House of Lords: Lord Speaker’s Committee Report

Debate between Lord Lea of Crondall and Lord Burns

Tuesday 19th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Burns]

That this House takes note of the Report of the Lord Speaker’s committee on the size of the House.

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

My Lords, I note that there is no one on the Government Front Bench who is connected with the Burns report. I will reiterate the point that has been made by many noble Lords that there are two main reasons this report is able to command such a consensus—and they have consequences, I think, for the way we go forward from the acceptance of the report and, I hope, the buy-in to the report from the Prime Minister. I think that the secret was, first, the excellence of the report itself. I will name not only the noble Lord, Lord Burns, and his colleagues but the clerk, Tom Wilson, who I am sure played a very active part in making it a readable and very coherent presentation. It is a model of its type. I also join in the thanks to my noble friend Lady Crawley, and the noble Lord, Lord Newby, for their statesmanlike contributions. I hope that that accolade does neither of them any harm.

I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Cormack. The secret comes also from the fact that the Cormack group, for quite a long period of time, showed considerable statesmanship in being ready for the moment when the constellation of the stars was such that a request to the Speaker to progress this matter was acted upon. The key in my view, and it comes to the operational side of the implementation of this, is that the leapfrogging between the three parties—the two major parties in particular—was becoming an embarrassment. No one could keep on asserting that somehow the increase in the size of the House had anything to do with the Members. Clearly, that would be a preposterous argument.

As a former TUC employee, I feel I should mention that the phrase “package deal” is something that people take to mean that you have to say yes or no to the totality of what you are presented with and take a view on it. On that basis, I have no doubt that this package will command overwhelming support. To use a popular phrase in the current debate about Europe, it cannot be cherry picked; it is a bit like the European internal market—I am the only speaker so far to have got Brexit into my speech.

It is very bold in some ways. I will ask the following question to anybody in the House who is competent to respond to it. In some ways, this report signals the end of the dissolution honours. Unless the numbers stack up at the time, there will be severe limitation on the prime ministerial prerogative, not just as a principle but in practice. I stress that because I think that it would be impertinent, almost, of the House to say that we want to see the end of the dissolution honours. However, as I understand it—perhaps someone could comment on whether I have understood the implementation arithmetic—there cannot be a dissolution honours in the traditional sense if the numbers do not make provision for that. It is against that background, but only against that background, that I have a limited degree of sympathy for the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, who made the comment that he thinks that any new year list for 2018, in a couple of weeks’ time, could be seen as a legacy issue. That is not to move the goalposts, but the Labour/Conservative gap in the House is 50—250 versus 200—which is 25% if you do the arithmetic that way round, or 20% the other way around, and it is obviously bigger than the gap at the last general election. I just make that point.

I will make one more point about how, in the implementation period—a point touched upon by one or two other speakers—it is a coincidence that the reference to 15 years is the period of three Parliaments. It has other connotations, but in this case I think it would be useful for somebody to take on board the fact that there needs to be an implementation group, in some way or other, to see how and when the arithmetic would be done for the changeover of each new Parliament—if Parliaments are, in fact, averaging four years rather than five.