Draft House of Lords Reform Bill

Baroness Whitaker Excerpts

Monday 30th April 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Whitaker]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow my friend the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, but I shall take a different line. Like my noble friend Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe, I am a member of the Campaign for a Democratic Upper House, and I very much follow his analysis.

I mainly want to record my support for the Joint Committee’s endorsement of a democratic second Chamber, with an electoral mandate and commensurate powers, so ably navigated by my noble friend Lord Richard, and a lingering degree of surprise that the principle should still be so contentious. I have quite often found myself advocating causes not shared by others, but I would never have dreamed that the election of even part of one Chamber of a modern democratic state legislature might become one. I think that future centuries will look back at proposals to cling to an entirely appointed Chamber as an extraordinary aberration. Opinion polls confirm this. Some may even find it a betrayal of all those who fought in the struggles for emancipation over our history.

It is also the case that I quite often do not agree with the Government, so I am also surprised to find that to a degree I may, with reservations, somewhat agree with them over the Bill. But then, I am not sure that the Government agree with the Government, so I await with interest the Minister’s reply. Of course, constitutional change needs fundamental thought; the preservation of the primacy of the House of Commons needs to be worked out with great care. But evidence to the Joint Committee has laid out sensible and authoritative ways to do that. There is also the idea of a binding oath suggested by my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours. The nature of the mandate also needs thought, but the report provides a good starting point, and I do not doubt that our native capacity for innovative and practical constitutional thinking will be equal to this task. But the timidity evinced by some at the prospect of reform will need reassurance at various levels.

I would like to say a word about the alternative report. I find it slightly misleading. On primacy, for example, the alternative report says that it cannot be maintained with an elected Chamber. A majority of the committee felt that the remaining pillars on which Commons primacy rested would be sufficient to ensure its continuation. None the less, it is agreed that a means should be established to define and agree the conventions governing the relationship between the two Houses by means of the adoption of a concordat. The alternative report calls for the same outcome in the light of the Cunningham committee as the Joint Committee proposes, but it simply ignores the principal mechanism recommended for securing agreement. It therefore adds nothing to the committee’s recommendations while ignoring the solution that it proposes.

On costs, the Joint Committee rejected salaries for transitional Peers and for office and staffing costs for personal case work. The effect of that is to remove £264 million from salaries for the transitional Peers and considerably cut down the £186 million estimate for office costs. So it is not quite as it seems in the alternative report.

Finally, the alternative report claims that the Joint Committee gave no material consideration to alternative means of dispute resolution—clearly, a very important point. The Bill does not give any material consideration to that but the report does, in paragraphs 369 and 370.

There is just one other aspect which the Joint Committee might have looked at. It is a second-order question, but I am concerned that the term Senate will have different associations from what the committee recommends. Could we not have a term of our own, such as a state council? I thank the Joint Committee and I hope that, when we come to the Bill, we can move forward on its conclusions.