House of Lords Reform Bill [HL]

Lord Desai Excerpts

Friday 3rd December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, here we go again with the noble Lord, Lord Steel, and his Bill. I am reminded of the famous tenor who sang at La Scala. He received a thundering encore for his aria, and then another, and then another. Finally he said, “Signori, signore, I cannot go on. I am exhausted”. Someone from high above said, “You will sing until you get it right”. That may be the message to the noble Lord, Lord Steel. My views on House of Lords reform are well known and I shall not repeat them in full. I believe in a wholly elected Chamber because, like most other noble Lords, I believe in the primacy of the House of Commons. If the House of Commons has decided that it wants a substantially elected Chamber, so be it.

As my noble friend Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe said, while I do not doubt the sufficiency of the Steel Bill, I am not persuaded of its necessity. I have lost faith in the coalition’s ability and good will on reform of the House of Lords. It may be a strange thing to say but the coalition has dilly-dallied and I am not sure that its Bill will appear by February or March. As my noble friend Lord Wills said, the timetable for this is increasingly beginning to look impossible. I have always believed—and have said so before in your Lordships’ House—that no Bill for the reform of the House can pass unless the Government are willing to use the Parliament Act 1949. It will take two rounds. It is the declared intention of the Liberal Democrat members of the Cabinet not to vote for a Bill that they have themselves put forward in another place, so who knows? Will the Lib Dems vote for the House of Lords Reform Bill? If they do, will the Conservatives vote with them or will they say, “You voted against higher education fees so we are going out this way”. It is chaotic. We will all spend much good time—I would love to speak yet again—on the House of Lords Reform Bill but I do not believe that the coalition is serious. After wasting two years on this, we will have to fall back on this substitute, as the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield, said in his excellent maiden speech. That is why I believe we should take this Bill seriously, as I do.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, which is itself an uncommon event, in his rejection of Part 2 of the Bill. I agree with him that you cannot achieve substantial constitutional reform through a Private Member’s Bill. I also agree that a pact was made with the hereditary Peers to accept the retention of 92 of their number on the condition that they would all go when the full reform was completed. It was not a matter of by-elections; they would all go. However, under Part 2 of the Steel Bill, they will stay until the Grim Reaper does his job. I prefer to wait and see them all go together, perhaps with a silver or golden handshake.

As my noble friend Lord Howarth of Newport, has said, Clause 8 is very interesting. We ought to pay attention to it as it says something about the total size of the House. I am impressed that the Deputy Prime Minister so hates the House of Lords that he has decided to add more and more people to it. I do not know whether this is how he takes revenge on his friends, but he is clearly adding lots of Liberal Democrats to the House, so he must hate it very much indeed. Therefore, I wish him luck if it is abolished. I am sure that there is a misprint in Clause 8(7)—I say that as I am trying to prove that I have read the Bill diligently—and that it should refer to “subsection (2)(c)” rather than to “subsection (2)(5)”. That is my signal contribution. That is what happens when you are an academic; the first thing you do to prove that you have read essays is to find all the typos in them.

I am somewhat against coercive retirement. I am glad that Clause 12(2) enables Peers to explain their absence from the House. It may be due to illness, for example. As Clause 12(1) does not say something like, “fails to attend without reasonable cause”, Clause 12(2) is essential as it would allow Peers to explain that there are legitimate reasons for their absence. Clause 13 is too harsh. Peers who have taken voluntary permanent leave of absence or who are ejected, as it were, for one reason or another, should be allowed to retain club rights. That could act as an incentive to take voluntary permanent leave of absence.

The noble Lord, Lord Steel, has introduced the Bill for the fourth time and my calculations show that at least two more years will elapse before we deal with it seriously. However, I wish him God speed with it. Perhaps, before I reach the age of 75 in five years’ time, the Steel Bill will be passed.

Women in Society

Lord Desai Excerpts

Wednesday 21st July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, who is well known for her contribution to children’s welfare.

I start by welcoming the Government’s decision to ring-fence overseas aid at 0.7 per cent of GDP. I suggest that we should see slightly more than half of this devoted to causes which apply to women’s welfare rather than men’s. If someone can get that accounting done, I would be very pleased. It would be a good start to redirect our aid towards problems where real poverty actually bites.

I want to take up my remarks about the position of women at an even earlier stage from that about which most noble Lords have spoken. There are parts of the world in which women have difficulty being born because of female feticide, and if a baby girl is born it is very soon smothered in a variety of ways which I shall not talk about because they are too cruel to contemplate. This is done by mothers, aunts, grannies; very often it is the older women of the family who take up the task of killing the child. There are areas of India—Punjab, Haryana and much of north India—where the gender ratio is now 800 women or below to 1,000 men. The situation is extremely serious.

It has not much at all to do with poverty. Female feticide and the killing of young girls happens in prosperous states—Punjab and Haryana are among the most prosperous states in India—and very often prosperous, middle-class families resort to it. The preference for boys is so high that families are willing to go to incredible lengths. This does not happen just in India—there are families here of Indian origin who take part in abortion tourism or feticide tourism to India. Although it is illegal in India to use amniocentesis and have an abortion based on the sex of the foetus, it is practised and is very prevalent. There is a lot of tourism from here to there.

This is therefore a situation that we all have to take seriously; not only is it bad in itself that there is this killing of baby girls at an early age, it also creates enormous social problems. Some of the motivation for the profits in trafficking arises from the gender imbalance which has been concocted by the society which then imports female children to correct that gender imbalance. There are many things we can do about it; I just point out this is a very serious problem.

So much for the position of women in society. What do we do about their advancement, the second part of the proposition before us? The noble Baroness, Lady Flather, is not in her place but she has written an excellent book, which I recommend. I have entirely forgotten its title although I chaired its launch at the Nehru Centre. It is something to do with the exploitation of women which she, in her own inimitable style, advocates. Unlike the noble Lord, Lord Deben, she believes it is only when women are employed in paid jobs that people will value them. It is a very sad thing to say but, as the noble Lord, Lord Deben, said, if you say that you are a housewife—an unwaged worker— people conclude you are worth nothing because your value is measured by your income in money terms and no other. Society values paid jobs. The fact that in these paid jobs women are not paid as much as men is another problem that other noble Lords will take up.

We ought somehow to insist that one of the development strategies, not just for the third world but for us also, would be to encourage as much employment of women as possible and, now we have the technology, to employ women who can work from home. We can have flexible hours, we can have flexible locations, we can have jobs that can be done from a distance. People do not have to go to an office to work—there does not have to be a nine to five structure to a paid job.

One of the ways in which we can advance the cause of women is to think of many ways in which women can be employed from whichever location they choose to work in and whatever job they want to do, because there are a lot of jobs to be done—there is no shortage. The problem is that facilities do not exist for women to pursue the jobs they want to do.

From the amount of fuss that was made in another place when women MPs wanted a crèche, you might have thought this was the greatest crisis since William the Conqueror. If people have to work they have to have all the facilities they require; the fact that men do not require crèches is neither here nor there. We ought to build workplaces in which it is possible for women to work when they choose, how they choose, looking after their children, which sadly men will not do.