Draft House of Lords Reform Bill

Lord True Excerpts

Tuesday 1st May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord True]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Lord, who adorns this House, and will continue to adorn the House even if the composition of the political Benches in the House is decided by the people rather than by patronage.

Many would say it is unenviable to be the 73rd speaker to address your Lordships in the last debate of a 293-day session, but I can conceive no more enviable privilege than to be able to address your Lordships’ House. However, I suspect I may have caught the selector’s eye this morning, since I do not share the certainty of many who have spoken in this debate that election of Peers to this House is unthinkable. Given the reaction of Peers to speeches yesterday and the witty speech of my noble friend Lord Forsyth this morning, perhaps as last man in I should have prayed for rain and stayed in the pavilion.

I would like to consider one of the refrains running through this debate—the primacy of the Commons. I suggest that we fret over that too much. Yes, the Commons has primacy, but the question is how well it uses it. I agree with the noble Lord, Norton of Louth, that we need to begin from the functioning of Parliament as a whole. Frankly, you would not begin constructing a strong and free Parliament by putting it under the primacy of one House shackled by executive-dominated procedures and telling the other House, however constituted, that it must not say boo to that over-mighty place.

The main case for introducing election to this place is—as the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, said the other day—that it would enable this House to hold by what it believes to be right, rather than knuckling under whenever the other House shouts “unelected”, “primacy”, “privilege” or what have you. Parliament is a trinity of the Crown, Lords and Commons, and in modern times one part of that trinity has, because it is elected, usurped effective power within it. It was not always so, and need not always be so. Indeed, for many centuries your Lordships were the dominant House, though after the 1670s generally accepting Commons privilege in finance. That did not stop your Lordships occasionally rejecting money Bills—for example in 1860, when you rejected paper duties as a tax on knowledge, then being circumvented by Mr Gladstone’s invention of what has become the modern curse of a multi-decker Finance Bill, which your Lordships could not touch, and still cannot, without bringing the whole House down, as happened in 1911. One consequence of an elected House—and the other place has to realise this, just as much as us—could be that if the Parliament Act is to be amended, as some propose, we might look again at the way that money Bills are defined and consider the Joint Committee of both Houses, which was offered by Mr Asquith and Lloyd George to the unionists in 1910, but was not ultimately accepted.

Our acceptance of Commons primacy on finance was rooted in the fact that, even then, the Commons was elected but it was mirrored, after the great privilege battles which raged between the two Houses back in the 1670s, by Commons acceptance of this House’s primacy in justice. Here, at that Bar and in the Benches before it, was embodied the supreme court in the High Court of Parliament and almost all of us will recall the noble and learned Lords who came here, or will have heard of the mighty Lord Chancellors who sat there in olden times, centuries ago. That was the historic, if largely unspoken, deal about primacy between the two Houses: primacy of the Commons on finance, primacy of your Lordships in justice.

I did not hear the other place troubling too much about your Lordships’ primacy on justice when they drove through the expulsion of the Law Lords and dismembered the Lord Chancellorship in the past few years. For my own part, if we are invited to embark on a reform which involves election I do not feel that your Lordships, if elected, need be too squeamish about the other side of the bargain, the Commons primacy on finance, and still less other, all-embracing claims to primacy that have quite recently been laid upon it on the basis that it is elected and we are not. When Parliament is functioning so badly in its prime role of checking the Executive and protecting the citizen against bad counsel—as they used to be called right back to the 13th century—and unjust and incompetent law, why must we always meekly be expected to say: “Oh, but the Commons has primacy and must not be challenged”?

As was said by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, the case for election is that challenge might become more confident in that case and stimulate another place to do its job better. A stronger House here, armed with the authority that comes from election, could deliver that refreshing and, to my mind, necessary challenge to an imperfectly functioning sister House. Yes, there would be a need for resolution procedures, as the noble Lord said, but in the history of these Houses, when they were roughly co-equal in power, there were perfectly good systems for addressing those problems and others could be devised.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

Can my noble friend help me and perhaps explain how it would be that if we had this elected second Chamber, it would not suffer from the same problems of the other place in the domination of the Whips and the power of the Executive, given that it was elected? How would we avoid that?

[Lord True]

My Lords, it is avoided precisely by the concept of the long mandate, which is non-renewable and with no right to go on to the House of Commons. That means that someone coming here would not be able to develop a political career and go forward to be a senior Minister of the Crown.

[Lord Ryder of Wensum]

I am very grateful to my noble friend. I have known him for many decades and I would never accuse him of naivety, but I have been following his speech carefully. If the other House continues to automatically guillotine every piece of legislation, what is to prevent this House from doing exactly the same and therefore being a mirror image of the other House by not revising legislation properly?

[Lord True]

My Lords, the procedures of this House are not currently in a state which would enable the Executive to impose the guillotine. Nor would that be the case in a House in which the political element would be smaller but selected in a different way. If I may, I would like to get on.

I accept that election would change the relations between the Houses, and of course the absurd Clause 2 of the draft Bill is froth, but the balance of power between the Houses is in my submission not a zero-sum game. Both Houses, acting more assertively, could claw back powers surrendered to the Executive, and perhaps other authorities too. However, and here I agree with others, there is no point in reform to include election if you also try to restrain the powers elected Members might exercise. Aside from the risk of letting in the courts, you simply secure all the confusion that follows radical change with none of the benefits that might follow from constructive and confident challenge. If that is the game, I want no part of it.

Elected Members with a mandate will not wish to be restrained. The noble Lord, Lord Dubs, was quite right yesterday to say that nothing is so transforming as seeing those pieces of paper with crosses by your name being tipped on to a trestle table. This House would be different and would behave differently. I agree that it is equally absurd to say that an elected Peer would not respond in a representative capacity; of course he would. My noble friend Lord Trimble described the realities in Australia. Is it really suggested that a Senator should write back to an elector saying, “I’m not able to help you because I’m not allowed an office and I might upset an MP”? The idea is a farce.

I agree with my noble friend Lord Forsyth that no one in either House, particularly in the House of Commons, should be blind to the uncomfortable effects for them of creating a stronger House here which, if we go through all the trauma of change and reform, would and should be ready to challenge aspects of Commons primacy. It so happens that I differ from my noble friend because I believe that, done correctly, the benefits of such challenge might outweigh the problems many have described.

To conclude, I am not going to be the first to proclaim the merits of the Bill. I cannot accept, for example, that in the form of election we should send back to the British people another version of the proportional voting systems that have only lately been rejected in a referendum. That may be okay overseas, but I expect rather better from my Government. The voting paper on page 123 of the Joint Committee’s excellent report reminds me of one of those hospital menus where you tick the box for roast beef and Yorkshire but end up with a vegetable omelette and mushy peas. If we are to have election, please let it be simple and first past the post. I also agree that introducing election here would be a major change to our Parliament and should be put to the people in a referendum. However, I cannot agree that faced with the manifest failings of our 21st-century Parliament and the crying need—the age-old need around which Parliament grew up—to control better the actions of the Executive, the Members of this House should sit back and say to the British people, “Leave us out of it. There is no remedy in changing the composition here”. There might be, and we should consider the Bill maturely when, or if, it arrives.