House of Lords Reform

Lady Saltoun of Abernethy Excerpts

Tuesday 29th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[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.