multiple medical presidencies, to two of which I was elected by a single transferable vote, which led to my being ennobled 21 years ago. The moment I entered this House I was immensely impressed by the all-pervading sense of authority, experience and expertise which so frequently enlightened and enhanced the debates in your Lordships' House. I say in contradistinction to what the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, has just said, that this is a revising Chamber. We are most effective and at our very best in revising ill-digested legislation coming up from the Commons, to such an extent that more than 75 per cent of the amendments to poorly digested Bills from the Commons which the Lords have passed are subsequently accepted in another place. That is one of the major roles that this House plays.
I do not believe that you could find in any other second Chamber in any other developed country as many distinguished former Cabinet Ministers, noted MPs, diplomats, heads of the Civil Service, defence staff and police, and leaders of academia, science, law, business, trade unions, political parties and religious life as you will find in this House. That is one of its greatest strengths.
One of the other strengths of this House rests in the Select Committee mechanisms. I served at different times, for a total of 14 years, on your Lordships’ Select Committee on Science and Technology. I agree entirely with what the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, said a few moments ago in totally refuting the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Richard, who said that no one listens to what happens in this House. My baptism of fire in 1989 was with the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. I was reliably informed that our lengthy debates, often going on until three in the morning, greatly influenced the subsequent votes in the Commons that led to that legislation being passed. We also had an inquiry into forensic medicine, which led to the establishment of a national Forensic Science Service. I was happy to chair an inquiry into research in the National Health Service, which persuaded the Government of that day to create a research and development branch within the National Health Service, which has led to the establishment of the National Institute for Health Research.
I could quote many more examples in which the work of that Science and Technology Committee has subsequently had a major effect on government policy. That is important—and even more so now, because in the Commons we have lost no fewer than 10 able scientists, two of whom in the last Parliament lost their seats and several others of whom stood down. There are some scientists in the new Commons, but not as many as there were in the last Commons, and the role of this House in assessing complex scientific matters is going to be of increasing importance. I add that I had the privilege of chairing your Lordships’ Select Committee inquiry into medical ethics which led to the government policy, which still holds, although it has been increasingly questioned in many parts of the House, on issues such as voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide. These things have been among the strengths of this House.
It has been regularly said that the Cross-Benchers, of whom I am proud to be one, have played an important role. I believe that they have often diluted the worst excesses of rampant political parties in this House. How can the electorate of an elected House be so constructed as to retain a powerful Cross-Bench independent view, which many if not most Members of this House believe to be crucial for the future? Of course, I have heard that there will be, if the House does have an elected component, a grandfather clause—in my case it would have to be a great-grandfather clause. That is important. I am glad that the Steel Bill, which I warmly support, has included the possibility that Peers may have the opportunity of taking honourable retirement. If that Bill passes into law, that is something I would be glad to consider, although it would be nice to feel that one might be given some kind of modest incentive to accept that choice. I also hope that, if that does come about, there might be the possibility of retaining what one might call simple club rights, even after retiring from the Chamber.
I make one other point of importance on the geographical representation in this House. That does require some reform. The noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, rightly referred to the excellent work being done by Meg Russell of the Constitution Unit at University College, London. In a major analysis of the present strength of the House, she has discovered that I am the only Cross-Bench life Peer in the entire north of England between north Yorkshire and the Scottish border. I think that she overlooked my noble friend Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington but, nevertheless, we are not well represented in that particular part of the country.
I have a great admiration for the Leader of the House and the Deputy Leader as well as for the Leader of the Opposition, so I hope that they can find some clever Machiavellian means of manipulating their proposals relating to an election to this House in future which would, on the one hand, retain a major Cross-Bench component and, on the other, retain something like the massive expertise that exists and so strengthens the work of this House. I cannot feel that that is likely to be achieved. Hence, I feel a little like the ageing wife of the taxidermist who looked on the future with increasing apprehension.
Viscount Astor
My Lords, one of the strengths of this House is that political parties in opposition love the place. It is the only Chamber where they can defeat the Government. Of course, once they get into power the love affair wanes as, often, the Government’s carefully planned Bills, which have inched their way through another place, are revised in this House. Then Ministers in another place get frightfully cross and start talking about the undemocratic nature of this House, or the cost to the Treasury of undoing their carefully thought-out plans. I hope that we never lose our reputation for awkwardness to Governments.
When one looks at our composition, we are a varied bunch and there are varied ways of getting here. One can be an elected hereditary Peer, like me. You can come from another place for services rendered or services to be rendered. Some noble Lords are active in retirement, but the sightings of some freshly made Peers from another place are as rare as those of a white rhino. You can also stay long enough in another place so that you get a peerage to encourage you to vacate the seat for some up-and-coming young politician. Finally, there is the more traditional Labour route; you deny vigorously that you ever want to come here; you rubbish the place vehemently; then, suddenly, a couple of months later you are here. I think that is the Healey, Hattersley and now the Prescott route.
In this House, you can be gallant, learned, right reverend, or even a people’s Peer; we are a mixed bunch. The question is how we can change this House, following the votes in another place and the recent general election result, and reflect the wishes of the electorate. One must start by saying that this House has become too large, as many noble Lords have said. As a parliamentary Chamber, this House is second in size only to the National People’s Congress of China. It is the only Parliament in the Commonwealth that I can find where the second Chamber is larger than the first. We are told that we will have more noble Lords arriving here. We have to do something, because we will soon have more than 800 Members. I am sure that there should be a way of encouraging some form of retirement, but if that does not work we may have to consider a mandatory retirement age, as for example happens for High Court judges. I also believe that the Cross Benches—this may be unpopular there—have become too large in relation to the political parties in this House. They are, in effect, almost the largest party.
We must remember that we are fundamentally a political chamber, not a debating society and however good our speeches, we are often self-congratulatory and too smug about what we do in this House. Too often, we have general debates; they are always informed and often fascinating, learned and entertaining, but the problem is that very few people listen—least of all Governments. That includes the noble Lords opposite and, indeed, my own noble friends. How often do we have brilliant foreign affairs debates, yet can anybody—from their time in government or the Civil Service—remember when, after a debate in this House, a Private Secretary has rushed in to see his Minister, saying, “Minister, you must read the Lords Hansard before you go to Brussels”—or to some important meeting—“because there has been a very interesting debate”? It just does not happen; we kid ourselves. Hansard is, I hope, read by those who have made the speeches. I have always thought that everybody should be forced to read their own speeches the following morning, as a sort of hangover cure. Perhaps there are a few insomniacs too.
Anyway, this House is at its best when it scrutinises and revises legislation. As we have heard, most amendments that are agreed in this House are accepted by another place and, as my noble friend Lord Jenkin of Roding pointed out, the Select Committees are very influential, so this House functions surprisingly well both because of recent reforms and, indeed, in spite of them. Yet any new reform must look at function as well as composition and everybody has their view to the future; sadly, so have I. We must move towards an elected second Chamber but, as we have seen in the past, rushed reforms do not always work well. We cannot bury our heads in the sand and hope that reforms will be sidelined or somehow go away. They are promoted by all three political parties.
A possible route would be to have elections based on Euro-constituencies for one Parliament. This would amount to 78 seats. If we were, over time, able to cut our number to around 400, that would amount to around 20 per cent. It would ensure that the grandfathering proposals put forward by my noble friend would work and we would need to consider how to move on from that change. The one advantage would be that if the consensus was that it was working, we could extend it. If it was not working, as might easily be the case, we could return to a fully appointed second Chamber. We have to find a way of getting all three major parties and their Front Benches off the hook of a fully elected Chamber. It will not go away. We have to help them.
We must improve what we do in this House. I am afraid we did not always hold the previous Government to account in the previous Parliament as we should have. We are too nice sometimes—too gentlemanly and perhaps too afraid of reform. We allowed a Minister to come here after having twice resigned his post in another place. We failed to hold the Government to account on the vast increase in national debt, the rise of unemployment, increased taxes and, most importantly, the breaking of our covenant to the Armed Forces.
I make one further plea. Reform of this House is too important just to be left to the political parties—even one as well led as my own. I suppose I must declare an interest as the stepfather-in-law of the Prime Minister—or, to put it more easily, I am married to his mother-in-law. I am very grateful to the Leader of the House for initiating this debate so early in the process of reform. I know he will take a close interest in everything that has been said this evening, and inform his colleagues in another place.
Lord Neill of Bladen
My Lords, it is past 10 pm and I am the 60th person to speak. I will try to be brief and depart from what I was going to say. If anyone is interested in what I think on the general subject, they will find it in previous copies of Hansard and I will be happy to supply references.
I was very struck by the debate that took place in the first half-hour of our proceedings, when people began to ask questions about the nature and size of the committee that was looking at this proposal, and its plan to bring forward a draft Bill in December. I listened to the voices raised by your Lordships, the overall tendency of which—although not unanimous—was to be, I suggest, very much opposed to the thinking of the Deputy Prime Minister and the notion that we would proceed to a House that is elected or partly elected. The realpolitik as we face it is that the chairman of this small committee is, I understand, the Deputy Prime Minister. The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, and the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, are members. There is no Cross-Bench member. I pause for a moment on that. Why not? The reason I heard some time after 3 pm was that they did not want Cross-Benchers or Back-Benchers on the committee because they want a political consensus. I have attributed this—I hope not unfairly—to the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde. He can contradict me if I am wrong. In my respectful submission, that is the wrong approach. What is wanted is something that will unite everybody.
The first thing to do is to address the topics that have been raised here. What is the purpose of having a second House? What sort of people do we want to form its membership if we are going to achieve the best result? You want to start with that before you take out the drafting pen or call in a parliamentary draftsman and say, “Can we have a draft?”.
I respectfully suggest to the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, that the conclusion of what we have heard today is that there is no will to look at a draft Bill in December. That document is not wanted. Many Members of this House think that the committee has been wrongly set up with no Cross-Benchers, which means that a quarter of the House is not represented, and no Back-Benchers from the other place.
We should apply common sense to the present position. We are not dealing with the statutory position. As I understand it, the committee is set up by agreement between the leaders. There is nothing to stop them for the time being dropping the proposal that they will come up with a draft Bill in December. It is not impossible for them to alter the nature of the committee to include Cross-Benchers from this House and Back-Benchers from another place. Serious consideration should be given to both these ideas before we have a long period of six or seven months while the committee toils away producing that which is not wanted and making proposals which are not acceptable. It would be much better for it to produce a report or a White Paper—call it what you will—which faces up to the various points on which we know there is dissension and disagreement, produce a report by December which we can assess and reorganise the committee’s membership. Those are my suggestions to the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde.
Lord Elton
My Lords, I hope that the House will forgive me if I go back briefly to first principles and stand back from the question we are looking at to consider the whole population of the United Kingdom. The first question we then need to ask ourselves is, “What is Parliament for?”, not “What is this House for?”. The short answer is: to enable the British people to choose a Government, to finance them and, essentially, to see that they remain their public’s servant, not their master. The very cornerstone of keeping a Government under democratic control is protecting the individual liberty of the citizens of this country. That is what Parliament is for.
We live in a democracy. Has the democratically elected House of Parliament sufficient power to ensure that Governments remain ultimately under its control? You might think so. It has the power to refuse to supply them with money. That is a nuclear deterrent and is rightly for the Commons alone, but the erosion of liberty is little by little. More appropriate to protect liberty is its power to refuse to give a Government the laws they want or, more commonly, to insist on substantial changes before it will agree to them. With such massive powers available to it, the Commons surely ought to be counted on to protect those liberties—but, my Lords, it cannot be. In 2005, it utterly failed to do so. If the House of Lords had not then acted in their defence, everyone in the United Kingdom would now be liable to summary arrest and detention without either trial or appeal. This and all future Governments would have been able to issue a derogated control order against any individual they decided to label a terrorist threat. With this order they would have been able to detain our citizens without trial, not just for a week or month but for 90 days. Such a weapon belongs in the armoury of a fascist state, not Whitehall, yet the democratically elected House of Commons let it through. It made clear what it thought of it; Mr Blair's majority was cut from 161 to a handful of votes—I think it was 14. I remind your Lordships that this unelected House stopped that happening. We stopped it by constantly refusing inadequate changes to this monstrous proposal. We did so in a sitting that lasted unbroken from 11 am on 10 March 2005 till 7.31 pm on 11 March. We rose only when we had secured just enough judicial involvement to prevent this thing being used unfairly, unnecessarily, or for undemocratic purposes.
Why did the two Houses behave so differently when faced with this same, very simple issue? I have never sat in the Commons and I intend no disrespect, but what I am about to say seems to have been borne out by inference from a lot that I have heard from Members who were there previously. The Commons voting figures seem not just to reveal the strength of some Members’ feelings but to draw our attention to the influence, even the power, of the party Whips on what for many MPs was a matter of conscience. Consider that MPs are elected but cannot be elected without their party's support. They therefore arrive, as the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, said, indebted to their party. If they belong to the majority party, they find up to 150 of their fellow Members sitting with them as members of the Government in the same Chamber. Therefore they do not, without effort, think of the Government and party as separate bodies. They also receive substantial salaries. To lose their seat is to lose their livelihood, and party Whips can arrange the deselection of a Member as well as his selection. That means not just that he will not win the next election but that he will not be able even to fight it.
Therefore, in the House of Commons as now constituted, three elements together necessarily diminish its power to keep the Government under the control of the electorate. Its Members are in an elected Chamber, they are paid a substantial salary, and they can become and remain Members only with the consent of their party apparatus. Even if they were all saints, these arrangements must have some effect on how they vote. Their effect is greatest when the number of Members is greatest—in the party of government. I regret to tell my noble friend Lord Caithness—or I would if he were here—that he is entirely wrong in his belief that election to this House would give it greater power.
How strange, how sad and how sinister that our colleagues down the Corridor are now clamouring to introduce precisely these three elements into the Lords—the only Chamber still strong enough to stand up to Governments who have prevented Members of the House of Commons from doing so. Your Lordships should also note that an appointed House does not automatically become the poodle of the appointing body. By March 2005, 45 per cent of the Members of this House had been sent here at the request of the very Prime Minister whose proposal they threw out; 147 among that new entry had taken his party’s Whip. The smallest margin of votes by which his proposals were rejected was 48. The largest margin—to the great credit of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, who is now our Lord Speaker—was on her Motion, which was carried by 150 votes. That is no poodle, but a guard dog with teeth. I ask my noble friends on the Front Bench to think about the need for this country to keep Governments under control, even when they are staffed by such benign and intelligent people as my noble friends. I listened to the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, with some reservation on that point.
Every Government, when they have been in power for quite a short time, want more power because Parliament is such a damn nuisance. If you are trying to run the country you do not want a lot of other people telling you how to do it better. You want to shut Parliament up. The pressure is from not only the Government and their colleagues, but the huge Civil Service machinery behind them, which wants to go this way, finds that a few people are squeaking in this House, and suddenly has to go that way. This is a matter of the greatest importance and I hope that in the years to come your Lordships will not let it go.
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe
My Lords, I thank noble Lords on the Front Bench for providing us with the opportunity for this debate. I thank them also for the firm leadership which they are giving the House. They have recognised that the electorate this year have spoken with quite a different voice from what we have normally heard, and have been endeavouring to respond as best they could to the will of the people and to try to win back support and trust in the ways that they are exploring these issues.
When reflecting on the debate, I share the view of the noble Viscount, Lord Astor, who is no longer in his place—there has been an element of disconnect from what is happening out there in political terms and in real life. It is important that we endeavour, as we work through this issue, to ensure that we are connected. It is worth reminding ourselves that all three parties went to the electorate with manifestos seeking either an elected or a partially elected Chamber. For the first time, the issue came up regularly before 8 million to 10 million people in the leaders’ debates, which we had never had before. I suspect that for the first time people knew more about the House of Lords and the attempt to reform it.
I ask myself what right I have as an appointed Member of this Chamber to override and ignore those facts. If we are about rebuilding trust, we have to look for the areas in which we can do it. We should listen to what people have said. It does not do us a great deal of justice or help us if we start ignoring manifesto promises. I say that as much to my own side as to colleagues on the other side.
In my opinion—I am sure that this view is not commonly held—where the Government may have gone wrong is that they lost their radical credentials marginally by not immediately moving to hold a referendum on the coalition’s programme for action. Had they done that, we would not have been having this debate today; without such a referendum, many of the debates that they will run into will also be problematic for them. I have raised this issue with my party, arguing that, if we go into a coalition, we should seek the electorate’s support in a referendum. Indeed, I shall be asking the prospective leaders of my party where they stand on this issue. We have to tackle some of the fundamental changes that have taken place in society. One of them relates to involving the wider public through referenda to a degree.
I come back to the question that the Leader raised at the beginning of the debate. The Government have an opportunity to redeem themselves. They could commit themselves to taking the Bill, after we have finished with it, back to the public, just as they said in their document that they want a referendum on other changes. I ask the noble Lord to reflect on that, as I believe that that would be the right thing to do and I suspect that he would get the right answer if he did it.
My next point is on an entirely different issue. Will the noble Lord say whether the Government will consider breaking the linkage between the honours system and appointment to this Chamber? That is a fundamental issue, which I do not think has been raised today, and it needs to be looked at. I shall come back to that point later.
I come to the general approach. If the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, had been bolder at the beginning and had stated where the Government stand on the use of the Parliament Act, we might have had a rather different debate today. I understand that we are starting gently down the route, but I believe that we need to focus minds. I believe that the Government would have taken away a lot more useful information from this debate if we had known whether they intend to use the Parliament Act. I ask the noble Lord to clarify the Government’s position on that.
Where do I stand on this issue? I broadly fall in line with my noble friend Lord Butler. We have to deal with reality and I suspect that we will not be far off the mark of what he said might happen. I support an 80:20 per cent hybrid House. We can make that work if we want it to. I would go for 500 Members initially, possibly changing that further down the line, with the constituencies the same as for the European elections, with open lists and preferably with primaries—the Conservative Party was exploring that idea, which I hope has not been forgotten. We need new systems for selecting people to be elected to this Chamber. I hope that the views expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Low of Dalston, will be taken into account by my friends on the other side, as what he said was very useful. There are ways in which we can identify people of the right calibre from around the country who are prepared to stand and who could come here and give the kind of performance whose possible loss concerns so many people.
I come now to the unanswered question of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, who asked what difference and improvement elections would make. First, we would have an element of accountability. I would go for eight-year terms, subject to re-election for a further eight years, making 16 in total. Here I differ from what was suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Butler: I would go for re-election after eight years. What would also be different—this has hardly been mentioned, which is fascinating—is that tonight we have 12 women out of about 64 speakers in the Chamber. The problems that we have with the underrepresentation of women in Parliament have not been mentioned. We should have quotas and we should go for substantial increases in the number of women who would be eligible for election to the House of Lords. Similarly with ethnic minorities, we should look for substantial changes so that we end up with a different-looking Parliament entirely.
The issue of the absence of geographical spread has already been mentioned, so I will not pursue it, but perhaps we should look for a few Roman Catholics from Northern Ireland. Would they not make this Chamber better than it is at the moment? The noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, clearly demonstrated how the quality of the House has changed over recent years. There is a case for it to continue to change—and for the better—in order to become more accountable and more democratic.
My noble friend Lord Rooker raised the issue of the relationship with the Commons. This is not beyond solution. I suggest to noble Lords on the Front Bench opposite that they dust down the work that was done by the 2003 Joint Committee and look at the ideas on the codification of our conventions. They should move quickly on that to kill all the counterarguments that have come from many quarters. Our work and procedures would stay broadly in line with what we do at the moment, although my preference would be to look at the way in which, at the other end, they deal so inadequately with European legislation. That is something that could come to the House of Lords.
There are answers to many issues that have been raised today about quality; and there is an answer to the potential conflict between us and the Commons. Finally, I refer to the committee that will be established under the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and suggest, not without jocularity, that perhaps he should consider whether we could offer a conversion from life peerages to hereditary peerages—maybe for one or two generations and then they would disappear. In that way, either we would give substance to, increase and improve the aristocracy, or possibly provide the final nail in the coffin that will undermine it.
Lord Tyler
My Lords, at this hour of the evening the time for opinions—particularly mine—has passed, so I will stick to simple facts. The first concerns manifesto mandates. Whatever the status of previous manifesto commitments from a succession of Governments, this one is different. All three major parties committed themselves to reform, and that has been reinforced since by the coalition agreement. I have heard the sanctity of the popular mandate quoted so often in your Lordships' House. There is no escaping this one, as the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, said. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, that it would be preferable if the Government had also spelt out what exactly would be the role of the revised Chamber. That is not a point that can be put to one side, and they should return to it as the proposals develop.
The second fact concerns the primacy of the Commons, which has been referred to on all sides of your Lordships' House today. I remind noble Lords that on 7 March 2007, MPs voted by 375 to 196 against a fully appointed House; by 305 to 267 for an 80 per cent elected House: and by 337 to 224 for a 100 per cent elected House. Incidentally, my honourable and noble friends on Liberal Democrat Benches in both Houses voted for reform by large majorities. It has been suggested this evening that somehow that is out of date as there is a new Parliament. I challenge any Member of your Lordships’ House to tell me that any MP elected on 6 May refused to endorse the manifesto commitment of his or her party on this point. How can we respect the primacy of the Commons if we do so only when it suits our personal prejudices, which would seem to be the position of some Members? I trust that new arrivals here from the other place will be especially protective of their party manifesto commitments and the primacy of the Commons.
Lord Tyler
Unless my noble friend is going to give me some injury time for his intervention—and I do not believe he can guarantee that—I am not going to give way.
I now turn to facts about the timetable and transition. I am delighted that my noble friends on the Front Bench have already announced that there will be a draft Bill by the end of the calendar year. Continuously throughout these discussions, noble Lords have rightly demanded that we get some proposals for discussion in your Lordships’ House. That will now happen. However, better than that, pre-legislative scrutiny by a Joint Select Committee will ensure not only that there will be a full parliamentary inquiry but also that there will be evidence from outside the Westminster Parliament. We keep being told that the public have this or that view, and in polls they have continuously said that they want reform of the Lords. This will be a full opportunity for consistent public support to be given meaningful input.
On transition, again, the Government have announced that there will be progress on important developments. I was delighted to hear the Leader of the House say today that there will be a committee of your Lordships’ House—that is appropriate—to examine a dignified and legitimate retirement route. I wish the committee well. I also believe that we now have to look very seriously at the four issues raised by my noble friend Lord Steel of Aikwood. Even if we make good progress on the big Bill, these issues are immediate, particularly with regard to the numbers coming into the House and the possibility that we will be completely swamped by a huge number and that this place will become unmanageable.
I turn also to the way in which your Lordships’ House operates internally, which is just as important in terms of reform. The work done under the auspices of the noble Lords, Lord Butler and Lord Filkin, and the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, stimulated by the Lord Speaker with the Strengthening Parliament process, is extremely important—we have to raise our game. This is a parallel exercise to one that is already taking place under the auspices of the new Government in fully implementing the work of the Wright committee in the other place, and not before time. Again, I was pleased that the Leader of our House expressed a positive response to that work—in contrast to the half-hearted reaction from the previous Administration.
Finally, it is absolutely critical that we make it clear to Members of both Houses that improving the way in which we operate and improving the influence that we have is not part of a zero-sum game. I quote the late Robin Cook on this point. Both Houses can improve their game together in holding the Executive to account for both their executive actions and their legislation. It is definitely not a question of one House doing better at the expense of the other. That, too, is explicit in the coalition agreement and it is very welcome.
I appeal to Members of your Lordships’ House to read again the White Paper produced under the auspices of Mr Jack Straw, with representatives of all three major parties, the Bishops and the Cross Benches. A lot of the issues that have been raised tonight were addressed in that White Paper, and even more so, if I may say so with due modesty, in the Bill produced in 2005 in the other place by me, together with Robin Cook, Kenneth Clarke, Tony Wright and George Young, and supported by many Members of your Lordships’ House, as well as many Members of the other place, including five senior members of the present Government.
The facts are that issues such as the excessive numbers during the transition period, the competitive mandates possible between the two Houses and the risk of challenge and deadlock are addressed in the report produced by the Constitution Unit with the five of us for that Bill and, to a large extent, followed through in the 2008 White Paper. We called our report, outlining that Bill, Breaking the Deadlock. At long last, after 99 years, we have a Government who seem to be determined to break that deadlock and we should face the political fact that those with a personal interest in procrastination must not be allowed to derail this process.
Today I have heard so many Members say that they are in favour of reform as long as it does not reform the rationale for their own presence in this Chamber. Frankly, I do not think that is enough to satisfy the public. It was claimed earlier that this House represents the beating heart of democracy in Britain. That level of self-satisfied complacency, to which the noble Viscount, Lord Astor, referred, does not enhance trust in our House or respect for parliamentary democracy.
Lord Kakkar
My Lords, I address your Lordships as one of the most recently appointed Members to your Lordships’ House. Therefore, I come to this issue for the very first time. I thank the Leader of the House for having provided this opportunity because reform of the House of Lords is clearly no trivial matter. It is a serious issue which I think will resonate with the public although, clearly, at the moment it does not. We know that there are greater concerns for the citizens of our country. When this issue is discussed in more detail early next year, the nation will be facing considerable hardship and the people of this country will want to understand that we are discussing it for the right reasons.
What is the purpose of considering reform of your Lordships' House? Is it because this House is ineffective? Is it because this House has failed to serve the people of our country for many generations? Is it because this House does not provide value for money? The purpose needs to be clear. We need to understand the current function of your Lordships’ House. I have always understood it to be a revising and scrutinising Chamber. My own impression and experience, admittedly gathered over a short time while sitting among your Lordships, is that this House delivers that function exceedingly well. Therefore, any process of reform needs to ensure that we make the current purpose of your Lordships’ House more effective. In that regard, the Bill proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Steel of Aikwood, is very powerful and should enjoy broad support. It deals with some of the issues which potentially make the working of your Lordships’ House less than effective.
If the purpose of reform is to change the very nature of your Lordships’ House, a considerable constitutional change is envisaged. During the debate we have heard of the potential to create a House which could challenge the other place more effectively. That has not been the purpose of your Lordships’ House to date. What might an elected Chamber look like? How might it function? Those are very important questions. Will it be subservient to the party machine in another place? Will it be a House where those who are successful in an election, through a method of proportional representation, owe allegiance to the other place and to those who control the other place? What would be the consequences of that?
One of our important functions is to ensure that the life of a Parliament does not extend beyond five years. If this House were to be controlled by another place, how would that safeguard be maintained? That is hugely important and a vital constitutional question that must be dealt with in any proposal for reform of your Lordships’ House. On the other hand, if this House were to be elected and were to become truly independent of another place and the party machines, there would be potential for conflict.
Of course, there has been much discussion about the conventions which dictate the relationship between the two Houses in this great Parliament. Would those conventions stand? My understanding is that when the Joint Committee on Conventions last looked at this some years ago, it concluded that they would not. The conventions stand because one House is elected and the other, which was hereditary, is now an appointed Chamber. Some constitutional settlement needs to be achieved to ensure that there is a clear understanding about the relationship between those two Houses, if there is to be an elected House.
It is wrong for a Motion to come in isolation for debate in this House and in another place that does not deal with those important issues. This is major constitutional reform, and the people of this country will expect us to consider all the implications and provide solutions to ensure that there is not gridlock in our legislative system, that Parliament continues to work well and, ultimately, that they enjoy the very best laws. Those laws come from appropriate, thorough scrutiny and discussion with Government. The greatest strength of this House has been to help the Government of the day achieve the very best laws for all the people of our country.
Perception is another important issue. There should not be a misapprehension in future about the purpose of reform. It should never be suggested that reform was proposed as a matter of political expediency because there was a need to satisfy tensions within a coalition Government. This is important constitutional reform, and must be done for the right reasons. Because it is such important reform, the people of this country deserve the right to consider it by way of a post-legislative referendum, so that they know exactly what they are voting about and have explained to them all the implications and how we and those in another place propose to deal with them.
Process is also important. It is regrettable that Cross-Benchers have been excluded from the beginning of this process. I know that, down the line, there will be an opportunity for scrutiny of legislation. That is welcome, but it is important that perception is correct from the very beginning. I have felt privileged to listen to all the extremely high-quality contributions this evening.
Lord Lucas
My Lords, I shall come in as Pollyanna, even if I leave as Cassandra. I support an elected House of Lords; I am with the noble Lord, Lord Richard, on that. I am happy with the composition and purpose of the committee; I am with my Front Bench on that. We have to have a focused committee if we are to get through the difficult business of producing a Bill. The structure that my noble friends have proposed is exactly right. I am happy that it should be followed by a pre-legislative stage, as long as it is given enough time. I am happy with what my noble friend Lord Strathclyde said about the elected House having the same powers and duties as the current House.
I do not see that there is necessarily a vast difference between those who want an elected House and those who support the Bill of my noble friend Lord Steel of Aikwood. At its closest, the only difference is that my noble friend’s Bill involves Peers being chosen from a secret list, whereas election involves them being chosen from an open list. The two are very close together, especially as my noble friend Lord Strathclyde says that the House is to have the same powers and duties, and therefore that we are presumably to try to keep close to the current model of this House—to have, as far as possible, an evolution rather than a revolution.
Perhaps we shall end up with a House which one can reasonably hope will behave in much the same way as does this one, or at least that it will change slowly and predictably. If we go for some of the more revolutionary styles of an elected House and move further from where we are now, we will get something that is much less predictable. It does not take long before we are in the territory described by my noble friend Lord Norton, where we have much more conflict with the other place, much less quality in this place and much less value for the public in the House as a whole
As I said, I am fundamentally optimistic, but I think that my noble friends are making a grave mistake in making the committee so closed to us. So many of the matters which the committee will have to ponder are entirely common between an elected House and proposals under the Steel Bill. What size should this House be? Should it incorporate or tend to major on expertise? What should be the political balance of the House? What should be the social balance of the House between gender and ethnic minorities? What should be the geographical balance of the House? How should we attempt to incorporate small parties? What should the thresholds be? What is the size and role of the Cross Benches? Are we to be a part-time House or a full-time House? What is the length of our term to be and is it renewable? What is the cost of this House to be? What are salaries to be? What support is to be provided to Members? Are we to have members of the Government in this House or are they merely to be visitors? How will we handle the transition? Should there be a continued link with the honours system?
Almost all the questions that this committee has to decide are matters on which this House has great expertise and interest and can apply itself regardless of whether we will end up with an elected or an appointed House. They all have to be sorted out whichever direction we are going in. There is no reason why we should not do that with good spirit and co-operation. The Government might even find—and I think they ought to know us well enough to trust us on this sort of thing—that we would give them a decent hearing on which electoral system should be used if we go for an elected House. What we have to do is be involved.
If we are left at the point where we do not really have any say until we get to the pre-legislative stage, we will be, in effect, supplicants to a committee half of which is made up of another place. I envisage us ending up in a train wreck. It is quite clear from the speeches today that the majority of this House is extremely cautious about the idea of election. If we think that all their ideas and contributions have been shut out of the process of getting to the Bill, if we are left with all the decisions seemingly taken, how do the Government expect that they will get their ordinary legislation through, let alone the Bill that will follow this? What are the consequences for the coalition if this policy falls apart because of the mishandling of this House?
It seems to me that there is a great deal to be said not for changing the composition of the committee, but for giving this House a great deal of time with that committee. I note that the Commons are coming back in September and we are not. I note that we have not been told when we are coming back in October, and not many of us really spend much time attending party conferences. There is plenty of opportunity for us to be given some quality time with this committee to get to the point where we feel that we have made our arguments, have helped to resolve some of the difficult questions in the Bill and that we have, at least in part, ownership of it.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, this has been a long, substantive and highly enjoyable debate. I say to my noble friend Lord Richard that if perhaps we have heard little new, it has at least served notice on the Government of the scale of the challenge that lies before them. I am glad that they are taking on the challenge and that they do it on the basis of manifesto commitments by all three main parties.
The Opposition are committed to democratic reform, and we joined the committee on that basis. I am only sorry that our Cross-Bench colleagues will not also be represented. We will not be giving the Government a blank cheque. We will judge the committee’s conclusions on their merits. I welcome the commitment by the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, to listen to this House. I am sure that he will reflect on the points raised by his noble friend Lord Lucas and, no doubt, if the usual channels decide that we could take up some part of September discussing this matter in greater detail, we on this side of the House would be only too eager to co-operate and allow that to happen.
When the noble Lord, Lord McNally, winds up, will he give a clear assurance that the Joint Select Committee will be given sufficient time to undertake pre-legislative scrutiny? Nothing is more certain than that, unless this is done with thoroughness, it will come unstuck the moment a substantive Bill comes into Parliament. Surely, that is the lesson of the many failed attempts in the past 100 years, one of which was so graphically described by my noble and learned friend Lord Morris of Aberavon.
At the last election, my party committed itself not just to a fully elected House of Lords but also said that it would be subject to a referendum of the British people. I have to say that I find it quite extraordinary that the Conservative-Liberal Government have not promised a similar referendum. Yet it is prepared to offer a referendum on the AV voting system. Surely, in constitutional terms, the emergence of an elected Second Chamber is of much greater lasting consequence. My noble friend Lord Grenfell is surely right.
The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, says “Lisbon”. We promised a referendum on Europe on the basis of a new constitution, but Lisbon was not a new constitution.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, this is from the party which did not offer a referendum on Maastricht. In UK terms, an elected Second Chamber is of much more constitutional importance than what happened in Lisbon. I also hope that the noble Lord, Lord McNally, will explain clearly how he sees the place of an elected Second Chamber in our democratic process. That point was powerfully put early on in our debate by my noble friend Lord Rooker. Lords reform cannot be considered in isolation.
There are those who assume that an elected House will simply carry on in the same way as we do now. The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, said as much. But we know that that cannot be so. An elected Chamber will by its very nature behave differently. It will be dominated by full-time politicians. Inevitably, there will be more challenging of both the Government and the other place. I have no problem with that. Like the noble Earl, Lord Onslow, I want a more powerful Second Chamber. But the Government need to be open about this. They should spell out the consequences of what will be proposed. On that I am very sympathetic to the noble Lord, Lord Waddington.
What will be the relationship of an elected Second Chamber to the Commons? There is general agreement here of the need to maintain the primacy of the Commons. The 2008 White Paper maintains that primacy does not rest solely or mainly on the fact that the Commons is an elected Chamber while the House of Lords is not. I agree that the subordinate relationship of the Second Chamber is underpinned by the Parliament Acts, including supply, and the fact that it is the Commons on which a Government rely for confidence and from whom the Prime Minister and most of the Cabinet are drawn.
The White Paper states:
“A second chamber that is more assertive than the current House of Lords, operating against the background of the current arrangements for its powers, would not threaten primacy”.
I agree. But let us have no doubt that an elected Second Chamber will act to the limit of its powers. Currently, we do not do so because we operate a system of self restraint through the conventions. My noble friend Lord Rooker spelt it out. Conventions are just that. They have no statutory basis. They change over time. What self restraint would be exercised by a largely or wholly elected House? It could be very little, if any. Why on earth should it?
In previous discussions it has been argued that a clause could be inserted in a Lords reform Bill, which simply states that nothing in such a Bill affects the status of the conventions and it just leaves it at that. But how can you leave it at that when it is clear that the current conventions are voluntary and can change over time? That was the point made by the committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Cunningham. I agree with the conclusion of the committee, not because I want to obstruct change—I favour change—but I do not think that we can avoid tackling the convention question. My noble friend Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe suggested how we should do it.
To those Members who are concerned about the constitutional implications of, for instance, the option of the statutory coding of the conventions, I do not think that that is inconsistent with proposals from a Government for legislation that seeks to be very specific about Parliament in areas such as fixed-term Parliaments, the rules for dissolution and the use of super-majorities. The noble Lord, Lord Waddington, thought that a written constitution was inevitable, and I must say that I am becoming more sympathetic to that view. So I say to the noble Lord, Lord McNally, that this is the most important issue that has been raised tonight. I greatly respect him and we share his view on Lords reform, but we will have to deal with the issue of powers. We cannot sweep it under the carpet.
I would also remind him of the question put to him by my noble friend Lord Brooke that in the event of this House’s opposition to reform, will the Government be prepared to use the Parliament Acts? I am hopeful, indeed optimistic, about reform, but I am convinced that we need a transition. First, we need it because of the practicalities of building up a new second Chamber, particularly if we elect that Chamber by thirds, which I favour. Secondly, we need to ensure continuity between the work of this House and the new one.
The 2008 White Paper set out a number of options for transition. We now have a further option, that of grandfathering, as described in the coalition agreement—except that no definition has been given. The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, seemed to suggest earlier that it is anything that the noble Lord or his friend Mr Clegg wants it to mean. Perhaps I can help the Government on this. I should like to ask the noble Lord, Lord McNally, to confirm that Article 13 of the Health Professions Order 2001 contains the most recent statutory definition of grandfathering. My understanding—and I had ministerial responsibility for this well known and perfectly formed order—is that if you have been a member of an unregulated health profession that was to become regulated, experienced practitioners did not have to sit a professional examination if they had previously been practising in a safe and effective way. That describes the position of the Members of your Lordships’ House. I sympathise with the view of my noble friend Lord Richard on this point.
I say to the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, that I believe in reform. I say also to my noble friend Lord Filkin that I want to make the current House as effective as possible, and I welcome the proposals of the Leader of the House for a group to look at working practices. Indeed, I ask him to reflect on the words of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, who suggested a number of points that could be encompassed within that review which, as he said, would make the House feel more involved in the important matters we are debating tonight.
On the question of retirement from this House, I noted what the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, had to say about the establishment of a Leaders’ group, and I welcome that. However, I put the point to him and to his noble friend that if they are so concerned about the number of Members in this House, why on earth did the Conservatives veto in the wash-up sensible provisions in the Constitutional Renewal Bill that dealt with this point? If the noble Lord is so concerned about the numbers coming to this House, why are we faced with the intention of the coalition to appoint dozens more new Peers? Why is that being done given that the coalition already heavily outnumbers the Opposition? We have long had an understanding that there should be rough parity between the Government and the main Opposition parties.
The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, has long and honourably argued for a strong, independent House of Lords, but unless this House is in a position to ensure that the Government are asked to think again, what is its purpose? Earlier the noble Lord, Lord Denham, said that if you win the argument, you usually win the vote. The noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, argued that the House has proved itself time and time again by its effectiveness in the number of changes that have been made to legislation as a result of what this House has done. This is not going to happen if the coalition insists on winning every vote.
We have heard today a great deal of the virtues of this House. The noble Viscount, Lord Astor, and the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, thought the House was being a little self-congratulatory. However, we, too, should acknowledge its virtues—the quality of debate, the scrutiny of legislation, the holding to account of the Executive. Next week the House will have an early test of this under the new coalition agreement with the Report stage of the Academies Bill. It is defective, ill-digested, as the noble Lord, Lord Walton, might say, and is being rushed through your Lordships’ House at an unseemly pace, which has attracted attention from around the House. I look forward to the House asserting its independence when it comes to voting next week.
It was said of Abbé Sieyés, the drafter of constitutions for revolutionary France, that on the second Chamber question he instructed:
“If a second Chamber dissents from the first Chamber, it is mischievous; if it agrees, it is superfluous”.
I know—elected or not—what kind of second Chamber I would like to have.
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord McNally)
My Lords, I was interested to hear the quotation of Abbé Sieyés. The only one I know is that he was asked at the end what he did during the French Revolution and he said, “I survived”. That is a good lesson for everyone in politics.
I was looking at the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and I thought that he looked fit and happy and 10 years younger, and then I suddenly realised why. For many a day in the previous Parliament, when we sat over there on the Liberal Democrat Benches, we used to initiate debates on reforms of this Chamber, and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, used to sit here, tense and flipping through his notes, waiting to reply. It is a lot more difficult on this side than it is on the other and I wish him good health.
I immediately take up the noble Lord’s point on grandfathering rights. If this excellent legislation will have his imprimatur on it, I shall certainly bring it to the attention of the Deputy Prime Minister. On the matter of the voting record, as he knows well, the record for this Government so far is that we have lost every vote in this House.
This is going to be difficult. I know that if I am too firm, clear and decisive then noble Lords will be up on their feet and saying that I am bouncing the House, not consulting it, and they will ask where all this came from. If I say we are listening and will consult, noble Lords will say that it is all wishy-washy. I can assure the House that the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, I and indeed the Deputy Prime Minister are in listening mode. We are simply trying, with the best of intentions, to set out a road map for this House and for Parliament so that they can deal with an issue that some would say has bedevilled it for 100 years. Certainly those who have been around for the past 10 years have seen it being dealt with without much progress.
In 1909 the then Prime Minister, Mr Asquith, received the following assessment of prospects of reform of the House of Lords from his Parliamentary Private Secretary, Edwin Montagu. He wrote:
“The history of all former attempts at coming to close quarters with the House of Lords Question shows a record of disorder, dissipation of energy, of words and solemn exhortation, of individual rhetoric … without any definite scheme of action”.
In some ways, try as they did, that could be the description of the previous Government between the reforms of 1999 and the cascade of deathbed repentances which ended up in the CRAG Bill. We are desperately trying, perhaps in time for the 100th anniversary of the first passing of the Reform Act, to make some progress.
I want to make a correction. Noble Lords will know that the 1911 Act was passed on 10 August, and I said in an earlier debate that we all know why they managed to pass it then—their Lordships wanted to go off and slaughter grouse. Not at all, it turns out. The noble Lord, Lord Willoughby de Broke, immediately brought me his grandfather’s memoirs. His grandfather was the leader of the last-ditchers, and he explains in graphic terms that the reason why they failed to derail the 1911 Bill was that the bishops ratted. When the last-ditchers needed their votes, they were inexplicably absent. Those noble Lords who are relying on the bishops this time around, remember that precedent.
Quite seriously, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Hunt. I know how much work he and Jack Straw put into attempts to make progress on this. That is one of the reasons why the Clegg committee is able to get off to a flying start; as the members will know, we are using quite a lot of that work. Some of the officials and experts have been on this topic for 10 years so they are not new to the issue, and the work that has been done, I should say to the noble Lord, Lord Richard, includes some drafting of parts of a Bill that was commissioned by Jack Straw. As I have said before, some of the building blocks are there.
Yesterday, when we were talking about the expenses regime, the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, pointed out that this House has not been slow in bringing reforms forward. She said:
“In the space of less than a year we now have a stringent code of conduct, an active sub-committee on privileges and standards and greater financial transparency”.—[Official Report, 28/6/10; col. 1515.]
That is backed up by an officer of the House who is going to police those reforms. So we have carried reforms forward and we continue to do so.
I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham. As I have said before, I sometimes think that we missed an enormous chance by not taking up the Wakeham recommendations; we would have been almost halfway through his transition period by now. That is a lesson sometimes in politics. I have said to the Deputy Prime Minister that he could well with profit read the Wakeham report as part of his reading on this subject.
I pay tribute to the noble Lords, Lord Butler and Lord Filkin, and the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, for their initiative on the other matter of trying to parallel the Wright committee’s report. There are things that we could and should be doing as we approach the issue of major reform.
Let me take head-on the structure of the committee. Lots of people have asked, “Why are the Cross-Benchers not on it?”. I put it quite bluntly to the Cross-Benchers: they can be one of two things. They can be the fourth political party in this House or they can be what they all take pride in—individuals who come as independents to put an independent view to this House. Their strength is their individuality, which makes them separate from the political parties but does not make it easy for them then to be on a committee made up of three political parties which, in their manifestos, have just taken a case to the country.
Having had the experience of the past 10 years—this is something that always happens with these debates in the House—I know that there are colleagues who couch their speeches in notes of surprise as though some of the issues that have been raised have never been put to them before; this is all a matter of shock, goodness gracious, we must start from first principles and it will take at least five years. But if you start in the first few weeks of the Parliament, you are then accused of rushing them. Then, if you leave it, as the previous Government did, to the last few weeks of the Parliament, you are told, “This can’t be done in the last few weeks of a Parliament”. I know Catch-22 when I see it.
We are trying to produce what we have not had in the last century—a Bill which we can focus on. All the issues can be considered. It was said that Cross-Benchers were not being consulted. I assure your Lordships that not only will the Hansard of this debate be put before the Deputy Prime Minister, the Prime Minister and the other members of the Clegg committee, but so will a paper analysing the major themes that have come out of it. This is part of a consultation that we want. It is not matter of just going through the motions; it is a matter, at this stage, of having a committee of the willing to try to draw up a Bill to make progress. I have in my notes a line—it is all mine—that says that if the Member for Old Sarum had been on the committee for the 1832 Reform Bill, he might still be in the House of Commons. I was going to leave that out of my speech so as not to be provocative, because my noble friend Lord Strathclyde said, “Don’t provoke them. Be conciliatory”. I really resent the attack of the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, on my noble friend, whom he implied was trying to lure the House in directions that it would not otherwise wish to go, which is again far from the truth.
We are trying to set out the Government’s strategy, listen to the views of the House and then try to resolve the differences such as we can. However, if I believe in a directly elected House and my noble and learned friend Lord Howe of Aberavon believes in a wholly nominated House, I have with all respect to ask him what alchemy will provide a solution. The late Liberal MP David Penhaligon used to say, “If you believe in something, write it on a piece of paper, stick it through a letterbox and persuade people to vote for it”. That is how democracy works—I assure my noble and learned friend that I am not telling him how to suck eggs. I cannot see a way of resolving a dilemma such as this other than by the political parties taking their case to the country and then bringing it back to Parliament. That is the process that we are undertaking at the moment. We have taken our case to the country; we are bringing it back to Parliament for a full debate, for full scrutiny, on the basis of a draft Bill. I cannot for the life of me see any other way forward.
The noble Lord, Lord Norton, asked why the Parliament Acts exist. I have always understood that the Parliament Acts are there to underpin the supremacy of the Commons. It was asked what the new reformed House would do and how it would challenge Parliament. There are many bicameral regimes around the world that manage to work out the relationship between Houses and do not end up with gridlock. I say in response to the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, that I see this as an advisory and a revisory House. I was on the Cunningham committee. I remember the debates, and I remember why the refuseniks were so determined to write in to the Cunningham committee to say that its proposals should apply only to an unreformed House. They want to do exactly what they are doing now, which is to raise the spectre of some great constitutional battle between the two Houses.
I signed the Cunningham committee in the end, not, as the noble Lord, Lord Wright, implied, on the basis that at the point of reform there would be a great constitutional crisis; I signed it on the basis that it would apply to a new House, but that at the point of reform it would have to be looked at again. Noble Lords can read the Cunningham committee report, and that is what it says. That is absolute common sense. My belief, which was confirmed in many discussions in the Cunningham committee, was that the Cunningham committee conventions would still work and operate in a reformed House. If there was a transitional period, there is no doubt that it would give the opportunity for a proper look at where and what part of the Cunningham conventions would need to be looked at again. I do not see them as the great crisis point implied in the debate.
A number of noble Lords said that we should not be looking at this because there was a great economic crisis. As I said during the Queen’s Speech, the Churchill coalition brought in the Beveridge report and the Butler Act and won a war. I do not believe that Governments are one-trick ponies; they should be able to bring forward other reforms at the same time as dealing with the economy.
I have no doubt that if a pre-legislative scrutiny committee of both Houses was set up to look at a subject as important as this one, whatever I say from this Dispatch Box, those Members will not be bullied or railroaded. They will do a proper, thorough job. Every one of them will know that it will be one of the most important pieces of pre-legislative scrutiny that anyone has ever considered, and I do not believe that it would be a problem. I am sure that I have missed some other questions.
On the attitude towards the Steel reforms, I am a little worried, as the Minister responsible for freedom of information, that the noble Lord, Lord Steel, breached the Act by revealing our e-mails. I have always said that we should let the Steel reforms be part of the mix, and the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, has already indicated that one particular reform will be taken forward in a study group. The other elements will certainly be reported to the Clegg committee.
On the question put by the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, on working practices, I am assured that the usual channels are looking to make an announcement very, very shortly—and that means very, very, very shortly, within the next few days—about how to go forward with a full debate on that issue.
The noble Lord, Lord Jopling, asked what would happen if a party came from nowhere to amass an overall majority. There is ample precedent for that. Labour was the junior partner in the war coalition but won a landslide at the 1945 election. I like to tell the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, that on a regular basis. Again, that shows you how the House deals with such things. That is where the Salisbury convention came from. One of the great things about our Parliament is its ability to adjust to new circumstances, and that is a good example of it. We all want now to go to our beds—
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
Forgive me, my Lords. The noble Lord answered the question from the noble Lord, Lord Norton, about future use of the Parliament Act, but my noble friend Lord Hunt of Kings Heath and others asked whether that Act would be used in the case of a forthcoming Bill on House of Lords reform. I wonder whether the noble Lord could clarify that.
Lord McNally
That is why I was going to sit down before the noble Baroness asked her question. She has been in Government. If I said at this Dispatch Box now, “We are going to use the Parliament Act”, those on half the Benches would stand up, and quite rightly so. We are going to produce a Bill that we are going to ask you to look at in the most constructive form possible. Let me end—
Lord Desai
The noble Lord mentioned the Salisbury convention. That convention had to do with a party’s manifesto before the election. If there is a coalition, there is not one manifesto; there are two. How does the Salisbury convention apply if there is a coalition Government?
Lord McNally
I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, is already preparing a book on the whole subject. I remember the noble Lord, Lord Desai, when he was a troublemaker at the LSE. He has not changed.
Lord Rooker
With respect, he deserves an answer. The political parties all took legal advice before they drafted their three manifestos as to whether their words would cover them in the event of the Parliament Act being used. That was the case and it is why they are so similarly drafted. The noble Lord, Lord Desai, deserves an answer to his question tonight.
Lord McNally
I am not aware of that. My noble friend Lord Strathclyde said that the Labour Party must have had more money than sense if it was taking legal advice. Look; the fact is that the commitments made in our manifestos have been merged into the coalition agreement. If the Labour Party is saying that it is planning some kind of guerrilla warfare on that basis, while as far as I am concerned the Salisbury convention and the Cunningham conventions will still be operated in this House, we will have to wait and see.
The Earl of Onslow
What is slightly odd in this thing is that those on the two Front Benches and I, and the noble Lord, Lord Desai, agree. There is a sea of people from all over the place who do not agree, so those who are causing trouble will be led by the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, who is a Labour Peer, and by my noble friend Lord Cope, and my noble and learned friend Lord Howe, who are Conservative Peers. I am sure that I can think of one here as well. It is not a party political issue of where the Parliament Act arises. It seems to me totally wrong for this House to throw out a Bill like that, which had been agreed by the Commons. That is why I could never, ever agree to that myself.
Lord McNally
It slightly chills the soul to think that my sole supporters are the noble Earl, Lord Onslow, and the noble Lord, Lord Desai, but I will take any help I can on this. However, the noble Earl makes a valid point. This is something else that this House has to think about, and it is why we want to take it gently through this. If the other place, on the basis of a substantial majority, brings a Bill to this House, this House will have to think very hard about what it does next. I think that has been understood over a long period.
I will give your Lordships two quotes to finish, and shall then sit down. The historian Janet Morgan, writing over a quarter of a century ago, wrote:
“On summer evenings and winter afternoons, when they have nothing else to do, people discuss how to reform the House of Lords. Schemes are taken out of cupboards and drawers and dusted off. Speeches are composed, pamphlets written, letters sent to the newspapers. From time to time the whole country becomes excited. Occasionally legislation is introduced; it generally fails”.
That is a very pessimistic view, so I finish with this. As something of an historian manqué, I subscribe to History Today. The latest edition has an article on the 1832 Act. We might find its opening useful as we go to the next stage of Lords reform. It says:
“There is a curious but almost entirely consistent feature of the history of constitutional change in Britain, a feature which could be said to typify the twin national characteristics of boldness and caution. It is that significant political alterations … are generally resisted for decades, but once adopted are almost immediately absorbed into the general pattern of stable political continuity”.
I believe that would happen if we faced up to the fact and reformed this House.