House of Lords Reform

Lord Murphy of Torfaen Excerpts

Tuesday 12th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Murphy of Torfaen (Lab)]

My Lords, that advice was certainly relevant yesterday, when 80 people spoke in the debate and I was 71st. But it gave me time to reflect on the nature of yesterday’s debate on the Budget. It was weighty, informed, very impressive and very civilised. In the 40 years that I have been in Parliament, 10 of them here, I have been deeply impressed by the level of debate and of course by the level of revision and scrutiny of legislation that comes before us, but we do need reform. It seems to me that the House is too big. Perhaps the ideas of the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, today could be looked at by my noble friend the Leader of the House as to how we could do that. Naturally, as someone who was born in 1948, I prefer the idea of participation rather than of age, but I say to the party opposite that there were two occasions during the last Parliament when we could have partly resolved that. One was through what my noble friend Lord Grocott was doing in terms of by-elections for hereditary peerages and the second was what the noble Lord, Lord Burns, did with his report. Had we adopted both those suggestions, perhaps it would not be quite so difficult today.

I was privileged to be a member of Gordon Brown’s Labour Party commission on the constitution. He came up with some excellent recommendations on how to tackle the overcentralised state that we are in at the moment and to deal with devolution. I have to agree with my noble friend Mr Roger Liddle about where we go in the political landscape we currently have, which is different from what it was when I entered Parliament a long time ago. We now have devolved Parliaments in Wales and Scotland, and happily now too in Northern Ireland. Great areas of England are governed by mayors, and there is a very strong case for this House to be able to reflect and represent the nations and regions of our United Kingdom—partly, incidentally, to ensure that it remains a United Kingdom by having such representation here. I will give my noble friend the Lord Privy Seal an idea: in the meantime, while we discuss these things in the months and years ahead, is it possible, for example, that former First Ministers of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland could be offered peerages in order to come here and give their experience? A lot might not want to do that, but the offer should nevertheless be made.

One of the recommendations of Gordon Brown’s commission regarded the House of Lords. Ultimately, after a lot of deliberation, he came to the conclusion, which I did not share, that the House of Lords should be completely directly elected. I gave a dissenting opinion, which was that, in my view—and only mine—the House could be partly elected but that an overwhelmingly elected House would be wrong. I believe that it would be wrong because it would be a rival to the House of Commons. I say that not as a Member of the House of Lords but as someone who was in the House of Commons for 30 years. If we elect a House of Lords, particularly if it is elected by a method of proportional representation, inevitably those who are elected to this place in those circumstances will argue that their mandate is greater and more democratic than that of Members of the House of Commons.

Power in this country must reside in the elected House of Commons entirely. We of course should complement that, in the way we do now and in different, reformed ways to come. That, in my view, is the bottom line. However, I see that there are many cases for reform. It has taken 113 years to get to where we are, and I hope it will not take 113 years to reform. Many ideas will flow from this debate today but ultimately, our position as a revising Chamber, a Chamber for scrutiny and debate, remains unparalleled.