House of Lords Reform Bill [HL]

Earl of Erroll Excerpts

Friday 3rd December 2010 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Erroll]

My Lords, I suppose that I should thank the noble Lord, Lord Steel, for the opportunity to put one’s thoughts on the record. I am sorry not to have done so before now but I always felt that there were quite enough people on the list to speak in these debates. I am not sure why we are discussing this Bill when the three parties with a democratic mandate are going to put forward their ideas in the near future. Perhaps it is so that, long into the future when everything has gone wrong, some researcher will be able to look at your Lordships’ comments and say, “What wise words of wisdom were uttered by that noble Lord”.

The trouble with the Bill is that it attempts to preserve the appointed life Peers through a pre-emptive strike, but that is not what Parliament intended. It removes several incentives for change. I am one of the hereditary Peers who was elected to stay here, and I accepted that because the purpose was to make sure that proper reform would take place in the future. The hereditary element left was the incentive for change. The trouble is that, when you remove the incentives, people stop moving in the direction in which you want them to go. If we allow the hereditary Peers to die out, steadily and slowly the whole House will become under the control of unaccountable people who appoint those who come here—a theme that has cropped up throughout these debates.

Perhaps we could look, first, at the future of an appointed House. As I said, people are driven by incentives. We also know the mantra that, if you have no democratic authority, all power will be removed, and therefore there will be no purpose in people coming to sit in this House. If people sit and debate in this House without the power to affect legislation, they will simply stop bothering to come, and this place will just be a club for those who like waffling on. The wise people will walk away and that will be sad, because we will not get the sort of people who are being appointed at the moment.

The trouble is that in our constitution there is nothing to prevent that happening, although we thought that there was. The closest thing to it is in the oath of a privy counsellor on the Front Bench. That oath is supposed to be binding, yet there have been attempts to overturn it on many occasions—in fact, this Bill seeks to do just that. Therefore, one realises that our constitution provides no way of binding any future Parliament, so that, whatever we do, it can be changed, and that is the real problem. We cannot put in proper protections.

The Commons supremacists welcome this. They think it is a very good idea to have a House of Lords with all its powers removed because it is a nuisance to them. However, democracy is not a unicameral system, especially when the Executive sits in that one elected Chamber, which is supposed to have primacy when it comes to legislation. The problem is that, when a large party has a majority, Prime Ministers sometimes forget that they are the Prime Minister not of Parliament but of the majority party, as leader. They are Prime Ministers of the Executive, which Parliament is supposed to control. The number of Members of another place who had some form of Executive appointment in the previous Parliament was astonishing. I believe that it was in three figures—and it has got bigger. That is not how the legislature should be behaving. It is there to set the controls and boundaries for the Executive.

We must have a balance. We need a bicameral system and must keep the checks and balances in it. I do not know how we would do that if we were to start appointing in this place. We know that Ministers in the Commons are already irritated by us; they do not even bother to read our debates when we get into that ping-pong session. We do not send things back to the Commons lightly but they cannot be bothered to find out the reasons. We will be completely ignored.

The other thing that worries me is that the Bill, rightly, tries to set out the concept of the Appointments Commission, make it independent and give it the right objectives. But the real control is who you put into it, and the real problem then comes as the commission will tend to appoint the great and the good. I am sorry that the rebels are slowly disappearing. We get very wise people but we also need the rebels and agents for change—those who will push the boundaries or resist what sounds terribly sensible on the surface but has hidden dangers.

We must have checks and balances. If we are to have an appointed House we must separate powers in the other place. We should look at the American model far more closely. I never thought that I would say that. It would have been anathema 15 years ago but I am very worried about the consolidation of power now. If we opt for an elected House, we assume that we will get failed politicians, or whatever, but why? America seems to survive, which another noble Lord said earlier. Maybe we might for a while, but do we assume that the public will permanently be idiots? I am certain that something good will come out of it. There are lots of different ways of electing Lords. People think about it and I am sure that we can achieve something that is not a mere mirror of another place.

I do not want to lose the expertise or the independence but we must have that democratic authority to survive. Otherwise all residual power will have been removed or stifled within the next 10 to 20 years. If we want to preserve some places for experts the 80:20 model—80 per cent elected, 20 per cent appointed—looks quite attractive. As a Cross-Bencher I would say that, wouldn’t I? That is always the trouble.

I shall refer briefly to some other bits in the Bill. On ex-prisoners and people who have been to prison being Members of your Lordships’ House, I always thought that we had a principle of rehabilitation and that after a while people have paid their debt to society. We should remember that when putting something like this together. As we are about to give votes to prisoners should they not have someone in Parliament to represent them since they cannot sit in the other place?

Why are there so many new Peers; why this huge influx? It really worries me. Is it because they do not matter; is it because they are seen as Lobby fodder; or is it because they will be abolished quite soon? I do not understand what is going on. It is ridiculous.

On the other hand I have great hopes. It is amazing how independent people can become once they are no longer beholden to a master, so I look forward to welcoming a huge number of recruits to the cause of a truly bicameral Parliament with power balanced properly between the two Houses, exercising proper control of the Executive through legislation and scrutiny.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

I am so sorry. I am already overcome by the tension in winding up on the noble Lord’s Bill.

I also welcome the noble Marquess, Lord Lothian, and the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, and congratulate them on their excellent maiden speeches. I hope that they will contribute to our future debates on Lords reform, and I am sure they will find one or two more opportunities to do so in the months ahead.

The noble Lord, Lord Steel, deserves congratulation on finally persuading the previous Government to allow for retirements and ending hereditary Peer by-elections. It was disappointing in the wash-up that the Conservative Party would not agree to those provisions going through. I suspect that it now wishes that it had allowed them, and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Wirral, would not now have the arduous task of helping the House to come to a view on how noble Lords might be encouraged to leave your Lordships’ House. No doubt the noble Lord, Lord Steel, is now hopeful, as he is now in the coalition, that his colleagues in that Government will be somewhat more sympathetic to him than they were in the past, and we very much look forward to hearing the noble Baroness perhaps saying that she accepts the principle of the Bill.

I do not think that there can be any doubt about the Government’s concern about the size of your Lordships’ House. That is why a Leader’s Group has been established, under the excellent chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Wirral. I also have the honour to serve under him and we are examining ways of encouraging Members to leave your Lordships’ House. Our first report was published on 3 November, which shows that the great majority of noble Lords who responded to the consultation felt that there needed to be some way by which Members could leave the House permanently in order to reduce the size of the House. Other noble Lords have commented that the report also makes it clear that primary legislation is required to allow that to happen. The Leader’s Group will of course continue its work, although I think we might need to take account of the five tests of the noble Lord, Lord Taverne.

One cannot help pointing out the irony of the situation in which we find ourselves. On the one hand, the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, the Leader of the House, is evidently concerned about its size and has asked the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, to lead a group to see how it can be reduced. On the other hand, he has presided over a massive increase in the appointment of life Peers. We are promised many more. Indeed, as a number of noble Lords, including my noble friend Lady Royall and the noble Viscount, Lord Falkland, pointed out, only two days ago we had the promise from the noble Lord, Lord McNally. He reiterated the coalition Government’s intention to have a second Chamber reflective of the share of the vote secured by the political parties at the general election. The noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd, quoted from the work of Meg Russell, who estimates that if that were to be the case we would end up with a House of 977 Members. Apart from the sheer impracticality of that, it would make reform much harder to achieve. It certainly would make the transition arrangements much more difficult.

The noble Viscount, Lord Falkland, said that there is method to this. He believes that it is the coalition Government’s intention to show that the House of Lords is not working and that is why more substantive reform should take place. I have another view on why the coalition Government want to create many more Peers. Earlier in this wonderful debate, we heard from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd, the noble Marquess, Lord Lothian, and the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, who talked about the impact and effectiveness of this House as a revising Chamber. However, we are in different circumstances. Already we see that with the size of the coalition Benches, and the evident intention of the Government to create dozens of new Peers on top of that is to ensure that they cannot be defeated in your Lordships’ House. The problem is that I do not think this House can do its job effectively if the Executive are virtually guaranteed to win every vote that takes place. You cannot be a revising Chamber unless you can revise. You cannot revise unless you have a decent chance of defeating the Government from time to time.

Let us consider the Public Bodies Bill, which gives draconian Henry VIII powers to Ministers. Noble Lords on all sides of the House know that it is a bad Bill. They also know that if my party in government had produced the Bill, it would have been ripped to shreds. There will be a test of the coalition partners in this House over the next few weeks. A number of Peers from the coalition parties have told me of their horror at the Bill. Unless it is substantially changed, how can this House claim to be an effective revising Chamber?

The noble Lord, Lord Steel, clearly recognises that. I acknowledge the careful drafting that he has undertaken. A number of noble Lords referred to Clause 8(2), in which the noble Lord sets out that a coalition of parties forming a Government shall not have a majority of Members in the House of Lords. He goes on to state that in the event of a coalition, the largest party in the coalition shall be entitled to a larger number of Members than the Official Opposition but that the majority of the larger party should normally be no more than three per cent over the Official Opposition party. Clearly, the noble Lord has gone into this matter carefully. I ask him nonetheless whether a coalition, whatever parties are it, would still have an effective majority because of the relatively low voting turnout of the Cross-Benchers. I take on board the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, who spoke of the careful judgments made by Cross-Benchers when they come to vote. However, their turnout is roughly 20 per cent, compared with the turnout of Members of the main parties, which is more than 50 per cent. This is a matter for consideration in Committee but it is a factor when one comes to a view about getting the right balance between the parties and the Cross-Benchers in your Lordships' House. I would suggest having more Cross-Benchers, but of course we are trying to reduce the number of noble Lords.

[The Earl of Erroll]

Perhaps I may suggest that the important thing is that, when all Cross-Benchers vote in one direction, it shows that one side has got it wrong. It is not the regularity of the voting that matters, but certain critical votes in which the Cross-Benchers really show that someone has got it wrong.