House of Lords Reform Bill [HL]

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Friday 3rd December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]

My Lords, it is not very often that I get the privilege of following a maiden speaker in your Lordships' House and to be given the opportunity to pay a tribute to him. It is even rarer to follow a new Member of such exceptional talent and distinction as the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield.

The noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, is known to all of us as a broadcaster and writer; and, in the case of my noble friend Lady Hayter, as her PhD supervisor. For 20 years he was a journalist, working as a leader writer and Whitehall correspondent on the Times, and lobby correspondent on the Financial Times. We listened to him as the presenter of the “Analysis” programme on Radio 4.

In 1992 he joined the department of history at Queen Mary in the University of London and, since 2001, has been the Attlee Professor of Contemporary British History. In 2008 he won the Times Higher Education's lifetime achievement award, when he was described by the acting principal as,

“an inspiration to all those students fortunate enough to have been taught by him and a hugely supportive colleague. He has the unusual combination of intellectual rigour and media know-how, which he exercises to full advantage as an independent critic of the government and establishment”.

The Guardian, in a leader column in 2007, said:

“Prof Hennessy is not like anybody else … He is simultaneously both scholar and journalist, traditionalist and radical, conservative and liberal, patriot and subversive”.

We have just listened to a brilliant maiden speech full of humour. I am sure that I speak for the whole House when I say that we look forward to hearing from him many, many times in the future, especially when we are debating constitutional issues. The noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, will be a huge asset to your Lordships' House, and I congratulate the Appointments Commission on making such an inspired choice.

[Noble Lords]

Hear, hear.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]

My Lords, that leads me neatly into expressing my complete support for the Bill again introduced so ably by the noble Lord, Lord Steel of Aikwood. I congratulate him on his patience and perseverance.

I reread the Hansard report of the debate on the Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Steel, on 27 February 2009. The arguments that he used then in support of it—and those made by the overwhelming number of noble Lords who also spoke in favour, including myself—seem incontrovertible nearly two years on. Indeed, they were so convincing that the previous Labour Administration adopted most of the Bill's provisions in their Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill, as my noble friend Lady Royall of Blaisdon reminded us in her speech earlier.

Many noble Lords warned in February 2009 that if there were no provision for retirement, a change of Government would trigger the appointment of large numbers of new Peers, making the membership of the House intolerably large. That is exactly what is happening. Frankly I doubt whether many of your Lordships were reassured by the answers given by the noble Lord, Lord McNally, in response to my noble friend Lord Dubs's Question on Wednesday. Perhaps the most extraordinary statement made by the Minister in those exchanges was that the “dilemma”—his word—of too many Members in your Lordships' House has been created by the House itself. I was under the impression that it was not this House which put forward recommendations for peerages, but the leaders of the political parties, plus, in the case of a handful of Cross-Benchers each year, the Appointments Commission.

At the very least, I hope that the party leaders will accept the advice offered by Dr Meg Russell of the UCL Constitution Unit in her paper of 22 November, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd, referred in her speech, entitled Time for a Moratorium on Lords Appointments. She takes head-on the argument that the composition of this House should reflect the share of the vote secured by the political parties at the last general election. If we follow that route we will have an intolerably large House with, as the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd, says, almost 1,000 Members. We are already at the point where the Chamber is seriously overcrowded for Questions. We have had to commandeer the use of the Below Bar visitors’ seats. This is before the first of the 54 new Peers joins us. I suspect we shall be taking over the spouses’ seats next. The pressure on facilities if we get bigger and bigger will also become increasingly intolerable. I have a final comment from Dr Russell:

“For as long as the system of appointment for life continues, the proportionality goal must therefore simply be forgotten, before serious damage is done”.

That is a compelling reason for the retirement provisions in the Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Steel.

What is of paramount importance in any discussion of how we change the House is that we do not diminish its effectiveness in holding the Government to account, scrutinising and revising legislation, and drawing on the experience and knowledge of its Members to investigate subjects of national concern through our Select Committee system. Completely absent from the debate about election or appointment is any evidence that an elected House would do that job better. The legitimacy of an assembly can be achieved in several ways. Elections are certainly one route but they are not the only one. That would certainly not be the case if we became just a second-rate shadow of the other place, consisting of a bunch of placemen and placewomen who had got here through being placed high up on a party list.

I would have much more faith in a statutory appointments commission being able to produce a Chamber in which ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, representatives of the regions and nations of the United Kingdom, as well as outstanding leaders of the professions, such as academics, senior police and service chiefs, and all the other distinguished people who make up the Cross Benches were to have a place. That is why I cannot believe that it would be right to go down the 100 per cent elected route. Central to the future of this House and its effectiveness is the continued presence of independently minded Cross-Benchers, such as the noble Lord whose maiden speech we heard just a moment ago.