House of Lords: Reform

Lord Grenfell Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grenfell]

My Lords, following the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, I am tempted to utter a loud “hear, hear” and resume my seat.

[A noble Lord]

Hear, hear!

[Lord Grenfell]

I know that those who do not share my views would wish that that was so. I think I would have been similarly tempted if I had followed the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd, in the debate yesterday—she said it all. The noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, follows me and he might take a two-word speech as a sign of infirmity, or maybe even a lack of stamina, and encourage him in his view, expressed here in this Chamber just a couple of years ago, that,

“your Lordships’ House is the best geriatric day care centre in the country”.—[Official Report, 27/2/09; col. 451.]

Just a week short of a year ago, on 29 June 2010, the Leader of the House, the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, initiated a debate on Lords reform. In that debate I expressed my irritation at being invited to take note of the case for reforming this House as though it was on the coalition’s agenda. I pointed out that it was not. What was on the agenda, I said, was the abolition of the House and its replacement with something entirely different. I recall this not to claim that I was the first to articulate a growing awareness that the coalition was cloaking its intentions in the garb of a reform not even worthy of a referendum—I may well not have been the first—but because I find it significant that a year later on all sides of the House there is now wide recognition that abolition, not reform, is what lies at the heart of this miserable draft Bill.

General de Gaulle once remarked that since politicians rarely believe what they are saying, they are always surprised when other people believe them—a cynical observation maybe, but one that is not without a grain of truth. I wonder how many of the professed abolitionists in this House really believe in the claims that they are making in defence of their case. I would understand their surprise at finding many to share their beliefs; believers in these reforms appear to be in quite short supply in this debate. That is no surprise. How can anyone rationally claim that the purpose of this legislation is to reform the House, not abolish it, that the supremacy and authority of the other place will not be challenged by an elected second Chamber, and that senators elected by PR for a single 15-year term will not claim greater legitimacy than MPs and equal accountability to the electorate? Are the Bill’s supporters telling us that these wholly irrational claims are in fact rational?

One is tempted to equate coalition policy on the future of this House with the doctrine of intentional irrationality that the Dadaists and Surrealists embraced in both art and literature as a means to reject logic and reason, which some insisted were the causes of many contemporary social problems. Perhaps the coalition sees this House as a contemporary social problem. I do not think that either the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, or the noble Lord, Lord McNally, cut particularly Surrealist figures—well, not always—but looking for reason and logic in their arguments in favour of abolition is as fruitless as searching for rationality in Salvador Dali’s limp, melting watches.

Time permits me to take but one example: the charge that this House lacks democratic legitimacy. What do we mean by legitimacy? Recently, during Report on the European Union Bill, my noble friend Lord Liddle, who I am pleased to see is in his place, spoke wisely from our Front Bench when he said, in relation to the European Union, that,

“there are two ways of looking at legitimacy. One is to think about it in terms of how decisions are approved, but the other is to think about whether the institution is effective at doing the job that it is supposed to do”.—[Official Report, 13/6/11; col. 583.]

He could have been speaking of this Chamber. This draft legislation reflects the monistic view held by its framers that you need to look only at the composition and decision-making methods of a political institution and no further to determine whether it has democratic legitimacy. I emphatically reject this. The nature of a political institution is a cardinal factor in assessing its legitimacy, but it is the quality of the outcomes that weighs heavier in the balance. If that quality is found wanting, if outcomes fall far short of what is agreed by the people to be for the common good, the claim to democratic legitimacy is of course undermined. To fail to deliver is, after all, to fail the people. It is wrong, however, to determine that as a matter of ideological principle a political institution cannot claim legitimacy, whether or not its outcomes approximate the perceived optimum, simply on the basis of its composition.

In last June’s debate I spoke of my belief in the fundamentally important constitutional role played by your Lordships’ House, the House that we are now invited to abolish. My belief in that role has only strengthened since then. We seek to meet the electorate’s requirement that the legislation proposed by the party that wins office is fashioned to the highest possible standards, consistent with the will of the elected Chamber, whose primacy we unquestionably acknowledge. With few powers to exercise, and rightly so, we draw on our experience and apply our expertise to help ensure that Parliament delivers to the people what they have the right to expect: high quality, implementable Acts of Parliament. Perversely, though, we are told that an appointed House is disqualified from performing that crucial democratic function and so must be pulled down. Where is the coalition Government’s sense of proportion in all this?

I make this plea to the coalition: away with irrationality, embrace logic and reason, and invite all sides to work together on a programme of incremental reforms that will enhance this House’s ability to perform its role as a revising Chamber that is already the envy of Parliaments across the world. That is the path to pursue if we are to ensure the high quality legislation to which the people have a democratic right.