House of Lords Reform Bill [HL]

Earl of Caithness Excerpts

Friday 3rd February 2017 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, here we go again on reform. We have already had Bills to reform the Lords from my noble friend Lord Elton and the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, and now we come to another Bill. The sadness of this Bill is that there are no Explanatory Notes. It was a great courtesy and help to the House that my noble friend Lord Elton produced Explanatory Notes with his Bill. There are none with this one but I am grateful that the Library produced an In Focus briefing which helps explain what the Bill is supposed to do.

First, the noble Baroness wants to fulfil her prejudice to get rid of the remaining hereditary Peers. I do not disagree with her on that. I have made my position perfectly clear: I am very happy that we hereditaries should go provided that the life Peers go as well and that we have a fully elected House. The Bill does not fulfil that wish.

Looking at it in a little more detail, we come to the election of the House of Lords. In Clause 3(1), the person who is elected will get a Writ of Summons. Presumably, that person then becomes a Lord. We will come on to that in more detail in a moment. As has already been mentioned, we then get two classes of Peers in the House. That is a recipe for total disaster. As I think everybody has said, one advantage at present is that we are all treated equally in this House.

Then one looks at what regions the noble Baroness proposes. I agree that the regional imbalance in this House is acute, startling and to the detriment of its working. Earlier, I proposed that the House should be elected on a regional basis but on the old county model, much more like the American Senate, so that Caithness would have one representative and so would London. That would be on a totally different basis to the House of Commons and would be more geographically diverse and much more representative. However, the noble Baroness proposes the same constituencies as for our Members of Parliament in Europe.

Of course, that leads to the question on which the right reverend Prelate ended: what is the purpose of this House? Why do we need to elect new Peers from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland when we do not deal with much of their legislation? This House has changed. It is a bicameral Chamber no longer for the United Kingdom but for England, with a little bit of work for the United Kingdom. As for our role, that needs to be examined because if the Government were to produce better legislation and the House of Commons act properly in being a revising Chamber, our role could be significantly revised, enhanced and improved. We could have a much smaller and more effective Chamber.

On numbers, I agree broadly with what the noble Baroness suggests. A House of 300 should be quite adequate for our revising work. This House worked extremely well 40 years ago with a smaller number of Peers than take part now. We expanded our workload as more and more Peers came in but it would be quite easy to rationalise that back.

There is no mention of Cross-Benchers in what the noble Baroness proposes in her Bill. She said there would be a role: they can stand for election. However, in her submission to the Library’s In Focus briefing, she says,

“there would be special arrangements to allow crossbench peers to stand as a group”.

That does not appear in the Bill so we have a major contradiction there in the proposals.

Clause 12 contains one of the fundamental difficulties that we have faced, which the noble Lord, Lord Low, referred to: the power of Her Majesty to confer life Peers under the Life Peerages Act 1958. In fact, that is really a power of patronage for the Prime Minister. Whatever the reform of this House, that power must stop or change dramatically. It has been abused by three former Prime Ministers—Mr Blair, Mr Brown and Mr Cameron, the latter aided and abetted by the Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Clegg. They changed the constitution of this country and the workings and constitution of this House in an unlegislated manner. To allow that to continue is quite wrong.

This brings me back to my earlier point that the elected Peers will become life Peers because they will get a Writ of Summons. There is no provision in the Bill for such persons to be removed after they serve their term of eight years so presumably they become life Peers and are allowed to sit in the House with existing life Peers. If we do a little calculation, over the last 15 years the net increase in this House has been more than 10 Members per year. Let us round that down to 10 to be on the safe side. At the first election, we will get 146 new life Peers and we will lose 90 hereditaries. At the end of the four years, we will get another 146 new life Peers plus the 40—that is, the 10 appointed annually on the trend of the last 15 years. In only 14 years’ time, in 2030, we will have 1,338 Peers in the House. Is that not a thought that fills us all with joy?

The noble Baroness said that it will lead to a full democratic reform but that is the one thing it will not do. It will lead to a complicated, potentially diverse, very unwieldy, undemocratic second House. As the right reverend Prelate said so well at the end of his speech, any reform of this House must be done to enhance our role and function. The Bill does not do that. I think the noble Baroness ought to think it out again.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb]

I offer my apologies. I am quite good at languages; I do not know why I am having a problem with the language used in the House of Lords.

The noble Lord, Lord Beith, said that non-voting would be a massive concession, and that is absolutely true. The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, referred to a “soft landing”, and I think that was my motive. It is a kindness to those who are here already and have contributed massively. We would keep them for as long as we possibly can. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich pointed out that we must look at the powers, too, but that is not the point of this Bill. I agree with him and I think that in general we have it more or less right, but again, that is not the point of this Bill. The noble Earl, Lord Caithness, pointed out that this is the third Bill, so there is an appetite for change. The noble Lord, Lord Young, pointed out that there is no consensus on the matter, possibly apart from the size of the House. That is useful, but we have to find consensus on other things as well.

Several Peers mentioned the patronage of the Prime Minister and said that it must stop because it has been abused recently. I totally agree because it brings discredit to the House. The only thing that can be said for it is that it brings down the average age of the House. I am 67 and feeling my age, but I am still under the average age here, which is 69.

[The Earl of Caithness]

My Lords, would the noble Baroness agree that successors to hereditary Peers also brought the average age of the House down? The noble Lord, Lord Selsdon, and I combined have been here for more than 100 years. We were quite young when we arrived.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb]

I thank the noble Lord. I personally think hereditaries have contributed massively to the House. Some of my best friends are hereditaries.