Parliament: Elected House of Lords

Lord Grenfell Excerpts

Wednesday 10th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grenfell]

My Lords, when the last Government set out their vision of what an elected second Chamber would be like, they imagined,

“A second chamber that is more assertive than the current House of Lords”,

to quote from their July 2008 White Paper. Such a reformed Chamber,

“operating against the background of the current arrangements for its powers, would not threaten primacy”.

That is precisely the argument which the present Government advance, among others, to convince us of the merits of an elected Chamber. They advocate, within the constraints set by the Parliament Acts, a more assertive House of Lords but one which does not threaten the primacy of the other place. This is a smokescreen and one in which they themselves now seem to be stumbling about in some confusion.

The danger in establishing an elected second Chamber lies not in some imagined threat to the primacy of the House of Commons because, as in the case of other countries where there is a wholly or partially elected second Chamber, constitutional arrangements and conventions are set in place to protect that primacy. In our case, we have the Parliament Acts and the Salisbury convention. Our focus instead should be on the relationship change because there can be a substantial change in the relationship between the two Chambers, as my noble friend Lord Grocott most convincingly said, without primacy being threatened.

With an elected senate, the relationship that will see the most significant change will be that Chamber’s relationship not with the other Chamber, although that will be significant enough, but with the Executive. Within the confines of respect for the primacy of the other place, an elected senate will seek the means to be more assertive in its efforts to hold the Government to account. In the interests of there being a better check on the Executive, that is in principle good but, shorn of the expertise to be found in this present House, I do not see the new assertiveness of an elected senate adding much if any value to the effort of Parliament as a whole to hold the Government better to account. The second Chamber will replicate the first and its relationship with the Executive will change accordingly, from an expert scrutinising House much to be reckoned with, as it is now, to a pale, unthreatening junior partner to the House still enjoying its primacy. The beneficiary of this change in relations will be the Executive. Is that really what we parliamentarians want?