House of Lords: Working Practices

Lord Higgins Excerpts

Thursday 1st November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Higgins]

My Lords, I join all those who have congratulated the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, on initiating this debate. I am very glad that the Leader of the House is to reply since much of the debate has centred on the report of the working group on which he took the initiative in setting up. I also congratulate the House of Lords Library which has produced an outstandingly good brief. Appendix 1 provides the agenda the noble Lord opposite referred to a moment or two ago and gives an indication of what needed to be done, how much has been done and how much still remains to be done.

I find it quite extraordinary that in the summary by the Library, in the debate today and in the Goodlad report no one refers to what has been the most obnoxious and fundamental change that has taken place in our proceedings in relation to the scrutiny of legislation by Parliament: the programming of debates in another place. This is in no sense a criticism of another place. The reality is that it has been prevented from working as it should by successive Governments, first Mr Blair’s and, regrettably, now the present Government, despite assurances that the incoming Government would not programme legislation in another place. We have almost ceased to be a revising Chamber. In many ways, we have become the primary legislative Chamber. On top of all that, we find that when we have passed amendments, they are then programmed in another place so that the time allocated in the Commons for discussion of our amendments, on which we had important, complex legal arguments a short time earlier, has been less than the time we took going through the Division Lobbies in passing those amendments. This has to stop. I hope that my noble friend the Leader of the House will carry out urgent discussions with the new leader in another place and also, if necessary, raise the matter in Cabinet because we ought not to go on in this way. It is an indication of how much we are doing that should be done by the other place that we pass very often many amendments, all of which are immediately accepted by the other place. At the same time, there are one or two controversial issues for which time is not allowed for proper debate in the light of the discussions which have taken place in this House. Much more important than many other issues that we have discussed is that the balance between the two Houses should be restored.

In the little time I have left, I shall say something about the size of the House. It is absolutely clear that the proposal that the membership of this House should reflect the result of the previous election is bound over time to lead to a bigger and bigger House. It was a mistake to agree to that in, I believe, the coalition agreement and it should stop now. We cannot go on having more and more Members.

There have been many proposals on how we should reduce the size of the House as it now stands, including age, length of service, party selection, votes in the House and so on. Proposals about the usual problem of removing the people who do not come does not make any difference to the number of people who attend. That is an intrinsic problem. My feeling is that there are a number of Peers who would be prepared to retire but that it requires a degree of incentive. The proposal that perhaps by way of incentive one might offer the amount by the individual Member claimed as expenses in a previous year, excluding travel allowances, might provide a reasonable and sensible sort of an incentive. An inquiry as to what extent that might produce a number of people who might be prepared to retire, or might think it appropriate to retire, might solve this problem, which otherwise will be very difficult and troublesome to resolve in any other way. I am out of time, although I have dozens of points to make which will have to wait for another occasion.