House of Lords Reform Bill [HL]

Lord Low of Dalston Excerpts

Friday 3rd February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Low of Dalston (CB)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Norton, although I do so with some trepidation in view of his great authority in this area, as in many others. I declare my interest as a member of the House of Lords Appointments Commission, but make it clear that anything I say is in a purely personal capacity.

As we have heard, the main purpose of the Bill is to provide for a system of elections to the House of Lords. I have some fairly major reservations about that, but let me make it clear to the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, that that does not mean I am against reform. I am in favour of reform, just not this reform. But the noble Baroness has made a serious contribution to discussion of the future of this House with her Bill and I assure her that I take it seriously.

Before I get on to that, I shall mention a few points of detail. I am not sure that a membership of 292 will be enough to cope with all the work the House has to do. When the coalition’s House of Lords Reform Bill went through Parliament, the Joint Committee considering it said that,

“a House of 300 members is too small to provide an adequate pool to fulfil the demands of a revising chamber, for its current range of select committees, and for the increasingly common practice of sitting as two units: the main chamber and Grand Committee … Accordingly, we favour a House of 450 members”.

A range of views were canvassed, but the committee’s view represented the consensus.

Then again, the status of Members entitled to sit and exercise the same rights as an elected Member but not vote is bound to give rise to questions. Indeed, it has given rise to a number from the noble Lord, Lord Norton. What are these rights of sitting and exercising the same rights as elected Members, except for voting? This suggests something more than just dining rights or using the Library. Will they be able to speak? The noble Lord, Lord Norton, assumes that they will. That would certainly be something new to get our heads around —although I suppose, by the side of elected Peers, it would be a mere bagatelle. On the other hand, the idea of selecting the 146 transitional Members on the basis of points allocated for the numbers of days they have attended, the number of times they have spoken and the number of times they have voted may have some attraction for the noble Lord, Lord Burns, and his committee.

Turning to my more major reservations, there are many reasons for being against elections as a means of recruitment to this House. First, it would tend to throw up the same kind of career politicians who stand for the House of Commons, not those with the kind of expertise and experience needed for a revising Chamber. If the same system were to be used as that for electing the House of Commons, the Lords would tend to duplicate the Commons and thus not add value. As Sir John Major said a few years ago, if the answer is another 300 professional politicians, we are asking the wrong question.

Secondly, the Lords would soon become more politicised and lose many of the qualities for which it is currently valued: no single party holds sway; Members are more independent-minded; and debates are, as I think Wakeham put it, “Less adversarial, better tempered and better informed”. In other words, the House of Lords has a more deliberative character, better suited to a revising Chamber.

Thirdly, there would be the possibility of turf wars at constituency level between MPs and Peers. When this was under discussion before, at the time of the coalition’s Bill, a Cabinet Minister was quoted as saying:

“If you’re an MP faced with an elected senator in your constituency purring about in his Jaguar with a higher salary than you, going to all the hospital openings, but not doing the social security casework, you’re not going to like it much”.


I thought that put it rather well. If Members were elected using a regional list system, I suppose you could have several Members purring about in your constituency.

Fourthly and finally, if a variant of the present system were used, especially if it involved an element of proportional representation as the noble Baroness proposes, the Lords could soon begin to rival the primacy of the Commons. It is claimed that elections are more democratic. Indeed, we have heard it claimed this morning. The noble Lord, Lord Norton, has already shown that the equation of elections with democratic legitimacy is overly simplistic.

There is more to democracy than just being elected. From the standpoints of accessibility, openness and responsiveness, the unelected House of Lords is much more democratic. Organisations representing the needs of the poor and dispossessed find it much easier to get their point across and have it taken on board than in the House of Commons, which is much more politicised and dominated by the Whips.

As I have said, I do not favour election as the means of populating this House, but further consideration needs to be given to how Members are appointed. So long as appointment is based principally on a system of patronage, this House will continue to be vulnerable to charges of illegitimacy. I favour a system of appointment by an appointments commission, as at present, but greatly strengthened by a system of nominations from the different branches of civil society: the law, medicine, the arts, sport, education, the armed services, business, trade unions, the third sector and so on. Schemes of this sort are sometimes spoken of as a system of indirect election based on electoral colleges, but in truth they are more correctly thought of as a more broadly based system of appointment.

This is my idea, but a range of alternative proposals have been made in a similar vein. The best and most fully worked out scheme of which I am aware was devised by John Smith of Stamford in Lincolnshire. He proposes a system of indirect election from what one might call constituencies of expertise, with a general college for those not affiliated to any particular constituency and a parliamentary college for politicians.

I was pleased to see that both the Joint Committee on the coalition’s draft House of Lords Reform Bill and the alternative report on that Bill called for further work on the question of indirect election. That would provide a framework for examining the various proposals made for strengthening the system of recruitment to this House. Once they have finished addressing the question of the size of the House, I hope the various groups looking at these things may agree to undertake some work on this issue of appointment. I like to think the Government might give some support to that work.