Draft House of Lords Reform Bill

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Monday 30th April 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws]

My Lords, this issue has engaged me since the launch back in the 1980s of Charter 88, which called for House of Lords reform as part of a serious rethink of our constitutional architecture. I chaired Charter 88 from 1992 to 1997 and played a role in putting constitutional reform on the Labour Party manifesto prior to the 1997 election.

More recently, I chaired with the Conservative politician, Ferdinand Mount, the Power inquiry, which also recommended the reform of this Chamber. However, I reinforce the point that those recommendations for a change to this House were set against a backdrop of holistic constitutional reform, a recognition that if you want to reform this House that reform will have knock-on effects and therefore should be seen in the wider context of the checks and balances that are needed to make our system work well. You have to ask questions: what is the second Chamber for, and what are its powers?

For that reason, Charter 88 in its manifestation argued for a written constitution, something that I still believe is necessary, particularly as we become a more mature and sophisticated democracy. We continued to argue in the Power inquiry report that there had to be a written declaration of what the powers of this House would be in relation to the House of Commons. If the primacy of the House of Commons was to be maintained, there would have to be some kind of statutory document or concordat setting down the nature of the respective powers.

We also suggested that there should be a regional basis on which this House might be elected. Parliament is at the heart of our democracy and it is vital that it has the confidence of the people. When the Power inquiry went around the country and asked the public what they felt about the House of Lords, they said that they wanted it to be elected. Interestingly, when the follow-up questions were asked as to what kind of membership they wanted, they said that they wanted it to be expert; they wanted Members to have a hinterland and to have experience in many different walks of life; and they wanted to see independence. They wanted in a strange way to square a very difficult circle, because finding an electoral system to produce that is the real challenge. I am not satisfied that the recommendations in the recent reports meet the requirement.

People repeatedly told us that they wanted independence of mind and a distance from party diktat. They were very clear that they did not want any extension of dominance and control by the main political parties. They did not want any reform that brought an increase in the writ and power of the Executive—that is, Downing Street— whichever party was in power. This was not in relation to any specific distrust of any particular political party. They liked the idea that people had a lifetime’s experience in different walks of life and that that would provide a different kind of Chamber from the other. It is here that I take issue with the noble Lord, Lord MacGregor, who asked what kind of person would want to be in this new Chamber if they could not see a progression in their career. What people really like about this Chamber is that it is filled with people who are not professional politicians as we see in the other House.

What people did not want—we should concentrate a little on what is not liked about this House as we congratulate ourselves on our successes—is for the Lords to be used to reward party donations or as payback for services rendered to a political party or Prime Minister in some form or other or as a place of refuge for persons being removed from the House of Commons. They did not want it to be seen as a place to bump someone into to provide a safe seat for a party favourite. I am afraid that those suspicions are regularly reiterated by critics of this House.

There is wide agreement, therefore, about the need for reform. We are too large, and it is clear that there has to be a review of our size and our purpose, but we have to reflect for a moment on how you achieve that. It really is not becoming for us to congratulate ourselves on how terrific we are and on the quality of our debates. It is for others to say whether that is what they think. It is not enough for us to say that we should be allowed to stay here for ever. It is for others to decide on that. We cannot therefore talk about reforming this House without giving the public their say in how it should be done. It is for that reason that I urge that we consider taking a step similar that to that being recommended by the alternative report, which is that there should be some kind of constitutional convention but not in the form that is being suggested, with the great and the grand and the academic researcher being put on it.

The people doing that should come from among the general public. This is not something that has not been considered in other nations. Recently Canada, which looked at whether it should renew its electoral system and change it from first past the post to a proportional system, created a convention made up of a cross-section of its public. There is a clear methodology for doing that. It had proper and full debates, with evidence gathered from a properly drawn cross-section of the public, who in fact all decided that they preferred first past the post to the proportional representation that had been proposed. It is the public who should decide on this and not parliamentarians, who may have vested interests.

The person to whom we should turn is a very distinguished professor of political science at Stanford University, James Fishkin, who with a whole team of people there has developed this deliberative polling system. He has done it for Canada, and he has done it for other parts of the world when presented with constitutional issues of importance. I would advise this House to embark on having his team conduct such a thing here over the next period and advise our political leaders.

The complementary relationship between the two Houses should be at the forefront of our minds, but it is not acceptable in the 21st century for this House to be created through patronage. Power has to be given to the people. We have been enriched, no doubt, by the many people on the Cross Benches who have come here independently and not as part of the party system, but that could still be done under an electoral system. I am happy for it to be 80:20 per cent hybrid House if that is the consensus, but it is the public who should decide and not us.