House of Lords Reform Bill

Debate between Chris Bryant and Jesse Norman

Monday 9th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

I nearly fell off my chair earlier today because I had an e-mail from a constituent on Lords reform. I think that that is the first one that I have had in all my years, despite the fact that I have held forth about the subject on many occasions. Fortunately, I agreed with her, so 100% of my constituents are in agreement with me.

I say to hon. Members who are opposed to the Bill that the current House of Lords is unsustainable. It has more than 800 Members, and the coalition agreement says that more should be appointed. At the rate that we are going, every member of the Liberal Democrat party will end up as a Member of the House of Lords. There are enormous problems with the numbers that we have at the moment, because appointment as the defining way of getting into the House of Lords leads to a heavy over-subscription of people from London and the south-east. Two hundred and seventy-three Members of the House of Lords come from London and the south-east, but just 38 come from the midlands and 74 from the north. It cannot possibly claim to be the representative House that it claimed to be seven centuries ago, when it had all the tenants-in-chief of the land available to advise the king.

[Jesse Norman]

Any reduction in the size of the upper House can be achieved without election. The hon. Gentleman is arguing not for election, but for a reduction in the size of the House.

[Chris Bryant]

I have only just started, to be fair. I wanted to start by saying that there are too many Members and, on top of that, too many who come from London and the south-east and too few who come from everywhere else. With a system of appointment, the people who do the appointing end up choosing people they already know, and that is why there is a heavy preponderance of people from London and the south-east. We also still have crooks, perjurers and arsonists up at the other end of the corridor. The hon. Gentleman will say, “Ah yes, but we can change all this through David Steel’s Bill,” but then we end up with a House of Lords that is solely appointed, and that is a House of patronage and power given to too few people, not to the people of the land.

We have the ludicrous situation of by-elections for hereditary peers. I say to all those who are opposed to the alternative vote system that we already have that system; it is used to elect people to the House of Lords. It is ironic that the last person who was elected in July last year, in a by-election that was not much commented on in the national media, was Lord Ashton of Hyde. I have never met that gentleman, and I suspect that few of us in this House have, but he got to stand as a hereditary peer only because of his original predecessor who was made a peer. That Lord Ashton of Hyde had been a Member of this House. He tried to get elected for Hyde several times and never managed to do so; but none the less, when he went to the Lords, he called himself Lord Ashton of Hyde. He went there because he had vacated his seat in the Commons two months before the vote on the Parliament Act 1911 to try to make sure that it could get through down at the other end of the building.

The system of having elected hereditaries in the Lords is completely bizarre, but it is even more bizarre to have the bishops of the Church of England there. There was an argument for that when we also had the bishops of Wales and Ireland, and some representation from Scotland, but it makes no sense for only one denomination representing one geographical area to be appointed to the House of Lords. I would move an amendment to get rid of all the bishops.

To those who argue in favour of the House of Lords on the basis of expertise, I would say that sometimes expertise is also a vested interest. Just take the case of two members of the Joint Committee on Privacy and Injunctions, which is considering a very sensitive issue in politics. One of them is Lord Gold. Most Members have probably never heard of him, but he happens to be a Conservative peer. He also happens to be a lawyer who specialises in litigation. Some people might say, “That’s great—he has expertise,” but I would say that he has a commercial interest in the legislation that he is advising on. Similarly, Lord Black of Brentwood, as the executive director of the Telegraph Group, has a direct financial and commercial interest in the legislation that is going through. That is why I say that, all too often, the commercial interests of people down at that end of the building turn it into a corrupt House.

House of Lords Reform

Debate between Chris Bryant and Jesse Norman

Monday 27th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

It is a delight to follow the hon. Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire (Jesse Norman), although that was the most casuistical argument based on party manifestos, and I completely disagree with him.

My central argument in favour of reform of the second Chamber is that the current system is unsustainable, in particular because of its effect on this House. At the moment, that House infantilises this House, because all too often Ministers stand up in this Chamber and refuse to give way or to agree to a perfectly sensible amendment, and then the Government go down the corridor and give way in another House.

Quite often, civil servants—whom we all love—say to their Minister, “What are you going to give away when you get down to the other end of the building?”, and that means that we do not do a proper job of scrutiny in this House. We will never do a better job of scrutiny in this House until we reform the other House, and that is why it needs to be changed.

[Jesse Norman]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Chris Bryant]

I will not, if the hon. Gentleman does not mind, because he has only just spoken. Some 34 Back Benchers spoke, and I want to reply to as much of the debate as possible.

The current system is also unsustainable simply because of the numbers. There are already more than 800 Members down the other end, and if we do not make reforms towards an elected second Chamber, we will end up with another 269.

Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Debate between Chris Bryant and Jesse Norman

Wednesday 1st December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

That is an interesting point. The Bill of Rights refers, I think in section 9, to the fact that proceedings in Parliament shall not be touched by any other court. The moot point then is what constitutes a proceeding in Parliament. There have been many discussions about this over the past couple of years, not least in relation to the arrest of the hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green). The hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex is right in one sense. However, I have presumed—this is the advice that I had when I sat on the Government Benches as Deputy Leader of the House—that parliamentary privilege covers proceedings in Parliament and the whole of the Standing Orders of this House, because that how this House chooses to proceed. I think that there is greater security in the Standing Orders of the House.

Another issue is how we ensure that the Speaker is not dragged into a partisan contest, particularly at a moment of great political drama. As I said in an earlier debate, my concern is that if it is left for the Speaker to have to determine all these elements, the Speaker’s impartiality is compromised.

Another strange element of the Bill is the provision that says that before the Speaker issues his certificate, he shall consult the Deputy Speakers. That mirrors the provision in the 1911 Act whereby the Speaker, before issuing his certificate on a money Bill, has to consult two members of the Panel of Chairs. What happens if all the Deputy Speakers disagree with issuing the certificate? Why should the Speaker have to consult? One presumes that it is simply a matter of fact, although I suppose we all know that facts are rarely clearly delineated and are rather more subjective than most people would want to admit. The point is, however, that this puts the Speaker and potentially the House in peril, because people may want to contest any one of the various elements of the Speaker’s decision. One of the matters that would almost certainly arise if there were any contest as to whether the certificate was being rightly issued is what the Deputy Speakers had said. That is an unfortunate direction for us to take.

We have tabled an amendment, on which I hope to divide the Committee, on the timing of when the Speaker issues the certificate. At the moment, the Bill makes no provision whatsoever on when the Speaker’s certificate should be issued. One therefore presumes that it could be a month, two months or several months after the passage of two weeks. Let us say, for instance, that after a motion of no confidence has been carried, the Government try to reform themselves with a different concatenation of political parties and do not manage to secure a new motion of confidence, but there are still patently ongoing negotiations that are nearing their closing phase. Would it then be all right for the Speaker not to issue a certificate at that point but to wait until such time that another Government had been formed? The difficulty is that if the Speaker chose not to do so, who is to gainsay the Speaker? There is no provision in the Bill for what would happen if the Speaker has not done what the Bill requires.

For all those reasons, I believe that this element of the Bill is flawed. I also believe that certain elements should not be in statute but should be in Standing Orders in order to provide greater certainty for the House by taking them within the concept of proceedings of this House. Above all, I want to ensure that there is no uncertainty about the specific provision as to when the Speaker has to act and when the Speaker may act.

[Jesse Norman]

I wish to speak in favour of the amendment. First, may I congratulate my hon. Friend and neighbour the Minister on the very calm and effective way in which he has steered this legislation through the House?

None the less, it seems to me that a basic issue with the legislation remains unresolved. It has been described in this House as a matter of parliamentary privilege, but in fact it concerns the fundamental principle of parliamentary sovereignty. One thinks of the magisterial words of A.V. Dicey:

“The principle of Parliamentary sovereignty means neither more nor less than this, namely that Parliament thus defined”—

by which he means the King or Queen in Parliament, rather than just Parliament itself—

“has, under the English constitution, the right to make or unmake any law whatever: and, further, that no person or body is recognised by the law of England as having a right to override or set aside the legislation of Parliament.”

That is the cardinal principle at issue today. It is worth saying that our parliamentary sovereignty remains intact in principle. It remains open to this House to repeal, if it so wished, the Act of Settlement 1701 by simple majority. The sovereignty of Parliament can thus be deliberately limited in its effects by this House—for example, by treaty—but it should not be limited by accident, by inadvertence or by over-confidence. There is a risk—a small risk—that this will happen under these provisions.

The Clerk of the House has advised in writing and in testimony that to include parliamentary voting procedure in statute would risk judicial scrutiny of the proceedings of this House, and possible legal challenge. It is important to note that this is not merely the view of the Clerk of the House, but also the view of Speaker’s Counsel, and it has legal authority behind it. That is simply because the functions described under the clause are statutory functions, and it would therefore be for the courts to determine whether those functions are lawfully exercised. That is, of course, advice rendered to the House, not to the Government.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jesse Norman]

rose—

[Chris Bryant]

He wants to sing. Sing for Britain.

[Jesse Norman]

No. Hon. Members will be pleased to hear that I do not propose to sing, but I am pleased to report that I have managed to overcome the quadruple handicaps of being tall, white, English and male.