House of Lords Reform

Edward Leigh Excerpts

Monday 27th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Wolverhampton South East (Mr McFadden) and I think I agreed with virtually everything he said. There have been some outstanding independent-minded speeches from hon. Members on both sides of the Chamber, including three excellent speeches: the last speech and those made by the hon. Member for Middlesbrough (Sir Stuart Bell) and the right hon. Member for Torfaen (Paul Murphy). I agree with them all. It is a bit of a pity, if I might say so, that the Deputy Prime Minister did not stay for longer, because this is an important constitutional issue. I know that a lot of people in the Dog and Duck are not very exercised about it, but why should they be? It is an important debate and it is important that the Government should listen to it. I know the Minister is listening. Virtually every speech we have heard has been thoughtful and very critical of the proposals and it would be highly regrettable if the changes were forced through on a three-line Whip. I believe that the House of Commons should consider all the options very carefully and by all means come to some sort of compromise, but it would be regrettable to force this through on a three-line Whip, with people who have taken no part in the debate, who perhaps have very little interest in it and who have their careers to look after, being poured in, especially given that the proposal was not in a manifesto. Let us consider that.

I sympathise with the Deputy Prime Minister in a sense, because he has an impossible task. In the absence of a written constitution he is trying to create an elected second Chamber that is not a rival to the House of Commons, but that is a virtually impossible task. He has therefore come up with the idea, which was well summed up by the right hon. Member for Torfaen as “dotty”, of electing people for a single, 15-year term. We really have to kill that idea; I am not aware of any other major legislature in the world that does that. The points have been made again and again, so I do not need to repeat them. Those people will be elected but unaccountable, and what sort of life will they lead if they are in the House of Lords for 15 years and never have to stand again? Is the senator for the east midlands, which is a vast area, really going to want to go and talk to Poverty Action in Nottingham on a rainy Saturday night, or to their local party in Leicester on a wet Friday evening? That is not going to happen. Those people will be sitting in the Lords knowing that they are never going to be allowed to stand again—so, unaccountable in that sense—but they will claim that they are elected, and it is for the birds to suggest that they will not take on this House. Of course they will, especially if they think they are more representative because we are elected under this old-fashioned, first-past-the-post system—which by the way people quite like, but let us forget the people for a moment—and they are elected under a much more democratic, proportional representation-type system.

I think it is the worst possible system and I say to the Minister that it does not address the real problem. The problem is not a great constitutional dispute between the people and the House of Commons or between the House of Commons and the House of Lords: the problem is that there are too many Members of the House of Commons who are not sufficiently independent, because, yes, they are elected but, quite rightly, they are ambitious and they want to be Ministers as the only outlet for their energy. I suspect that once the people in the Lords are elected for their 15-year term, they will start off with all the joys of spring but will very soon be like the rest of us—they will want to become Government Ministers and they will be as much under the thumb of the Executive as most Members of Parliament are. So what will the changes achieve? Having just got rid of 50 Members of Parliament, because, apparently, too many of us are under the thumb of the Executive, why are we creating another 280-odd up there who, after a couple of years, will also want to become Ministers?

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

Why, if the other Chamber is to be a revising Chamber, should there be Ministers in a reformed House of Lords? This Chamber could be well distinguished as having primary powers by being the only seat of Government Ministers—not the other Chamber.

[Mr Leigh]

That was an excellent intervention. There are many other legislatures in the world, such as the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate, in which one cannot be a Minister. That is why Senators in the United States are much more independent of the Executive than Members of Parliament here are. If we were to create an elected Chamber, why not have a rule that nobody up there who was elected could become a Minister? Then, perhaps, they would be free from the powers of patronage, which strongly militate against genuinely free debate in this Chamber.

[Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)]

What we should be talking about is what the House of Lords is for and what it should be doing, but all we are talking about is whether it should be fully elected, fully appointed or 80:20. We should really be concentrating on what its key role is.

[Mr Leigh]

That is absolutely right. Perhaps we have spent too much time, even this afternoon, talking about methods of election rather than about the sort of men and women whom we want in the second Chamber and what sort of job we want them to do. Apparently, the sort of men and women we want are people of expertise who are good at revising legislation, and I submit that we have very large numbers of dedicated Members of the second Chamber who do precisely that. Of course, there are some who are lazy, corrupt or bad—and some are good, some are old and some are young—but there are scores of people up there who do their job as men and women of expertise in revising and improving legislation. Let us concentrate on the sort of people we want up there rather than being absolutely obsessed by the methods of election.

[Chris Bryant]

The hon. Gentleman rightly says that one of the most important things in the second Chamber is having a number of people of independent mind. Is it his experience that party leaders, when recommending people to go into the second Chamber, primarily think about their independence and their voting record in this House?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Leigh]

I suspect that a lot of the people taking part in this debate would quite like to end up in the other place—we all have fallible human natures. No doubt Prime Ministers reward their acolytes, friends and people who have been in the Cabinet—we all know that goes on—but before we get terribly excited about the concept of an independent appointments commission, let us consider whether it would produce a House of Lords that was necessarily superior in intellect or whether it would just produce the same old great and good from the liberal establishment and ensure that nobody of idiosyncratic views, such as myself, perhaps, or my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis), would ever end up in the other place. I am not sure I accept that the concept of prime ministerial patronage is altogether wrong.

Why is the Deputy Prime Minister fixated on the concept of PR? It will not only ensure that the Lords will claim democratic legitimacy but will allow our right hon. and hon. Friends on the Liberal Democrat Benches to have a gridlock on legislation. It will make it more and more difficult for those on the radical left or the radical right to come up with ideas that will actually get into legislation. Why do we want that kind of gridlock? In the remaining seconds of my speech, I contend that what we have in the House of Lords is not so very bad. It reflects our history and traditions and I would have thought that, as Conservatives, that is what we are about. We are about preserving what is best in our history and I very much hope that as this debate proceeds to its final conclusion, there will be a blocking mechanism from the old left and the old right to throw this proposal into the dustbin of history, where I believe it belongs.