House of Lords Reform

Lord Soley Excerpts

Tuesday 15th September 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Leader of the House for the way in which she introduced the debate. I agree very strongly that reform must be incremental, aside from any bigger changes that come from constitutional changes. At the moment it has to be incremental. The other thing that she said, as have others, is that if we are to get agreement it has to be led by the parties and groups in the House. If we took a vote on any of the suggestions that have been made today, we would have about 101 different approaches, which would not help. Those two suggestions are very important.

I want to talk about process. Everybody here knows that this House does incredibly good work. If we did not do our job, the people outside who are expected to obey the laws passed by Parliament would have much more difficulty understanding them and would have to struggle with some of their contradictions. We understand that and some experts understand it, but the vast bulk of the public do not. We need a process of reform to which we can draw attention. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, used the phrase “a perfect storm” for the events in July. I made comments at that time, too. The three things driving that perfect storm are: first, the size of the House; secondly, the appointments; and thirdly, individual behaviour, which at times is either sad or bad or both.

The problem is that we are in this perfect storm, which I will talk more about in a moment, because we are not addressing it in a way that the media can respond to, and indeed people outside can respond to. I say that from a long history of dealing with the media and politics, some of it successful and some of it very unsuccessful. What makes up a perfect storm for a political institution in relation to the media is: first, if there is a bad story and it runs without being stopped or addressed; and secondly, a series of bad events one after another that again are not seen to be being addressed, and are not stopped. Right now, if we read the press or listen to the radio, watch TV or anything else, comments about the House of Lords tend to be at best marginally derogatory or at worst severely derogatory.

All of us should be warned, particularly on the Conservative Benches, when the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail start saying that the House of Lords should be abolished, is not worth it, is a disgrace, or whatever. We have an image problem, and a serious one. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, was right that we need to find a strategy for dealing with that.

I like the approach of the Leader of the House, but it needs to go a bit further. We need a reform process. It is process that matters. If we can look at ways of both dealing with the problems and addressing them to the media, we can begin to fight back. At the moment we are like a rabbit in car headlights; we are frozen. When I was interviewed in the media in July—the Lord Speaker had already done a great job, and one or two other Members addressed them, too—I was struck by the number of people in the media who would say, “Why is nobody doing anything about this? Why, as an institution are you not addressing it?”. It is as though we are frozen not just by the media but because of the fear of what the House of Commons might do or say.

The reason why I urge the noble Baroness to talk to the leaders of the other groups about this, and why we might need a reform structure led by her and the others, is that we can come up with a list of suggestions that we can keep quiet at first until there is broad agreement and then begin to spell them out. We would have two achievements. First, there is a story to tell to the media about not only what we do right, but above all what we are doing to stop some of the bad stories. The majority of people out there think that we have done nothing about those who have committed criminal offences and are still here. In fact, we have done things, but it is not out there. Secondly, we have to be very clear that without something that we are seen to be doing ourselves, it feeds those people—particularly in the House of Commons, but outside as well—who simply say, “It will never be reformed. We have to abolish it, scrap it, elect it”, or whatever. As I have said before, the question of election is secondary to the issue of what we want this House to do.

I plead with the noble Baroness to take the initiative that she already has, which I support and applaud, and discuss it with the leaders of the other groups to see whether we can broaden this out so that we are addressing a range of issues and can start telling a good story about how we are dealing with the problems that face us. We have to have ways of dealing with this. I talked in July about the need for the House to have a system where a Member could be stood down for a period until the storm blew over. That would protect the Member as well; it is not just a protection for the House. Very often, if a Member has done or said something wrong, they will actually dig themselves in further unless they are in some way stood down, as they would be in almost any other organisation. We need to address that. If we do not, we will continue to be driven by the storm, because the media have now decided that this place is beyond reform. That is profoundly dangerous, and it is believed not just of here but of down the corridor as well.