House of Lords Reform

Baroness O'Cathain Excerpts

Tuesday 29th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness O'Cathain]

My Lords, I must apologise for being absent for most of this debate. Unfortunately, I had to go to a meeting of the EU Select Committee, but at least I have truncated my speech. I hope that what I will say will not be too repetitious. The Motion on the Order Paper is:

“Lord Strathclyde to move that this House takes note of the case for reform of the House of Lords”,

and we seem to be going through all sorts of options of how we will reform. But we ought to decide whether this House needs to be reformed.

I believe that there are three options. The first is to leave this House as it is. The second is to make some changes to structural procedures, such as reform of an evolutionary nature. The noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, is right that we should go for an evolutionary process. Reform implies evolution in terms of reforming something which exists and making it better, and we hope not to make it worse. When you chuck out everything and change the whole basis of the constitution—what it does and its relationship with other things—that is revolution. It is not reform.

Looking at the three options, I refer first to the option for leaving the House as it is: that the tasks undertaken add value, not least because of the body of experience and expertise. Moreover, as others have probably said, we have more time to consider issues because Members of the other place have serious constituency duties which do not permit them to undertake the same level of scrutiny as we can. In the last Parliament, there was an appalling situation of a House of Commons Bill where in only three of its seven stages had it been scrutinised even marginally before it came to us. That is one of the things we do, but I am not about to back this option.

We are in danger of being seen to be wasting time considering all sorts of options when people in the world outside this place are horribly burdened with managing their finances and wondering if their jobs are going to disappear. The amount of time we have already spent on this issue and the amount we are going to spend on it will, I suspect, be far greater than the 700 hours we wasted on the Hunting Bill. Is that what the people out there really want, and is that what they are going to be told it is all about?

I turn to the second point, that of evolutionary reform. The burgeoning size of this House is clearly a cause for concern. Although we have recently lost some very distinguished Members, their number has been more than offset by the creation of more than 50 Peers, with talk of more and more coming through. There are practical resource implications, not least in terms of accommodation, and political implications in terms of how we are seen by those outside the Westminster village. We are caught between a rock and a hard place. If Peers do not attend, they cannot claim allowances, so there is no burden on the public purse, but none the less it conveys a poor impression if we operate on the basis of a certain proportion of our membership being able to come here or stay away willy-nilly whenever they want.

We now have a dedicated and transparent House of Lords Appointments Commission. I support my noble friend Lord Steel and I firmly believe that it should be put on a statutory basis. That would bring us into line with what electors expect in terms of the appointments process, and in effect would guarantee independence for the process. Perception is all, and as a matter of principle we need to enhance our powers to deal with Members who break the law, or indeed who break the spirit of the law. Our powers are far too limited. I also favour changes to some of our existing practices and procedures for the purpose of strengthening what it is that we do. We should make greater use of evidence-taking committees when a Bill originates in this House, we should play to our strengths in establishing a committee for post-legislative scrutiny, and we should press further for the greater use of pre-legislative scrutiny. In short, we could, should and must build on strength as an evolutionary process.

What I am totally opposed to is the third option, which constitutes the exact opposite of building on strength. The Government’s proposals for an elected House are a recipe for wiping out the strengths of this House. Why would elected Members of a second Chamber devote their time to detailed scrutiny that has little potential to attract the attention of the media and their constituents? I do not think that I have ever heard of a Member of this House issuing a press notice when he or she is about to make a particular point in a speech, or has done so. That is a feature of what happens in the other place.

Moreover, what would elected Members in this House bring to bear to enable them to engage in these tasks? They would be here primarily because of their political skills and not because they have a particular expertise that is likely to be of value to the House. Despite some of the claims of the previous Government, an elected House would not be a House of Lords in a different guise. The reality of who would stand for election to a second Chamber was conceded in the last Government’s White Paper. After serving a single fixed term, Members of the second Chamber would, for a period of five years, be debarred from seeking election to the House of Commons. In other words, the group established by Jack Straw conceded that people coming to the second Chamber would be those who would rather be in the other place. We would be their number two choice.

Who would vote for the Members of a Second Chamber? The Government appear to believe that an elected Chamber would not have any more powers than the current House. However, turnout in elections is likely to be low—one suspects it might be lower than that for elections to the European Parliament, which now has considerably more powers than this House. Again, the Government appear to concede this by wanting to hold such elections on the same day as those for the House of Commons. In short, the Government’s proposals effectively concede that the new House would lack popular legitimacy.

I fail to see that the case has been made for the third option. They need to go away and think about it, not rush ahead with ill considered legislation. In fact, they should not even consider it. If they really want to see reform, they should take what we have got and go part of the way I have suggested in an evolutionary process.