House of Lords

Debate between Lord Maxton and Lord Jopling

Tuesday 6th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jopling (Con)]

My Lords, it is a very great pleasure for me to follow the noble Lord who has just spoken. He and I have followed our careers for the past 70 years, since we first met in the school classroom, and I am glad that he clearly is as well now as I feel. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Williams, on this timely debate. We need to discuss this issue and to move to a resolution at this time. Not only do we need to reduce the number of Peers attending debates, as the Motion states, but we need drastically to reduce the number of Peers who have a right to attend. We need a permanent reduction in the number of Peers, which can be done only by primary legislation. I was not very happy with the suggestion by the noble Lord, Lord Williams, of two-tier Peers or very keen on his suggestion of using the criterion of attendance as the key to membership. Attendance does not always reflect usefulness.

My United States friends die with laughter when I tell them that we have an upper House of almost 850 Members. They say, “We in the United States manage very well with 100 in our upper House”. Of course, there are many differences but I believe that there is a lesson there. Unlike the noble Lord, Lord Richard, I strongly oppose having an elected House. For more than 12 years I have advocated a scheme which I put together but which up to now not many people have taken seriously. I take the opportunity to peddle it once more before your Lordships because I believe that more than ever my suggestion is worthy of close scrutiny.

The problem that we are faced with, of course, is that when the hereditary Peers were disbarred from coming, the Government of the day failed totally to reorganise this House. They were told repeatedly, “If we are going to throw out the hereditaries, we must reorganise the House for the future”. We did not do that and now we are paying the price. First, we need a cap set by legislation. I do not mind what it is—perhaps 400, 500 or something of that sort—but we need to bring the number down in stages after each election towards that capped figure. A Parliament would start with whatever the cap is, but there should be flexibility for new blood to come in, as a number of noble Lords have already suggested. Perhaps a limit of 5% or 10% more could come in during a Parliament but, after the subsequent election, the total membership must be brought back to the statutory cap figure. New Peerages could be created but then the House should return to the cap.

I am strongly in favour of a substantial Cross-Bench presence. A figure of, say, 20%—I am happy to discuss either side of that—should be in statute, which would ensure that the Government of the day never has a majority in this House. I find that a lot of people outside have no conception that the last Labour Government had around only 30% of the total vote of the House. I shall come to how it can be done in a moment, but you must have an arrangement which shows that this House is not and can never be the poodle of Government.

The key to this is that, after each general election, the membership of the House of Lords on party lines should broadly reflect the result of the election which has just taken place. That might be done through the number of votes cast for each party or by the number of seats won. For each Parliament, this House would be made up of 80% party-political Peers who in general would broadly—it does not have to be exact—reflect the membership of the other place or the votes cast in the election.

One of the difficulties, which I acknowledge, is that immediately after an election and before State Opening, which can always be put back by a week or two, the membership of this House would have to be reviewed very quickly. I would prefer it to be done in the same way as the hereditary Peers did when the 92, or whatever number it was, were elected. Colleagues in the House know who contributes. I do not like an age limit, although I have to be careful what I say because only three or four weeks ago I was 84. However, it is colleagues who know best those who contribute the most.

The question is this: what should we do about the composition of the parties in the House? One of the reasons I am suggesting this solution is because, in my view, the membership of this House does not begin to reflect the possible changes in the political scenario of the country as a whole. Let me suggest three scenarios in which the membership of this House could look seriously unsatisfactory, and I hope that I will give no offence to anyone or any party, because I am merely using press comments which we are all aware of.

We have been told that at the next election, there may be a collapse in the Labour vote in Scotland and that a large number of Scottish nationalist Members could be elected to the other place. Let us say that they form a coalition with one of the other parties. They have no representation in this place, and we would look very silly having no Scottish nationalists.

[Lord Maxton (Lab)]

Will the noble Lord give way? The Scottish National Party has been offered peerages again and again, but it has refused to take them. That is why there are no members of the SNP in this House.

[Lord Jopling]

I am well aware of that, but if they found themselves in government with Ministers down at the other end of the corridor, it is inevitable that they would need to have Ministers on the Government Front Bench here to speak for their party in your Lordships’ House. I think that that is obvious.

Let me put forward another scenario. We are told by the public opinion polls that the Liberal vote has seriously sunk. If that was to happen—I think it was my noble friend Lord Strathclyde who referred to this —and there was only a handful of Liberal Members in the House of Commons, this House would look particularly stupid if it still had 103 Liberal Peers sitting here simply because the arrangements for membership of this place were not flexible. We must somehow build a flexibility into the membership. I believe that, after each election, the way you can achieve that flexibility is to pitch the party membership of the House to broadly reflect the views of the public. That is quite different to having an elected House—this is more or less what you would get if you had an elected House, but this is a much better way of going about it.

The third and final scenario—