House of Lords: Reform

Lord Sewel Excerpts

Tuesday 21st June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sewel]

My Lords, it is the first time that I have followed the noble Lord, Lord St John of Fawsley, in a debate, and it is a dubious privilege. Let us just say that the quality will go down, if not plummet, and I am afraid that I am bound to be a little repetitive. I apologise for that. It is also pretty clear that over today and tomorrow the Government will come in for quite a bit of head bashing. If I may summon up as much of a spirit of generosity as I can, I congratulate the Government on achieving something that I did not think was possible. The Bill and the White Paper make the previous Government’s attempts and forays into trying to get an elected House of Lords look almost—I stress, almost—coherent.

About 10 years ago, I spoke relatively frequently on House of Lords reform, and then I stopped, because—quite simply—the arguments did not change. The debate did not move on. We are all familiar with the two basic arguments. One is that a legislator ought to be elected, and the other concentrates on the balance between the two Houses. I come down very firmly on the latter side.

I first want to deal with two minor points. The Bill places great emphasis on the accountability of the new elected Members of the second Chamber; but surely the fact that Members will be elected for a single non-renewable 15-year term simply flies in the face of any idea of accountability. You can be held to account only for what you have done. The fact that you cannot be re-elected actually has the opposite effect and will make Members utterly unaccountable. This sort of confusion runs through the whole White Paper and the Bill. It is a total conceptual mess in a constitutional conundrum.

The Government also propose that Members of the new House will not have a constituency role. Who is going to stop them? Is a Minister going to be ordered not to reply to letters? Is a candidate going to stand for election and say, “Vote for me, but I won’t help you”? Is that the sort of thing that will happen? On this issue, it does not matter what the Government say or what is in the Bill because, at the end of the day, the electorate will force the Members to play a constituency role, whether they like it or not.

The White Paper and the Bill have a number of serious weaknesses that have to be examined in the context of the approach that the Government have taken. There are basically two problems here. One is that the approach fails to recognise the interaction between composition, powers, functions and conventions. If you change one, you are bound to create implications for the others. That sort of understanding is completely missing from the Bill.

The other weakness is that it is a totally a-historic document. It betrays complete ignorance of how the constitutional development of this country, particularly in the first half of the 20th century, came about, and what it led to in terms of defining the relationship between the two Houses. The Parliament Act was not some nice little piece of constitutional drafting but the product of a power struggle between two Houses—one elected and one unelected. In the context of a growing democracy, the elected House was able successfully to assert its supremacy. Why? It was because it had a monopoly of democratic legitimacy. That is how it was able to do it. If the Commons loses that, it inevitably changes the relationship between the two Houses and, as was said earlier, moves the weight back in favour of the second Chamber and away from the Commons itself.

Traditionally, the House of Commons has been sceptical of establishing a directly elected second Chamber, although I admit that in recent years there has been greater enthusiasm for it. However, I detect that things are changing and the House of Commons is beginning to revert to its traditional position. Why? The penny has finally dropped. Increasingly, Members of the Commons have realised that their primacy rests upon their monopoly of democratic legitimacy. If the Commons loses that, perhaps not immediately but eventually, fundamental change will take place in the relationship between the two Houses. In the context of our constitutional development, the justification for the second Chamber being subordinate simply disappears when elections are introduced. I am at a loss to see how the conventions governing the relationship between an elected House and an unelected House can long survive the creation of an elected second Chamber.

On this sort of issue, we do not have to theorise or speculate, because we have evidence readily to hand. We know how political institutions develop. The Scotland Act 1999 established a strong model of devolution in Scotland and a Scottish Parliament with wide-ranging powers. Some saw it as a settlement, but as soon as it started work the debate started again on it claiming more powers. After the Recess we are coming back to debate and, we hope, to pass a new Scotland Act which will give the Scottish Parliament more powers.

The important thing to realise is that political institutions are not static; they are dynamic. Once you have election to the second Chamber, the direction of travel is clear. As the relationship between the two Houses is at the core of the debate—many speakers have rightly emphasised that—it is deeply worrying that there seems to be confusion over the issue at the heart of government. My noble friend Lord Grocott and other noble Lords cited the heroic Clause 2 of the draft Bill. Let me summarise it by saying, “Nothing changes. You can have an elected Chamber, but it does not change the relationship between the two Houses at all. Powers remain the same; conventions remain the same; everything remains the same”. However, the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, said:

“I fully expect the conventions and agreements between the Houses to change, to evolve and to adapt to different circumstances; it would be very strange if they did not do so”.—[Official Report, 11/5/11; col. 1279.]

I think that the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, got it right. That is why this is a bad Bill.