Draft House of Lords Reform Bill

Lord Quirk Excerpts

Monday 30th April 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Quirk]

My Lords, I join the many, blessedly without even attempting to repeat the views of the many, who have grave misgivings about the draft Bill and would favour only modest, provenly necessary, incremental reform of the kind that the noble Lord, Lord Steel, introduced in his Bill, which we are glad to know is back on course.

Of course, everyone here has benefited from reading the report of the noble Lord, Lord Richard. I was for example reinforced in my support for our bicameral Parliament that we have enjoyed for so long, at least until such time that the House of Commons can be trusted to scrutinise the Bills that it passes upwards. I welcome the idea of reducing the size of the House of Lords to something under 500. I welcome bringing in a term limit, and 15 years sounds just about right to me although I would prefer this to be done in three five-year bites, which could be manipulated to give the Appointments Commission a bit more room for manoeuvre. I share the strong feelings over Clause 2, as one who welcomes and would go on supporting the primacy of the House of Commons. I note with alarm the words in House of Lords Reform: An Alternative Way Forward that the draft Bill reveals an,

“unbridgeable gap between the election of the House of Lords and the primacy of the House of Commons”.

What I miss in the report is any convincing argument that the proposed massive change would mean that a new second Chamber would be any better than our present Chamber at what the present Chamber does best, which is revising and advising. Just think of the legislation that has passed through this House this year on health, welfare and legal aid. Bills were not only in need of root and branch revision, but they got it and, let us be fair, they got it above all through the intervention of the Cross-Benchers.

Obviously I would say that. I grant that not all the House’s expertise, for which we are famed up and down the land, resides on these Cross Benches. But most of it does. I am astonished at the way in which we have come to expect something like a reduction to 20 per cent of a reduced total House as sufficient to get the kind of expertise that we have at the moment. The hybrid House that we are threatened with would be a very poor exchange for an alternatively revised House in which the independents in fact would form the core, serving and served by a political architecture like at present but smaller, representing the structures of government and opposition. My sense of the national mood is that our people would happily settle for such a House of Lords. I do not think that the people at large are so enamoured of what they currently get in the House of Commons as the result of their democratic vote as to be anything other than perfectly happy to forego the privilege of something similar but of paler complexion in the House of Lords.