House of Lords Reform (No. 2) Bill

Lord Haskel Excerpts

Friday 28th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Haskel (Lab)]

My Lords, I echo the tributes to the noble Lord, Lord Steel, and others for their tenacity, their hard work and their efforts in bringing this before us. I, too, am sorry to see my noble friend Lord Grenfell go. He is of course great value as well as being good company, because in him we get two for the price of one: both a hereditary and an appointed Peer. He is also an old Etonian, so the one person who may be pleased to see him go is the right honourable Michael Gove.

I entered your Lordships’ House in 1993, when the House was dominated by hereditary Peers. They also dominated the House in 1912, when Asquith famously said that reform of the House of Lords “brooks no delay”. That reform was achieved in 1999, when most of the hereditary Peers left and more reform was promised. Since then, we have had a royal commission, four White Papers, two Bills reforming the House and reports from Select Committees and elsewhere. In addition, we have had the Steel Bill, the sixth version of which is now before your Lordships.

So what has held up this reform? It is lack of consensus, as my noble friend Lord Grenfell said. Yes, there was consensus that the hereditary Peers were an anachronism and that was reformed, but there is little agreement on the role and duties of the House. There is little agreement on the powers of the House, the membership of the House and the legitimacy of the House, and absolutely no consensus on how these reforms will be achieved while maintaining the primacy of the House of Commons. Unless there is agreement on those matters, there will be little reform. That is why we must pursue small, incremental reforms as they come along—reforms such as are in this Bill—all the while maintaining the quality and standard of our work.

During the same 20 years in which I have been a Member of this House, I have been a regular visitor to the United States. There, I have witnessed a once-powerful Congress gradually disintegrate into a kind of distrustful partisanship. Political debate there has become marginalised and, instead, last-minute deals are done on such important constitutional matters as the budget. Do I see a red light flashing? This is why I find absolutely nothing wrong with slow and careful incremental reform.

In the time that I have been in your Lordships’ House, it too has changed. Wealth and privilege have been replaced with experience and expertise. Dogmatic debate has been replaced with more reasoned argument—well, generally. As a result, the House has become more confident and more assertive, and I think that Parliament has become stronger as a whole. That is why I support this Bill in spite of some shortcomings. I am most grateful to Dr Meg Russell and the Constitution Unit for pointing them out, and I hope that the Minister and other noble Lords will agree on the importance of having independent academic commentary and research on such critical and complex matters as our constitution and the House of Lords. Their independent academic commentary is invaluable in considering this Bill. Perhaps I may add that their running commentary and observations on what we do and how we do it here are also very valuable.

Dr Russell is not the first person to point out the loopholes that were described by the noble Lord, Lord MacGregor. The royal commission of 2000 recommended that Members of the second Chamber should not be eligible for election to the House of Commons for 10 years following their departure from the House of Lords. This was repeated in the 2005 report from the cross-party group of MPs. The 2007 White Paper on Lords reform dealt with this, as did the proposals published by the coalition in 2011.

Could it be that this omission is just an error? Ministerial assurances were given in the other place that the Lords would not become, as they put it, a training ground. Will the Minister repeat those assurances here, perhaps more strongly? As there is no parliamentary time for amendments, will the Government acknowledge the possibility of such a loophole and give assurances that this will be dealt with in the future, perhaps in the next Session? Of course, the real way to deal with this and other matters is for the power of the Prime Minister to create Peers through patronage to be regulated by the Appointments Commission—but, of course, this is for another day.

For today, as the noble Lord, Lord Steel, told us, the Bill provides two further reforms as well as retirement. Those who do not attend will cease to be Members and those who cannot attend because they are in prison for a year or more will also cease to be Members. These long overdue, common-sense reforms are important because they add to the reputation of the House—and reputation is central to the authority of an unelected House like ours. The attendance required—unless there are exceptional circumstances—is reasonable in view of the undertakings given on accepting nomination to the House.

This is not a perfect Bill. It is not helpful that it is a Private Member’s Bill; it is not helpful that it comes before us at this very late stage. However, it is an incremental step in the reform of your Lordships’ House and, for those reasons, it should go forward as it is. I hope it is supported by undertakings from the Government on the record. For these reasons, I hope the House will give the Bill a Second Reading.