House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) (Abolition of By-Elections) Bill [HL]

Lord Adonis Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 7th September 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)]

My Lords, we will try not to provoke beyond endurance. I regret this amendment to the Motion that we should go into Committee. In a sense, it is another Second Reading and that really is not the way that we deal with Bills. I will say only two things. First, 1999 is nearly 20 years ago; in that time, much has happened and much is happening now. Just down the corridor they are reducing the number of MPs by 50, as if that has no impact on the size of the Government or of this House. It seems extraordinary that when the Government are putting a lot of pressure into doing that, they now sit and say that they will do nothing on this issue. That is regrettable. It is something that we could do.

Secondly, I think that the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, is wrong to say that it is not for us to do. In the very wise words of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown, this is our way of showing that it is for this House to begin to do something. If we take a lead on this, it will help to give a fair wind to Burns. If we cannot even do this minor thing—this just puts more men into this House; a very small number—and begin to reduce the numbers, it does not seem to me that we are very interested in bringing this House into the current century.

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My noble friend is setting out the position of our party but the Labour Party manifesto at the last election, which both she and I supported, said:

“Our fundamental belief is that the Second Chamber should be democratically elected”.


Can she explain how this Bill advances that cause?

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

This Bill is about something much more immediate. We are not actually in government. It is very nice to say, “If we want to be in government, we could do something about this House”, but we are not there at the moment. The House can do something at the moment with this Bill. It is a very modest proposal and I call on all noble Lords to move with speed today and get the Bill through.

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[Lord Adonis]

My Lords—

[Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall (Lab)]

My Lords—

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[Lord Grocott]

The noble Earl should simply read the title of the Bill: the clue is in the title. The Bill is the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) (Abolition of By-Elections) Bill. That is what it does: nothing more, nothing less. If you oppose the Bill, you support the by-elections: there is no equivocation on that fact.

I must respond on two specific points made that are worthy of emphasis. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown, made a point about the assisted places scheme that the Bill addresses. It is worth putting it into figures. If you inherit a title from a hereditary Peer, you have something like a one in 211 chance—that is the number on the list of hereditary Peers able to stand in any by-election—of becoming a Member of Parliament, because this is a House of Parliament. If you are anyone else, like most of us here or the 60 million or however many people it is who are over the age of 18 in Britain, you have something like a one in 70,000 chance of becoming a Member of Parliament. That is the arithmetic, as I make it, so it is a ridiculous assisted places scheme, and all those who speak up to defend it who are hereditary Peers—I know that some are not—need to explain why they should have that massive advantage over all their fellow citizens.

[Lord Adonis]

Can my noble friend tell the House the size of the electorate that made him, and indeed me, a Member of this House?

[Lord Grocott]

I cannot speak for my noble friend, who has spent so much of his life with the Liberal Democrats. I am not sure whether he was a recommendation of the Liberal Democrats or of the Labour Party, but in my case it was on the basis of 60 years’ membership of the Labour Party, of which I am very proud and for which I will continue to do the job here.

I must deal briefly with the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, because it needs addressing, which is that somehow we must wait until the Burns report is implemented before we act. I make the very obvious point that the cardinal argument within the Burns report is that we must reduce the size of the House, and the mechanism for doing it would be two out, one in. Since our first debate in Committee, there have been two further by-elections for hereditary Peers. Those two hereditary Peers should have been replaced by one, according to the Burns report, but no, lo and behold, there are two more here. It is essential for anyone who is sincere about wanting to implement the Burns report that we get on and pass my Bill, because it would enable us to reduce the number of hereditary Peers, not precisely arithmetically but in line with the recommendation of the Burns report.

The only consequence of the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, is not to enlighten anyone; it is simply to delay further progress on the Bill. The two principal—I will not call them culprits, because I am sure they are proud of it—Peers who have relentlessly tried to filibuster the Bill are the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, and the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne. This time, 55 of the amendments are in their names. We had a similar debate to this before our previous Committee sitting, when there was a long debate on whether to put the Bill into Committee. We are doing that again now, and presumably we will do it again whenever it is next considered in Committee. It is clearly their objective to talk the Bill out.

I simply say this to the two of them: I know that the overwhelming majority of people in this House want the Bill to pass. The exchange of views up to now does not at all proportionately reflect the view in the House because—I am grateful to them for this—the numerous colleagues on all sides of the House who I know support the Bill have not wanted to contribute to the filibuster. A tiny minority is thwarting the clearly expressed view of these Benches, the Liberal Democrat Benches, a large number on the Conservative Benches and the Cross Benches and, in my judgment, a majority of hereditary Peers, any number of whom have come up to me to say that they wish that the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, and the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, would desist from what they are doing.

They should know better. Between the two of them, they have had about 100 years’ membership of this House. I repeat that because I could barely believe it when I looked it up: 100 years between them. They ought to be getting the hang of the rules by now, one of which is surely that you know when it is time to call a halt. They should call a halt on this and allow the Bill to proceed, because the only effect of what they are doing at the moment is not to improve the Bill or to stop it—they know they cannot do that, they do not remotely have the numbers; every time we have had a vote on the Bill there has been a majority of about 100. They should desist. I fear we now have only two and a half hours, but we had three and a half hours when we began the discussion. I will gladly give way to the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, because every time he speaks he gives me greater confidence of my position.

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Tabled by

[Lord Adonis]

At end insert “but regrets that the bill does not provide for a democratic second chamber to replace the existing nominated and hereditary House of Lords; and that the bill does not provide for a democratic second chamber to meet in the north of England”.

Lord Adonis’s amendment not moved.

Motion agreed.

Clause 1: Abolition of the system of by-elections for hereditary peers

Amendment 11

Moved by

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[Lord Northbrook]

I will give a brief historical background to support my argument. The Act of Union between the UK and Ireland in 1800 provided that the Peers of Ireland should elect 28 of their number, to be called Irish representative Peers, to sit for life on the part of Ireland in the House of Lords of the new United Kingdom. The fourth article of this Act of Union provides that,

“such act as shall be passed in the parliament of Ireland previous to the union, ‘to regulate the mode by which the’”,

representative Peers should be chosen,

“shall be incorporated in the acts of the respective parliaments”,

by which it was to be rectified.

The Irish Parliament passed such an Act, laying down in great detail how the original representative Peers and their successors were to be chosen. It laid down that the Irish temporal Peers were to meet at a stated time and place to elect 28 of their number, and each of the temporal Lords so chosen,

“shall be entitled to sit in the House of Lords during his life”.

Clearly a similar role is set out for a Peer chosen to fill a vacancy. This procedure continued unchanged until almost 100 years ago, when the Irish Free State was established. Crucially, the legislation that created this abolished the offices of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland and the Clerk of the Crown in Ireland, who was responsible under the Act of Union for carrying out important duties in connection with the election of Irish representative Peers.

In 1925, the UK Government were advised by their Attorney-General that this abolition demonstrated an intention to terminate the rights of Irish Peers to elect Irish representative Peers to fill vacancies as they arose. Expert legal opinion was obtained from two leading members of the UK Bar—namely, the future Lord Chancellor and the future Master of the Rolls—that the right of Irish Peers to elect representative Peers had survived and was unassailable. But the matter was not insisted on or carried through by the Irish Peers. Those already elected carried on serving for life, but no effort was made to replace those who died. While in 1925 the Attorney-General’s opinion could be justified for the south, it left Northern Ireland out in the cold.

[Lord Adonis]

I am trying to understand the significance of the point the noble Lord is making, because the figures that have been provided to me by the Library suggest that among the hereditary Peers—leaving aside the big problem we have about the lack of adequate representation of large parts of the United Kingdom among the life Peers—Scotland is overrepresented and Northern Ireland is appropriately represented. The figures that I have show that 10% of hereditary Peers are Scots, against 8% of the population at large. So I am not sure what the particular evil is against which he is seeking to protect the House.

[Lord Northbrook]

The noble Lord is correct on Scottish representation—I said earlier in my speech that the Scots were adequately represented. As I understood it, only one of the 92 was a Northern Irish Peer, and I wanted to see that process continued among both nationalities.

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[Lord Adonis]

I am having some difficulty in understanding what the noble Lord’s amendment actually does. Can he explain to us in plain English what subsection (4) his amendment would do?

[Lord Northbrook]

Let us say that hereditary Peers operate after Burns in line with the 15-year term for life Peers, new hereditary Peers would be appointed for 15 years, and there would be a by-election at the end of that period of 15 years to replace them.

[Lord Adonis]

Can the noble Lord explain how that relates to Burns? My understanding is that the Burns report would reduce the size of the House. His amendment would not reduce the size of the House at all, would it? We would simply have an arbitrary 15-year re-election requirement for hereditary Peers. Or have I misunderstood him?

[Lord Northbrook]

The point is made. Maybe the amendment should be refined to say that once the Burns report has passed, the by-election procedure part of that falls.

[Lord Adonis]

So it is entirely in respect of those who come up for re-election at the end of the 15 years?

[Lord Northbrook]

I need to give that consideration.

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[Lord Northbrook]

Yes. I beg to move my amendment.

[Lord Adonis]

I have learned more about the British constitution in the last five minutes than in many years. I had no idea about the arrangements for the rotation of the office of the Lord Great Chamberlain. I hope that whoever succeeds the present one has a more pronounceable name than the Marquess of Cholmondeley because the problem with holding receptions in the Cholmondeley Room is that nobody knows how to pronounce the name of the person after whom the room is named.

This is an issue with my noble friend’s Bill. I strongly object to my noble friend’s Bill because it entrenches a nominated House, which is his purpose—my noble friend wants to entrench a nominated House. He is not interested in a democratic House and he is not even interested in what the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, wants, which is incremental reform, although I notice that the noble Lord did not say what his next incremental reform would be. Maybe he might tell us in due course. Perhaps he does not want any further incremental reform.

[Lord Cormack]

This reform.

[Lord Adonis]

Just this reform and no further. We need to be clear about this. This will entrench a nominated House in perpetuity.

[Lord Cormack]

My Lords,

“Up with your damned nonsense will I put twice, or perhaps once, but sometimes always, by God, never”,


as Richter said to the first flute in the orchestra. The noble Lord ought to know that we have in this House a Campaign for an Effective Second Chamber, which I have the honour to chair and which my noble friend Lord Norton convenes; it has many Members of his side—enthusiastic Members, who are nodding as I am speaking. We believe in incremental reform. This is one more incremental reform following Steel, which dealt with retirement, following the Hayman Bill, which dealt with expulsion and there will be others. I hope that the big instalment later this year will be Burns. I would love to see that. It does not need legislation. That was why Burns was so skilful. I hope that we will have that, and it will be a further stage of incremental reform. It is not all legislative.

[Lord Adonis]

But these incremental reforms are so minute that no member of the public outside will have the faintest idea that any of this is happening. The reform that they will notice is whether we fundamentally change this House to turn it from being a nominated House that has no democratic legitimacy into an elected House which has legitimacy. That is the reform that will make a difference that people will notice. All this other incremental reform that the noble Lord is talking about is so much stuff and nonsense. It will have zero impact in the way that the House is perceived externally, and nothing other than a tiny, marginal impact on the actual operation of the House internally.

However, in terms of the integrity of the Bill, because I know that my noble friend is keen for us to stay on message, in so far as there is any principle at stake in the Bill at all, I do not accept it because I do not think that it makes the House any more legitimate than it is at the moment. To have hereditary Peers is fundamentally illegitimate. As a nominated House, as it would become after the passage of my noble friend’s Bill, it does not even achieve my noble friend’s objective. I understood that his objective was, over time, to eliminate the hereditary Peers. Now we discover from the noble Lord’s amendment that two hereditary Peers will remain, so there will still be an hereditary component in this House, even after the labours of Hercules that my noble friend has engaged in over many recent months.

The nonsensical nature of this Bill—nonsensical if one believes in wider reform, which some of us do—is made even greater when one looks at the actual detailed provisions. It does not even achieve my noble friend’s objective of seeking to entrench in perpetuity a nominated House.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

My noble friend Lord Adonis has this completely wrong. I normally agree with him, fully. There is no contradiction between having incremental reform now, while there is a Conservative Government and working towards major reform. I support major reform by the Labour Party, which Labour’s candidates stood on at the last general—that is, a senate of the nations and regions and not a directly elected legislature, which would challenge the primacy of the House of Commons. There is no contradiction between incremental reform now, and then, when we eventually attain a Labour Government, making some major reforms.

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, it is very important that we do not dissemble. I agree entirely with my noble friend, and actually I think that he and I would probably agree on the nature of a reformed second Chamber. However, it is important to understand that that is not the position of my noble friend Lord Grocott. He wants a nominated House in perpetuity and he will frankly accept that. He does not want this to be the first stage towards wider reforms; he wants to entrench a nominated House which has, in my judgment, no legitimacy whatever within a democratic constitution. He should be, and indeed he is, open about that.

I do not understand why it is, if that is what he is setting about, that those people who claim to be in favour of democratic reform—there are some in this House—are playing his game. His game is not to take a first step on the road to wider reform—rather, it is to stop any wider reform at all from taking place. We need to understand what my noble friend is up to. He is a very serious politician; he knows absolutely what his own game is, and we should not be playing that game.

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[Lord Grocott]

Perhaps I may have a word with my noble friend, who I always admire for his psychic powers, which I do not possess. He knows exactly why I do what I am doing at all stages. My noble friend is totally opposed to this Bill. I think he is the only person on these Benches—someone will stop me if I am wrong—or even on the Liberal Democrat Benches who is. I am grateful to him for clarifying his position. Whether he is sitting in the right place or not is only for him to judge.

I say this to my noble friend: I wish that he had made this statement a bit earlier. I had an identical Bill in the previous Parliament which received a Second Reading and a Committee stage. I do not recall seeing him in his place to express his view. He certainly did not take part in the Committee stage of this Bill on 23 March this year. I looked for him in the Division Lobby.

[Lord Adonis]

I was too concerned about filibustering my noble friend’s Bill.

[Lord Young of Cookham]

Perhaps I may gently remind your Lordships that we are debating Amendment 17 onwards, which relate to the Earl Marshal and the Lord Great Chamberlain.

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We will have a Report stage—I have asked the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, outside the House. It may be that, between now and Report, the noble Lord will tell me that all he wants to do is end by-elections—he is a fair man and a good party man, and he will understand that I am something of a party man, too—and that he considers this a fair and reasonable proposal.

[Lord Adonis]

I think that the Conservatives currently have 60 more Peers than the Labour Party. Does the noble Lord regard that as fair? Surely, we should get to parity—which I believe was the convention established when the House of Lords Act was passed in 1999—before his amendment takes effect.

[Lord True]

There is an argument there. As I understand it, the convention is that the governing party should not have a majority over the opposition parties—and we certainly do not have that on this side. I do not know whether the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, was present during the debates on leaving the European Union, but he may well have noticed, in the course of those debates, that the Conservative Party did not command an overwhelming majority in your Lordships’ Chamber.

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[Lord Adonis]

My noble friend Lord Grocott knows these things because he was Chief Whip, but I do not believe that the Labour Party was the largest party in this House until a few years before it left office. Even after the passage of the 1999 Act, for some years the Conservative Party was still larger. Is the noble Lord seriously suggesting that the Conservative Party needs a buffer of 50 or 60 seats in order to deal with the disunity in its own ranks?

[Lord True]

The noble Lord is suggesting that, and of course it is utter nonsense. I will not follow on with what I am tempted to say, because it is very rare that the noble Lord speaks nonsense. The reality is, of course, that in time there will be attrition. I believe that anybody who has the honour of being Prime Minister should have regard to balance. I had the honour of working in the Administration in No. 10 under Sir John Major, and it was put to Sir John frequently at that time that it would be good to have more Labour creations. I think that the failure to have more Labour creations at that time led, probably indirectly, to the anger that caused the 1999 Act. Of course, there should be fairness as well as restraint in creation, and I think that the Prime Minister is trying to have that.

My point is that I do not think that there is a principle of friendship and comity across the House for a majority in the House which is not the Conservative Party—although many might agree with it. I am sorry if they do; I try to persuade them. But I do not think that we should pass legislation—and I could not support legislation—the back door of which would be to strike heavily at the political strength of the Conservative Party, the governing party. It would cut the number from 250 to 200—which the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, said he would welcome. Yes, it would be over time, but I remind the House that, I think, 20 Conservative hereditary Peers are already over 75 and a number are over 85, and the effect will take place.

I have prolonged my remarks because of interventions. I think that the principle is clear: I believe that, if the House wants to proceed with legislation, an element of fairness towards the Conservative Benches and the Cross Benches could be achieved by including an amendment of this type. I beg to move.

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[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

Perhaps I may make one small point. I apologise to my noble friend, having said that I would stay quiet all day. I want to say one thing about why the Labour Party so supports this amendment. It was never about the political balance in this House. In fact, it has been a Labour Party claim for a long time that the idea that because people whose fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers and sometimes great-great-grandfathers did service for this country and were therefore put in this House, their subsequent children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren should be here is one that we no longer find democratic. That is the reason why we support this Bill. We put the issue of any political balance on the very wide and strong shoulders of the noble Lord, Lord Burns, and when we are able to move to a smaller House, we will deal with it then. This is not the way to do it. The importance of the Bill is that it is incredible that in the 21st century, we are talking about having by-elections for people because of what their ancestors did.

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, the incredible thing about the proposal before us is that we would entrench a wholly nominated Chamber of Parliament in perpetuity. My noble friend, whom I hugely respect, says that we support this amendment because it is in line with Labour Party policy. My noble friend Lord Grocott gave me a lecture earlier about how my position was inconsistent with that of the party. The Labour Party’s policy at the last election was:

“Our fundamental belief is that the Second Chamber should be democratically elected”.


I keep inviting my noble friend Lord Grocott to say whether he supports the Labour Party’s policy. Does he support a democratically elected House of Lords?

[Lord Grocott]

I am opposed to it being directly elected. In answer to my noble friend’s question: yes, believe it or not, after 60 years once in a while it may be the case that I do not say that I agree 100% with my party’s policies. Can he remind us how long he has been in the Labour Party and how often he has disagreed with the party manifesto?

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, I have been in the Labour Party for 24 years and I have voted against the Whip less often than my noble friend has in recent Divisions on European Union legislation. I do not take any lectures from my noble friend about party loyalty. He said to me earlier that he thought I was sitting in the wrong place in the House because I supported Labour Party policy. My noble friend appears to support an extreme version of the Conservative Party’s policy, which is for a nominated House in perpetuity. Maybe he would wish to cross the Floor. Let us keep this debate in proportion. We are talking about very specific amendments—I am drawing my remarks to a conclusion—to very minor legislation, but which would have a very major impact: it would entrench in perpetuity a nominated House, whereas the right reform is not to tinker with second-order issues of this kind but to engage in a proper democratic reform of the House of Lords, which happens to be the policy of the party which my noble friend Lord Grocott and I support.

[Lord Rooker (Lab)]

If my noble friend will allow me, what it would entrench in perpetuity is the sovereignty and superiority of the elected House of Commons, because that will get undermined the minute this place starts getting elected. It is as simple as that.

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[Lord Adonis]

I completely respect my noble friend’s point of view but it is not the policy of the Labour Party.

[Lord Rooker]

I do not care about that.

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Rooker may not care and my noble friend Lord Grocott may say that he has complete licence to disagree with the party’s policy. I respect that but it is not the policy of the party, which is for a democratically elected House. Anything else is a departure from that policy. I respect it but it cannot claim any moral or political virtue at all.

[Lord Mackay of Clashfern (Con)]

My Lords, I wonder whether it aids the Bill in going forward that we have so much discussion of the policy of the Labour Party, or any other party for that matter. We want to get the Bill forward and the less irrelevance that comes into speeches, the more rapid will be the progress.

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Moved by

[Lord Adonis]

35A: Clause 1, leave out Clause 1 and insert the following new Clause—
“Election of hereditary peers
(1) The House of Lords Act 1999 is amended as follows.(2) At the end of section 1 (exclusion of hereditary peers) insert “, except a person who fulfils the requirements of subsection (2).(2) A person fulfils the requirements of this subsection if—(a) there is a vacancy amongst the 90 hereditary peers excepted under this Act;(b) the person is a holder of a hereditary peerage; and(c) the person is elected by the persons who, on the date of the election, would be entitled to vote as electors at a parliamentary election.(3) The Secretary of State may by regulations made by statutory instrument make provision for and in connection with the provision of an election under subsection (2). (4) A statutory instrument containing regulations under subsection (3) may not be made unless a draft of the instrument has been laid before and approved by a resolution of each House of Parliament.””

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, Amendment 35A had an unusual genesis. I sought to table amendments to the Bill to provide for an elected House. As I have now said several times in my fundamental commentary on the Bill, that is the big issue before Parliament and should be addressed sooner rather than later. The clerks said that it was not possible, within the scope of the Bill, to move for elections which involved members of the public being elected. However—wait for it—it was within the scope of the Bill to make it possible for the public to elect hereditary Peers from the register when a vacancy arose. That is why the Committee has before it an amendment providing that, in future, the entire national electorate would vote when hereditary Peer vacancies arose.

I am not proposing this as a serious proposition for the future composition of your Lordships’ House, but I unapologetically move the amendment because it puts into the debate the central issue of moving from a nominated/hereditary House to a democratic one. I have always believed that we should do so. I believed it when I was writing the constitutional reform policies for the Liberal Democrats and when I was advising Tony Blair on constitutional reform. My noble friend Lord Grocott and I disagreed all the time about this fundamental issue.

My noble friend has, as I see it, a very conservative view of the constitution, which is basically that the constitution circa 1950 was jolly good and we should not make any changes. My view is that we should carry on modernising; part of that is more democracy, which means really substantial devolution, a fair voting system and a democratic second Chamber. Those, to my mind, are fairly sensible propositions that, sooner or later, we will have to address as a country. The reason I believe that they have much greater urgency than before is that the whole context in which constitutional reform is now being debated is that of the single biggest constitutional reform this country has undergone in the last half-century, and that is Brexit.

In my travels across the country, which I have been engaged in intensively in recent months, I can tell the House that—as many noble Lords will know from their own communities—there is intense discontent at the state of governance in this country at the moment. It is particularly intense in the Midlands and the north of the country, where there is a great sense of alienation from the centres of power and a significant feeling that parliamentary institutions are not working effectively. There are many things that I believe need to be done to address that. My own view is that we should have significantly more devolution—part of the problem in the Midlands and the north is that we have inadequate devolution. We had good devolution settlements for Scotland, Wales, London and, when it was operating, Northern Ireland, but we have only scratched the surface of devolution in the Midlands and the north and we need to address that seriously.

Reform of Parliament has a part to play in that too. The conclusion that I have reached—though I put this forward tentatively and believe that we should have a constitutional convention to discuss it—is that we should now have a democratic second Chamber, either directly elected or representing the devolved elected institutions of the country. I think an argument can be made either way for a directly elected second Chamber, as in Australia, for example, or an indirectly elected second Chamber, representing what would become a federal structure of the United Kingdom, like the Bundesrat in Germany. There are arguments for and against, but what there is no argument for, in my view, is a perpetuation of a wholly nominated second Chamber, which, by the way, we got by accident.

We got to a wholly nominated second Chamber through a series of incremental reforms to what was a hereditary House. No one at any stage set out to create a wholly nominated Chamber. When Harold Macmillan introduced the then Life Peerages Bill in 1958, it was to complement what was still predominantly a hereditary House. Indeed, ironically, a large part of the reason he introduced the Bill was that members of my party, the Labour Party, were quite rightly not prepared to accept hereditary peerages. Lord Attlee, much sainted in the memory of my party, was one of the very last members of the Labour Party to accept a hereditary peerage; others simply would not do so. As part of a classically Tory attempt to keep the House of Lords going at all, the Life Peerages Act was passed.

We have had a substantial debate on what happened in 1999 and 2000; I know about it intimately because I was advising Tony Blair at that time. We gave firm commitments that the nominated and part-hereditary House that would replace the substantially hereditary House that applied before 1999 would be interim. It was deemed interim in the report of the royal commission chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, which of course recommended a predominantly elected House. For various reasons, not least the strong advice of my noble friend Lord Grocott, who was always passionately against any public elections to this House, those proposals were not taken forward, which I believe was a mistake.

[Lord Grocott]

I can live with a certain amount of total misrepresentation, but there comes a point where it is impossible for me to remain seated. At no stage have I said to the noble Lord in private or in public anything other than the fact that I am opposed to a directly elected House. He is a clever chap who no doubt would be happy in a university; he knows that that does not rule out an indirectly elected House, nor a House that is more representative of important interests across the nation. There are a whole range of other options. My fixed position—this is the only part of his long speech that has been accurate about me—is that I am opposed to a directly elected House for precisely the same reason that my long-standing noble friend Lord Rooker explained to him: it would be a threat to the House of Commons. He has never been elected to the House of Commons, never been an MP or anything of that sort, so he does not understand how fundamentally a directly elected senate would be a threat to the powers of the House of Commons.

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[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, I defer to my noble friend’s greater understanding of these issues. However, it is not the case that an indirectly elected House that represented the nations and regions of this country would not be a powerful House. If my noble friend wishes himself to go and spend time in a university, he needs to go and study the operation of the Bundesrat in Germany, which is a substantially powerful institution, because it represents the elected state Governments of the Federal Republic of Germany. If my noble friend’s concern is about having a stronger second Chamber, any of these options would lead to a substantially stronger second Chamber than we have at the moment, and that would of necessity take power away from the House of Commons, which would be a very good thing.

These are issues which we should be debating as a country, and which the public wish to see debated, because they want to see more substantial power brought to them. It is a particular issue in the Midlands and the north of this country, where the sense of alienation is greatest and, I might add, if you look at the statistics, those regions are least well represented even within this nominated House. Eight per cent of the Members of your Lordships’ House come from the north of England; 15% of the population comes from the north. London and the south-east are almost twice overrepresented in this House if you compare the number of Members of this House with the population of those regions.

There are fundamental problems with the operation of this House, which will not be dealt with—I say with great respect to the noble Lord, Lord Cormack—by minute, incremental reforms. They require fundamental reform. The Brexit crisis that we are now going through puts fundamental constitutional reform on the agenda. The time is right to address it now and not to engage in tinkering reforms of this kind, which will simply entrench a nominated House.

[Lord Low of Dalston (CB)]

Instead of addressing us at some length on the rationale for his amendment, could the noble Lord possibly answer an important question about the process or the mechanism by which it would operate? As I read the amendment, it says that whenever a vacancy occurs by reason of the death—or, I suppose, the resignation—of a hereditary Peer, the whole panoply of a general election has to be mobilised to fill this one vacancy. Is that really what the noble Lord’s amendment suggests?

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, this is such a well-crafted amendment that it would make a fundamental reform of this House unavoidable, which was the original purpose of the undertakings given by my noble and learned friend Lord Irvine of Lairg during the passage of the 1999 Act. He saw at the time, and we agreed, that this would be a poisoned pill in the composition of the current House of Lords that would make the creation of a democratic House unavoidable. That, alas, has not happened in the last 20 years. I greatly regret it and I accept some measure of responsibility for the fact that the Government of which I was apart did not succeed in carrying through its proposals for a fully elected House. But I am afraid that the party opposite did not succeed in it, and that the noble Lords on the Liberal Democrat Benches, who claim to be most powerfully in favour of these reforms, also failed when they were in government. So in different ways, all the parties in this House have failed.

That failure, and the failure of wider constitutional reform of which it is a part, is a substantial part of the reason why we are going through the current Brexit crisis. We need to address it, and I would much rather do so by fundamental changes and improvements to the constitution of the United Kingdom than by wrenching this country out of the European Union.

These issues cannot be ducked, and we certainly cannot sweep them under the carpet with tiny, incremental changes of the kind which my noble friend Lord Grocott is proposing, so I beg to move.

[The Earl of Erroll]

My Lords, I rise to support this amendment because it introduces the concept of democracy. As I have said, I would like to see democratic reform of the House of Lords. As for the practicality of it—as has just been raised by my noble friend Lord Low—with online voting coming, I am sure, and with modern electronic methods, we do not need a sort of general election set-up with lots of voting polls. Things will be handled electronically online, and this is an interesting way of introducing some democracy and accountability. I support the amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Grocott]

My Lords, I think I have a responsibility to respond, as this is an amendment to a Bill I introduced. I suppose I should be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, for changing his mind so dramatically in the space of an hour; we are all entitled to change our minds. However, he gave us a little lecture an hour ago about the inadequacy of my Bill, saying it should be opposed because it was pointless and incremental, and he now puts down an amendment providing for the preservation of hereditary peerages, just elected by a different mechanism. I have to agree that it is not merely a frivolous amendment, as the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, himself has acknowledged; it is a silly amendment, and I hope the House will throw it out.

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, I do not propose to press the amendment at this hour, given how thin the House is, having thinned out progressively over the last two hours. However, I believe the issue of a democratic second Chamber is the fundamental issue which we need to address in this House, not tinkering reforms of the kind we have been debating over the last few hours. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 35A withdrawn.