House of Lords: Reform

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, it is a complete pain to be speaking after the noble Lord, Lord Howarth. He said so much that I wanted to say that I shall have to prune my speech as I go along. I suppose I can summarise my attitude to this Bill by saying, “I agree with Nick, but not much”. I agree much more with the noble Baroness, Lady Royall. I am a thoroughgoing supporter of an elected House of Lords, but rather in the mould of my noble friend Lord Waddington. I want to see a more balanced bicameral system. I want to see the Executive having less power. As the Executive have so much power in the Commons, a stronger, elected House of Lords would be a useful change to the British constitution, but that is not what we are talking about now.

What we are talking about now is a completely botched reform, concocted in dark rooms by a party that is meant to believe in openness, without even involving the Front Bench of the Labour Party or taking any account of all the expertise around this House about how it might have got further in achieving its aims. As my noble friend Lord Lang pointed out, leaving the powers and functions as they are but changing the composition of the House is a recipe for instability. The powers and functions will have to be rebalanced, and how that will happen is essentially unpredictable. I believe that, as others have said, we will go through a period where an elected House under this Bill will fight to improve its position, to get power and to make itself worth while. How could it do otherwise because the alternative is grim, dull and uninteresting?

We are offering people coming into this House 15 years with the wages of a moderately senior teacher, no prospects of promotion, no afterlife and no influence. How are people like that going to be respected by the House of Commons? It is the respect that the House of Commons has for the people here, for us, that makes the whole thing function. A lot of people here were senior Ministers, have played a part in Government and have the same qualities as the people in another place, except that they have been through it all and succeeded. Added to that, there is a collection of people who have succeeded in the courses that they have followed in life. Although we are a nuisance, get in the way of what the Government want to do and do not have to go through elections, none the less we are accorded respect, and that makes for the balance in the House.

We have a Bill and I do not see how, in the course of coalition politics and looking after the pride of the Liberal Party and its leader, we can get away from the fact that this is the Bill we will probably end up with. However, as many Peers have said, a lot in this Bill reproduces what is in the Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Steel. Therefore, we can actually build on many of the proposals in this Bill. If we cut away the bits that do not work and do not make sense we may end up with this Bill looking remarkably like the Steel Bill, perhaps with a few improvements. It is a task which I do not envy the noble Lord, Lord Richard, and his committee. I am delighted he has taken it on. I am sure he will chair it brilliantly. I have no wish at all to join him but I look forward very much to what he has to say in a year or two’s time.

I have some suggestions for him. Now that we are going to have a fixed pattern of elections, it seems to me that even in an appointed House we could take a step towards election by making sure that at election times the parties expose to the public the list of those they intend to put forward for the House of Lords under the Steel Bill. If we are having the Steel Bill system with a 15-year term and a regular flow of new entrants, the major parties—Conservative and Labour—will have about 70 or 80 Peers to create in any five-year period. They can safely expose the top 30 or 40 names without any risk that anyone on that list will not get into the House of Lords. That would mean that when you were voting for a party you knew what they were going to do with the House of Lords and you knew the quality of people they were going to put in there. It would be something which was a matter at the general election. It would be an element of democratic accountability. You could even have a separate vote for the lists of Peers that parties were putting forward. This would have the advantage of dissociating the percentages in this House from the percentages that had voted for the other House and would greatly weaken any claim to democratic legitimacy that this House might feel as a result of having had an element of election.

I would also suggest, in contrast to what my noble friend Lord Marlesford said, that when it comes to reducing this House, as needs to be done, we should not pay people, we should offer hereditary peerages. It is an attractive thing. My peerage, if I am cynical about it, is a reward for buggery and bribery but hallowed by several hundred years in between. Noble Lords have got here for entirely legitimate and honourable reasons, certainly by comparison, and they would be elegant additions to the hereditary peerage as it will then be, which is something entirely irrelevant. It will have been severed from its connection with this House and will be merely a decoration rather in the way that French titles are a decoration. It would be a pleasant badge for people in this House to be able to hand down to their successors and adequate compensation for many people who were looking for a good reason to retire. Giving money to people to retire is going back to sinecures and to bad old ways I would not like to see reproduced.

I want to see a House of Lords which is as strong as it is now and which is an attractive place for the many people who get here because of their own experience and skills. That is the right balance to try to maintain. I think we can do it while improving, in many ways, the House at the moment and I wish the noble Lord, Lord Richard, every success in that. I hope, too, that he will manage to remove IPSA from the Bill. I do not think we should wish that on ourselves.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Tyler]

I am very grateful to my noble friend, but there is an additional reason. In fact the average is not 300; it is over 400. That figure is out of date. I accept entirely what my noble friend said and I hope that there will be support from other Members across the House when it comes to looking at this issue in the Joint Committee.

Finally, under whatever system of PR, if the number is so small it will be quite difficult to get diversity—indeed, even gender balance—in the membership of this House. If only 80 Members are elected in each tranche there will be relatively small multi-Member seats and it will be quite difficult to get the sort of diversity and gender balance that I know many Members of your Lordships' House wish to have. Many have already expressed concerns on this.

[Lord Lucas]

Does the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, accept that whatever way I vote today and whatever I think of his speech as a whole, I am in total agreement with that last section?

[Lord Tyler]

I am embarrassed by this support from all sides. It is an unaccustomed experience. I hope that this will be a very early discussion in the Joint Committee.

The Government’s proposals are incremental and evolutionary and take advantage of the work of the royal commission led so ably by the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham. They take advantage of all the thinking that went into the work on the Jack Straw White Paper and it is simply nonsense to suggest that this issue has suddenly burst upon us in this House and in the other House and among the public. People have been talking about these issues for a very long time and been studying precisely the concerns which have been expressed in your Lordships' House yesterday and today. These proposals maintain the best of this place and will give it the legitimacy and credibility that I believe it not only needs but deserves. The pace of change will still be slow, but its direction will be clear. For that, it is very much welcome.