House of Lords Reform: Lord Speaker’s Committee

Gavin Newlands Excerpts

Wednesday 15th November 2017 Westminster Hall

[Gavin Newlands (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Howarth. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East (Tommy Sheppard) on securing the debate and leading us off so thoughtfully and powerfully. It was not for the first time that I agreed with every word he said.

I want to start on a positive note—or at least as positive a note as I can muster—by welcoming aspects of the Lord Speaker’s report. Any attempt to reduce the number of peers is progress of a sort towards abolition. Needless to say, in my view the report is a missed opportunity and goes nowhere near far enough. It has a number of interesting recommendations, such as capping the number of peers and 15-year term limits. However, with a two out, one in limit, combined with restricting the method of reducing the existing number of peers to retiring or expiring, progress towards the proposed limit of 600 will be glacial—a pace that, although undeniably revolutionary for this place, will be viewed unsympathetically elsewhere.

For those who support the House of Lords, I see why these recommendations will be welcome. They address some of the common criticisms levelled at the Lords but, more importantly, supporters think it will kick the wider Lords reform debate down the road. The arguments for abolishing the House of Lords are well rehearsed, and we in the Scottish National party have been consistent in opposing the undemocratic anachronism that is the other place. It is a matter of principle for our party that is held almost as strongly as independence itself and our opposition to Trident nuclear weapons. Quite simply, we believe that a second Chamber should have representatives elected by the people, rather than appointed by party leaders.

As has been said, the House of Lords is a bloated institution that is largely manipulated by the Westminster-based parties to serve their own party political priorities. Its current gross membership stands at 821—some 171 more than the current elected Chamber. As we have heard, the Lords is the only second Chamber in the world whose membership exceeds that of the primary Chamber; only China’s National People’s Congress has more members. That is utterly ridiculous and completely indefensible. The SNP rightly has no peers sitting in the Lords; we are the only political party in Westminster not to play that self-serving game. In contrast, 70% of current peers come from the Tories, Labour and the Liberal Democrats.

In the last Parliament, David Cameron appointed 40 peers per year, which is more than any other Prime Minister—even Tony Blair, who is comfortably at No. 2 with 37 peers per Session. Cameron, like Prime Ministers before him, exploited appointments to the House of Lords, awarding them to party members and cronies who had previously donated handsomely to the Conservative party; of course, I suggest no link between the two. That yet again highlights the deep-rooted flaws with the House of Lords, with the Prime Minister able to appoint any number of peers he desired without any kind of check or balance in place. How can anybody in their right mind say that that is anything but grossly undemocratic?

It should be noted that the report suggests that political appointments to the House of Lords mirror the results of a general election. However, this is not the first time that that has been proposed. In 2010, the coalition Government agreed as an interim measure that the appointment of new peers would reflect the vote share at the most recent general election, on the way to introducing a Chamber of 450, wholly or mostly elected by proportional representation. As we know, a Tory rebellion shamefully defeated that reform.

However, being led up the path of Lords reform is not new. The Labour Government of 1997 came to power promising to abolish hereditary peers, but as we heard in the powerful contribution from the right hon. Member for Delyn (David Hanson), in order to get that legislation, which was planned to be the first step, through Parliament, it was agreed that 92 hereditary peers, elected from the hereditary peers en masse, should be able to sit as a temporary measure until the second stage of reform was completed. As we have heard, we still await that second stage of reform 18 years on. In March 2007, 10 years on from the Tony Blair landslide, the Commons voted by a majority of 113 in favour of a fully elected House of Lords, and by a majority of 280 to remove all hereditary peers. Once again, the country was led a merry parliamentary reform dance with nothing to show for it.

The Electoral Reform Society, among many others, points out that the House of Lords is hugely unrepresentative—I am sure it will not come as a surprise to many—with just 26% of its members being female and nearly half coming from London and the south-east, which accounts for only a quarter of the UK population. Another issue the ERS highlights is that political appointees rarely show independence and instead vote with their party Whip the vast majority of the time.

I will play devil’s advocate, and going against my better judgment, I will take on board the points made by the hon. Member for Ochil and South Perthshire (Luke Graham), but if we must continue with an unelected Chamber, I suggest that the newly reformed Canadian Senate serve as an example of an expert-appointed revising Chamber. I reiterate that that is not my favoured solution, but it would be churlish not to accept that there are some fantastically skilled people in the Lords who personally offer a huge amount to the legislative process. Like the House of Lords, the Canadian Senate was for decades hampered by individuals often being more motivated by partisan interest, rather than by effectively scrutinising and revising legislation. Under the new system brought in by Justin Trudeau in 2015, an appointment committee picks independent candidates to serve in the Senate, rather than people affiliated with any political party.

That has been widely welcomed in Canada, and moves it closer to having a second Chamber in which people serve based on merit, rather than loyalty towards any political party. However, I am a radical at heart, so despite offering that non-partisan, unelected Canadian alternative, I feel so strongly about the importance of electoral accountability that, if we cannot have an elected second Chamber, I would follow another Canadian example: the Assemblée Nationale in Quebec, which abolished its unelected Chamber in 1968.

I readily admit that the House of Lords might not be the No. 1 issue raised with me on the doorstep or causing long queues at my constituency surgeries, but it says so much about the country we want to be, and equally about how the international community perceives us.

[Mike Amesbury (Weaver Vale) (Lab)]

Would it be progress, and a sign of a mature democracy that would engage people more in the democratic process, if we had a fully elected second Chamber and abolished the House of Lords?

[Gavin Newlands]

I could not agree more. That is the point almost every contributor has made thus far, apart from the hon. Member for Ochil and South Perthshire. It is obviously a given that, in 2017, we should not appoint any unelected member to a legislative body.

To be honest, as somebody who has been campaigning for Scottish independence since I was nine years old, I never feel more strongly about independence than when I view the farce on the day of the Queen’s Speech. I have always viewed the Lords as a kind of pumped-up parliamentary panto, and seeing all that ermine and fancy dress, and the Lord Chancellor playing Widow Twanky, is embarrassing in the extreme in 2017. I believe that the Lord Speaker’s report was probably as much as we could have expected, given his position and his narrow remit, but it falls spectacularly short of what any developed western democracy should be aiming for.