House of Lords: Reform

Lord Cobbold Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cobbold]

My Lords, I am one of the many speakers who believe that the draft Bill we are debating today is not about House of Lords reform; it is about House of Lords abolition and replacement by an 80 or 100 per cent elected Chamber or senate. It is unlikely that many Members of the present House would wish to stand for election and so the new senate would not have the benefit of the experience and expertise that this Chamber enjoys and given that the new senators would be salaried, the proposed senate would cost several times as much as the present House. There can be little doubt that an elected senate would threaten the primacy of the House of Commons and, for this reason alone, I am surprised that any Member of the House of Commons supports the idea of an elected upper House.

To reject the proposals in the Bill is not to say that this House is not in need of some reform. Indeed, the Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Steel, lists a number of reforms, all of which would or should be welcomed. The most urgent and important of these is the creation of a statutory appointments commission which would be responsible for all appointments to a life peerage and a consequential membership of this House. The commission should choose candidates from a publicly recognised range of experience and expertise with an agreed annual maximum number of appointments. Under present arrangements, there is no control on numbers of new appointments and consequentially no limit on total numbers in the Chamber. Following the exceptionally large number of recent new appointments, the House is definitely too large and one hopes that the excessive number of new appointments is not a deliberate tactic of those advocating an elected senate to weaken the present House.

There is no doubt that the present House of nearly 800 is too large and the Steel Bill suggests a system of voluntary retirement. While welcome in principle, I do not think that such a scheme could achieve the long-term reduction in membership that is required. In a sense, there is already a system of voluntary retirement in that a member may simply stop attending. I believe that a long-term reduction in existing membership can be achieved only by a system of compulsory retirement. This could be based either on the age of the Member or on period of service. Personally, I do not think age is the right choice. People age at different rates and I believe that the only fair and workable system would be a compulsory period of service for all Members which, in my view, should be 20 years. Given a fixed period of service of 20 years it should be possible for a Member reaching 20 years and still performing a valuable role in the House to be given an extension of service of, say, one to five years on application, I suggest, to the Lord Speaker. Implementing such a 20-year period of service would need to be accompanied by agreement on an optimal total size of the House, which is probably around 300, and a phased programme of retirement for the 150 Members of the present House with a period of service in excess of 20 years.

A further reform in the Steel Bill is the ending of the electoral process for choosing replacements for the 92 hereditary Peers when they die. While I am lucky to be one of the 92, I do not think that heredity can any longer justifiably be on its own a qualification for membership of this House. These suggested reforms are readily implementable. The Bill which is the subject of this debate must be rejected. It is a waste of time and money to set up yet another commission to investigate its merits.

Finally, if the coalition decides to proceed with the Bill, it is a major constitutional issue and could not be introduced without a referendum. In last year’s election, the manifestos of all three parties called for an elected upper Chamber so the public have not yet had the chance to express a view. A referendum could be the last way left to defeat the Bill. The Bill before us must be rejected: reform, yes; abolition, no.