Draft House of Lords Reform Bill

Baroness Young of Hornsey Excerpts

Tuesday 1st May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Hornsey]

My Lords, I rise to speak briefly in the gap and thank the House for allowing me the opportunity to do so. I apologise to the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, for trumping her as the last speaker from the Joint Committee.

Like others before me, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Richard, for his diligent and patient chairing and engagement with this most difficult of tasks. As a member of the committee, I learnt a lot about how both Houses work and welcomed the opportunity to work with Members from the other place as well as a cross-party group of Peers. In the main I supported the Government’s proposals for a number of reasons. However, I did so having changed from my original position. I had previously supported an appointed House along the lines of the original Steel Bill. However, given that Bill’s death by a thousand cuts, that was no longer a viable option and in any case I had some major misgivings.

After considering and analysing the statements made to the Joint Committee and hearing some of the arguments that I had previously made played back to me, spoken by other Members of your Lordships’ House, I could no longer subscribe to the notion that an all-appointed House was the right course for reform. I will not say that it was an easy decision to come to, partly because I anticipated that many of my noble friends on the Cross Benches would oppose an elected second Chamber, although I might have underestimated the vigour with which they would do so. But arguably even more importantly, I was wary of supporting the proposals in the White Paper and Bill that we have pored over for so long because the draft legislation contains a number of problems that need to be sorted fully before it is considered fit for purpose. Noble Lords have, of course, pointed out those flaws.

I wish to address three points in the short time allocated to me. I am addressing these because they are some of the issues on which I modified my views as scrutiny progressed. First, some noble Lords say that there is more party-political independence in your Lordships’ House than in the other place. As the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, and others have mentioned, on many occasions this House has successfully put forward amendments challenging government Bills. However, in the vast majority of cases—well over 90 per cent—noble Lords vote with their political party, even though they may sometimes feel like doing so while holding their noses.

Secondly, I have heard it said many times that there is more diversity in the Lords than in the other place. I have said it myself in the past but I decided to check the assumption. Diversity in this House across the category of age is particularly poor, with many more noble Lords over 80 than the two Members we have under 40, as the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, pointed out. On gender, we do about as well as the other place. However, no rigorous research is available on disability, ethnicity and faith as we do not monitor these areas. Further, it must be clear to most noble Lords that we are drawn from a narrow stratum of society as regards social class and regional representation. In other words, we have no evidence to support the assertion that the Lords is more diverse as a result of being appointed. Incidentally, the issue of evidence is very important when considering what was put before the committee. Much, if not most, of what we heard and read was essentially opinion, albeit the opinion of experts, and should be examined in that light.

Thirdly, there is the question of whether the public think that Lords reform is a priority, especially in the current challenging times. If they do not, perhaps that is because they have lost faith in our political system and see it as being concerned with maintaining the interests of an entrenched privileged political elite—one that works to the advantage of all three major political parties. Perhaps the public are not prioritising constitutional change because they do not think that the institutions are willing or able to change that much in the end. The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, has already referred to the fact that, when polled, the majority of the public regularly state a preference for Members to be elected in the House of Lords. They also want Members who are less in thrall to the party political machines. In any case, have we really reached a point where we have so little confidence in the Government and Parliament that we feel that they, or we, are unable to work through more than one major issue at a time? Historically, the work of Parliament has not ground to a halt in order to deal with one grave situation to the exclusion of all else.

In spite of the hostile reception given to the Bill in your Lordships’ House, I remain convinced of the principle of election, at least for the majority of the House. We continually assert that this House does an excellent job at revising and scrutinising, so let us hope that the Government will take on board the many considered and thought-through comments from the Joint Committee, noble Lords and the alternative report. Then, when the Bill comes to this House, no doubt we will perform this function with our customary rigour.