House of Lords: Reform

Baroness Howe of Idlicote Excerpts

Monday 11th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote]

My Lords, though I had spent a lot of my life on the political fringes, the range of exceptional experience, ability and independence of view that I found on my arrival to your Lordships' House came as a very welcome surprise and has convinced me that the balance and value of what history has delivered to make today’s House of Lords is more than worth fighting for. What we have is a typical British accident, but one that works supremely well.

As your Lordships will know, normally I find myself making the case for equality and non-discrimination, but on this issue I want to strike exactly the opposite note: that is, that the membership and composition of the two Houses of Parliament are, and must continue to be, absolutely different from each other, for that difference makes all that is best out of the partnership between the two Houses. The crucial difference, of course, is that one is elected and the other is not, and that the elected House is the master and has the last word while the other—misleadingly called the upper House—does not. The Members of the first House, the elected House, are recruited, rather like soldiers in a regimental system, and are bound to each other in solidarity, whereas the membership of this House is much more individualistic and independent. Most of us are selected through a very strict process.

In short, we all have independent experience and expertise that are very different from those in the other place, and we must remain so. Why, otherwise, should we need—as others have said—two different Houses? It is because the deciders—the Commons—may well be able to take a broad view but they have to take account as well of the distinct and often different judgments that emerge at this end of the Building. That very difference—the input from two directions—is the fundamental of our Parliament: in other words, vive la différence. If either of the two Houses was to lose its distinctive quality, which is what would happen if elected Members began arriving here, the mother of Parliaments would become a much less effective place and much less of a model to the world, and the British constitution would suffer a gravely damaging blow.