Draft House of Lords Reform Bill

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Monday 30th April 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

My Lords, to say that this Bill is half-baked is to put it politely, and the idea of pushing it forward in the next Session, even with the guillotine, is offensive. That would be a procedure which would be admired in a banana republic. Indeed, it is perhaps not untimely to go right back to the fundamental question: what is the problem? I must conclude that the only instrument that the Government had to hand was a sledgehammer. One would not otherwise use a sledgehammer to crack a nut. The whole point about that metaphor, which we use every day of the week without perhaps stopping to think about it, is that you do not use a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

The sledgehammer in this case is, to use the demotic, to deal with some deficiencies in the procedures and method of appointment to this Chamber. Indeed, I am reminded a bit of that other great example of overreaction which took place during the Second World War, when a leading admiral in the United States Navy went to see President Roosevelt and said, “Mr President, Sir, I’ve got the solution to the U-boat problem”. “Well”, asked the President, “what’s that”? “Drain the north Atlantic”, said the admiral. That did not go down all that well, but there are a few jokes in this. Anyway, there you go: you win some and you lose some.

However, there are many practical things that many of us have advocated for many years. Indeed, the Labour group wrote unanimously to Tony Blair five years ago in answer to his request, “Have you got any ideas?”. I had a hand in writing the letter, as a matter of fact, along with Robin Corbett. We had a whole string of things, including a statutory appointments commission which would entail the Labour Party, as well as the other parties, looking seriously at reducing prime ministerial patronage and finding out about the different constituent parts. This is in the same spirit in which my noble friend Lord Morris of Handsworth was speaking: to find some new formula—whether regionally, industrially or in any other way—to give more confidence within the constituency parties that this was a House of Lords of which they had some ownership. The Labour Party constitution could certainly be easily adjusted to provide it. That is a practical answer to a practical problem, without overreacting in this totally dramatic way.

We have some very sober committee reports on the record. I, too, recall what I think was the unanimous report of the Cunningham committee, that one could not simply state that the conventions would remain. Yet here we are, and as far as I can see the Richard report has more or less said, “Yes you can”, when clearly the answer is, “No you can’t”. We cannot just look at the next Session and expect to get the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, or some equally brilliant draftsman, to rewrite Clause 2 to remove the problem. This is not that sort of problem. Perhaps noble Lords will correct me in a few minutes.

The report sees there being no change in the powers and functions of the two Houses. How? This leads to the committee struggling with the corset that it wants to put around the new Senate to make sure that these conflicts with the House of Commons do not arise. I think I am right in saying that there is some reference to the fact that IPSA should make no provision for casework by the Senate. Surely, that is struggling a long way to make sure that the corset still holds the Senate in check.

This relates to a point made in a most interesting way in one of the most interesting contributions, by my noble friend Lord Whitty. He said, “After all, we are not America. We don’t have a Supreme Court that arbitrates between the House of Representatives and the Senate”. I have been thinking about that in the past half-hour. One could put up a plausible—if not even more convincing—case to say the opposite. Are there not members of the Supreme Court right now, on the other side of Parliament Square, licking their lips because that is exactly the function that they will have? They are servants of the people; they work 24/7.

If there is a historian of the American Senate and House of Representatives here, I am sure I will be corrected but I do not think I have got this wrong. We are celebrating the centenary of the 17th amendment of the American constitution, which was made in 1912. It effectively meant that, instead of the states doing their own thing through their own indirect methods to appoint the Senate, they moved to direct elections. Many historians would say that this was when the Senate started to become the more important of the two Houses. I think it would happen here for all the reasons that made it happen in the United States. There is every reason to say that we are not like America, from the monarchy downwards. However, in this respect there would be that opening, which we might regret, for a role for the Supreme Court.

On the role of MPs, when somebody says that we do not hear MPs say openly that they are worried about their relationship, that is true, but the reason is the one that would have been given by Mandy Rice-Davies: they wouldn’t say that, would they?

I conclude from the same position as my noble friend Lord Morris of Handsworth. I vote for the alternative report and, from doing my sums this evening, I think that I am alongside at least three-quarters of this House.