House of Lords: Lord Speaker’s Committee Report
Debate between Lord Davies of Stamford and Lord Elton
Lord Davies of Stamford (Lab)
My Lords, I thoroughly agree with and welcome this report. It is an excellent piece of work. It has been called “ingenious” in this House and it thoroughly deserves that term. However, I have two reservations or concerns about it which I want to mention to your Lordships—and, as I always try to do on such occasions, I will try to suggest some possible remedies if the House were to agree that they were potential problems.
The first relates to the election of hereditary Peers. The report is uncharacteristically abdicatory when it comes to that subject. It mentions that, as a result of its proposed model, the one group of Peers that will increase in size in this House is the hereditary Peers. I think that that would be seen by the outside world as absurd, ridiculous and crazy. It would be a gift to anybody who wanted to rubbish either the reform of this House or the existence of the House at all—so I do not think that we can leave that aside.
It is much easier to deal with the problem of the potential election of people who have not yet been selected or identified and the problem of too many people sitting in this House at any one time. It ought to be possible for us to take action on the election of hereditary Peers without causing any distress or sense of injustice to any individual. So I hope that we can be very robust. Personally, I think it should be possible for us simply to refuse to introduce any more hereditary Peers who are elected in that fashion, and certainly to deny them allowances or offices if it comes to that. However, the most effective way would be simply to say, “I’m afraid we’re not prepared to arrange any introduction ceremony”. Surely that is within our scope and does not require legislation. Of course, on this and every other matter, it would be far better if we could have legislation; I am just assuming, as the report does, that we will not have legislation.
The second problem that I foresee is the manner of selection of those who in the future will be asked or encouraged to leave the House. The suggestion in the report is that it is a matter for the convenor of the individual parties, or at least for the parties themselves. Two possible ways of doing this have been mooted. One is that the Chief Whip in each party draws up a list of his own Members and speaks to the ones whom he wants to get rid of, using some kind of moral pressure to get them to resign. This is not a criticism of any Whip, because inevitably all Whips have behaved like this since the beginning of time. The agenda of any Whip would be to try to get rid of people who are more difficult and unpredictable—I may possibly be speaking in my own interests here—and to keep people who are malleable, amenable and do what is asked of them without creating too many problems. I do not think it is right to try to make the character of the House evolve in that way.
The alternative proposal is that there should be elections in each party group, in which we would all decide ourselves who to throw out of the balloon. That might also have some very damaging unintended consequences. It would change the spirit of the House. For months on end there would be a sense of everybody fighting an election for survival. An awful lot of conversations—
Lord Elton (Con)
I merely wish to say that we hereditaries have been through that and it was not like that at all.
Lord Davies of Stamford
Well, when one is looking at a new model or proposal, inevitably some of the dangers that one envisages are theoretical—one does not know whether they would eventuate or not—but I want to share with the House my concern on that. As somebody was saying, there are too many MPs here, and certainly anybody from a political background knows immediately how people respond when there is some suggestion of an election. So I think it is asking too much to expect Members of the House not to be concerned with their own survival and not to allow that to influence conversations with colleagues, or even their political and public acts, comments and so forth. It would be extremely undesirable, so that is not the right way forward.
I said that I would try to make a suggestion as to how that might be dealt with. It would be much better if we adopted more objective criteria. There is one easy trick: in recent times there have been quite a lot of people who have not appeared in the House for at least half the number of days on which the House was sitting. I have the figures from the Library. In 2015, 391 Peers participated or came to the House for less than half the time when the House was sitting. In 2016, it was 356. People who do not come to the House on even half the days on which it sits are not displaying the commitment that it is reasonable to expect of anybody who is a member of a legislature anywhere in the world. He or she would not be up to speed with what is going on and what people are thinking in the House.
There would be much merit in adopting a rule in future—we cannot do it retrospectively—that people who do not appear on at least half the occasions when the House is sitting should be asked to resign. People will say that that may have a disproportionate effect on one political group or another, but the report suggests a way of coping with that problem: the number of new Peers allocated could be modulated so as to restore any imbalance that had occurred following the application of the rule.
House of Lords (Cessation of Membership) Bill [HL]
Debate between Lord Davies of Stamford and Lord Elton
Lord Davies of Stamford
My Lords, the last thing I want to do is to prevent the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, from responding to that important question but, as your Lordships will know, I had tabled an amendment for the Committee stage today. It would have withdrawn the automaticity in the Bill on exclusion of Members. It would have meant that if anyone had any criminal conviction, the House might by resolution decide to exclude them but that that would not be automatic. That would have dealt with the double problem, which is that over the past 100 to 150 years, there have been many cases when we would not have wanted to exclude someone who had been convicted—for example, for supporting conscientious objectors during the First World War, for supporting the suffragettes, or the Irish who were imprisoned under the Coercion Acts.
Lord Davies of Stamford
I will give way in a moment, because I shall be extremely brief. That would also have dealt with the anomaly that, under the Bill, even if someone had a series of convictions for up to 12 months, we would not be able to exclude them. However, it has been put to me very persuasively that if I were to pursue my amendment it might risk the Bill getting through, with its important provisions on retirement and exclusion for chronic absence. I therefore decided to withdraw my amendment and the noble Lord, Lord Steel, has generously undertaken that my point will be debated when the Bill comes before the House of Commons. As there was a real risk of losing this important Bill, I decided to withdraw the amendment.