House of Lords Reform (No. 2) Bill
Lord Bishop of Leicester Excerpts(10 years, 7 months ago)
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The Lord Bishop of Leicester
My Lords, I, too, am deeply grateful to the noble Lords, Lord Steel, Lord Cormack and Lord Norton, and other noble Lords, for bringing us to this point. I speak as a Member of your Lordships’ House not directly affected by the retirement and resignation provisions in Clauses 1 and 2 as they do not apply to Lords Spiritual. Nevertheless, as one representing the consistent and profound interest of this Bench and the Church of England in making progress in reform of your Lordships’ House, we are clear that this is a helpful, sensible, albeit modest step in the direction advocated by the Lords Spiritual for many years. I am grateful to Dan Byles for consulting church officials when the Bill was introduced in the other place and I share the concern of the noble Lord, Lord Steel, and others that it is vital that the Bill should pass unamended today.
Our present political landscape reveals widespread and profound reform of many of our major institutions in education, healthcare, local government and elsewhere. Our story in this House, as other noble Lords have remarked, is of a much more gradual, incremental journey of change which allows us the privilege, but also holds the responsibility, for demonstrating not only that we are serious about reform of this House but also that we are capable of delivering it. In that sense, the Bill is a small-scale test of the capacity of a self-regulating House to be an effective self-reforming House.
My service on the Joint Committee examining the coalition’s reform proposals led me to become something of a student of Lords reform history. Even the most cursory examination of that history reveals that two conditions are necessary for each step of change to be taken: first, they must be incremental, as indeed this is; and, secondly, they must respond to urgent need. This Bill fulfils that condition because of the increasing size of the House and because of the inadequacy of the House’s disciplinary proceedings following the expenses and lobbying scandals. Both these things, in different ways, undermine public trust in the parliamentary system, especially if the size of this Chamber grows to the point at which it can no longer effectively fulfil all its primary functions. Therefore, my hope is that the voluntary and compulsory retirement provisions in Clauses 1 and 2 may begin the process of cultural change that will in time create a norm of managed exit rather than an exit through natural, or what some of us might call supernatural, causes.
I mentioned that the provisions in Clauses 1 and 2 do not apply to the Lords Spiritual given the ex officio nature of our membership and the existing retirement provisions that apply to us. However, for the avoidance of doubt, your Lordships will be aware that the expulsion provisions in Clause 3 apply to the Lords Spiritual, which is as it should be, as in our response to the Government’s draft Lords reform Bill we said that we wanted to be treated equally to others in this regard.
In the event of the Bill passing, your Lordships might wish to consider in any scheme for retirement the present privileges accorded to the Lords Spiritual on retirement—which include club rights and the use of dining facilities and the Library, as well as the right to hear debates from the steps of the Throne—and to reflect on whether these might be extended to noble Lords who make use of the retirement provision. These provisions are certainly much appreciated by some on this Bench and would not lead to an overstretching of our present facilities.
The Bill will receive the support of this Bench as it addresses, as others have said, a sensible, necessary and pressing need. However, I am sure, as are others, that this cannot be the end of the reform process for another generation. Some of us on the Joint Committee on the draft Bill came to the conclusion in the alternative report, which we signed in addition to the main report, that there was merit in a constitutional convention—to which the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, referred in his moving and distinguished speech—to consider the next steps of further reform of this House and any consequential impact on the other place. We wrote in the preamble to that report:
“The Joint Committee was unable to deal with some of the broader issues concerning House of Lords reform which in our view lie at the heart of the argument about whether and how the House of Lords needs to be reformed and what needs to be done to achieve that in a way which would genuinely strengthen Parliament and the political process”.
That work still remains to be done. For today, let us pass this Bill and demonstrate that we are in earnest in preserving and developing the reputation, esteem and effectiveness of this House.
House of Lords: Size
Lord Bishop of Leicester Excerpts(10 years, 10 months ago)
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The Lord Bishop of Leicester
My Lords, this House owes a debt to the noble Lord, Lord Norton, for his assiduous work towards creating a more effective second Chamber. As usual, he has today rehearsed very clearly and effectively the case for reducing its size.
It seems to me that the challenge is clear. In spite of the speech of the noble Lord, Lord True, there is surely overwhelming agreement with the fundamental proposition that this House is too large. The question, therefore, is to find ways not just of agreeing with the principle of creating a smaller House, but to give effect to it. In that sense, this debate is part of a wider discussion upon which hangs the reputation and credibility of the political class.
A noble and right reverend former Bishop of Durham said about Lords reform a few years ago:
“I would rather be a Member of an upper House which works effectively as a revising and scrutinising Chamber than retain membership of one which is not fit for purpose”.
For the avoidance of doubt, I do not quote this in order to offer up this Bench for abolition but rather to make a different point about what will bring about change; namely, that the overriding issue for examination needs to be what makes for the good governance of our country. On that point hang successive submissions from the Church of England in the past 10 years, and I believe it is on this basis that the debate should proceed.
This Bench supports the thrust of the proposals of the noble Lord, Lord Norton. We passionately believe that the function and, therefore, the character and composition of this House need to be different from that of the other place. To achieve that, any reduction in size needs to maintain true and impartial accountability and to represent the breadth and diversity of civil society and intellectual life. Therefore, any reduction in numbers will need to have regard to the proportion of independent Members as the pressure for political appointees continues to mount.
We will see nothing but serious dysfunction if these principles are not given effect soon. The coalition agreement appears to enshrine the doctrine that membership of your Lordships’ House should reflect the proportions of votes cast at the 2010 election. Unless there is change, and if this doctrine continues to obtain, we all know that the consequence will rapidly become unmanageable. If the suspicion is to be allayed that the necessary limited reforms of this House are being frustrated in order to create the conditions for more radical reform, surely we need to proceed to action soon. This House is not, and never has been, a Chamber embodying the doctrine of proportional representation—our character, purpose and raison d’être lie elsewhere.
I speak from a Bench whose Members are required to accept the disciplines of a cap on numbers and a final retirement age. Certainly, those limitations have not prevented this Bench playing a full part in the range of policies and laws which come under scrutiny in this House. Indeed, a process of appointment which is time-limited and number-limited enables Members of this Bench to reflect our regional involvement and speak not out of self or party interest but rather reflect the truth that profound moral and ethical questions surround a great deal of the work of your Lordships’ House. From this experience we have consistently argued in favour of measures to allow for the expulsion, retirement and suspension of Members of a reformed House of Lords, believing those measures to be the interests of this House and of Parliament more widely.
However, we need to be open also to reform on this Bench. We have indicated in evidence to the Select Committee on the Clegg Bill that we would be willing to work with government to find ways in which a small Bench of Lords spiritual in a proportionally reduced House could continue to play its full part in its proceedings and offer rather more than is presently possible. More immediately, we have begun to explore the possibility of modification to the Bishoprics Act, which governs the succession of Lords spiritual after a vacancy, in order to make it possible for women who may be ordained as bishops in the next few years to be fast-tracked to this Bench. I am glad to say that the Prime Minister was able to give an encouraging response to the Second Church Estates Commissioner when asked about this recently at Prime Minister’s Questions.
Many of the issues raised by this debate were extensively explored by the Select Committee of both Houses, of which I was a member and which gave pre-legislative scrutiny to the Deputy Prime Minister’s reform Bill two years ago. I cannot remember a single witness to that committee, or a single member of it, arguing that the present size of this House is optimal. What we do here is of vital importance to the nation. We surely cannot tolerate increasing and inevitable dysfunctionality. My hope is that this debate will help us to define some practical proposals around which it will become possible for all of us to gather, and soon.
House of Lords Reform Bill
Lord Bishop of Leicester Excerpts(12 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, I am grateful for the Convenor’s questions. Of course I agree with him: the House of Lords, not just since the general election but broadly since 1999, has done a good job of scrutiny and worked well on Bills. I have put on record many times that this is not about the current effectiveness of the House of Lords, which is recognised as having done its job extremely well and having improved legislation. The Government’s view is to improve the legitimacy of the House—indeed, to strengthen its ability to hold the Government to account and to challenge the decisions of the House of Commons.
On the noble Lord’s second question, yes, the House has changed substantially throughout the 20th century, most recently in 1999, and has always accepted such changes. Many of my colleagues in the coalition regard the transitional period as being extremely long. There was no transitional period, or not a very big one, in 1998-99, but there will be a substantial one for the new House to get used to the new arrangements over three electoral cycles.
I confirm that the 20% appointed Members will be appointed by a statutory Appointments Commission, as laid out in the Bill, and will be non-party political Members of this House.
The Lord Bishop of Leicester
My Lords, I am grateful to the Leader for his clarification of the Government’s proposals. We on these Benches recognise the need for some reform of this House, and welcome the opportunity that the Bill will give for a thorough debate about the future of Parliament. In particular, we are pleased to see that the Government endorse the Joint Committee’s recommendation on the continuing contribution of the Lords spiritual to a reformed House, albeit that the decision to raise the proposed size of the House to 450 from the original proposal of 300 suggests that the proportion of Bishops, at the number of 12, may be too low if the total number is revised upwards.
We have always said that we will assess the proposals on the basis of what makes for the good governance of Britain. I therefore raise two questions. First, as a member of the Joint Committee, I remained puzzled throughout the course of its work about how the Government’s expressed desire for a more assertive House could be squared with the confident assertion that a reformed House could be relied upon to exercise the necessary self-restraint required to guarantee the primacy and effectiveness of the House of Commons. Will the Leader help us to be as certain as he appears to be that the Parliament Act will prevent the serious risk of dysfunction in the relationship between the two Houses?
Secondly, as your Lordships will be aware, the Church of England has always argued for diverse religious representation in this House so that it properly reflects the diversity of civil society as a whole. The Government appear not to have accepted the Joint Committee’s recommendation that it is necessary for the Bill to make explicit reference to the inclusion of major faiths in a reformed House. How is it proposed that the Appointments Commission can ensure that a reformed House will reflect the religious heritage and cultural diversity of Britain today?
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, I reiterate a view that I have long held and which the Government also hold: the Lords spiritual play a valuable and important role in the House and make an important contribution. The right reverend Prelate wonders about the numbers. I think it was the Joint Committee that suggested a reduction to 12 Bishops. The proposal in the Bill is that there should be five named Bishops and Archbishops, and then seven others chosen by the Church of England.
On two key questions of self-restraint and how this can be achieved, of course nothing can be guaranteed. It depends on the House evolving, and its new relationship with the second Chamber, which either will or will not change. It will be up to the new House, and the House of Commons, to decide how best to govern itself.
On the second question the right reverend Prelate raises, he is right to point out that we have not accepted that there should be an explicit condition on the statutory Appointments Commission to put in Peers of other faiths and make sure they are represented. There is no such view on the current Appointments Commission, yet it works extremely well. Other faiths have been introduced into the House, and I hope that that will continue.
Draft House of Lords Reform Bill
Lord Bishop of Leicester Excerpts(12 years, 6 months ago)
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The Lord Bishop of Leicester
My Lords, as a member of the Joint Committee, I add my tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Richard, as chair for his skill, staying power, stamina and achievement in delivering a report on time. I recollect that the retiring most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury recommended that his successor should have the skin of a rhinoceros and the constitution of an ox, and it occurs to me that after his work on the Joint Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Richard, might consider allowing his name to go forward for that position. In speaking today, I apologise to the House that urgent business in my diocese will make it impossible for me to be in my place when this debate concludes tomorrow. I am grateful to the Leader’s office for making an exceptional concession for me on this occasion.
In the mid-summer’s day debate on the draft Bill in your Lordships' House last year, I reminded the House that on these Benches we recognise along with very many of your Lordships that some reform of this House is long overdue and that the test of any reform is that it helps to serve Parliament and the nation better, not least by resolving the problem of its ever-increasing membership. To measure that, I pointed to four tests that we might apply to any proposal to replace this House with a wholly or largely elected second Chamber. The Joint Committee’s work has in my view made it very clear—to me at least—that these tests have not been met.
The first was whether the proposals flowed from a clear enough definition of the functions of a reformed House. Because of the limits put on the Joint Committee’s work referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market, this matter has been addressed in some detail by the alternative report, which I signed. That report makes it clear that the overwhelming mass of evidence received by the Joint Committee pointed to the difficulties that will arise between the two Houses as a result of the Government’s determination to hold to the position that the primacy of the Commons will be undisturbed by the advent of an elected House of Lords.
The second test is related and is of course about primacy. It rests on the assertion that the Bill contains nothing that will affect the conventions governing the relationship between the two Houses. The unanimity of the witnesses on this point is beyond dispute. It is manifestly unreasonable to argue that you can change one part of a delicately balanced system and leave the other parts unaffected. The noble Lord, Lord Richard, has argued that this appears not to concern Members of Parliament but he knows that at least two MPs on the Joint Committee expressed consistent and vehement concerns on this very issue.
Thirdly, I proposed a test relating to the independence of the upper House from party political control. The Joint Committee explored whether any of the available voting systems offered the possibility of electing people who would take an independent view and speak from time to time with a voice distinctive from that overwhelmingly influenced by party discipline. It is clear that a mainly elected House would become a creature of the party system, whatever mechanism for election was chosen. On this test, too, the proposals fail. I welcome the recommendation for further consideration of a nationally, indirectly elected House.
Fourthly, I sought to apply a test relating to the claims of democratic legitimacy. Would a non-renewable, 15-year term provide this House with a sense of conscious connection to, awareness of and responsiveness to the changing priorities of the electorate? I remain persuaded that this kind of democratic legitimacy is so diluted in the draft Bill as to be almost pointless. Here lies the intellectual incoherence of the draft Bill. On the one hand, the Government want a House that is accountable to the electorate but, on the other, seem to recognise that any such House might assert itself to the point where it radically disturbed the fine balance between the two Houses of Parliament.
We are left with a Bill predicated on the encouragement of greater assertiveness by an elected upper House yet one so circumscribed by the electoral proposals and so dependent on the Parliament Act that a reformed upper House would soon either find itself frustrated in its attempts to behave representatively or assert its determination to test the present conventions to breaking point. Either way, the risks are considerable. I have no doubt that this House will look carefully at those risks today and conclude that the benefits of radical reform as proposed cannot justify them.
In spite of these concerns, on this Bench we are pleased that the Joint Committee was persuaded that in a reformed House there should remain a place for the Lords spiritual. This question was not at the front or centre of the committee’s attention, but I am grateful that the committee found time to hear evidence from the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury, who spoke tellingly about the grounded relationship between the Church of England and the communities in which our parishes and churches are set and drew the committee’s attention to the particular role of the Church of England in supporting, encouraging and convening other faith communities, especially in our great cities. His views were endorsed by significant voices from the Jewish community, the Muslim Council of Britain and others. I am pleased that the Joint Committee has pressed for the increasing presence of leaders of other denominations and faiths. A reduction in the proposed number of Bishops from 26 to 12 will be testing and challenging for the Church of England, but we will work hard to achieve a consistent presence from this Bench. We recognise that this will entail careful consideration of the processes by which members of the Bench of Bishops are selected.
It was a privilege to serve on the Joint Committee, not as a professional politician. I learnt a great deal from my colleagues and my respect for those who spend their lives living a vocation to politics has been substantially enhanced. But if I have brought a particular perspective to the discussions, it may be that I was continually asking myself how these proposals will serve the people of the diocese in which I live and work. With the passing months of the committee’s work, my puzzlement increased. At a time like this, when we need leadership that unifies our country and vision in Parliament that addresses the needs of the people, why are we embarking on proposals for reform which will be manifestly divisive? At a time of continuing recession, these proposals run the risk of setting the two Houses of Parliament against each other, dividing Parliament from the country’s evident needs and suggesting that the political leadership is out of step with the membership. That is why I felt it right to vote for a referendum.
Surely it is partly the responsibility of the Lords spiritual to raise questions about those things that can demonstrate Parliament’s capacity to respond to the mood of the day and raise our sights to the urgent need to address the common good at a time of severe economic risk. My fear is that in three years’ time we may have achieved a reformed Parliament but, in the process, have unintentionally created one that feels even less relevant and responsive to the people’s needs. I hope that the Government will heed the voice of this House today.
House of Lords: Reform
Lord Bishop of Leicester Excerpts(13 years, 4 months ago)
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The Lord Bishop of Leicester
My Lords, the longest day may be an apt moment to embark on this new stage of what the Leader of the House has called the longest of long stories in the reform of this House. Whatever the deficiencies of your Lordships' House that the Bill seeks to address, a lack of opportunity to discuss and debate reform is certainly not one of them.
I shall not detain your Lordships by rehearsing all of the consistent position held by those on this Bench over many years on reform. A summary of the Church of England's response to the Bill was published three weeks ago in my name. The mixed reaction that it received put me in mind of Mrs Cadwallader in Middlemarch. She was a vicar's wife who despaired of her husband, and said:
“He will even speak well of the bishop, though I tell him it is unnatural in a beneficed clergyman; what can one do with a husband who attends so little to the decencies? I hide it as well as I can by abusing everybody myself”.
The essence of that church’s response was that we welcome an opportunity to reform this House, and to improve, develop and adapt its working in ways that are advantageous to the functioning of Parliament as a whole and to the service of the nation. Where evidence of improved functioning is clear and well established, we on this Bench will be ready to consider changes and to play a part in bringing them about. However, where such evidence is lacking—and we believe that it is lacking in much of the Bill—and where the test of parliamentary functioning and service to the nation is seriously in doubt, this House and Parliament as a whole should expect challenge and questioning from those on the Lords Spiritual Bench.
I anticipate that those of us speaking from this Bench in the next two days will demonstrate a concern that is wider and deeper than the narrow question of whether Bishops should be retained in a reformed House, and if so, how many. We accept that in the institutions that we represent, we have been entrusted with the spiritual well-being of the people of this country—a trust that we share with many others. Therefore, we cannot see our role in these debates as being simply to defend privilege or to maintain the present arrangements at all costs. Rather, we recognise that we have a duty to press into the debate some fundamental issues of principle, because we do not accept that the government of the country should be left exclusively to politicians, and religion to the churches and other faiths.
We shall give careful attention to four tests of what is proposed in the White Paper. The first is whether the proposals flow from a clear enough definition of the role of the second Chamber, and whether a change in the present role is implied although not clarified by what is proposed.
The second test will relate to the independence of the upper House and its ability to require Governments to think again about specific legislative proposals. If we on these Benches discern a drift towards greater party-political control, through which any governing party or coalition can rely on a majority in the second Chamber, we shall find ourselves questioning the proposals.
Thirdly, we shall apply a test related to the question of the primacy of the House of Commons, and we shall be keen to determine whether the two Houses of Parliament will find themselves increasingly in conflict with each another. We note that the Wakeham commission expressed strong opposition to,
“a situation in which the two Houses of Parliament had equivalent electoral legitimacy. It would represent a substantial change in the present constitutional settlement in the United Kingdom and would almost certainly be a recipe for damaging conflict”.
Fourthly, we shall apply a test to claims of democratic legitimacy. Of course we recognise that all three major parties are committed by manifesto to some degree of constitutional change. The key question is whether the amount of change in these proposals is proportionate to the perceived problem that it is designed to address. On all four tests at the present moment we remain unpersuaded.
Let me draw your Lordships’ attention to the specific proposals on the place of Bishops in a reformed Chamber. We are pleased and indeed grateful that the draft Bill proposes retaining 12 places for episcopal members in the event of a reform to an 80 per cent elected House. We are glad also to see the Government propose,
“that in a fully reformed second chamber which had an appointed element there should continue to be a role for the established Church”.
That role was clearly spelt out by the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York, speaking in your Lordships’ House four years ago. He said,
“the Queen in Parliament is sovereign, but is also Queen in law, in council, and in the Executive. That is the constitutional arrangement. Are we going to preserve it? The Lords Spiritual remind Parliament of the Queen's coronation oath and of that occasion when the divine law was acknowledged as the source of all law. We see ourselves not as representatives, but as connectors with the people and parishes of England. Ours is a sacred trust—to remind your Lordships' House of the common law of this nation, in which true religion, virtue, morals and law are always intermingled; they have never been separated.”—[Official Report, 13/3/07; col. 580.]
Your Lordships will need no reminding of the physical expression of establishment: the outworking of the church’s wider vocation to the service of the nation. Without doubt there is no better placed organisation, religious or otherwise, able to cite a presence in all communities, and have good understandings of and relationships with all denominations and faiths. In his submission on Lords reform, the noble Lord the Chief Rabbi wrote,
“disestablishment would be a significant retreat from the notion that we share any values and beliefs at all. And that would be a path to more, not fewer, tensions”.
Establishment secures a place for spirituality in the public square. This benefits all faiths and not just Christianity.
The draft Bill proposes that the House should contain 12 episcopal members comprising the five named senior sees and seven ordinary members. This proposal will confront the Church of England with some challenging decisions about how those 12 particular episcopal offices are identified so that Bishops can continue to make a distinctive, competent and influential contribution to a reformed Upper House. Your Lordships should be in no doubt that the Church of England stands ready to make those decisions in the event of this reform being enacted.
In short, your Lordships will find that we on this Bench will be active in furthering proposals for reform that render this House more effective in exercising its scrutinising and revising role. Without a clear definition of some new role that determines the composition of an effectively new House, we on this Bench will press the questions that we have consistently asked.
I speak from a Bench of those whose presence in the House is an expression of their service to their communities rather than any privileged influence and whose track record is of a concern for the common good. What constitutes the common good in any situation is what politics is or ought to be about. For the Christian, the common good arises partly from the imperative to love God with all one’s heart and to love one’s neighbour as oneself. From a Christian perspective, if God’s purpose for humanity is a common purpose, we have a duty to ask how the organising of society and of Parliament makes this purpose harder or easier, more or less attainable. It is in that spirit and on those principles that we look forward to playing our part in this debate in the months ahead.
House of Lords Reform
Lord Bishop of Leicester Excerpts(14 years, 4 months ago)
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The Lord Bishop of Leicester
My Lords, I know that brevity and clarity are at a premium in a debate of this length. I therefore ask your Lordships’ indulgence if I take this opportunity to remind you of the consistent position of this Bench and of the Church of England in the matter of Lords reform and to reiterate the principal points made both to the Wakeham commission in 1999 and more recently in response to the 2008 White Paper.
We have, along with others, consistently raised the question about the purpose of a second Chamber. In the Church of England’s submission to the Wakeham commission we expressed the point in this way:
“In a number of senses”,
the second Chamber’s role,
“is to provide a different yet complementary system of representation to that provided by the House of Commons. It should not seek to challenge that House's democratic primacy but it must not be a mere cipher. It should have powers to amend legislation, to require reconsideration and should play its part in the duty of Parliament to hold the executive effectively to account”.
The distinction of roles implied by the historic functions of your Lordships' House suggests that a second Chamber requires a different mix of skills in comparison to the other place and, crucially, a source of legitimacy which does not pit the second Chamber against the first in a potential stalemate. It is clear that our focus must therefore be on the role of a second Chamber in holding the Executive to account.
The party-political system has contributed a great deal to the functioning of our democracy, but where it needs augmentation from a non-partisan element is in enabling Parliament to maintain the necessary checks and balances that good governance requires. Elected Members in the other place sit on behalf of all their constituents, not just those who voted for their party, and the Executive legislate on behalf of all. A politician will, no doubt, believe with a passion that his or her party’s programme is the best hope for the common good, but understandable single-mindedness must always be moderated by the perspective of others, especially those who, because of expertise or experience, have reason to know the detail of how legislation impacts on people’s lives. Furthermore, a move to a fully elected House would come at a time when the greatest issues that we face, such as climate change, competition for scarce resources and reform of our financial systems, cannot all be fixed within the short-term time horizons of the electoral cycle.
My colleagues on this Bench and I question, as others have, the composition of the committee set up by the Deputy Prime Minister to take a first look at reforming the constitution. We would have expected such a committee to include representatives of all the stakeholders in the present arrangements. In replying to this debate, will the noble Lord, Lord McNally, at least acknowledge that, by setting up a committee entirely composed of members of the three main political parties, the Deputy Prime Minister runs the risk of appearing to foreclose the question about the role of non-party members in any future second Chamber?
At a time like this, your Lordships would expect me to raise the wider question of the place of religion and bishops in our national life and hence in our constitutional structures. The experience of the last decade or so has made one thing very clear. The theories of secularisation, with which most of us have been familiar for a long time, are no longer an accurate picture of how the world works. Contrary to expectations, increasing material prosperity, scientific advance and global mobility have not led to the death of religion or even to its relative eclipse. That may be a matter of celebration or dismay to some of your Lordships, but it remains true that the persistence of religion has to be accounted for and, since it will not go away, its ongoing place in society must be taken into account. It would be at the very least a shame if major constitutional reform, potentially the most significant for nearly 200 years and designed to last for perhaps several hundreds more, were grounded on a 20th-century theory of secularisation that has been fairly comprehensively discredited and no longer describes the world as it has turned out to be.
Of course I do not believe that Christians, let alone Anglicans, should be the only Members of a second Chamber who stand for and speak for their religious principles. Nevertheless, the established place of the Church of England is deeply woven into the constitution and unpicking it at any one point will have numerous consequences in other areas of our national life. Successive Governments, including the last, have asserted that they intend to do nothing to diminish the church’s established role and I hope that we can look to the new coalition publicly to continue that commitment. Embeddedness in the nation’s life and history should surely count for something. Of course, bishops of the Church of England claim absolutely no monopoly of those qualities among the religious communities of the land.
My case is this. I ask what a second Chamber is for and I remain convinced by the answer that it must be primarily a revising Chamber that does not seek to usurp the prerogatives of the other place. That in turn requires some distance from, or leavening of, the party system by independent Members chosen for a different set of virtues. Those virtues should include experience, expertise and wisdom gained in vocations to service outside these walls, and should be brought to the service of Parliament to serve the good of all. Some of these Members should represent the religious character of our country and the religious motivation that enhances citizenship for so many of our people.
House of Lords: Post-legislative Scrutiny
Lord Bishop of Leicester Excerpts(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, it is certainly our intention shortly to bring before Parliament a Bill that will repeal some of the highly authoritarian legislation that was passed under the previous Government. As far as sunset clauses are concerned, in many instances they are extremely desirable.